Memories Matter
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Life Story Links: July 29, 2025
Recent recommended reads about memory preservation, life story writing, and memoirs of note round out personal historian Dawn Roode’s curated roundup this week.
“Life is story in motion. Each day, you add to your story, revise it, and view it from a different angle. You erase things. Tear pages out. And sometimes, in hindsight, wish you could put them back. A day is a story. A year is a story. A life is a story. You are a story.”
—Ruta Sepetys
Vintage photograph by Danny Lyon: “Two Latin girls pose in front of a wall of graffiti in Lynch Park in Brooklyn, New York, June 1974”; 1999 print from the original 35mm slide. Records of the Environmental Protection Agency. Courtesy Picturing the Century Exhibition, National Archives.
For generations to come
‘LOVE, GRIEF, LONGING FOR HOME’
A local history buff donates his treasure trove of wartime letters—more than 11,000 in total, spanning the Civil War through Vietnam—to Chapman University’s Center for American War Letters:
THE NITTY-GRITTY OF DIGITAL PRESERVATION
“The reality is harsh: hard drives fail regularly. If you're relying on a single drive for storage, you're essentially gambling” with your family archive. While this piece is written for professional photographers, there is a wealth of information of value to anyone with digital assets worth safeguarding.
EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY
“The sea is a stranger to me,” Ella Sheldon confessed in the first pages of her journal, which goes on to chronicle her voyages on the high seas all over the world between 1892 and 1900. Here is a fascinating look at how one woman's personal handwritten diary can hold gems even 125 years later.
DATA PROTECTION OBLIGATIONS?
“The destroyed records had the potential to be an unknown memory, an identity, a sense of belonging, answers—all deeply personal pieces in the jigsaw of a person’s history—some now lost for eternity.”
Memories, memoir, and mementos
BUT WHERE ARE THE JUICY BITS?
“It’s sad to think that, if the current trend for cutting indexes continues, future memoirs might be accessible only electronically.” How will readers browse for gossip in celebrity memoirs, then?
PROOF OF LIFE; STORY
“There’s a strange intimacy to a stranger’s grocery list; a found scrap of paper is a rare analog window into someone else’s needs. It’s an accidental autobiography, a blank space to be filled with one’s imagination.”
DEBBIE MILLMAN’S JOURNALING PRACTICE
“Some years ago, I reread a journal I kept during my college years, in 1982.... I found myself holding my breath as I realized these weren’t just diary entries or memories. They were evidence of a life. They were my witnesses to living and persevering.”
INFO VS. STORIES
“Take a look at your family tree. Are you seeing people or just data points? If it’s feeling more like a spreadsheet than a collection of human stories, it might be time to dig a little deeper and bring those ancestors back to life.”
Happy and hard—it’s all worth writing about
TRAUMA-FOCUSED WRITING
Writing hard stories is…well, hard. But as Megan Febuary puts forth in her new book, Brave the Page, doing so may also bring healing and wholeness. Last week, I reviewed this worthwhile book.
INHERITANCE
“I was procrastinating while writing a piece that involved research on genealogical websites, and, on a whim, I began punching my grandparents’ names into search bars.” Jessica Winters’s piece is a tour de force of layering past and present and an incredible example of how skilled writing can infuse genealogical research with life.
ON NAVIGATING SUICIDE IN MEMOIR
“Our stories shape us. We can’t escape them. I was no longer the same person after Daniel. I couldn’t run away from him on the page. My book wouldn’t ring true to me without him.”
‘THE OG VIBE SHIFT’
Thematically, this one’s a stretch for our Life Story Links roundup, and yet I couldn’t resist including it for the grammar and word nerds among us: “The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations.”
EMBRACING GENRE FLUIDITY
“Like breakfast for dinner, hybrid writing challenges expectations—not for rebellion’s sake, but because it’s practical, and something deeper, stranger, or truer demands it from your material.” On finding the right container for your story.
