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“The messy middle”: Pushing through the toughest part of memoir writing
You start out with excitement and fervor—blank pages are feverishly filled with stories about your life. But what can you do when your memoir momentum wanes?
“The page is indifferent to us—no, worse. The page turns from us like a wounded lover. We will have to win it over, coax it out of hiding. Promise to do better next time. Apologize for our disregard. And then, we settle into the pattern that we know. Three pages. Two hours. A thousand words. We have wandered and now we are back.”
—Dani Shapiro, Still Writing
Every memoir begins with passion. You start off energized, eager to tell the story that’s been living inside you for so long. Words flow effortlessly as you sketch out the opening scenes, capture vivid memories, and feel your project beginning to take shape.
And then—somewhere in the middle—the energy fades. The structure starts feeling unwieldy, doubt creeps in, and the momentum you once had seems like a distant memory. The excitement that fueled your early writing sessions is replaced by a gnawing sense of obligation, or worse, dread (the prospect of writer’s block is dreadful, to be sure).
If you’ve found yourself in this “messy middle,” you’re not alone. Nearly every memoirist hits a point where pushing forward feels overwhelming. But the good news? There are ways to get past it. Here are three strategies to help you regain focus and finish what you started.
Go back to your original “why.”
When you began this project, something deep inside compelled you to start. Maybe you wanted to preserve family history, honor a loved one, or make sense of your own past. Whatever it was, reconnect with that original spark.
Go back to your early notes or journal entries. Re-read passages where your enthusiasm was strong. Remind yourself why this story matters—not just to you, but to the people who will one day read it. Your “why” is what will carry you through the hard parts.Find an Accountability Partner.
Writing is solitary work, but finishing a book doesn’t have to be. If your motivation is waning, find an accountability partner—someone who will check in on your progress, encourage you, and keep you from abandoning your project.
This could be a fellow writer, a trusted friend, or even a writing group. Set clear goals together, whether it’s a weekly word count or a deadline for finishing a section. You might even want to read just a sentence or two to a family member to get their take (and find some respite in connecting). Just knowing that someone else is expecting you to show up can be the push you need to keep going.Accept Imperfection and Keep Moving.
Perfectionism is one of the biggest culprits behind stalled writing projects. You might feel like your structure isn’t working, or your writing isn’t good enough, or that you need to go back and fix everything before moving forward. But getting stuck in endless revisions is a surefire way to stay stuck in the middle.
Instead, give yourself permission to write poorly. Drafts are meant to be messy. The important thing is to keep moving forward. Every single word brings you closer to the finish line.
Don’t be discouraged by this inevitable “messy middle”—embrace it, and push through. As memoirist Dani Shapiro says in the opening quote to this piece, you have wandered…but WILL find your way back.
Life Story Links: June 17, 2025
Dawn Roode’s curated roundup for the week of June 7, 2025, includes recent stories of interest to personal historians, preservationists, and family history fans.
“People who make an effort to listen—and respond in ways that support rather than shift the conversation—end up collecting stories the way other people might collect stamps, shells, or coins.”
—Kate Murphy, You’re Not Listening
Vintage postcard depicting the New York World’s Fair of 1939 as seen from the Empire State Building in New York City, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.
Memories made tangible
TO KEEP OR NOT TO KEEP?
“Both of our parents had died earlier that year, within weeks of each other.... It felt that every object we picked up was imbued with a memory of them, and we struggled to sort them into our neatly labeled boxes.”
FAMILY HEIRLOOMS, DOCUMENTED
Whether you have centuries’ worth of expensive heirlooms handed down through generations or a few sentimental objects from a single ancestor, you should consider photographing your heirlooms to preserve their stories and provenance.
EARLY AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY
“The collection is just filled with the everyday stories of people,” Rosenheim tells the Guardian. “I don’t think painting can touch that.” The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through July 20, 2025.
HERITAGE, HISTORY, AND MILESTONES
A “culture and heritage venue” called The Story in Durham, a county in North East England, celebrates one year of being “the gateway to County Durham’s past” as well as “its important role in our present and future too.”
Reading—and writing—our life stories
MAGIC OF MEMOIR
“Memoir invites us into that subtle listening to what our soul wants to explore.” Linda Joy Myers on the transformative power of writing to “the end.”
OH NO!
An egregious typo on the spine of Jeff Hiller’s new memoir, Actress of a Certain Age, inspired this piece with tips from a book editor on ensuring the same thing never happens to you.
