Why you should Write your own memoirs

Posted on June 13, 2021

You should tell the story of your life. At least for your own family.

Really–a life worth living is a story worth telling.

Right now, the genre of personal “memoir” is very popular. You can find all kinds of resources and courses on how to do it. But people assume that to write a memoir, one must be either already famous or noteworthy, or else a narcissist, as if somehow telling your story is indicative of a personality disorder.

These are erroneous assumptions.

I propose that we need more stories of ordinary lives, ordinary people. As a student of history, I find such stories important and compelling. Historians, in fact, often rely on simple and everyday material such as letters, business documents, telegrams, etc., to piece together the texture of life in times past.

I have visited many cemeteries, in both the US and the UK. Ok, at least I find this interesting, in the way a student of history does. And I know many might find it boring or morbid. Even so, I think about the fact that some of the very old stones in these cemeteries are all that is left of a life once lived. The date of birth and death, and maybe a passage of scripture or other sentiment. Sometimes the stones are so worn that even these are illegible. Nothing else remains.

How I wish to know what those lives were like, in the everyday sense.

Even my elderly family members, parents and grandparents who have passed on, live only in the memory of those who knew them personally, and in the items they have passed down to us.

My own grandparents on my father’s side were born in 1901. They both died in the 1980s, when I was still a young adult. I have my own memories of them, but these are limited to the portion of their lives when they were already pretty old. Like, my current age and older. In my youthful ignorance, I neglected to have them tell me more of their own lives, stories from when they were younger. Now it is too late, and they left little behind by way of any written record. A few family stories that get told around holiday tables, but those who remember those stories are now aging as well.

I wish they had written more of it down.

In fact, I wish that there was more of a record of my great-grandparents, whom I never knew. The lives and choices of those ancestors only three generations before me have affected my life in profound ways. Yet, I know very little about them.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Why not tell our own story, so that at least our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will know something of our own lives that will shape theirs as well.

Besides that, even non-family members may find our life stories interesting. Fifty or 100 years from now, people may appreciate a window into the ordinary lives of people who grew up largely in the 20th century.

When I was in high school, The Waltons was a popular TV show.

Even as a teenager, I watched it regularly. Earl Hamner Jr. was the originator of the series, telling stories based on his own life growing up during the Great Depression. The lives of the Walton family were ordinary for the time, but a generation or two removed found it compelling, and the series lasted nine seasons.

It didn’t really sink in to me at the time that the Walton children were basically the age of my own parents during the Depression. I may have known more about this semi-fictional family, at least as a teenager, than I did about my own parents and grandparents. The anecdotes and reflections on everyday events that made up The Waltons, and the fact that Earl Hamner Jr. wrote them down, were less complete in my own family history.

I wish that my parents and grandparents had written or recorded more of their own lives, while they had the chance. Actually, my father did start to do this, but he was already over 80 years old when he started. He wrote by hand in a spiral bound notebook, but he was only getting started before he wasn’t able to continue with it.

I wish he had started when he was fifty, and just chipped away at it over the years.

So, why don’t more of us do that? What is keeping us from it? If celebrities in their 20s can write and publish autobiographies, then surely an ordinary person who has lived 45, or 50, or 60 years on this earth also has a story to tell.

I began writing my own memoirs probably eight or nine years ago, in my mid-fifties. I wish I had started sooner, but that’s when the idea came to me. At first I just wanted to write a few things that I could pass along to my kids, but as I began to organize it, the project became more comprehensive.

My method works for me, because I work on it a little here and there, when things occur to me. And I have no particular time constraints or deadlines. Other than that I would like to write as much as I can in whatever time I have left.

I’ll share here my approach, and then offer some general tips and information for those of you who may wish to organize and write your own story.

First off, I’m not trying to write for publication. At least not in my lifetime. If I were, I would use a different format and tell it as more of a cohesive story, as if writing a novel. In my case, I’m just trying to relate as many anecdotes and memories as possible as possible, in a general chronological order.

I started off using Evernote, and later switched to Google docs.

I created an overall life timeline, starting with a Prologue. This was a section where I wrote whatever I knew of my parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents. Not their life story, just the basics of where they had lived and what they did in the years leading up to when I was born. This is about one page, single spaced.

After that I created headings for the time blocks of my life. This is partly organized around school and jobs, or life events and stages, and labeled by years or decades. There is a section for birth to age six (1957 to 1963), grade school (1963 to 1969), junior high through high school (1969 to 1975), college years (1975 to 1980), graduate school (1980 to 1983), and then basically by decade after that–1980s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s.

Within each of those sections I have subsections for major events such as marriage, birth of children, major job changes, etc.

Beyond that, I have short sections for whatever specific anecdotes or memories I want to record. Some of this reads like episodes from the 1990s TV show, Friends–i.e., “The One About…”

These little sections include all kinds of things.