HOW HISTORY IS (RE)WRITTEN
“The national parks were established to tell the American story, and we shouldn’t just tell all the things that make us look wonderful. We have things in our history that we are not proud of anymore.”
Where memories reside
“‘THAT ANCESTRAL TRAVELING LIFESTYLE…’
“I have noticed that my memory is strangely place-bound: I don’t often remember when something happened but rather where it occurred.” Madeline Potter on letting the Roma narrate their own story.
SEARCHING FOR HOME
Hala Alyan, author of new memoir I'll Tell You When I'm Home, “and her relatives have been displaced from their homes in Gaza, Kuwait, and Lebanon—and she says it's difficult to fully separate herself from these places.” Listen in:
LEGACY, VALUES, AND LOVE
A veteran in the personal history space, video biographer Iris Wagner, speaks about how she got started, what makes a good legacy video (it’s not prescriptive advice!), and why she’s so passionate about her work. Listen in below, or click here to see time stamps of the topics they cover.
...and a few more links
Larry Smith (the “six-word memoir” guy) shares 6 lessons from a return to live storytelling.
“Wishing to Be Remembered, I Remember,” a prose poem by Beth Kephart.
“America’s Cup finally has a coffee table book, and it’s a work of art.”
How Petite Keep “boxes of memories” are faring after Shark Tank investment
5 creative ways to add storytelling elements to your next travel book.
Read an excerpt from the memoir A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas.
Colorado’s Marshall Fire survivors find healing and meaning through oral history project.
Short takes
Life Story Links: June 16, 2026
Personal historian Dawn Roode curates recent posts on the topics of memoir, life story writing, family history preservation; here, the June 16, 2026, roundup.
“It is not the job of future generations to make sense of our lives from the remnants of the marketplace, scrap snapshots, refurbished heirlooms, electronic bits of bits. Only we can make of it all a song of self, a story with the power of myth, to leave somewhere the best of what we were and what we learned.”
—Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir
Vintage photograph by Walter Lubken of the Hancock homestead, July 23, 1910: settler from Benson, Minnesota, Sun River project, Montana; 1999 print from the original glass negative. Records of the Bureau of Reclamation (115-JAD-224). Courtesy Picturing the Century Exhibition, National Archives.
Finding our stories
INVITATIONS TO MEMORY
“Writing prompts are really just ways of listening—to memory, to emotion, to curiosity. They remind us that there’s no single path to finding your story; there are hundreds of small openings that lead to it.”
NO TRANSLATION NEEDED
“My grandfather only spoke Lao, and I had lost the language—but with one dish, we shared so much.” Manichanh Naonady on how eating snails with her grandfather bridged their language barrier.
MOBILE RECORDING BOOTH
Inside a circa 1978 camper trailer, The Chatterbox Project founder David Balzer collects and shares joyful audio stories in Canada:
Writing our lives
MEMOIR IN THE AGE OF OVERSHARING
“From sad-fishing on Facebook to sensational Substack revelations, today’s readers don’t have to look far for confessional writing. Is this the end of autobiography?”
WRITING THE TRUTH
“Memoir required a confident retelling of experience, a way for a reader to exist inside someone else’s life for a moment. The problem, I was coming to understand, was that even though I wanted to write my life story, I had disappeared inside the stories of everyone else.”
WRITING MEMOIR IS HARD
“For any memoirist who’s struggling to write, you’re not alone, and there’s nothing wrong with you or your process if it’s taking longer than you want.”
Short takes
Life Story Links: June 2, 2026
Personal historian Dawn Roode curates recent posts on the topics of memoir, life story writing, family history preservation; here, the June 2, 2026, roundup.
“Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.”
—Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861
Vintage photograph of the South Street waterfront in New York City, 1935, by Berenice Abbott, courtesy the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Personal history potluck
INTERGENERATIONAL CONNECTIONS
“You might not think calling your grandkids on the phone could invoke more than clipped answers—‘school was okay,’ ‘I have a flag football game later…’—but I guarantee using video and a few of these ideas will rouse spirited—and meaningful—conversation.” Last week I wrote about how to be proactive sharing your stories with your grandkids.
