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. 

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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?

Memoirs come in all shapes and sizes. Danny Gregory’s Everyday Matters: A Memoir is a graphic memoir (a memoir told in pictures and words). Danny and his wife, Patti, were happily married and had a 10-month-old son when Patti fell under a subway train and was paralyzed from the waist down.

Everday Matters is a picture-chronicle of Danny’s transformation after Patti’s accident. He realizes he needs to slow down. He teaches himself to draw, and in doing so finds himself looking at the world anew. “You sit and stare at something long enough, and it starts to come to life.” Most people draw badly, he says, because they draw symbols, not what they really see. How could he have missed so much of what was all around him?

Who among us has not had that feeling?

This memoir is a lifetime of eye-opening in just 120 pages. If you’ve ever felt sorry for yourself, if you know someone who is handicapped, if you’ve ever tried to draw or paint, or even if you just love New York City, you must buy this book.

Wake up. What do you really see?

Let me know.

Danny Gregory is the author of several books, including The Creative License. His illustrated journal is read daily by thousands on Dannygregory.com. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Was someone in your family a part of history? Recently, at the Self-Publishing Book Expo in New York  I met Donna Nordmark Aviles, a memoirist who has written three books about her grandfather, Oliver Nordmark. Oliver was an orphan in America’s “Orphan Train Movement.”  He traveled from New York City to Kansas in 1906 on what came to be known as an “Orphan Train.”

Even though my parents and grandparents were born and raised in Kansas, they never mentioned the Orphan Trains. In the years between 1854 and 1929, The Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital developed a program whereby up to an estimated 200,000 orphaned, abandoned, or homeless children—mainly in New York City and Boston—traveled by train to adoptive homes in 47 of the 48 states then comprising the United States. The children came to be known as “Orphan Train Riders.”

In Fly Little Bird, Fly! Donna Nordmark Aviles tells the true story of her grandfather Oliver’s early life as an orphan in New York City.  Fly Little Bird, Fly! won the National Best Books 2009 Award.

In Beyond the Orphan Train, Donna Nordmark Aviles describes her grandfather’s life as an Orphan Train Rider. Beyond the Orphan Train won the National Best Books 2009 Award.

Aviles’ third book, Peanut Butter for Cupcakes, focuses on Oliver as an adult. The story describes how he survived with his six children during the 1930s, after the sudden and tragic death of his young wife, Estella. Peanut Butter for Cupcakes was a 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist and National Best Books 2009 Award Finalist.

Orphan Train Riders were told not to talk about their past lives. Their collective experiences disappeared from consciousness. Gradually, however, their descendants began to unearth and honor their past.  There is now a museum dedicated to the Orphan Train children, The National Orphan Train Complex, Inc., located in Concordia, Kansas.

Was someone in your family a part of history? Have you asked questions about what happened? Friday, November 27, 2009, is StoryCorps’ National Day of Listening. Its goal is to encourage you to take an hour and record a conversation with someone who is important to you. Why not set aside some time over Thanksgiving to ask, first, whether your loved one played a part in history? If so, what was it like? Were they in a war? Were they dislocated in a natural disaster? Did they take part in protests? Did they witness a famous event?

Let me know how it goes. What questions did you ask?

Happy Thanksgiving!

I liked this official, political autobiography more than I thought I would. I had expected something staid, so I was disarmed by the book’s openness. It is far from the whole truth and it reads like it. But the book has a lyrical charm that is full of heartache and blessing. Perhaps that’s the Irish in Ted Kennedy.

There is a loving, nostalgic quality to the first half of the book, where Kennedy details growing up in the Kennedy clan. True Compass is as close as we will ever come to having memoirs by his three older brothers:  Joe (who was killed in action in 1944), Jack (who was assassinated in 1963), and Bobby (who was assassinated in 1968). Ted looked up to them from the viewpoint of a much-younger brother. Jack (who was 15 years older) was his godfather, mentor, and guide to Washington politics. The book is full of examples of Jack’s thoughtful tutelage and care. Ted Kennedy doesn’t seem to have been as close to Bobby. As the caboose in a long line of overachievers, Ted felt he couldn’t live up. “As I think back to my three brothers, and about what they had accomplished before I was even out of childhood,” he writes, “it sometimes has occurred to me that my entire life has been a constant state of catching up.”

Kennedy had his share of childhood hardship. I was surprised that Kennedy attended 10 schools between 1937 (age 5) to 1950 (age 18). He was a mediocre student who never stayed at any school long enough to form friendships. At one point, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Riverdale,  New York, where he witnessed nightly sexual abuse of boys by an abusive housemaster, which he says he luckily missed.

The second half of the book is a more traditional political autobiography, except that Ted Kennedy comes across as a man who got lost along the way. He says he could not cope after Jack and Bobby were murdered. It never occurred to him he was being overwhelmed by grief and could get help. He says he kept it all inside and tried to keep going. He drank too much. His life spun out of control. Although he admits to his weaknesses and foibles generally, when he comes up to the brink of the serious scandals, such as Chappaquiddick, he stops at the edge and sticks to the script. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to have expected more, but I was still disappointed.  By the time he finally found himself, Kennedy had figured out how to deepen his love of country, family and friends, and work. He had also figured out that he needed to be married to a buddy, not a trophy wife.  He devotes a chapter to Victoria Reggie Kennedy, making it clear that without her, he would never have been the man he became.