Writing a Memoir, Writing a Biography | Write Your Memoir

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.

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?

Our friend Julie from Cedar Grove, New Jersey, got stuck when she was writing a family memoir about her mother.  Julie wanted to include her “bits and pieces”— her random memories about her mother. But she felt they wouldn’t be as good as the rest of her memoir, which was structured chronologically. She quit.

Beginning memoir writers often get stuck at this point. They want to write about material that is unconnected or unrelated, but don’t know how. Memoir Writing Technique #1 enables you to write coherently about unrelated items, such as: random memories, fun you had, childhood memories, collections of family sayings. We like to compare the random “bits and pieces” to pearls. The key to making a beautiful necklace is how you string the pearls together. 

Step One–Write and Organize the Bits

Write down the memory bits. Don’t worry about the order.  Then, group the bits into segments or sections by theme. For example: Let’s say you want your memoir topic to be about sayings you heard growing up.  Write them down in no particular order, as they come to mind. Then, categorize the sayings into segments or sections, for example:

• funny things your Uncle Bill always said—that’s one segment or section
• something a gas station attendant said to your mom which became part of the family lore—that’s a segment or sections
• Acronyms your dad quoted all the time because he had been in the Navy—that’s a segment or section

Lastly:

• Something your football coach lived by and which you adopted—that’s a segment or section

 These segments or sections will become paragraphs or parts of paragraphs, depending on how long they are. Note: if your bits and pieces are too short to turn into sections or segments, simply put them in a bulleted list. 

Step Two–Write an Introduction

The introduction must tell your readers what the memoir is about and must signal to the reader how the memoir is structured.  

Here’s how you do that. Look at all the segments or sections you’ve just created. Write an introductory sentence that is broad enough to encompass all of them. For example:

“These are the family sayings I heard growing up.”

“Here is everything I remember about living in Utica, New York, in no particular order.”

Step Three–Insert Transitions

Step three is to insert transition sentences between the sections or segments, as necessary. Transition sentences are like the string in a necklace. The string turns the separate pearls into a work of art. Transition sentences or phrases give the reader a heads-up about the structure you are using and provide coherence. Here are examples of  how transition sentences would start:

• “Another thing that happened was…”
• “Another time”
• “In addition,”
• “Also”
• “There is also”
• “He also said”
• “Nothing else meant more to me than…”
• “I don’t remember much more except”

Step Four: Re-Read and Edit 

Read through your memoir. Check whether your introduction is broad enough to cover all the segments or sections in your memoir. Check whether the transitions add the right amount of coherence.  Read it aloud to yourself. Ask a friend to read it. What you are checking is: will my audience be able to see the structure? Have I provided enough transition sentences? Is my overall topic clear? Bear in mind that someone reading this in the future may not know you, or anything about you.

Our Memoir Writing Technique #1 enables you to write a professional-quality memoir about unrelated or loosely related bits and pieces.

Let us know how your memoir turns out. Write to us at writeyourmemoir.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/17/misery-orange-prize-judge-authors

If you are writing a “misery memoir,” sprinkle in some humor or no one else will want to read it.

Review of Ben Yagoda’s “Memoir” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112502870.html

When it comes to close encounters of the animal kind, you don’t have to be Captain “Sully” Sullenberger to have had one. Our friend Frank was accosted by a swan which didn’t leave him alone until he punched it in the beak. I’ve had two deer encounters, both of which were close calls. In the first, if I had been a foot ahead of where I was walking, the buck would have landed on me and might have killed me. In the second, a deer came out of nowhere one warm November night and struck my car, smashing my driver’s-side mirror, door, and window. At first, all I saw was a dark shape. I thought I had killed someone. If it had landed on my windshield, I might have lost control of the car.  Close calls that turned out well. But what if?

What close encounters of the animal kind have you had? Were they funny? Scary? Why not write a memoir about it?

Let me know how it goes.

The other day, I walked home from my elementary school. Virtually. Using Google Street View.

I went to Google Maps and entered the school address.

