Memoirs and memories

Recent conversations with potential clients for personal memoirs have made me think a lot about who tells stories and what kinds of stories they tell.

Of course, this isn’t really anything new for me. Since first becoming interested several years ago in helping people to write their memoirs, I’ve devoted plenty of thought to questions about personal story-telling. But as we consider more and more potential projects, the questions become increasingly interesting.

For example, because much of our potential clientele comes from the senior demographic, where memory loss is sometimes an issue,we’ve been asked how we can write about someone’s life when his or her memory seems so spotty. That’s an easy one for us to answer: we can bring in family members and close personal friends of the subject to help jog his or her memory, retelling stories that the memoir subject has told many times in the past. 

Sometimes these stories help the memoir subject to remember related stories. Sometimes one family member will remember one anecdote and another family member will remember a related one, and soon we have a whole stream of stories flowing.

But just as often, family members who think their elderly relative will have trouble with a memoir project because of perceived memory loss is pleasantly surprised to find out that the subject can remember stories from the past just fine. This makes sense, actually: memory loss in seniors often relates more to short-term memory than long-term. As the typical joke goes, people who can’t remember where they left their car keys can still remember the name of their second grade teacher from 80 years ago. But this works to the advantage of us memoir writers. We don’t need to know where your car keys are; we need you to remember what matters to you from the past.

Questions also arise about what people may not choose to tell. Our answer is that we help people write memoirs, not autobiographies. They are free to include or leave out whatever they wish. Accuracy is certainly helpful, but comprehensiveness isn’t necessary. We encourage memoir subjects to tell the stories they choose to pass on and leave out the ones they would rather not have figure into an overall reflection on their lives.

What becomes more apparent to us every day is that not only does everyone have a story to tell – after all, that’s the basis of our memoir-writing business – but everyone also has someone who wants to hear their story. It may be a large and diverse audience; it may be just one person. It may be several decades of students or devotees of someone’s professional persona; it may be one spouse or one child. But we have yet to find anyone who can’t find a single ready ear eager to hear the story they can pass on, or a single ready pair of eyes to read the text, increasingly engrossed in the story of a person they thought they knew but about whom they may still have so much more to learn.

Lives like snowflakes

It’s fun to be immersed in other people’s long lives once again.

My new company, Concord River Publishing, recently signed on to write a community memoir at a nursing home in Newburyport. Last week I did the interviews – twenty in all – and this week I’m drafting the stories.

It’s my second full-scale community memoir, and I wondered as I approached the project if the stories might start to sound familiar. Last year I wrote about 47 people in their eighties and nineties at a continuing care community in Bedford; now I’m talking with twenty people at a very similar facility on the North Shore. Demographically, the two groups have much in common: their age, their educational and professional backgrounds, their predominantly East Coast roots.

But as I dove into the interviews, I was reminded once again of how no two stories end up being alike. This set of seniors includes military veterans and scientists, professors and doctors, homemakers and gardeners and boaters, people widowed young and couples celebrating sixty or more years of marriage. Some had children and some didn’t; some lost children.

So yes, of course there are commonalities. But just as each participant has a different name and face and history, each story manifests differently, because people recall different details from their lives, impute importance to different aspects of their experiences, and react to twists of fate with different attitudes.

It’s only our second project, but I don’t anticipate this work ever growing dull. “Everyone has a story to tell,” my colleagues and I say when we approach potential clients. And perhaps this task on which I’ve set out is a little like collecting snowflakes. Many are similar….and yet each is ultimately unique. My mission is to catch each story like a snowflake and examine it until I can extract the essence of how it is different from every single other story out there.

Launch Day: A company is born

In some ways, launching a new company was a dream come true.

Not that I’ve dreamed for long about starting my own company. I’m a writer, not an entrepreneur. My dreams for the future have generally tended more toward writing a novel than establish an LLC.

But about six months ago, that began to change. I had just finished working with a group of fifty seniors at a retirement community to record their memoirs. They told me about their most formative experiences, and I wrote them down, and revised and edited a little, and soon we had a 200-page book, professionally bound and printed by a self-publishing press.

That was almost a year to the day after I helped another client self-publish her memoir. The earlier project focused on just one subject, a woman who told me the story of her seven decades over the course of about three months of weekly interview sessions.

It was just two books, published a year apart, and yet I knew I’d found my calling. Yes, I enjoy writing essays and articles and seeing them in the newspaper – I still occasionally wake up on the morning an article of mine is scheduled to appear in print and feel a little bit like it’s my birthday – but that side of my work life didn’t really seem to be growing, as much as just….continuing. I could always strive to write better, always be on the lookout for ever more interesting or complex article ideas….but overall, I was at something of a plateau in my journalism career.

And then a few opportunities arose to help other people tell their stories, this time in long form, as a book. I knew as soon as I started working with my first memoir client that I’d discovered not just a great job but a passion.

Still, it wouldn’t have become a company if my husband hadn’t met a couple in his networking group right around the same time who run a marketing firm. He told them about the work I was doing, and they suggested we meet to try to combine skills. Two or three meetings later, we were not only combining skills, we were brainstorming on a company name for our new enterprise.

That seems like a long time ago now, but it was in fact less than six months. Earlier this week, we celebrated our company’s birth date. With the launch of our website – beautifully constructed by a pair of talented web designers – our company became a living, breathing entity.

At least that’s how it feels to me: like a new person, a member of the family. Something that was first an idea and now a presence, ready for us to nurture it into maturity.

What happens next remains to be seen. Our goal is to find communities, families and individuals interested in having us help write their memoirs. This is only the very beginning, and I have no idea what I’ll know a year from now that I don’t know today: whether it will be much harder or much easier than I imagine, whether we’ll find opportunities quickly or whether it will happen slowly, whether every project will feel as rewarding as the one that originally gave me the idea to do this or whether each one will be a different experience.

Right now, it’s all just possibility. This early phase is the part that is still full of hope. I’m ready for the challenge and thrilled about the opportunity this presents. A dream come true, indeed, even if it’s a dream that until six months ago I didn’t even know I had.