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Life Story Links: February 28, 2023
This week's curated roundup has a focus on first-person narratives and how they inform history, plus stories on artifacts of memory, memoir, and family photos.
“I have always encouraged collecting memories—it helps people form a connection with something that makes their lives more meaningful.”
—Martha Stewart
Vintage illustration of diners at the Hotel St. Regis in New York City, circa 1905, courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
First person narratives, for the record
“AMERICA’S MISSING STORIES”
Julieanna Richardson has been preserving Black Americans’ first-person stories for decades. The digital archive she created “had grown so vast, the collection so significant, the Library of Congress agreed to become its permanent repository.” Explore The History Makers archive here, and learn about Richardson’s extraordinary journey here and below:
SCHOLARLY RESEARCH INTO FAMILY MEMORY
A new study “focuses on how memory is constructed, communicated, accomplished, negotiated, and hindered in the family context” in a changing media environment.
PANDEMIC PROJECT
“Most Americans think they know the story of the pandemic. But when I immersed myself in a Covid oral-history project, I realized how much we’re still missing.” One reporter delves into the stupefyingly large archive.
“IT IS MY JOB TO SHARE OUR STORIES”
“Lately, I’ve wondered how my son will view Black History Month. I don’t want him to feel like his history is an aside. I want him to know that his history is a part of who he is.”
Artifacts of collective memory
A NEW LIFE FOR HEIRLOOMS
Don’t let your family mementos sit in boxes collecting dust, advises Clémence Scouten. On the blog for The Biographers Guild of Greater New York, she shares tips to curate family artifacts and preserve their stories in a book.
LOST AND FOUND
The result of one man’s extraordinary efforts, the Museum of Lost Memories helps reunite misplaced family mementos with their owners. Listen in to “the Sherlock of TikTok” as he describes his why:
FOLLOWING THE VISUAL CLUES
A photo album found on the shrapnel-strewn beaches of Okinawa in 1945 made an incredible journey across decades and an ocean, with serendipitous help from a friend of a friend of a friend…
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Even photos with no context submitted by community members of Black Archives are “still filled with stories. I think it’s so beautiful when people recognize something in that photograph that resonates with them, and they think back to their childhood...”
REVEALING RESEARCH, RESPONSIBLE STORYTELLING
“To create the narrative, I had the mindset of ‘start chipping away at the archives.’ In the end, we wanted to display the truth being an equally painful and uplifting story because that is the history of the continuous battle for racial equality.”
Memoir through various lenses
ART APPRECIATION
“My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still a while,” Patrick Bringley writes in his memoir, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, reviewed here.
FOOD AS A PORTAL TO THE PAST
“There’s a cozy vibe, like a church supper cookbook (with famous congregants),” writes this reviewer of My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings edited by Zosia Mamet, a collection of personal essays that explore memories and identity through food.
A HOUSE WITH MEMORIES
On a recent meandering through the archives of The New Yorker, I encountered this wonderful piece by Jamaica Kincaid. “It is only now that I can think of the luxury of a man’s children choosing to dispose of the substantial things he might have left for them, choosing to keep only the recipes for pies and cuttings of old roses—choosing memories, as opposed to the real thing, the house.”
THE CHALLENGES OF PERSONAL NARRATIVE
“I’ve been writing about myself and my family for two decades, but masking it in fiction. And that made it easy. But now I’m putting myself out on Front Street. Who do I write about? Who don’t I write about?” After 15 books, Bernice McFadden says her first memoir is the most difficult thing she’s ever written.
Miscellaneous
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
Last week I shared a detailed primer on how to create your own heritage cookbook, from recipe gathering and testing to editing, designing, and printing your family cookbook.
TWO JEWISH KIDS AND AN IDEA
“From time to time, Joe would pause and look in the mirror, striking a pose or screwing up his face he imagined a character would make, then go back to his paper and try to re-create it.” The bedroom origins of Superman.
AUTOMATED “MEMORIES”
“When your smartphone tosses up a photo memory, it’s a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes you get to…enjoy a compilation of your children’s birthday parties over the years. Other times, it’s heartache.”