A LEGACY OF VALUES
“While leaving a legacy may feel more urgent for older adults who feel the pressing nature of limited time, some scholars argue the drive to leave one can—and maybe should—begin earlier in life.”
‘THE STORIES MAKE MY MOM COME ALIVE’
Comedian Gus Constantellis shares how his Greek mom inspired a heartfelt cookbook—called, hilariously, My Greek Mom’s Recipes: She Died. I Wrote This Cookbook—filled with family recipes, humor, and memories:
SEARCHING FOR FAMILY
“At age fifty-eight, I discovered my biological family from a DNA test that [my adoptive mother] had given to me. I found an unbelievable connection to my biological father and learned he had been with me most of my life…. The story I discovered, my story, was a true war story.”
BOOKS ABOUT MEMORY
“I’m fascinated by how memory works, how it is organized, all the methods that have been developed to increase it and explore it and to summon images from the depths of the past. I write about my own memories and those of other people because that is the history I pursue: the subjective experience of time.”
‘WHEN BIOGRAPHY GOES DELULU’
“The process of discerning the truth from illusion was an unexpected yet crucial task in researching and writing my book, Follow the Signs, a hybrid biography that combines the story of Goodman’s life alongside my quest to create an authentic portrait of her.”
...and a few more links
Short takes
Life Story Links: May 5, 2025
Personal historian Dawn Roode curates recent posts on the topics of memoir, life story writing, family history preservation; here, the May 5, 2026, roundup.
“This, perhaps, is the greatest gift of the diary—its capacity to stand as a living monument to our own fluidity, a reminder that our present selves are chronically unreliable predictors of our future values and that we change unrecognizably over the course of our lives.”
—Maria Popova
Vintage postmark and stamp on a Union prisoner envelope, dated Oct. 26, 1864; original public domain image courtesy of the Smithsonian.
Notes on the craft of life writing
THE POWER OF ASKING ‘WHAT IF?’
“I am watching and listening for what makes electricity in me, in the story. Somewhere in this list I always find the next doorway. And that’s all you need: one good detail to wake yourself up.” Ramona Ausubel’s favorite exercise for getting unstuck.
TEXTURE, CONTEXT, DETAILS
Last week I wrote about how to add historical context to your family history—and beyond the six diverse and rich resources I share, there is a wealth of inspiration and specific ideas to ensure your family’s stories are not only remembered, but felt.
ON WITNESSING HER OWN STORY
“Two months ago, I started EMDR therapy. That’s also when I happened to join an 8-week storytelling workshop. It turns out, both have a tendency to invite your past into the present. And when done at the same time, well, it’s a doozy.”
Recent memoirs
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Leise Hook meditates on what her American and Chinese names reveal about herself in this excerpt from her graphic memoir, Names and Faces.
FAMESICK
“Oddly, from a writer who has been consistently ridiculed for TMI, I wanted to know more,” Kaitlyn Greenidge writes in this piece about what Lena Dunham’s memoir leaves out.
A WRITER’S MEMOIR IN ESSAYS
“Memory is research, because we forget so much, and one recovered detail leads to another. And there’s risk in remembering, deleting sentiment and hope and finding an inclusive truth that is bigger than specific lives and includes us all.”
‘KEEPER OF MY KIN’
“‘I know that at the very heart of our family is this original sin.’ She knew, too, that she would write about it, and she urged her parents to throw nothing out. They bequeathed her an invaluable family archive.” Ada Ferrer tells her family’s Cuba migration trauma story.
SAYING YES TO THE BOOK
“When I started writing a memoir,…sifting through the most devastating thing that had happened to me—my mother’s dementia and her eventual death on my son’s first birthday, the day I was hosting a zebra-themed party for him at our house—I knew I’d have to embrace weirdness in order to actually finish a draft of it.”