AGAINST ERASURE
“I’ve been making room for all the stories that were thrown to the bottom of the ocean, made to drown. Bit by bit I’ve been bringing them to the shore, drying them off, and sharing with those around me the great tale of my great-great-grandfather, Jefferson Lewis Edmonds.”
A MEMOIR BY GEOFF DYER
“Homework records the kinds of memories we all have—first sip of beer, first fight, first sexual encounter—but also the vividly remembered oddities, like the summer afternoon when the children in Dyer’s neighborhood played on the street with a beach ball until it popped. The important fades so quickly and the trivial turns out to be unforgettable” …maybe with too much detail?
SHAPING HIS VOICE
In a recent conversation, Jonathan Capehart spoke candidly about the emotional labor of telling his own story and what it means to show up, unapologetically, in a world that hasn’t always made space for him.
HARD-TO-TALK-ABOUT SUBJECTS
What kinds of questions should you not ask in an interview? What are the reasons to set a timer mid-interview? When should you leave a sensitive topic alone, and when should you press for more? Utah–based personal historian Rhonda Lauritzen shares tips in this recent podcast episode:
TAKING INSPIRATION FROM MEMOIRS
“Memoirs are a good reminder that people have countless interesting stories to tell about their lives," Bill Gates wrote as he introduced his summer reading list for 2025, which is all about memoirs.
...and a few more links
How to plan for what happens to your digital legacy when you die
How to write an obituary that captures the essence of a once-lived life.
Yiyun Li’s unsparing memoir of life after two sons’ suicides
IQ121 app launches to manage and safely store essential life documents and digital assets.
A new video game is inspired by photo albums and scrapbooking.
The first known photograph took at least eight hours to capture.
Finding creative freedom in the fusion of fiction and biography
Short takes
How to photograph your family heirlooms like a pro
Cataloguing your family heirlooms in a book is a great way to pass down their stories. Here are some tips for capturing incredible images of them, too.
Heirlooms can be unexpected—such as the gorgeous glass doorknobs shown here: “I was born into the bedroom with the glass doorknob and I didn’t leave it until I got married at age 23,” the subject remembers; she uses the object as a jumping-off point for stories from her life in that home (she even took the doorknob with her when the house was sold—a true heirloom). This is an example of a family heirloom photograph that has been styled and arranged in an environment, used as part of a broad family history book.
Whether you have centuries’ worth of expensive heirlooms handed down through generations or a few sentimental objects from a single ancestor, you should consider photographing your heirlooms to preserve their stories and provenance.
An heirloom’s preciousness does not derive from its financial worth, but from its meaning to you. Some of my most treasured heirlooms are valuable only to me—a crocheted blanket my mom made for me, a few shells I gathered on beaches during travels with my grandmother, and a wooden spoon that they both used that I now cook with daily. And yes, I consider each of those worthy of photographing—because they hold stories and love that I want to pass on.
Styling and photographing heirlooms can be as simple or as sophisticated as you’d like, depending upon your skill set and needs. Here are some guiding questions and helpful resources to empower you to photograph your heirlooms like a pro.
Decisions that will guide your heirloom photo shoot
What heirlooms do you want to photograph?
Knowing how many and what types of objects you want to photograph is a necessary first step. Make a list of the objects (some to consider: jewelry, letters, portraits, works of art, family Bibles, furniture, kitchen gear, instruments, clothing, china, military medals or uniforms, firearms, collectibles). Which do you want to photograph?
How will you be using the photos?
The two main ways I utilize images of family heirlooms in my books are
in a straightforward family history catalog, where the heirlooms are the main point of the book; or
in a broad family history book with a narrative focus, where the heirlooms are just one way of revealing a family’s stories.
For a straightforward heirloom catalog, the images need to clearly identify each object, perhaps show them from different angles, and hone in on relevant details. To achieve this:
Photograph each heirloom on the same backdrop. Using a large white foam board, available at any craft store, is an easy, clean option.
Maintain consistent lighting—either natural light from a window (in which case I recommend you schedule your shoots at the same time each day to ensure steady shadows) or artificial lighting (such as from studio lights, a camera flash, or directional light from a lamp). Strive to make each image look like they belong together in the same catalog.
Consider including a ruler or tape measure in some shots to clearly depict an object’s size.
I photographed this hand-turned plate, made by my client’s father, on a clean white background and from various angles, because it was being used in a catalog of family heirlooms. The lack of styling yields not only a timeless image, but a straightforward record of what the objects look like.