I clicked on the Red Balloon on the map, the symbol for the look-up address. A box appeared including a link to Street View. (Street View isn’t always available.) I clicked on Street View and a street-view photo of the school appeared. I felt like I was standing looking at the school. In the photo, a compass appears in the upper left-hand corner which allows you to see a 360-degree view. You can turn around and get your bearings by clicking on the compass–to orient yourself and figure out which way to go. Street names appear in white in the middle of the street, along with arrows indicating the direction you are facing on the street. When I clicked on the arrows, it was as though I was walking down the street.

Then I started walking home.

I went to the side of the school to the street I walked home virtually. From there, I clicked the arrows all the way home.

You don’t have to rely on your memory with so much information available. That makes memoir writing much easier.

Here are ways to use Google Street View when you are writing a memoir:

1. To refresh your memory about your neighborhood used to look like.  

2. To see what the neighborhood looks like now. How much has it changed? How much is it the same?

3. To get the look and feel of walking around (a great memory trigger).

4. To compare your adult memory against your childhood memories. How has your perspective changed?

5. To see the street signs and street names again. What associations do they bring up?

What have you found that you never believed you’d be able to find? Drop me a line.

Yesterday, we visited the Jewish Community Center of MetroWest in Whippany, New Jersey, to see “Family by Family,”  an exhibit of multi-generational family portraits of Jewish families from Newark, New Jersey. I was sorry there was no docent-led tour. Without it, the people in the photos didn’t come to life. We were just looking at family albums of people we don’t know.

I wonder how many family portraits amount to just that: photos of people you don’t know. Without first-hand descriptions, there’s no way to know the people in the photos. What did their laughs sound like? What did their kitchens smell like? How did they do their hair?

My great-grandmother Belle Gott (b 1875 d 1956) wrote the briefest of memoirs about her parents. ”My Folks and I” is only three pages long. But I know my great-great grandparents because Belle describes them in physical terms. Of her father she says,  ”It was always a joy to hear my father’s rich deep voice, to catch the sound of his whistled tune as he returned from work. I believe it is a happy man who comes home whistling.” Of her mother she says: ”Her eyes were that perfect blue to complement her spouse’s dark ones. She was fair, with brown wavy hair, but she lacked the strong teeth, such as father had. She had much dental trouble and finally resigned herself to a toothless old age, and matched it with a halo of silvery wavy, bobbed hair.” Belle says they both sang and hummed as they worked, something I do all the time.  “You get your singing from them,” says my husband.

Want an easy way to write a memoir? Pick a photo of an important person in your life and describe him or her using your five senses (see, hear feel, taste, smell). You’ll bring the person to life in a way the photo never can. Here are some questions to ask:

1. What color hair? What color eyes? Tall? Short? Stocky? Thin?

2. What did these look like: Feet? Hands? Walk? Stance?

3. What did this person sound like: Voice? Intonation? Accent?

4. Characteristic speech? Favorite words or expressions?

5. Views? Attitudes? Contradictions?

Let me know how this memoir tip works for you.

Seeing a mom and pop store on a corner is a memory trigger for me. The other day, I noticed the corner GE appliance store in nearby Caldwell, New Jersey, has windows full of “going out of business” signs. That triggered a memory for me of the corner candy store across from my elementary school in Schenectady, New York.

It was a candy and comic book store which catered to us kids. The first time I bought myself a treat–all by myself–was in that store. It was probably a Milky Way bar. I remember saving up coins from my allowance, taking them to school, crossing the street, and going into the store. Buying the candy was something to look forward to at dismissal time at 2:50.

Several years ago, I was in Schenectady and found my old school by accident. At that time, the store, which looked like a bodega, was still there. But it’s gone now. The display windows are boarded up. It seems to be just a home now.

Things change, but sensory triggers bring back memories. Music is a memory trigger. Tastes and sounds are too. When my husband, Evan Marshall, smells honeysuckle, he thinks of the terrible allergies he had as a kid.

What are your memory triggers? It’s easy to miss them, so keep some paper with you. Write them down. (“Seeing that store reminds me of…”) Even if you’re not sure, write it down. Keep the piece of paper in your pocket.