Writing a Memoir, Writing a Biography | Write Your Memoir

Bestselling business book author Seth Godin announced in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that in the future, he will bypass his commercial publisher, Portfolio (Pearson PLC's Penguin Group USA, headed by Adrian Zackheim). The author of Purple Cow and other business bestsellers also discussed this decision in a recent blog, which he says is read by 438,000 people. Godin says he knows who his audience is and has a direct customer relationship with that audience through the Internet.

So what?

Here's the quote in the Wall Street Journal piece that got to me: "Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don't know who reads their books." And he continues, "What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers."

Do you know your readers? Who are they? Who is your audience? You'll find it easier to write your memoir if you know who your readers are, who you are writing for.

Here are some questions to answer before you begin writing your memoir:

• Who is my audience?
• Who are my readers?
• Who am I writing memoirs for?
• Am I writing memoir topics for the record, for family, or for myself?
• Do I want to share my memoirs? 
• If yes, with whom?
•  If yes, how do I want to share them? 
• If no, what am I going to do with them?

Then when it comes to publishing your memoir, you can have a direct customer relationship with your audience on the Internet.

Go for it!

Want to tell your story, but hate the process of writing? Here's a creative idea: you can talk into your computer using voice recording computer software. That's what inter-network marketing specialist Jerry Clark recommends in his recent blog. He says, "You can get a no cost voice recording app known as 'Audacity,' from  audacity.sourceforge.net."

He has two other helpful suggestions: 

• You can record onto mp3s the significant events in your life.
• Don't be judgmental of your recordings.

I've blogged  about how your stuff  and a bridge can be a memoir. But as I was reading a Family Circle letter to the editor , I thought of something else. 

(more…)

Like physician-memorist, Abraham Verghese, who turned to novel writing with Cutting for Stone, memoirist Susan Fales-Hill, author of Always Wear Joy: My Mother Bold and Beautiful, a memoir about her mother, Josephine Premice, has just published a novel. One Flight Up is about four successful, urbane women (in the vein of Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale) but with a twist. Three of her four characters are married!

A 21st Century take on the marriage plot?

Can a bridge be a memoir? Heck, yes! Add bridges to the list, along with all your other stuff from my last blog.  Nj.com and the "New Jersey" section of The Star Ledger reported this week that Paul Bartick, of South Orange, New Jersey, is working with Miriam Sumner, Lynne Smilow, and the Village of South Orange to name a bridge over the Rahway River in South Orange after Jonathan Felsman, a beloved South Orange community leader who died at the age of 57 of cancer on July 9, 2009.

Jonathan’s community initiatives included the South Orange Performing Arts Center (SOPAC), the town soccer league, building baseball dugouts at Meadowland Park, beautifying the Rahway River waterfront, and programming ideas at the public library.

“He didn’t give a damn about people’s reactions to his ideas,” says Bartick. “He sold his vision by capturing people’s imagination. Then he took action to make his shared vision a reality.  Jonathan really was the bridge that brought people together to make things happen.  That’s why the bridge is such an apt memorial.” 

Have you built or created something that is a memoir? (A wall, a bridge a window, a shrine, a monument, a statue?)

Write to me about it. Send me a photo. 

I used to think memoir consists of three things: (1) writing, (2) in the first person, (3) about a thin slice of a person’s life. “The reader doesn’t want the whole iceberg, just the tip,” to paraphrase Russell Baker.

Now I realize memoir is much broader. First of all, you have a lot of other objectives–besides the act of writing itself–when you create memoirs. You want to: 

• record family stories
• research family history
• find lost relatives
• socialize with lost relatives once you've found them
• discover your DNA
• collect and preserve family data
• get over something traumatic
• tell the story behind a family memento
• create personal documents (video, audio, shadow boxes, etc.)
• get rid of something heavy which you've been carrying around (secret, imposition, demand)
• catalogue, organize, and archive family documents, photos, and memorabilia
• take the sting out of something painful
• save and identify family heirlooms
• capture family information that would otherwise be lost.