For images that will be included within a larger narrative book, you have many more options (and therefore, more choices—and more challenges). Consider:
What is the tone of your book? The design aesthetic? You will want to photograph the objects in a way that complements these.
In what context will the images be shown? This will influence how you style and shoot your heirlooms.
For example, in a recent book telling the story of a Jewish man who fought in the Red Army during World War II, I shot the subject’s military medals on clean white backgrounds, but in a stylized way—at an angle, with strong shadows, so when placed in the page layout they appear to be sitting on the book’s pages; I wanted the awards to stand on their own, visual reminders of the subject’s valor.
For another client, whose book encompassed generations’ worth of family history, I shot various heirlooms in styled settings that fit into the warmer, nostalgic tone of the book—an inherited cast-iron pan was styled with other items in their kitchen during a cooking session, capturing not only the textures of the heirloom, but its familiar use with a passed-down recipe; while a stack of letters that an ancestor had saved was tied beautifully with twine and styled with a handkerchief, floral stems, and one letter open for reading, an invitation into their intimacy.
This styled heirloom photo uses candles and flowers to add dimension and texture, natural lighting for soft shadows, and a simple wooden surface as a warm yet simple backdrop.
Where are the heirlooms?
Logistics can play a major role in how you photograph your family heirlooms. If you are the keeper of them all, then life is easy—skip this question! However, if your heirlooms are divided among various family members, or tucked away in a storage facility or bank vault, you will need a plan of attack.
Can you arrange to have all the heirlooms brought to a central location for one or two days of shooting?
If not, can you enlist the help of a family member at each location to make tackling multi-location shoots easier? Or ‘assign’ photo shoots to a different individual at each location?
How will you achieve consistent lighting across various locations (or change up your visual approach based on location)?
Have you thought of everyplace your heirlooms might be? Consider the homes of other family members; storage facilities, bank vaults or lock boxes; your own attic, basement, shed, closets;
Bonus: heirloom photography resources and ideas
Some easy heirloom image ideas:
Shoot a framed photograph in its environment, instead of scanning the image itself.
Shoot an everyday heirloom (one you use often, such as your grandma’s wooden spoon or your great-uncle’s woodworking plane) while you are using it—your hands and the surroundings will bring life to the object.
Have a collection of items such as baseball cards? Choose one or two representative items to make the center of your photo’s focus, but scatter many of the others around—you don’t need to see every item in a collection to understand its vastness or its value.
Shoot engagement rings on the hands of the wearer or in an elegant velvet ring box.
A few keys to getting great shots:
Remember, the subject is the focal point of the image—any props or backdrops you include should add texture and visual interest, but not distract from the main subject.
The angle you choose to shoot from will impact how the heirloom is seen. I recommend always shooting from a few angles—you might be surprised by which one resonates in the end.
Keep the trim size of the book in mind when shooting your heirlooms, as this may influence the orientation of your photographs.
Go for dimension and layering, but not a cluttered feel, when arranging props and heirlooms for your shoot. A simple dishcloth or ribbon, when styled beautifully, might be enough.
Reflective items such as mirrors and glass can be more difficult to shoot. Search YouTube for a tutorial on how to approach these objects.
“A ‘narrative’ is a little story or subtext that gives the shot its purpose,” prop stylist Robin Zachary writes in her beautiful book, Styling Beyond Instagram. “By combining any given theme and narrative, you can create endless options to give purpose and meaning to your images.” Be creative!
A few of my favorite (affordable) styling resources:
Related reading:
For tips on how to learn more about your family heirlooms, check out this piece in Family Tree Magazine.
For more ideas about preserving the stories behind your family heirlooms, explore the posts below:
Life Story Links: June 3, 2025
Dawn Roode’s curated roundup for the week of June 2, 2025, includes recent stories of interest to personal historians, preservationists, and family history fans.
“You are the landlord of your own soul. Let the words, the memories, the imaginings pour white-hot onto the page. You can decide later what they are, what they might become, and when it is time to show them to someone else.”
—Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others
Vintage postcard depicting a black-and-white photograph of children on the shore at an Asbury, Park, New Jersey, beach, postmarked 1933, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.
Writing comes and goes
‘THE SILENCE KEEPS ITS COUNSEL’
“I’d hoped I could find words, or they would find me, to share my thoughts about life, memories, and spirit during this period of mourning after my son’s death,” Linda Joy Myers writes. “I discovered I couldn’t rush anything. I sat with no words longer than I ever have in my life, and now they are returning.”
