Life Story Links: October 6, 2026
“What started as a simple family history project has become this web of community. When I pull a thread in one part of the world, the story in another place changes. Your memories have become my landmarks, the symbols of my own past.”
—Rachael Cerrotti, We Share the Same Sky
Vintage postcard captioned “umbrella tree, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y.”, early 20th century, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.
Personal history & memoir miscellany
TWO NEW BOOKS
Announcing a real labor of love: two new books from MHB. They contain so much of what I have come to believe through my work: that every life is worthy of attention; that curiosity is an act of care; and that one of the greatest gifts we can offer another person is simply to listen.
‘LITTLE TEXTURAL POLAROIDS’
I love this quote from Maggie Smith’s recent scrapbook of vignettes (things she might have Tweeted back in the day): “The more we understand the past, the more we understand the present. The more legible now is.”
DON’T WAIT. ASK.
“[My dad] gave me the world, he showed me the world, he paid for my world, and he made a lot of great jokes. But I don’t know how he accomplished it, or what he thought about it, because I never asked.” Writer and cartoonist Peter Moore shares five questions he wishes he’d asked his father (“note,” he writes, “you can’t do that posthumously”).
ILLUMINATING THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Via a a Literary Arts Fellowship and drawing on years of interviewing, teaching memoir workshops, and helping clients tell their stories, Lisa Napoli intends to create practical tools that make life writing feel less overwhelming.
THE SCIENCE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
Scientists studied a teenager with HSAM, or hyperthymesia, which is an extremely rare memory ability. People with HSAM have highly superior autobiographic memory and incredible recall for events in their own lives (original study here).
‘ON ONE CONDITION’
“After several long Saturday mornings of recording, grandpa abruptly announced one day, ‘That’s all.’” Eli McCann on the “sacred act” of recording a life story, and the oral history passed down in his family.
A SOMATIC, TRAUMA-INFORMED APPROACH TO WRITING
Jessy Easton, who serialized her memoir after it was rejected by 100 publishers in five years, in conversation about “writing the hard thing—and how releasing the hard thing into the world frees us from the burden of carrying secrets and being anything less than our whole selves in the world” (transcript here):
...and a few more links
Read an excerpt from Food Is a Feeling: Recipes and Stories, with Love by Carla Lalli.
Tilda Swinton’s memoir will be unconventional (can you believe it?).
Scientists discover how the brain adds new information to old memories
How feminist activist Robin Morgan helped preserve the legacy of Sylvia Plath
Short takes
Dawn Roode’s curated roundup for the week of October 6, 2026, includes recommended reads on writing memoir, preserving family history, and autobiographical memory.