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.