WHEN STORIES SURFACE
“Some moments in life are so powerful, they don’t just mark time—they open a doorway to our memories and to how to live more fully in the present.” Sacred Stories’ Whitney Myers on the power of life transitions to invite reflection.
GOALS: WRITE EVERY DAY
“Every time I showed up to write, there was always something to say if I listened for it. The problem was that I ‘thought’ before I acted, and felt ‘fear’ before the freedom that came in trying.”
The stories of our lives
CREATING A FAMILY ORAL HISTORY
“As a new mother herself, [Nicole Wong] realized she’d become ‘the person who holds the information now’—and that time was of the essence to capture it from her parents.” The author’s quest to learn Mahjong from her parents’ generation turned into a deep exploration of family history—and here, her experience is used as a jumping-off point for valuable guidance on interviewing your family members like an oral historian.
PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY LIKE AN ARCHIVIST
“You never know what will have value in 50 years, or what will help be evidence to fill in pieces of a puzzle later on.” KQED spoke to experts on how to best preserve family documents, digitize records, and how best to connect with organizations who may be interested in your personal archives.
REMEMBERING THE FALLEN, ANY TIME
Memorial Day may be passed, but I hope you’ll be inspired by these three ways to honor the legacy of someone who died in service, whether or not you have a family member who served and died for their country.
Miscellany
FRIEND—AND BIOGRAPHER
“In composing his biography, the wonderfully titled Peace Is a Shy Thing, Vernon appears to have tracked down most every individual who crossed paths with [Tim] O’Brien and had an interesting anecdote to tell.”
USING TECH TO STAY CONNECTED
Discover when and how to use digital tools with someone who has dementia, what types of tech can stimulate storytelling and memory, how to record and preserve family history and legacy, and more in the following conversation:
...and a few more links
“Memoir, memory, truth, and fiction mix it up in the ‘Taj Mahal’”
Palliative and hospice care experts about what they’ve learned from their patients.
planning ahead for the large digital legacy you will leave behind
MyHeritage and ScanCafe partner to digitize and preserve family memories.
As Google Photos turns 10, it now hosts more than 9 trillion photos and videos…
…plus, 10 ways (some new) to celebrate a decade of memories through the app.
Short takes
3 ways to honor the legacy of a family member on Memorial Day
The holiday’s meaning often gets lost amidst long weekends and cookouts, but we’ve got easy ways to remember loved ones who died in service.
Memorial Day has come to be seen as the unofficial start to summer in the United States, ushering in warmer weather (if not the actual summer season). Its meaning is often lost amidst long weekends and cookouts, but let us not forget, it is a day on which those who died in active military service are honored.
Here are three ways to honor the legacy of someone who died in service, whether or not you have a family member who served and died for their country.
Intentionally remember your family member who died in service.
Set aside time to actively remember your loved one. This could mean looking through old photographs, reading letters they wrote, or sharing their story with your family. If they are buried in a military cemetery, consider visiting their grave to leave flowers or a flag. You might also take a moment of silence or raise a toast in their honor during a family gathering. Small acts of remembrance help keep their legacy alive.
Invite stories from other veterans in your family or community.
While it may be outside your comfort zone to interact with people you’ve never met, Memorial Day presents a unique opportunity to talk with living veterans in your community. Libraries and senior centers often have intergenerational conversation groups, or consider a senior who is loosely in your circle who you’d like to know more about (the grandparent of one of your kid’s friends, for example, or a shopkeeper who you know casually). Ask them to share memories of any of their fallen comrades, or simply listen to their own experiences. Record these conversations—whether in writing, audio, or video—to preserve their stories. If they are comfortable, consider submitting them to a veterans' history project or helping them create a family archive. These firsthand accounts add richness to history and ensure that the sacrifices made are never forgotten—and moreover, they shine a light on a single individual and create sacred space for them to share stories from their life..
Visit a local cemetery and photograph headstones for the Find-a-Grave website.
One way to contribute to the collective act of remembrance is by helping document gravesites for historical and genealogical records. The Find-a-Grave website allows users to upload photos and information about burial sites, ensuring that the names and legacies of fallen service members remain accessible to future generations. If you visit a cemetery on Memorial Day, take a few extra moments to snap photos of military headstones and upload them to the site. This simple act of digital preservation can be incredibly meaningful for families searching for information about their ancestors.
Honoring a family member who died in service doesn’t have to be limited to Memorial Day, but this holiday serves as an important reminder to pause and reflect. Whether through personal remembrance, community storytelling, or historical preservation, you can help honor a loved one’s legacy in a way that feels meaningful to you.
