Memoir and Family History: Part 2—Memoir
April 4, 2009 by Lillie
Table of contents for Memoir and Family History
As mentioned in Part 1, the term memoir can cover many types of writing. Usually a memoir is focused on one aspect of the author’s life. Perhaps you lived through an important historical event, and you want to share how that event affected your life. Maybe you overcame a problem, such as illness or abuse or addiction, and you want to help others through your own experiences. You might want to focus on the joys and challenges of raising a large family or tell readers about your spiritual journey. You can write about how the experiences of a certain phase of your life—childhood, college, marriage—helped form you into the person you are or about your vocation or avocation.
Reviewing your memories and choosing a focus can be an exercise in introspection as well as the starting point for your memoir. The book Thinking About Memoir
William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. What you write doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.
Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir,” the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) 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.
A memoir is highly personal—it’s all about you. You decide which aspect(s) of your life to focus on and which specific incidents to include. You also decide the perspective you will write from. You can write from the perspective of the person you were at the time you’re writing about. For example, if you’re writing about your childhood, you can express the emotions and thoughts that you experienced as a child. Or you can write from the perspective of an adult looking back and evaluating the thoughts and beliefs you had as a child. It’s entirely up to you—but you will probably want to be consistent throughout the book rather than jumping back and forth.
Your memoir should be true (unless you write your story as fiction). However, the truth will depend on your perspective. We seldom see the absolute truth—our impressions are colored by our maturity, knowledge, and experiences. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable because ten people can witness the same event and each see something different.
It’s like the old story of blind men describing an elephant: each touched a different part of the animal and described an elephant as being like what they touched. Since each touched something different—a tusk, a leg, the trunk, the side—their descriptions are totally different.
You may describe an incident as you remember it, and others may describe it differently.
However, several recent incidents of false memoirs demonstrate you shouldn’t make up your memoirs. Don’t write about spending time in jail if you were never arrested. Don’t say you won a medal for valor in the military if it never happened. When writing facts, stick to the truth. When writing emotions, you may rely on your memory.
For more about memoir writing, check out these resources:
- Discover the History Within Your Memoir
- Memory Writers Network
- The Story of Me: Tips on Memoir Writing
- Writer’s Digest Memoir and Life Story
The next installment, which will appear after Easter, will cover family history.
All the false memoirs cropping up is astounding.
Bluestocking,
I think it’s not only a reflection on the deceitful memoirists but also upon the market for memoirs. Those false memoirs were published because they were sensational—people want to read about someone who’s been in jail and addicted to drugs rather than someone who’s led a more sedate and upstanding life. That’s why I said your chances of selling your memoirs to a publisher are a lot better if you’ve been involved in a sordid public scandal!
Writing about our family’s memoirs is very interesting but must be very tedious because we need to stick to the truth. And as much as possible, provide proofs of what we have to say about our family. I think, I’ll try this big challenge when I’m retired. At least, then, I will have more time to reminisce about the past. Thank you for the pointers.
Rosy,
In the meantime, you should be collecting notes to help you remember things. Keep a journal or start a file for notes about things that happen to you that you want to remember. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to remember.
In other words a memoir is an auto-biography of a person or a Daily Dairy which people scrap in their days happenings written in a professional manner.
Can I say so Lillie?
sriraj,
Your description could be a memoir, but so could many other things. A memoir could be more introspective, not merely a recording of what happened but reflections on those things and the person’s reaction to them. It’s really hard to pin down exactly what a memoir is because there are so many variations.
I was recently thinking that we have a lot better resources to write memoirs these days as a lot of us document our lives online and even more so in emails.
David,
That is a very good point. We don’t write letters like we used to, but we write a lot more in e-mail and online.
It’s true that while I don’t believe in relative truth, I do believe that history and memoir are relative in that different people experience things in different ways. Writing a memoir is all about providing a unique perspective on the events that have taken place in your life; without this you’re essentially writing out a list of events that will hold little resonance or significance with your reader.
-Sharon
Sharon,
I don’t believe in relative truth, either. But, as I said, we don’t see the absolute truth in most of our experiences because what we see is colored by our perspective. You’re right that a memoir that is just plain facts without personal perspective isn’t very interesting or beneficial.
I was creating a heritage scrapbook about my grandparents, who both happen to be deceased. While reading this article, it gave me the idea to go back and read some of their journals. Doing this made the book so much more meaningful and it helped me to understand them more than I ever did while they were alive.
Twyla,
I’m so glad that you had the journals and that you were inspired to read them and incorporate them into your scrapbooks.
I don’t think I’ll ever write a memoir. I’ve been too busy to keep a journal, and seriously, I don’t think I can even remember most of what I went through in the past. Also, I not very confident it would be interesting to anyone but myself.
Shaun,
Frankly, most memoirs are of little interest to anyone other than the author and those who love him/her. I heard of an agent who said, “I don’t want to see your memoir unless you slept with a mass murderer.” However, children, grandchildren, other family and friends benefit from memoirs and family histories. My grandfather was a cowboy and told fascinating stories about his cowboy experiences. But no one wrote them down, and now they are lost forever.
well its great to write memoir. one should have to save it. its just a good point that you have mention in your post.
Zhanjun,
Thank you for joining in the conversation.