From the archives
NEWLY RELEASED JD SALINGER LETTERS
“This exchange provides the clearest primary-source documentation yet of Salinger’s resistance to biographical framing and his determination to control how his identity intersected with his work.”
OBJECTS OF AFFECTION
John Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne, dated between 1819 and 1820, have been returned to the owner after being stolen from a Long Island estate in the 1980s.
WHAT WAS YOUR LIFE LIKE?
Every once in a while a local TV segment or radio broadcast shines a light on a resident’s personal history, like this one below. I hope people view this clip not just as an introduction to a fascinating man, but as inspiration to pull out old photos and ask their own family elders for their stories—they’re ALL worth time in the spotlight.
Short takes
Life Story Links: February 24, 2026
A curated roundup that spans more than a month of curated personal and family history content (thanks for your patience as we have been updating our website!).
“I have hurriedly re-read the whole of my Journal. I regret the gaps. I feel as though I were still master of the days I have recorded, even though they are past, whereas those not mentioned in the pages are as though they had never been.”
—Eugene Delacroix, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix
Vintage postcard depicting an American railroad scene, “Lightning Express Trains Leaving the Junction,” 1874; published in Viewpoints, a selection from the pictorial collections of the Library of Congress.
Family memories, photos & legacy
A DIGITAL DARK AGE
"There was a period from the early 2000s to 2013 where it was very difficult for people to get organized and photos were lost." On the ‘black hole’ of early 2000s digital family photos.
FROM CAPTURING TO CURATING
“We’re just trying to keep a record of our lives that doesn’t feel like a second job…. So the modern problem isn’t ‘How do I document my life?’ The problem is: How do I stop my documentation from becoming noise?”
‘21ST CENTURY VERSION OF CANVAS BAGS’
“Our digital stuff is so much more fragile than our paper stuff. And we don't really think about it like that.” Thoughts on preserving your (digital) legacy.
‘IT’S ABOUT THE FEELINGS WE CREATE’
“Maybe our families’ legacies aren’t so much about the things we do, but the values those things reveal and the atmosphere they generate.” Catherine Saunders muses on what our kids will remember.
WHAT’S ENCODED IN OUR LEGACIES?
Obituaries are one of the most enduring public records of an individual’s life, and a sweeping new study looked at 38 million of them to learn how we want to be remembered.
Moments in memoir
DEBUT MEMOIR
“In the same way that I knew I needed to hunt, I knew I would narrate this story of walking into the woods alone, with a rifle, in the dark.” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire” with Deborah Lee Luskin.
NIGHT WRITING
“Paradoxically, the writing I throw away makes possible my life as a working writer.” Moriah Hampton on how writing through trauma empowers her to live as a “working writer.”
THE POWER OF WRITING TO HEAL
“Three people attended my first memoir class taught in my therapy office, which expanded to dozens per week in several classes each week for over fifteen years.” Linda Joy Myers on the heart and craft of writing a healing memoir.
YOUR NARRATIVE QUESTION IS…?
“I would encourage writers of memoir to figure out early on what your narrative question is. You’re not writing the Wikipedia entry of your life or even a specific episode of your life.” Amen.
Musings on life writing
WRITE AN ASPIRATIONAL EULOGY
“That’s either brilliant or batshit,” Karen Salmansohn’s husband told her when he found her writing her own eulogy. Read about why she undertook the task, and how you can, too.
FROM BETH KEPHART, A SHORT MEDITATION ON MEMORY
“The fear of having lost the years. Of remembering only what I wrote, but did I write rightly? Writing being what you put in and all you leave out; the real word is abandon.”
52 WEEKLY PROMPTS, FREE
Keeping a journaling or family history practice alive through the entire year can feel daunting—until you realize you don’t have to come up with ideas on the spot. To celebrate the start of 2026, I have shared a year’s worth of journaling prompts.