...and a few more links
March is Women’s History Month, and this year’s theme is “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories.”
an interview with Annie Brewster, co-author of The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma, and Loss
Review: NYC Storefronts by Joel Holland, a book of colorful pencil drawings of well- and lesser-known mom and pop shops around greater New York.
Arthur Balfour’s parents’ love letters published by the National Records of Scotland
Read an excerpt from the new memoir Sink: A Memoir by Joseph Earl Thomas.
Short takes
Your 10-step plan for making an heirloom-worthy family cookbook
From gathering recipes to editing, from design to printing, these steps will walk you through how to create a family cookbook to preserve your food heritage.
This family cookbook hones in on the recipes of one family member known for her prowess in the kitchen, Granny Cooper.
Want to put all your family recipes into a printed cookbook? Doing so will not only ensure that generations’ worth of foods get passed on, it will also give you the opportunity to indulge in some nostalgia and revisit childhood memories (ah, the smell of my mom’s roast chicken! the texture of Nanny’s potato pancakes!!).
Creating a thoughtful, heirloom-worthy family heritage cookbook takes planning and a fairly serious time commitment, but don’t let that stop you. This 10-step plan—with details on how to execute each step with flair and accuracy—will take the stress out of making your family history cookbook (heck, you might even find the process fun).
1. Decide on a theme.
Sure, your theme can be as broad as “our family recipes,” but I encourage you to go a little deeper; a tighter focus invites more meaningful storytelling and will ultimately help you curate which recipes to include. Some ideas for family cookbook themes:
Cooking with Nana
Holiday Dishes of the Ruggierio Family
The Tastes of Our Childhood
Mama Nash’s Birthday Celebration Secrets
Three Generations’ of Schwartz Recipes
Grandpa Lou’s Barbecue Bible
Categorize your recipes any way you wish—and remember, you can always make a companion volume down the road.
2. Gather recipes.
Here are some key places to look to ensure you get all the recipes you’d like to include (you don’t want to be hunting them down midway through the design process, so focus on finishing this before moving to the next step):
recipe boxes
file folders
magazines and cookbooks (even handwritten faves can be stuffed inside)
your computer
other family members’ homes
in someone’s head (if Bubbe is the only one who knows how to make the matzoh ball soup you love, best get the details out of her head and onto the page!)
I suggest brainstorming a list of recipes you’d like to include with a family member. Having a partner can help not only with accountability but also with discovery.
And don’t discount simple favorites such as the easy vinaigrette your mom made on every school night—you might be surprised by how the simplest of “recipes” can escape us years later.
3. Get cooking.
You didn’t think you’d get away with writing a cookbook without a little recipe testing, did you? If you want the recipes you include to be truly useful, cooking them with someone who has never done so before is a great opportunity to learn what steps may not be clear enough. Include specific tips whenever questions arise—for instance, “a cast iron pan works best” or “letting the meat get to room temperature before roasting will ensure even cooking.” Make sure that all ingredients have measurements; all recipes have cooking times and temps; and, when possible, indicate how many servings a recipe yields. Take notes as you cook and edit your written recipe accordingly later.
A useful approach: Test recipes over the course of a few months so you don’t feel rushed (and can truly enjoy the results over multiple meal seatings). When you’ve worked out all the kinks, then schedule a few consecutive days to cook many of them again, this time with photography in mind. I recommend taking some photographs during prep (you could do a still-life of some key ingredients, or take shots of a sauce simmering on the stove, or of a family member stirring the pot) as well as taking well-lit pictures of the finished dishes, either styled on your counter or at the table with family members included. A cookbook with gorgeous photos is sure to inspire!
4. Determine how you will record everything.
If you are working towards a printed cookbook, at some point all your recipes and stories will need to be typewritten and placed in one document—but that doesn’t mean you have to start that way. In fact, taking handwritten notes in a dedicated notebook while preparing your foods (see previous step) is an efficient way to get everything down accurately. Having a partner will also expedite your process: One person cooks and preps while the other takes notes (and later, takes photos).
If you are including stories alongside your recipes (please do!!), you may want to dictate your memories and record them with an app on your phone—there are plenty of AI-powered transcription services now that make converting your audio files to type easier than ever (check out rev.com or otter.ai). Remember that handwritten recipes will need to be typed up, as well, so they can be imported into layout software and designed after editing.
