Life Story Links: November 18, 2025
“To be captured by a moment or to capture it. Decades later I’ll understand how they both exist, one inside the other intrinsic as breath—the inhale and the exhale.”
—Jamie Figueroa
A whole lot of memoir miscellany!
BACKSTORY
“Memories were bubbling up from all over the place—junior high, summer swim team, when I was first teaching creative writing in Utah—and I became obsessed with these moments. I wanted to sit with them and turn them in every direction like a kaleidoscope.” Melissa Fraterrigo on her new memoir-in-essays.
A RESPONSIBILITY FOR FAMILY STORIES
“After listening and transcribing and listening again, I felt different holes in our family’s history. I began searching for more stories,” memoirist Elena Sheppard writes about feeling closer to her grandfather through archival research.
‘INTIMATE AND INTRIGUING’
“In the last 15 years, [Patti] Smith has produced a tidy collection of small books that braid ruminations on her current endeavors with memories and photographs”—and now, her “most straightforwardly autobiographical book to date.”
FRIENDLY GHOSTS
“The ghostwriter is not just your thought partner and editorial support system. They are your consigliere, your part-time therapist.” A peek behind the curtains of the ghostwriting ecosystem.
NOT ANOTHER CANCER MEMOIR
“I call both of my books reported memoirs. What I really love to do is use my experiences as a jumping off point to talk about larger issues, to learn, and to interview people.”
ON MATERNAL LOSS
“To write Living Proof, I sat with my memories for thousands of hours. After decades, I made sense to myself in a way I hadn’t before. The wholeness I sought came when I was willing to examine my own story.”
SAFETY BEFORE DISCIPLINE
“Let your writing be tidal, trust the swell, trust the retreat. Your creativity is not a straight line; it is a rhythm, and rhythms belong to bodies that have lived through hard things.” Megan Febuary speaks to the highly sensitive writer.
INVENTING A LIFE
“Part memoir, travelogue, history of rock n’ roll, and insider look at the media business, Unplugged is a rollicking, often hilarious romp through [Tom] Freston’s 25-year career as a creative force in the music industry and modern media.”
VIRGINIA’S MOMENTS OF BEING
“The postcard is the self because it is instinctual and once gone, unobservable. As soon as it has been sent, it is history. The postcard is also a seeking, vulnerable self, extended toward someone else. It is the one-sided thought that asks to be acknowledged.” A wonderfully insightful look at Virginia Woolf’s postcards.
PRESERVING TESTIMONY THROUGH ART
Portrait artist Anita Lester says a recent project—featuring 16 oil paintings of Holocaust survivors—deepened her connection to her own family history. “I got to know my grandfather and members of my family through meeting these people and painting these people and understanding their experience.”
Short takes