THE HOLOCAUST STORY SHE SAID SHE WOULDN’T WRITE
I included this story in an April roundup, but upon seeing it again in a year-end wrap-up from the Museum of Jewish Heritage, decided to share once more: “What would become of stories like Mr. Lindenblatt’s if the generation of mine that was supposed to inherit them had taken the privilege that came with another generation’s survival and decided not to listen?”
...and a few more links
Short takes
A new book to help you write the hard stories
Brave the Page by trauma-informed writing coach Megan Febuary shares how to probe memories, write about your hard experiences, and find healing.
Brave the Page: How Writing Our Hard Stories Brings Healing and Wholeness by Megan Febuary was released in June 2025 (Baker Books).
While many of my clients come to me wanting to undertake personal history interviews to capture their stories, others endeavor to write their stories themselves—with a little help. In those instances, I act as a memoir coach, meeting them at whatever stage they are currently at by providing guidance, support, and editing. When their stories delve into traumatic experiences from their past, we inevitably have to slow things down and focus as much on self-care as on the writing. That often comes as a surprise to them.
Writing hard stories is…well, hard. But as Megan Febuary puts forth in her new book, Brave the Page (Baker Books, June 2025), doing so may also bring healing and wholeness.
Inside “Brave the Page”
In Brave the Page, Febuary shares more than once that “story healing,” as she calls it, has nothing to do with being a writer—rather, “it is about paying attention to the stories within and digging into the deep questions that our stories ask of us.” Sound scary? It can—and perhaps, should—be: Going deep and writing about trauma will inevitably make one feel some of that trauma again; as the title of her book suggests, you’ll need to be brave.
What Febuary offers up in this book is a whole lot of support. That support takes the form of:
inspiring personal stories
research-driven approaches to self-care and trauma-focused writing
gentle encouragement (including a mantra at the beginning of each chapter)
and plenty of guidance (the writing prompts are generative and clear, and will certainly get your pen moving across the page).
There are moments in the book where, if you haven’t been in therapy, you may feel thrown by some of the psychology jargon (attachment styles, inner child healing, trauma responses)—but don’t be put off by this. In every instance that the author describes the rationale behind her approach to story healing, she (a) footnotes her references if you’d like to dig further; and (b) perhaps more importantly, describes how these concepts have played out in her own life and writing. There is an autobiographical bent to the book that lays the foundation for all the guidance and writing prompts that follow.
Are you ready to write about your trauma?
Febuary is deeply knowledgable about writing about trauma. She has journaled since her youth and braved the page quite literally when she began putting words to her shame around a childhood diagnosis of scleroderma, and later to abuse she suffered as a girl and sexual violence as an adult. She earned her master’s degree at a school that specialized in narrative-focused trauma care, and she “researched the body as storyteller, learning how it becomes the gatekeeper for the stories too tender to address until we are emotionally available for them.”
Brave the Page, I hope, will help you know when you are emotionally available for your own hard stories, as well as how to support yourself and heal while doing so. It will teach you how to be a “compassionate witness to your life” and to feel safe while doing the tender work of probing your memories.
Do you feel like you need permission to write about your challenges? Permission to put words to your feelings of shame? Permission to claim your story as your own? Permission to go slow—to unbury memories that have been long hidden, but at your own pace? You’ll find all that permission and more here.
Your story is not finished. It is ever-evolving, and writing about it, Febuary describes, is a “spiritual progression.”
And you must keep at it, even when it feels hard. “This work of using our voices,” she writes, “is a muscle we must train, and it becomes stronger each time we do it.”
Megan Febuary and I are in agreement: Writing through your trauma will be hard—but it will also be transformational. I recommend picking up a copy of her book to be your companion on your personal story healing journey. And she hopes that your copy will be well-loved and visibly used: “May [it] be dog-eared and highlighted, may its pages be torn out and posted as reminders, and may its edges be filled with your own brave reflections.” Mine is.
So, go forth and find your voice…and be gentle with yourself on the way ❤️
P.S. If something about this post stirred you, but you don’t feel quite ready to “brave the page,” I implore you to buy the book anyway. In my opinion, YOU are exactly who this book is for. Let it sit on your bedside table for a year if you must. Once you dip into it, those stirrings will become stronger, and so will your resolve to give voice to your memories and to put pen to paper. Let Megan Febuary plant the seeds; you will sow them when you are ready.