5. Edit the contents of your book.
Now that you’ve got all of your heritage cookbook content in one file, it’s time to edit. First, focus on structure: Sort your recipes into categories according to the theme you selected at the outset, and place them in an order that makes sense. Add subheadings for each section, as well as any stories that will accompany your recipes.
Next, edit for readability: Cut extraneous things, add explanation where it seems necessary, inject personality into your writing (this is your family cookbook, not a college thesis), and generally make sure everything makes sense and reads well. (A great tip for any kid of writing: Read along out loud and see where you get tripped up—chances are you need to fix your phrasing or shorten a sentence.)
Finally, it’s time for copyediting. If your grammar and spelling skills aren’t stellar, I suggest asking someone else to take on this step. This is where you fine-tune language and ensure consistency of everything from punctuation to fraction styles to ingredient amounts.
P.S. I can hear your groaning about this step—yes, it’s tedious, but impeccable editing will elevate your cookbook from a homespun craft to a real family heirloom.
6. Find a printer.
Yes, I advise you to decide upon a printer before you begin designing your book. Why? Because knowing their specs—available trim sizes, importantly!—and pricing options will help you decide upon a format that best suits your needs. If you know you are printing 10 or more books, you’ll be able to find a printer that discounts bulk orders; and if you just need one or two copies of your cookbook, then print-on-demand is the way to go. Some publishers may have their own proprietary software that makes designing a book with them easier; while others will expect you to prepare press-ready digital files in professional software such as InDesign (not something you want to be learning from scratch for this project, I assure you). This step and the next (design and production) are by far the ones most people need help with, but if you’re fairly tech-savvy and willing to devote some time to this project, you can create something special.
7. Design your cookbook.
If you are not a designer, this can be one of the most challenging steps, especially if you’d like your book to look professional. I recommend finding a few favorite cookbooks to emulate—you may find those on your bookshelf, or a trip to the local library may be in order. Here are a few basic tips to get your cookbook design going:
Create a design template according to the specs from the printer you selected.
Limit your typeface usage to two basic font families: one serif and one sans-serif. Set all stories and accompanying text in a classic serif font such as Times New Roman or Baskerville, then set the actual recipes in a sans serif typeface that has multiple weights such as Futura or Helvetica.
Be consistent with image placement—perhaps a horizontal image of the finished dish at the top of each recipe or a full-page image on the page across from your recipe. The stronger your photography at the outset, the stronger your finished family cookbook will be!
Choose a fairly neutral color palette so your design complements the photographs rather than competing with them. That doesn’t mean no color at all, but rather colors that will work alongside your images. Did you use bright pottery in the images for your Mexican-food cookbook? Then bold colors such as orange and blue may work. If your book includes mostly muted tones (images of bread baking and lots of flour and dough, for instance) then perhaps a combination of a subdued blue and a shade of taupe will work. Whatever combination of colors you choose, use those few tones consistently throughout the design for a cohesive look.
Include page numbers and foot lines throughout the book.
Create a table of contents listing all the recipes and their corresponding page numbers—and if you’re ambitious, also include an index so readers can locate recipes by ingredient.
8. Proofread your book, please!!
You’ve worked so hard to produce this special legacy cookbook—it’s worth your time to read it two, three, even four times to ensure there are no mistakes after it is designed. Ideally you will also ask another individual to give it a read, as your own closeness to the project can make it hard to spot some errors. Copyeditor pro tip: Don’t forget to read the largest type on the page; too often our eyes will skim right over headlines and titles, and that’s the last place you want to see a typo!
9. Print your book.
Hopefully you already settled on a printing service in step number six above. At this point you will need to export your pages in whatever format your printer designates—generally either high-resolution jpegs or PDF files. Check to see if you need to account for bleed (photographs or colors that run off the edges of the page), and pay attention to any warnings for low-resolution images—you’ll want to replace those so your book prints beautifully. After uploading your book files, do a final check to make sure everything looks good before hitting “send.”
