Now, in this age of bicoastal families, writing your life story is the only way for future generations to truly know your life and times. By reading your memoirs, they will become intimate with your culture; they will come to understand your work, lifestyle, travel, and beliefs; they will get to know the people you loved and lost. They will be fascinated by what you have to say.

    Many people decline to write their memoirs because their life stories seem dull, uneventful. But if your life has known goals and obstacles, conflict and emotion, you have the makings of a gripping story. Others decline because they see it as an overwhelming task. But in this class, you will learn it's not overwhelming. You will learn how to take it chapter by chapter, one story at a time. As writer Ann LeMott's father told her little brother when he was struggling with a school report on birds: "Just take it bird by bird."


What is Memoir?


     Have people been telling you for years that you should write your life story, your autobiography? Unless you have enjoyed the fame of a Hillary Clinton or a Bill Gates, chances are you really want to write memoir.

     Memoirs are written memories clustered around a theme, a piece of your life told in detail. The theme may be travel, life on a farm, a career, a city, the theater, any aspect of life. Memoirs tell of particular times or episodes. They are not narratives of a whole long life history, for that is autobiography. Instead, they are selected parts: the trips, the jobs, the place, the stage. A memoir can be as long as a page, a chapter, or a book.

    Memoirs might have titles like this: "My Cowboy Summer," "My Summer in Madrid," "Our Depression Family," "Selling Door to Door," "The World's Fair," "On the Road with my Trombone," "Pilot of a P-47, "Home Again."

     Writers of memoirs use the first person, the "I," to relate and link selected stories of their own past, to tug the reader, ideally to show what it was like as a Kansas homesteader, a young fighter jock, an urban schoolteacher. A retired actor might write about backstage, a foster mother about her crippled child, a grandfather about a war he could neither forget nor repeat.

    Memoirs can stand alone or be linked into a series to show portraits of your life. They are glimpses into the past, to another time and place: a war, a career, a vacation, a love affair. They are memories of the events that stand out.

    It may be all the rage for celebrities to reveal intimate parts of their lives, but memoirs are also ideal for ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Readers in the next century will lead lives far different and will look back in wonder. For that matter, today's writers are full of their own wonder—that they are here in the 20th century, that so much has happened to them and their world while they lived in it.

    William Zinsser says in his classic book On Writing Well that memoir is the art of inventing the truth. By "art" he means that writers have taught themselves, as tellers of tales, how to be effective in the telling. He could add that for most people, writing is a craft to be learned: how to put down on paper the remembrances of the past and the people who were part of it.

    Determine early who your audience is, whom you are writing for. Are you writing for your own satisfaction? Your children? A writing group? As you choose what to include and what to keep out, hold your audience foremost in your mind. The content, form, and style of your story depend on your purpose.

    Simplicity and clarity are the first goals as you teach yourself, alone or in writing groups, the craft of assembling the pieces of your life into an artful and truthful whole.

    Be specific, not general. Focus on the details of particular incidents, often of brief duration, anchored in a specific time and place. Anne Lamott, in her book on the writing life, Bird by Bird, advises us to write down only as much as we can see through a one-inch picture frame. In other words, don't try to do too much too fast. Take it story by story.

    One woman, 90 years old, chose to profile her family and friends, as a kind of memorial or tribute to their lives. When she was finished, she wrote out the fairytale that had long delighted her grandchildren.

    "Now that's what I wanted to do," she said with satisfaction. "Like leaving a gift for my family."