My memory and description of the farm my family had when I was young, what our houses were like, our favorite foods as a family, any trips we took, etc. I have sections on my recollections of the Kennedy assassination from the perspective of a first grader, of what TV was like in the 1960s, of the Apollo moon landings, the Vietnam War, the time I met Johnny Cash, etc. I’ve described my memories of getting a driver’s license, books that I read, music I liked, how our family celebrated holidays. Anything of the sort that I wish I had known from my grandparents’ lives fifty years before that.

In sections for later decades I have accomplishments in school, dating and marriage, memories of our kids’ births, family gatherings and celebrations, buying our house, etc. I also include reflections on things like 9/11, or other big events from the world stage. But mostly it is my recollections of the stuff of everyday life.

In the past twenty years or so I have had the opportunity to travel to a number of countries and global cities, and to have memorable cultural experiences. I’ve kept a journal of a number of these trips, writing daily in real time. In these cases, I’ve just copied and pasted the journals for those trips where they fit into my memoir chronology. Perhaps someone, someday, might be interested in reading about international travel in the early 21st century.

Anyhow, you get the idea. This is how I organize my life memories, and it works for me.

The beauty of this approach is that I can dip in and write something for any section or period of time, as the memory occurs to me or as I have time. I’m not writing it as a continuous story that has to hold together, so this is easy to do. A lot of it is just the memories of things such as what I’ve told my kids at the dinner table over the years.

Sometimes, when I don’t have time or inclination to write out a whole memory or anecdote, I’ll just write in a short subtitle, so I can return and flesh it out later. Looking at unwritten sections I see such topics as, “Meeting Brooks Robinson,” “First airplane flight,” “Watergate,” and “Beach Boys concert, 1975.” I haven’t written anything on those yet, but at least I have categories that will be easy to flesh out with a couple of paragraphs when I have time. All it often takes is 10-15 minutes to write out the basic recollection of an event. I sometimes return to some of them and flesh them out with more detail.

As you can see, this is not a short-term project.

My approach is informal and anecdotal. I’ve picked away at it for some years already, and will work on it for years to come. With this approach, it doesn’t even need a conclusion–it can go on for as long as I have the ability to recall and to write. Plus, you don’t have to wait until you have lived to a certain point. Any adult can start recording memories of their life up to that point. The sooner you start, the better.

In my case, who knows, once I have written enough chronological anecdotal memories, I might see a way to shape it into more of an overall story.

As I indicated, the genre of memoir has become popular, and there are many resources and guidelines. Your goal and purpose for writing will shape your approach and how you wish to organize it. If you want to write a publishable book-type of memoir, do some of your own study on format and writing styles. Keep in mind that technically, there is a difference between an autobiography and a memoir. An autobiography is often an entire life story, especially of a more famous person. A memoir may be deep and personal reflections of just a part of one’s story or set of experiences. My own approach, I suppose, is a blend of these. But hey, it’s my story, and I can tell it however I want (especially if I’m not trying to sell it!).

Technically, my format isn’t a true memoir, but it at least provides a structure for recording experiences and memories for the future. The nice thing is that I can jump in anywhere on the chronology, and write a little something when I’m thinking about it, and there is already a place for it.

As an example of the “The One About…” nature of it, here are a few categories from my grade-school section that I haven’t yet written about, but the little heading is enough to tell me all I need to know to write a couple of paragraphs about each of those things when I have the chance or the inclination:

The dead cow

Drilling a well

BB gun

Sawdust pile fire

Christmas flood

Camping at the Old Mill

Stepping on a nail

Those phrases by themselves don’t mean anything to someone else, but they do to me, and they are just sitting there inviting me to write something. Sometimes all I do is let my memory wander, and write down categories like this without fleshing them out. Other times I jump in and actually write something. The organized randomness of it works for me!

Here are some tips and suggestions, especially if you want to write a more formal memoir:

Choose a theme, or portion of time (I haven’t done this–I’m writing everything I can remember).
Hook the reader, just as with a novel (I haven’t done this either, at least not yet).
Write like a novelist, even if it is the truth.
Don’t include everything (I’ve violated that as well, including recollections of small and inane things, that might be funny or memorable).
Follow the rules of writing fiction.
Write in a personal way, in your own natural voice, as if you’re talking to someone.
Write on a regular basis.

SUMMARY

The main thing is to recognize that if you are an adult, especially in midlife or older, you have lived and experienced any number of things. These things are unique to you. You’ve lived your life, and have your own memories and experiences–no one else is like you. You need to tell your story, or at least some of it.

At the very least, your family will benefit from having some stories and recollections from the life you’ve lived. How complete you want to make it is up to you. Start small and see if it grows from there.

Maybe someday, your great-grandkids will have a chance to learn about a life lived, one that has shaped their own. A Seasoned Life deserves to be remembered.

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