10. Share your heirloom cookbook with your family.
Why not host a party with some of the dishes featured in the cookbook? Take some pictures and keep the memory-making—and legacy—going. If you’re gifting the cookbooks to family members, handwrite a dedication on the title page to personalize the books for each recipient.
Free Guide: Preserving Your Food Memories
Download this free printable guide with family history questions designed to elicit food memories.
Life Story Links: February 14, 2023
Insights from the diaries of two very different writers, new memoirs, and tips for writing your life stories in this week's curated roundup for memory-keepers.
“Love is listening.”
—Titus Kaphar
Vintage Valentine’s Day card
Personal stories, family history explored
WRITE THE WAY YOU TALK
“Any life story book passed down to the next generation is a gift—but it's an even better gift if it sounds like the real you.” Last week I wrote about how to write with your authentic voice and why it’s so powerful.
UNLOCKING THE PAST
“The power of understanding our own personal history, and then how that connects to a larger story of who we are, I think that gets to why [the Virginia Untold initiative] is so important.”
WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?
“Most women on the family trees of the wealthiest families are reduced to little more than vital statistics.” Here’s how to elevate female role models in your family story.
LISTEN IN
As part of a season nine initiative, the Finding Your Roots team has been holding free national conversation events online. The most recent one, below, centered on how important it is to speak with older generations, and work with younger generations, to record and preserve family history. Register for upcoming events and see archived talks here.
Notable memoirs, diaries & biographies
FROM HER ISOLATION JOURNALS
Suleika Jaouad on living in the layers of our memories, “cracking the spine of a new journal to fill with very nascent inklings for a new book,” and inspiring love.
A RETURN TO HIS ORIGINAL LANGUAGE
“A record of his abortive attempts to transfer to the page what he called ‘the tremendous world I have in my head,’ [Kafka’s diaries] contain much that is fragmentary and disjointed, stumbling and stuttering.”
MEDITATIONS ON LIVING
“There is value in reading death memoirs, if we can take them on their own terms,” Kristen Martin writes in this review of Your Hearts, Your Scars by Adina Talve-Goodman, stacking the title up against other notable memoirs by the dying.
“A SCRAPBOOK OF IMPERFECT PEOPLE LIVING IMPERFECT LIVES”
Pamela Anderson, a celebrity whose image was all about her looks, takes control of her own narrative in a memoir and documentary that are complementary, “curated artifacts of a life lived.”
A TREASURE
This interview with author Angie Cruz is a delight, so if you’d like to listen, rewind the below audio to the beginning. Otherwise, pop in at the 37:30 mark to hear co-host Kate Gibson talk briefly about ““the most meaningful book [she’s] read in the last year.”
Another episode of The Book Case that may interest you: “Anna Quindlen Wants You to Write” from last year.
...and a few more links
Viola Davis confronts two Americas in Finding Your Roots episode.
“Seung-hwan and Seon-bu,” a beautiful, short first-person piece by Elliott Pak
Appeals to save Trove, a major digital archive of Australian history
Up for auction: a collection of Princess Diana’s personal letters to two of her closest friends
In Pursuance of Meanings: a memoir masquerading as a monograph
Short takes
Write the way you talk—your family will thank you
Any life story book passed down to the next generation is a gift—but it's an even better gift if it sounds like the real you: Write with your authentic voice.
One reason that life story books that derive from personal history interviews are often so compelling is that they reveal the subject’s true voice.
Picture it: An interviewer and a subject settle in for some reminiscing. Perhaps the story sharing is stilted at first. Then a comfort level is established and a rhythm is found and stories flow—and the storyteller, free of pretenses, sounds just like they always do. Maybe a little more animated (it’s exciting sharing all those memories!) or a little more sentimental (again, those memories!!), but like them.
If that same individual sat down to write their stories, though, all too often their voice would get lost. Even the most seasoned writers can spend too much time focusing on making things sound “writerly” at the expense of sounding natural.
Reading work that is written with a disregard for one’s own voice can feel labored—but mostly, it can feel like we’re hearing from someone we’ve never met. Where is the Aunt Ida you know and love amidst all those flowery adjectives and semi-coloned sentences? What happened to Grandmom’s penchant for punctuating her thoughts with cuss words? How about the southern idioms that Pop usually wields—without them it’s as if he’s speaking a different language altogether.
