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!

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. 

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.

Memoirs by physicians have have the added layer of insight which comes from a trained physician’s eye. Abraham Verghese’s 1994 memoir, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, is one of my favorite physician-memoirs. Verghese published a wonderful first novel last year, Cutting for Stone:

Review of Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, died over the weekend. Our friend, Robert Siegel, M.D., studied English with McCourt in a New York City public high school. I remember Robert saying McCourt was supportive, engaging, and fun. As a teacher, he spent time to give a little extra to his students, took them out, got to know them. As Hillel Italie said of Angela’s Ashes in today’s AP obituary, the 1996 book was “perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir.” But underneath its Irish charm,  Angela’s Ashes was an expression of defiance. ”I refused to settle for a one-act existence,” said McCourt. He set out to write about his past, but would not let himself be bound by it. He went on–after 30 years of teaching–to describe his childhood in a book that has been published in 25 languages, in 30 countries, selling millions of copies, winning the Pulitzer Prize. Angela’s Ashes was the beginning of a long and successful second act. An ordinary man, an extraordinary memoir.

My passion is helping everyday people write their personal memoirs. I expect most of these memoirs will be self-published, distributed to family and friends. Unfortunately, times have changed since McCourt published Angela’s Ashes and unless you’re a celebrity, you probably won’t get your memoir published by a commercial publisher. (That’s what so great about all the print-on-demand, self-publishing options, which I will write more about in subsequent blogs).

Frank McCourt taught us that we are all ordinary. But our memoirs can be extraordinary. If you  limit the scope of your memoir to a small topic (e.g., dad’s hearing aids), if you write honestly (it made you mad when he turned them off during fights with your mother), and if you include descriptions of concrete details (his hearing aids used to have a wire going over his head like a headband), your memoir can make the ordinary extraordinary. That’s because no one perceives the world exactly as you do.

Here’s to ordinary people writing extraordinary memoirs. And to saying “no” to a one-act existence. Do you think your memoir will be an act of defiance? Let me know.

Check out the May 2009 issue of Good Housekeeping. In “Teach a Girl, Change the World,” Judith Stone writes about Three Cups of Tea, the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea is the story of how Mortenson has built schools for girls in Pakistan. Three Cups of Tea has sold more than two million copies and has been on the Publishers Weekly trade paperback bestseller list for more than 84 weeks.

On January 23, 2009, Greg Mortenson and his 12-year old daughter, Amira, spoke in my town—Montville, New Jersey—at the Robert R. Lazar Middle School. In “Mortenson Shares His Message” in Neighbor News, Lisa Kintish reports that Mortenson asked the middle school kids how many of them had talked to their grandparents about The Depression, World War II, Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s usually only 10%. Our kids fared better (15%). But in Pakistan and Afghanistan, 90% of the kids raise their hands. The elders go to the schools and share their stories. “It’s a tragedy in our great country that we lost that,” says Mortenson.

Everyone’s stories are a treasure. Have you shared one today?

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/family/real/education-for-girls?click=main_sr

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6656909.html

http://www.theneighbornews.com/NC/0/2271.html

http://www.montville.net/lazar/mediacenter/

Look for Mortenson’s follow-up book, Promoting Peace with Books, not Bombs, in December 2009.

Photo credit: www.robturner.co.uk