Life Story Links: May 20, 2025
Dawn Roode’s curated roundup for the week of May 20, 2025, includes recent stories of interest to personal historians, preservationists, and family history fans.
“As a bird must sing, it’s your human nature to tell your story.”
—Tristine Rainer
Vintage postcard depicting a black-and-white photograph of German performers circa early 1900s, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.
Our lives, our stories
THE PUZZLE OF YOUR LIFE
Last week I wrote about writing towards your memoir. “Write, then write some more; read, analyze, tweak; then write some more. Then, as you begin to uncover patterns, you can MAKE something of what you have written.”
LEGACY PLANNING
“Nostalgia has its place. But if you're aiming for cohesion, belonging, and wise stewardship in your family’s future, story isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s strategic.”
GENEALOGY: SIDEWAYS STRATEGY
“Because living relatives possess what dead ancestors cannot give you: context, stories, photos, and artifacts that bring your family history to life. This is how you transform genealogy from a sterile collection of facts into a vibrant family narrative.”
CREATIVE NONFICTION MASTER
“There is no higher praise for a work of factual writing than to say that it reads like a John McPhee book.” Read an excerpt from Looking for a Story by Noel Rubinton by Peter Hessler (May 2025, Princeton University Press).
The family history we feel and seek
THREADS OF TIME
“As the world has changed, so has my family story. Not the facts or the bones of the narrative arc, but the meaning made and the memories I lean upon. And, more importantly for the shape of the story, as the world has changed, so have I—the narrator.”
‘THE END IS THE BEGINNING’
“I relied on memory, lived experience, stories my mother, my sisters, or other relatives or friends told me about my mother and her family before I was born, photos, scrapbooks, and research to evoke the milieu of my mother’s life.”
‘HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT’
“From childhood, Julie Brill struggled to understand how her father survived as a young Jewish boy in Belgrade; in her memoir, she recounts how through exacting research, a bit of luck, and three emotional trips to Serbia, she returned to her father a small part of what the Nazis stole: his own family history.”
GENERATIONAL TRAUMA
“My grandmother, Nina, had always described her rural western-Ukrainian childhood in romantic terms. I would sit for hours in her Chicago kitchen while she told stories about the old farm, how every beet, potato, onion, and egg came from the family’s garden.”
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF HER MOTHER
Writing the book “raised the bar” on the empathy this writer felt for her mother as she understood the milieu her mother lived in and discovered the aspects that shaped her mother in the early years of her life.
‘FEEDING GHOSTS’
“The point at which I felt I had accomplished what I set out to do with this story was when, for the first time, my mother told me that she understood how much I loved her,” Tessa Hulls says of her Pulitzer-winning graphic memoir.
The past, in pictures
‘A PRICELESS INHERITANCE’
Curators in Memphis have begun the painstaking process of saving a trove of 75,000 photographs that capture middle- and working-class life. It will take years—maybe even decades—to complete.
JEWISH WWII VETERANS
“I grew up listening to their stories and perhaps this is why ever since I became a war photographer, I didn’t just want to photograph wars, but also the veterans who had fought in previous ones.” He captures their personal histories, too.
CHRONICLING OUR LIVES—INSTANTLY
The upcoming doc Mr. Polaroid tells the little-known story of the man behind the camera, a Harvard dropout named Edwin Land. Over a half century ago, before the smartphone, Land was dreaming up “a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses.”
IN DEFENSE OF SOUVENIRS
“The Japanese have a word for when an object stirs a memory—natsukashii.” Physical keepsakes, whether priceless or prosaic, can be the most meaningful mementoes of a trip—here are 10 visually interesting ones.
...and a few more links
The pressure of ‘making memories’—is it the scourge of modern parenting?
Photographer captures the lives—and spirit—of immigrant moms in a striking and unexpected way.
New collection from Assouline is inspired by treasured family heirlooms.
“My grandfather was a Nazi executioner at Auschwitz—and I had no idea until 7th grade history class”
“A new biography of Mark Twain doesn’t have much of what made him great”
Short takes
Putting the pieces together (aka memoir ‘making’)
By holding as your goal the idea of ‘writing your memoir,’ you are focused too soon on the end goal. Instead, think about writing towards your memoir.
During the design phase of a personal history book, I often spread pages out all over my office floor to evaluate the book’s flow. Similarly, in the early stages of a memoir—when writings may consist of disjointed stories and short reflections without any narrative arc—I will spread pages out on the floor to look for patterns. Sure, you can do this on a computer, but I find this old-school approach much more efficient (and satisfying)!