William Zinsser (who wrote my all-time favorite book about autobiographical writing, Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past) put it this way when describing a life story book his father left to him:
“Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his ‘style.’ He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty. He wasn’t sentimental about blood ties, and I smile at his terse appraisals of Uncle X, ‘a second-rater,’ or Cousin Y, who ‘never amounted to much.’”
He just wrote the way he talked.
When drafting your own life stories, write the way you talk, I implore you. Let your loved ones hear you when they read your memoir. Give them the gift not only of your memories, but of your voice, too.
3 ways to know your memoir voice is your authentic voice
Read a few paragraphs aloud without getting tripped up.
If you stumble over pronunciation or find the rhythm wonky (too many commas? too many long sentences?) then you’ve lost your voice. “If you’ve gone wrong, tried in print to be something you are not in life, the phrases feel like marbles in your mouth,” Anna Quindlen says in her book Write for Your Life. “But if you’ve gotten your own voice down on the page, you will read aloud and think: ‘Yep, that’s it. That’s me.’”
Leave your thesaurus in another room.
If you’re constantly looking up ‘better’ words, chances are they’re not words that would normally come out of your mouth. You’re not trying to impress your audience (most often, your family and descendants); you are trying to reveal yourself to them in new—honest—ways.
3 - Edit for clarity and impact only.
Don’t rewrite your sentences to make them sound overly polished or ornate. Don’t edit with an editor or teacher in mind, but with an audience of loved ones: Read your stories and ask yourself, Is this how I talk? Is my personality there? Is the STORY compelling/interesting/funny/engaging/memorable? Edit your work so the answers to those questions are, ‘yes!!’.
Oh, and the easiest hack to writing life stories that maintain your true voice? Speak your stories into a recorder, then transcribe (and lightly edit) them later.
If you write with an authentic voice, your readers will be captivated by you—your words, your stories, you.
Life Story Links: January 31, 2023
This week's curated reading list has a host of recent articles of interest to family history lovers, memoir writers (and readers), and modern memory-keepers.
“We treasure the voices of our ancestors; we warm ourselves with the worn fragments that we have of the stories of their lives. We ourselves will be ancestors one day.”
—Pat Schneider
Vintage photo of children with a puppy in New York City circa mid-twentieth century. Photograph by Morris Huberland, courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Memoirs of note
HER OWN PERSONAL ARCHIVE
Janet Malcolm “knew better than most that the only thing scarier than writing about oneself is letting someone else wrest control of the narrative.”
“THE HAUNTING OF PRINCE HARRY”
“The unlettered Prince [Harry] has gained in life what Hamlet achieved only in death: his own story shaped on his own terms, thanks to the intervention of a skillful Horatio,” aka ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer.
On permanence and legacy
AMASSING DIGITAL MEMORIES
“My intentions to document my life are pure, but as a millennial mother, if I can’t get a grip on photo organization and the sheer volume of images I snap, will all my efforts be for naught?”
HISTORY, ERASED
“To see her legacy in tatters at my feet was…a reminder of how vulnerable elderly people are when it comes to relying on successive generations to treasure what they have to pass down.”
Writing our lives
WRITING FOR THEME
“When we are our stories’ protagonists, we must project our first-person experience on that larger canvas of universal experience to show...how it connects with readers’ experience or lives.”
PRODUCTIVE PROCRASTINATION?
While researching your memoir is an intensive—and necessary—endeavor, getting caught up in a never-ending web of research will only delay your writing: Ideas for continuing (and walking away from) your personal research.
VALUE OF SELF REFLECTION
“Even if no one ever reads or listens to what you preserve, you gain from thinking about what you’re doing with your life. It isn’t too late to improve the narrative.”
WHICH MEMOIR FORMAT?
Marjorie Turner Hollman, a Massachusetts–based personal historian, shares her wisdom about how defining why you are writing a memoir will help you determine your memoir’s structure.
