Your Life as Memoir

Tell your story

My dad was born in 1935 in a small town in New Jersey. He isn’t famous, his parents loved him and took good care of him, and the worst thing he did as a kid was to steal a bushel of pears from a local farmer, who forgave him after his parents hauled him over to the farm to apologize. It doesn’t exactly sound like compelling memoir material, does it? But reading his memoir is exactly what I’ve been doing recently. I’m proofreading it so we can print up some copies for my brothers and cousins because my dad is a good storyteller, and this manuscript is full of family stories. They might not matter to anyone else, but they matter to us.

The genre of memoir has been around for at least 2,000 years—weirdly, one of its earliest writers, Saint Augustine, also wrote of stealing pears—but until about 25 years ago, memoirs were mostly written by famous people, or at least people who were well known in their fields. Then Frank McCourt, a very unfamous high school teacher, wrote Angela’s Ashes, which became a huge bestseller—and so did memoir.

In her piece “Why Is There a Surge in Memoir? Is It a Good Thing?” Shirley Showalter reports that:

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of U.S. book sales, total sales in the categories of Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008.

The title question—is it a good thing?—points to the “outpouring of victim stories” that followed the popularity of Angela’s Ashes and other early memoirs like it, such as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. On the other hand, Showalter points out that memoir has “opened up previously unknown worlds” to many readers.

Over the past two decades, I’ve enjoyed many memoirs written by people who weren’t famous—including not only Angela’s Ashes and The Liars’ Club but also, for example, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, the graphic novels Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire (whom I actually got to interview once), The Color of Water by James McBride, and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, to name just a few. (Yes, I also read Educated, but I seem to be the only person who didn’t like it.) I have even enjoyed a few “celebrity” memoirs, including Just Kids by Patti Smith and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.

Some of these, according to a definition from the magazine Creative Nonfiction, are actually autobiographies, not memoirs. They define the “modern memoir” as

an offshoot of traditional autobiography, but though the two forms share the same umbrella, they claim different ground. The memoir tends to reflect a life organized by theme—drug addiction, for example, or illness—while autobiography is typically a linear catchall, a succession of facts plodding from birth onward.

So, I guess my dad’s book, which begins with the death of his grandfather before he was even born and reaches up to, essentially, the present day, is really an autobiography. But the other big difference between the books above and my dad’s is that he wasn’t writing for publication. He was writing for us.

More accurately, he was writing for his big sister. Not on purpose. But after she passed away just shy of her 90th birthday in 2020, he lost interest in working on his book. Though he hadn’t really understood so before, he realized then that she had been his number one audience. She was the only one who could corroborate or remember or, more likely, challenge his version of the events of their childhoods. Our siblings hold an incredibly important place in the stories of our lives.

My dad’s book would be boring to anyone but us because there’s precious little conflict—though the loss of his beloved cousin Garry and another cousin’s newlywed husband during World War II are devastating as told through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy who idolized them both. What there is—for me, at least—is a priceless window into my family, especially my grandparents, who died in 1978 and 1997. Sure, I knew them, but these stories are rounding them out as younger versions of themselves, showing me how they chose to deal with situations like the pear theft or the time my father and his friend went skinny dipping and a neighbor reported them to my grandmother, who just thought the transgression was funny. I love that my grandfather, who was an avid baseball fan (I remember him going out to listen to a game on the car radio in the driveway at our house more than once), swallowed his disappointment that my dad found the game boring and the next time took him to the rodeo instead to see cowboy singer Gene Autry and his horse Champion. That thrill was followed by this incident, which I’d never heard before:

Coming out of Madison Square Garden, we got on a bus. Pop kept looking out the window. Then he jumped up and said, "We have to get off." He started running. I ran after him asking, “What's the matter?” He just shouted back, "Keep running!" Pop had always been athletic. He did a lot of running and playing tennis. One time he overslept on his train and ran six miles to get home. But, active as I was, I was not a runner. I ran a half mile on the way to school once and thought I would have a heart attack as a ten year old. But we ran and ran. We ran block after block, past people, around barricades, across streets, between cars, on and on. Finally, we reached the ferry slip and raced onto the 42nd Street Ferry. Within minutes the ferry pulled out. Pop had gotten twisted coming out of Madison Square Garden, on a bus going east instead of west. When he realized, we had a long run to reach the ferry, the last ferry of the night. He knew we had to run to make it. Then, panting, we could sit and relax. But it had been a wonderful day, and he took me the next year again, this time to see Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger.

Picturing my young grandfather and my father at ten or eleven running helter skelter through the streets of New York made me laugh. The book is full of little incidents like this one.

Wikipedia’s entry on “memoir” as a genre notes:

With the advent of inexpensive digital book production in the first decade of the 21st century, the genre exploded. Memoirs written as a way to pass down a personal legacy, rather than as a literary work of art or historical document, are emerging as a personal and family responsibility.

But my dad didn’t write his story out of “responsibility.” He has always been a storyteller and a writer, and he would have written his memoir regardless of the trend. It was a true labor of love, a record of stories and observations and family color that would have been lost had he not written them down.

You don’t have to be famous for your stories to matter. They matter to the people you love. Be sure to tell them.

Photo by Joanna Stołowicz on Unsplash