Note: This is an unsolicited review of a book I purchased at full price. I did not receive any compensation or free products in exchange, and any endorsements within this post are my own.
Life Story Links: July 15, 2025
Dawn Roode’s curated roundup for the week of July 15, 2025, includes recent stories of interest to personal historians, preservationists, and family history fans.
“Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.”
—Cicero
Photograph by George W. Ackerman (1884-1962): “Farmer reading his farm paper,” Coryell County, Texas, September 1931. 1998 print from the original negative. Records of the Extension Service. Courtesy Picturing the Century Exhibition, National Archives.
Ways we remember
ON YIZKOR BOOKS
“They would pool their memories, knowledge and financial resources to put together these potluck books.... They were an internal form of monument and memory, keeping a connection to a place they couldn’t go back to.”
WOULD YOU WANT THIS?
“Despite near-consensus that memory has a physical basis, neuroscientists are split on whether we might someday be able to extract memories from a preserved brain or upload them into a computer.”
LETTERS FROM THE PAST
“My parents didn’t think that they would be here 50 years later to retrieve it with us. So it’s pretty special to know that their voices [are] in there that I haven’t heard in a long time.” The ‘world’s largest’ time capsule opened after 50 years.
Presentation matters
SIMPLY TIMELESS
“A book that captures your legacy should be designed with longevity in mind, so it remains engaging and accessible for generations.” Last week I made a case for classic book design.
MULTIMEDIA, GLOBAL STORYTELLING INITIATIVE
“The Last Ones is not a museum. It's not a textbook. It’s a movement—one that meets history where it lives: in the hearts and words of the [Holocaust] survivors who are still here, and in the eyes of the next generation who must carry their memory forward.... The organization has also developed a first-of-its-kind geo-located mobile app. Walk through Warsaw, Paris, or Berlin, and one's phone will light up with the testimony of a survivor who lived on that very street. It's memory, mapped.”
Writing our lives
SHE WROTE THE MEMOIR HER FATHER COULDN’T
“Even in the delirium-addled days before his death, my father continued to urge me to ‘write the book’ about his life.... I understood that he wanted to be honored and remembered, for his life to have had meaning, to leave a lasting trace upon this earth.”
FROM PAGE TO…?
“Rather than destroying them or sealing them up, I think I’d appoint my best friend, Lizzie, to be the arbiter and curator of my journals’ afterlife.” Suleika Jaouad shares her journaling routine.
THE UNEASY WORK OF REMEMBERING
“Remembering and forgetting are not so much actions as forces that everyone must negotiate. One might try to foster conditions for remembrance—take photographs, keep a journal, stash relics—but forgetfulness sets its own obscure terms.”
...and a few more links
Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet shared.
UK-based documentarian aims to preserve priceless memories with Family Legacy Films business.
A nostalgic look back at what it was like waiting for your first roll of film to be developed.
The July 2025 edition of the GAB Gazette from the Birren Center for Autobiographical Studies
Read an excerpt from Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story by Erica Stern.
New Haven launches Memory Lab to help community preserve and digitize family history.
Two fabulous visual aids derived from a roundtable about family history and legacy.
Short takes
The case for classic design
A book that captures your legacy should be designed with longevity in mind, so it remains engaging and accessible for generations. It should be beautiful, too.
Black leather and a debossed title elevate this book cover from boring to elegant, signaling the timeless page design inside.
I have a pair of Adidas Spezial sneakers that I purchased in the 1980s and still wear today. Adidas debuted the style in 1979, and it’s sold in an array of colorways as part of the Originals line on their website in 2025.
I have an Armani tailored black blazer that I bought in the late 1990s that I still wear today. Its materials and craftsmanship were worth the hundreds of dollars I invested in the piece when I worked at Vogue, and no one would guess it wasn’t brand new now.