THE CRAFT OF MEMOIR
Award-winning memoirist and writing teacher Beth Kephart joins Ronit Plank in conversation about what distinguishes a memoir in essays, the ethics of telling other people’s stories, and much more in this episode of the Let’s Talk Memoir podcast:
Holocaust remembrance
LAST CHANCE TESTIMONY INITIATIVE
The USC Shoah Foundation plans to interview several Holocaust survivors a week at its first-ever in-person ‘memory studio’ in Los Angeles.
IN 3-D
“When we talk about millions, that’s a statistic. When we talk about one person, that’s a story.” A Miami Holocaust survivor records holographic testimony for the planned Boston Holocaust Museum.
...and a few more links
StoryTerrace’s Rutger Bruining on why it’s important to document your family history
New narrative-driven video game offering hinges on memory-keeping theme
“If You Heard What I Heard”: True stories of Holocaust survivors as told by their grandchildren
Nikole Hannah-Jones on infusing her family’s personal story into The 1619 Project docuseries
Short takes
Why you should stop researching your memoir now
Research and fact-checking are integral parts of creating your memoir—but there's a good chance that it may be getting in the way of your actually writing it.
Ten more family tree hints just popped up on your Ancestry account.
Your sister called with news that she found another box of Nanna’s family photos in the basement.
That family history blogger you love just posted a great review of a life writing book that you NEED to read!
Stop! Seriously, every day will bring a new “reason” you shouldn’t start writing your memoir. It’s time to focus on the reasons that you should.
While researching your memoir is an intensive—and necessary—endeavor, getting caught up in a never-ending web of research will only delay your writing. So, how do you know when you’ve gathered enough research to finally put pen to paper?
3 signs your research is strong enough to begin your memoir:
You’ve got more than a file folder filled with research materials.
You’ve got a stack of papers delineating a lot of puzzle pieces: dates for key events on your life timeline, photos showing places and people involved in your stories, photocopies of pages from your journals, newspaper clippings providing historical context. And you’ve got an idea in your head for the path your memoir will take. That’s enough, I say, to begin putting your puzzle together. A crucial point is that you are writing toward truth. “At some point, we have to trust what we have and what we can make of what we have,” Beth Kephart writes in Handling the Truth. “We can be absolutely sure of just one thing in all of this: that our hearts are true throughout the making of our story.”
You feel compelled to begin telling your stories but wonder if you’ve got all the facts straight.
Unless you are questioning the essential bedrock of your story, it’s time to forget about the facts and focus on your truth. When you have finished a first draft of your memoir, then you can turn your attention to fact-checking historical information such as dates or place names. I suggest devising a system early on for earmarking facts that need to be checked later: It can be as simple as a question mark in the margin or using only a pink highlighter for facts to come back to. Don’t worry about these details while you are in the flow of writing—they will slow you down unnecessarily and hamper your creativity.
Your curiosity leads you down one research rabbit hole after another.
Let’s face it, researching can be fun. You unearth something interesting about an ancestor (oh, how I’d love to know more!); discover that your neighbor was embroiled in your family drama (ah, another interview opportunity!); learn that the street your grandfather grew up on was named for his hometown in Italy (how the heck did that come about?!). Many of these nuggets have potential to add wonderful details to your story, but do they all? Probably not. Don’t go down a research rabbit hole unless you expect to find something that, when stitched into your story, helps the reader rather than distracts them. “Sidestep or leap over those rabbit holes, work on, and you’ll complete your book,” memoirist Barbara Scoblic writes. “Go down the rabbit holes and you’ll wind up with an encyclopedia instead of a memoir.” Indeed.
3 fun—and fast—ideas for researching your memoir
Before you begin writing:
Find historical context through newspapers.
No matter what time in your life your memoir hones in on, adding color and texture specific to the era will enrich your writing. Head to the library and find the local newspaper from the day you were born, perhaps. Or read the major headlines from big city newspapers on various days within your time period—the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the carefree mid-1960s. You may find a few telling details to include, or simply get inspired by the prevailing mood of the time. Allow yourself one or two days for this research, then move on.
Midway through your writing journey:
Revisit your journals.
