Are you thinking about writing your life story? If you do you will be in good company. There has been a boom in memoir writing over the last twenty years.
“It used to be that only the rich or famous wrote memoirs,” said Karen Ulrich, author of How to Write Your Life Story. “Fortunately...times have changed. More and more people are choosing to recount their experiences, frustrations, struggles, triumphs, secrets and insights...Everyone has a story worth sharing.”
A recent poll indicated that 81% of American adults believe that they have a book in them. For many of them that is without doubt a memoir.
People undertake creating a memoir for a variety reasons, but in a poll conducted by Charley Kempthorne, editor of Life Story Magazine, his subscribers said that the number one reason for writing a memoir was “to review my own life to understand it better.”
Writing a memoir can be a process of self-exploration and discovery. It can also be transformational. “Writing about yourself should be thrilling,” said author and publisher Kevin Sampsell, “for both you and your audience.”
The audience for memoirs has changed in recent years. Books like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which won the Pulitzer Prize, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles or Barack O’Bama’s Dreams of My Father have appeared on the best seller list. But the real upsurge in memoir writing has been among people for whom technology has made it possible to write a book that would have a limited distribution among family and friends.
This new breed of memoir writers has a variety of reasons for telling their life stories. Some have sought to look back on their career accomplishments. Others have described how they have triumphed over seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Some have chosen to write a memoir that passes on their personal or spiritual values.
But whatever else memoirists have sought, they have wanted to preserve family traditions and stories while establishing a closer bond with their children and grand children. A generation or two ago, when extended families lived within close proximity of each other, those stories might have passed around the dinner table of living room. But with families today spread all across the map, family stories get lost unless people make a conscious decision to preserve them. What would you give to hear your grandmother tell the story of her first date with your grandfather, or to hear your father describe what it felt like to hold you for the first time?
“What the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it is the family stories that are worth the storage,” said syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman.
There are stories that only you can preserve. So, as Oprah Winfrey advised, “I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were.”