My fashion sense has always tended towards fine classics (often embellished with bolder accessories that I can swap out as the times change). “Classic,” in the way I view it, is a synonym for “timeless.”
And “classic, timeless style” is an aesthetic I also apply to the heirloom books I create for my clients.
You won’t find trendy design approaches or typeface choices that broadcast a specific decade (unless that’s befitting the stories within, of course!) at Modern Heirloom Books. Instead, we’ll work together to find a design that feels right to the client and their stories, while also respecting tradition and legibility—so your book feels fresh and of its time, no matter when your descendants are reading it.
Why I opt for classic book design
Have you ever picked up a book and known it was old despite its pristine condition? Your grandparents’ wedding album, perhaps (pillowy white leather with gold italic imprinting, say)? Or a softcover book that’s been sitting on your shelf for decades (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret comes to mind for me, with its instantly recognizable cover treatments across different editions)?
Design, like fashion, can date itself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—retro aesthetics have their place; but for life story books, I aim for something more enduring. A book that captures your legacy should not feel like a product of a fleeting trend. It should be designed with longevity in mind, so it remains engaging and accessible for future generations.
“Designers choose typefaces by considering the history of type, the combinations of form, the balance between readability and surprise, the content and themes at hand, and the designer’s own desires and interests,” Ellen Lupton explains in Thinking with Type.
The two variables sandwiched in the middle of that sentence are of the utmost importance to me when designing an heirloom book:
Finding “the balance between readability and surprise.”
Serving “the content and themes at hand.”
Ample white space gives a life story book breathing room.
The Balance Between Readability and Surprise
Readability should always take precedence in book design, particularly for long-form personal narratives. A typeface that prioritizes elegance over clarity—one with too much flair, too little contrast, or an overly condensed structure—becomes a distraction rather than an enhancement.
This is why many classic books use time-honored typefaces such as Garamond, Baskerville, or Times New Roman. These fonts have endured for centuries because they provide that perfect harmony: sophisticated yet unintrusive, distinctive yet universally readable.
Surprise, however, is where personality comes in. This might be through subtle flourishes—a well-placed drop cap, a unique yet restrained display font for chapter titles, a slightly unexpected but still harmonious color palette. These are touches that make a book feel special without overpowering the narrative itself.
Serving the Content and Themes at Hand
A book about a family’s multigenerational journey deserves a design that reflects continuity. A memoir detailing a life of adventure may benefit from visual storytelling elements like maps or archival-style captions. The key is ensuring that every design choice serves the story rather than pulling attention away from it.
Elements such as generous margins, high-quality paper, and a well-proportioned layout all contribute to a book’s readability and aesthetic longevity. White space, for example, isn’t just about making a page look elegant—it allows the reader’s eyes to rest, giving weight to the words and photographs that matter most.
This book of correspondence between a father and his daughter during her time at Georgetown University used Adobe Caslon, the same font in the Georgetown logo, for display type; Caslon was originally designed in 1722, and its modern iterations are still revered for its readability and elegance.
What makes a timeless book design?
There are a few fundamental principles that contribute to classic, enduring book design:
Typography with integrity: Typefaces that have stood the test of time, with an emphasis on readability and subtle beauty.
Thoughtful layouts: Balanced margins, considered line spacing, and harmonious text hierarchy to create an effortless reading experience.
Understated elegance: A design that enhances the story without distracting from it, avoiding overly trendy or gimmicky elements.
Quality materials: A book’s physical form is part of its longevity—fine archival paper, durable binding, and careful printing methods ensure that it lasts as an heirloom.
When you commission a personal history book, you are investing in something that will outlive you—a physical manifestation of your legacy. The stories within are timeless, and the design should reflect that. A well-designed book will not only be read; it will become a treasured heirloom, passed down and revisited for generations.
Learn about our Write Your Life course, providing memory prompts, writing guidance and a dose of inspiration to anyone who wants to preserve their stories now.