If you have kept a diary throughout your life and used it as a reference when deciding what to mine for your memoir, chances are you went through it fairly closely in the planning stages. Maybe you took notes, captured full quotations to include in your narrative, even narrowed down your memoir’s time frame as a result of your journal keeping. Still, it can’t hurt to reread some pages when you’re in the midst of writing your memoir. The immediacy of journal writing—the perpetual present tense, the unknowing of what is to come—can startle us back into a state of emotion; it can spark ideas that didn’t seem relevant early on but that may prove to have great resonance now that your story is unfolding.
When you’re stuck:
Talk to someone.
You thought you’d remember every detail of the day your dad walked out, but the picture is getting murky. You can’t recall why your family left that spring break vacation in Florida early, but you know in your bones it was something big. Whatever notion you’re stuck on, asking a family member, friend, or other involved party what they recollect can be helpful. If you can’t come to a consensus about “what really happened,” either use language to reveal your ambivalence (“I remembered things differently from my sister…” or “I can only use my imagination to paint a complete picture of that day…”), or write a composite of the event that is faithful to the truth as you experienced it. “If you strive for emotional honesty and permit yourself the vulnerability it requires, your reader will in all likelihood forgive your factual alteration, omission, or embellishment of details,” Tristine Rainer writes in Your Life as Story—that is, if you write authentically and do not intentionally alter events to fit a new narrative.
Yes, research is a key component of crafting your life story. Accuracy is “a first-and-foremost objective of memoir,” Marion Roach Smith has written. Just remember, there are times when setting aside the task of researching is your best course of action. Write. Just write. You can always come back to the research later. If you don’t begin to get your stories onto the page, all that research will have been a mere hobby.
Life Story Links: January 17, 2023
This week's roundup leans heavy into memoirs—including a bunch from well-known writers and editors—but includes plenty of wisdom for everyday memory-keepers, too.
“So what if your story of a small, unremarkable life is read only by you, in some quiet corner, or by one or two people you love and trust to understand? If those are people who can learn from and value it, isn’t that a notable achievement, a valuable audience?”
—Anna Quindlen
Vintage portrait of Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., by Herman Miller, originally appeared in the World Telegram & Sun, 1964, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Going deep
CHANNELING SOMEONE ELSE’S VOICE
"Beyond doing the writing, a good ghostwriter also encourages subjects to go beyond what they might say on their own." A look at how ghostwriters craft books in someone else’s voice, without leaving fingerprints.
TO BE CONTINUED
There are a variety of reasons—including traumatic memories—when pausing a personal history interview is the best course of action. Last week I wrote about when it makes sense to honor the silence.
SILENCE—A BETTER OPTION?
Amidst the maelstrom of coverage of Prince Harry’s blockbuster memoir, Spare, this short op-ed by Patti Davis—daughter of Ronald Reagan and author of a book she says she wishes she hadn’t written—stands out.
This and that
PASSING ON INTANGIBLE ASSETS
An ethical will “can be a meaningful component of a comprehensive legacy plan.” Susan Turnbull, a personal legacy advisor in Massachusetts, writes about why estate planners should introduce their clients to such legacy letters.
DEAR READER…
In the latest blog for the Biographers Guild of Greater New York, Anna Brady Marcus offers up six ways to use letters in your memoir projects.
PHOTO ACCOUNTING
From how our photo taking was impacted during the pandemic to how many images the average smartphone user has on their device, these statistics, facts, and predictions around our picture-taking habits are a lot to take in.
The branches of our family trees
FAMILY LORE, NOW DOCUMENTED
On the season premiere of Finding Your Roots, actor Edward Norton learned that Pocahontas is his 12th great-grandmother. You can watch the full episode here.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
Ancestry released survey findings that half of Americans know more about families from their favorite TV shows than their own family tree—and 53% can’t name all four of their grandparents. Watch an episode of their entertaining YouTube series “2 Lies and a Leaf” featuring Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland:
Writers, editors, themselves
RECORDING IT ALL
Allen “Ginsberg’s auto poesy gives us his life not merely as a collection of facts, but as an imminent reality—there for you to judge, worship, reject, envy, study, or imitate as you will.” How the poet’s self-recording sessions informed his work.