It’s a rare individual who decides to write a memoir and knows out of the starting gate the path their writing will take. No, it’s much more common to decide to write a memoir…then to wander—to wander amidst memories, to wander on the page, even to wander in one’s commitment to the endeavor as a whole.
When coaching my memoir clients, it can often be helpful to talk about ‘making’ a memoir rather than ‘writing’ a memoir. It’s a small semantic shift, but an effective one. Why?
Well, whether we call it imposter syndrome or insecurity, many of us (me included) may find ourselves staring down a blank page and letting our imagination get the best of us—and who doesn’t have thoughts in those moments such as,
Why is this so easy for everyone else?
I read ______’s memoir, and it was powerful and clear—they certainly weren’t all over the place like me!
Where the hell is this writing GOING?!
But ______’s memoir—hell, every memoir written by a human—was in its early stages all over the place. Disjointed. Lacking a theme or narrative arc.
Every memoirist has wondered where the hell their writing is going.
How to gain clarity on your memoir’s theme
By holding as your goal the idea of ‘writing your memoir,’ you are focused too soon on the end goal, in my opinion. In reality, you are writing towards your memoir. So: Write, then write some more; read, analyze, tweak; then write some more. Then, as you begin to uncover patterns, you can MAKE something of what you have written.
As William Zinsser recommends in this brilliant piece (I recommend reading the whole thing if you have time), begin writing by following the memories as they come to you. Keep writing—short vignettes, slivers of memory, feelings from your childhood, favorite stories you’ve told a thousand times…
“Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor…. Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s funny, what’s unusual, what’s worth pursing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take…. Then all you have to do is put the pieces together.”
Admittedly, “putting the pieces together’ may not be as simple as it sounds—but it is straightforward and fun, like putting a puzzle together: the puzzle of your life. Not your whole life, of course (a memoir isn’t an expansive tome covering every autobiographical tick on the timeline of your life), but the aspect of your life that has revealed itself in this exercise as holding meaning.
So, begin writing towards your memoir. One day in the future, I promise, you’ll be able to make it out of the raw materials you’ve penned.
Life Story Links: May 6, 2025
Dawn Roode’s curated roundup for the week of May 6, 2025, includes recent stories of interest to personal historians, preservationists, and family history fans.
“This isn’t a tell-all because some of what I’m telling you is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too—the spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem: What is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences?”
—Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Vintage postcard depicting a faded photograph of two daisies postmarked from Bari, Italy, in 1906, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.
Between generations
A SURPRISE ORAL HISTORY
“I was impressed that my father put this project together with such care, resurfacing stories my family had long repressed. I was also dumbfounded that he somehow had zero follow-up questions when my uncle said he was ‘attacked by Malaysian pirates.’”
TIME CAPSULE
“Imagine opening a letter from your younger self, a glimpse into the dreams and anxieties of a fifth-grader. That's exactly what happened to a group of graduating seniors.”
SHARING, OR OVERSHARING?
“I share my life on social media; I share my life in my newsletter; now, I’ve shared my life in my book. [My son] is a massive part of my life, and because of this, for the first time in my decades of public oversharing, I have a reason to censor.” Arianna Rebolini on writing about your kid in memoir.
Our own personal histories
WHAT’S STOPPING YOU?
“I’m scared,” the prospective client told me immediately after calling me about undertaking a personal history project. So we delved into their why—and their fears. Then I decided to share some of these common anxieties…and how to alleviate them.
MEMORY MAPPING
Florida–based life writing teacher Patricia Charpentier invites you to sketch your childhood street and the layout of your home, labeling everything you can remember. As you create your map, old memories might float to the surface.
Fighting for the future
REQUIRING EXTRAORDINARY EFFORTS
“Whoever controls the archives controls history.” A look at why it is important for Ukraine to work on protecting and preserving archival collections during wartime.
HIGHLIGHTING—AND HONORING—MILITARY STORIES
“It was hearing their life story—it humanizes people. It’s easy to label people and put them in boxes, but we all have a story, we all have lessons, we all have so much value to give.” Retired Air Force vet’s podcast shares hero stories.
...and a few more links
The Memory Box, Charlotte’s Big Surprise—a new children’s book that tackles loved ones’ memory loss
Read an excerpt from Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family by Jill Damatac.
Presenting thw 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners, including those in Memoir and Biography.
Read an excerpt from the new biography Dickens the Enchanter by Peter Conrad.
Short takes