I now have a working definition of memoir which is much more broad. Memoir is the communication of what you want to remember and what you want to be remembered. Which leads me to two more points. First, you can get really creative and use any of the following as the basis of a memoir:  

• letters you quote
• recipes
• random memories
• your hopes for the future
• a secret you no longer want to keep
• family sayings
• something that always got on your last nerve
• a mystery you never figured out
• funny family anecdotes
• what you want your legacy to be
• describing what’s going on in an iconic family photo
• a list of your favorite things and why
• describing how you got around a long time ago
• how a business used to make money
• your worst vacation
• how you kept the house cool in the summer
• the most expensive thing you ever bought
• a portrait of a relative using your five senses (see, hear, feel, taste, smell).

Second point. You don’t have to write at all. Lots of your "stuff" can be turned into a memoir:    

• Photographs
• Video
• Audio
• What things cost
• Collages
• Political buttons and pins
• Jewelry
• Fabrics
• A telephone bill
• “Shrines” you create
• Scrapbooks
• Songs
• Guns
• Music
• Portraits
• Paintings
• Statues
• Pottery
• Drawings
• Furniture
• Clothing
• Games
• Puzzles
• Tools
• Maps
• Drawings
• Self-portraits

Even a packing list from 50 years ago could be the basis for a great memoir. So, I ask you:

• What do you want to remember?
• What do you want others to remember?

Tell me about the memoir you create. Send me a photo.

Abraham Verghese recommended in yesterday’s Five Best in The Wall Street Journal five of his favorite books by physicians, including two memoirs. Adventures in Two Worlds is A. J. Cronin’s memoir about being a young physician in a Welsh mining town. The Puzzle People by Thomas E. Starzl is the memoir of the pioneer transplantation surgeon.

When you write a memoir about fishing, writes William Zinsser in Writing About Your Life, your subject is “the transaction between yourself and fishing—as a sport, as a pastime, as therapy, as a buddy experience, as a solitary experience, as a food-gathering experience, or whatever drew you to it.”

The same thing is true when you write a memoir about a place that no longer exists. What is the transaction between you and the place? What is its pull? What memories do you bring? What is the real place like now? Who used to live there? Who lives there now? What is still there? What is gone?

Barbara Krasner visited her grandmother’s ancestral home, Ostrów Mazowiecka (Ostrova in Yiddish) in Poland while she was doing research for a young adult novel that takes place in nearby or Zaromb (Yiddish). Her 30-photo exhibit of these Jewish communities which no longer exist, “My Home Is Gone—Remnants of Jewish Poland,” will be shown at the JCC of Metrowest in West Orange, New Jersey September 12-October 31, 2010.

What is the pull of a place that no longer exists? How do you write about it? Let me know.

I once found a photo tucked inside a book at an estate sale. The photo showed a Model T in ruins, destroyed by what looked like a head-on collision. The photo jumped out at me. I took it the man, about my age, who was running the garage sale. His mother had just died and he was selling the contents of her house. I handed him the photo. “This looks important,” I said.

He stood transfixed, staring at the photo. “Mother told us about that crash. Both she and Dad survived it. But I never knew if the story was true.”

My mother-in-law, Maxine (Shanbar) Marshall, has an iconic memoir photo. Her photo shows an apartment building (not hers) being moved from its location near Poplar Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The reason? The construction of The Mystic River Bridge (now the Tobin Memorial Bridge).

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Why not make your memoir writing easier? Why not organize it around an iconic photo?

My husband’s maternal great-great aunt, Feige Cohen, spent the Fourth of July of 1905 in New York harbor, waiting to clear immigration. She was onboard the S.S. Statendam (built for Holland America by Harlan & Wolff Limited, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1898). The Statendam sailed from Rotterdam, Netherlands, on June 24, 1905, and arrived in New York on July 2, 1905.

Were there fireworks in the harbor? Did Feige see them? Not sure. But thanks to Ancestry.com,  we know she was released by immigration on July 5, 1905, at 1:10 pm, to be met by her brother, Harry, who paid her fare. Feige, who gave her last place of residence as “Ostrow,” could read and write. She was 17 years old and had $15 in her pocket.

One-hundred years later, Feige’s great-niece Maxine (Shanbar) Marshall, my husband’s mother, cruised on the successor Statendam (same name, different ship), now a luxury cruise ship for tourist travel.

Have you taken a special journey on the Fourth of July? Do you have a travel story that happened on the Fourth? Let me know.

And have a great Fourth of July!