“AN EXERCISE IN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY”
Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of his writing teacher and friend Elizabeth Hardwick “braids together Pinckney’s memories of Hardwick and her circle of New York intellectuals with his own coming-of-age story.”
THE EDITOR WHO EDITED SALINGER
“Writing about this archive is like trying to push the whole career of Gus Lobrano into a day at the office. Have I even mentioned that he was descended from pirates in New Orleans?”
“STILL PICTURES: ON PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEMORY”
“The usually brazen journalist seems intimidated by her past; perhaps thinking it held the power to wound her.” In her new memoir, Janet Malcom “often dances right up to the line of major reckonings, but before she arrives, she shyly walks off the stage.”
KAFKA’S “TAGEBÜCHER”
A new English translation of Kafka’s diaries “illuminate a great deal about his world as a German-speaking Jewish writer in Prague...[but] they also go beyond our interest in the man and his time: On every page they reveal the writer at work.”
BETWEEN THE COVERS
Influential biographer Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb have worked together for more than 50 years. Turn Every Page, a documenteray exploring their relationship, is “a great profile, filled with wit, affection and detailed stories.”
...and a few more links
Short takes
“To be continued…”: When breaking up a family history interview is wise
There are a variety of reasons—including traumatic memories—when pausing a personal history interview is the best course of action. Give in to the silence if...
There are many times when it’s good to hit the proverbial pause button during a personal history interview—you can always pick up the topic during another session.
I was in a meeting with fellow personal historians recently when we got on the topic of helping our clients discuss challenging times during their personal history interviews. There was so much wisdom in that (Zoom) room and one thing I jotted down was a simple phrase: “To be continued…”.
In this case, we were talking about a son wanting to hear about specific—difficult—times in his mom’s life: These were things she didn’t talk about with her family, but that certainly contributed to her identity and outlook on life. It’s understandable that he would want to learn more about his mother’s experiences. But—and this is a big “but”—when my fellow personal historian brought up this topic during an interview session, the person answering questions only went so far before getting quiet. Was it too awful to probe? Was the subject paralyzed by bad memories associated with the experiences? Did she even want to “go there”?
As trained personal historians, my colleagues and I are accustomed to giving people space—space to formulate answers, to think, to spend time exploring memories and being heard; it is a sacred space. Often moments of quiet during an interview will lead to meaningful and surprising stories. But sometimes, well, they won’t—sometimes, those extended silences may go nowhere. And that is 100-percent okay.
And sometimes, those silences are productive in another way: A seed has been planted via the question, and that seed needs time to germinate. Hence, that phrase I took note of: “To be continued…”.
Saying those words out loud either at the end of an interview or after a pregnant pause in the midst of an interview gives the subject time and space. The words are a recognition of the fact that, yes, we can continue this topic another time. That, yes, it’s okay to give it some breathing room. And that, no, we don’t need to finish this conversation right now.
Remember, though, that it’s not only a probe of traumatic experiences that may necessitate those words, “to be continued.” You may want to turn the conversation towards something lighter and more fruitful during a personal history interview in other circumstances, too. Here are a few instances where hitting the proverbial pause button on your interview (or at least on a topic that ends in a prolonged silence) can be beneficial:
Decide to resume discussion of a topic in a subsequent family history interview when:
the interview subject feels like exploring the current topic (whether involving trauma or otherwise) is too emotional, too difficult, or too uncomfortable
the interview subject would like to consult with a family member to check details on a sensitive memory or story
the interview subject is feeling tired
the interview subject has expressed that they would like to think about how to approach the topic
the topic being discussed could reveal things that negatively impact a loved one or other individual (in this case, be sure to reiterate that anything that comes up during the interview can be removed later, whether from an edited recording, a transcript, or a book).
One other thing worth noting: All of the above reasons for breaking up a personal history interview involve some form of challenge, but there’s another strong reason for resuming conversation again later—quite simply, because every time we tell a story, new aspects of our memories may come to the fore. So each new telling of a story may add texture, details, meaning. “No memory is ever alone,” Louis L’Amour wrote, “it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.” So take one trail today, another tomorrow. Give your subject space. Let them know it’s more than okay for your conversation “to be continued…”.
