Over the next few months she produced a short manuscript that covered most of her life. Though my three sisters and I knew many of the incidents she wrote about, we gained new insights into how she experienced them. For instance, she disclosed new details about how she met our father.
A few months later, my mother became seriously ill, and a week later, she died. She was 87.
In the intervening years, I've begun teaching memoir-writing, first to my students at Stanford, Faculty Page, both to graduate and undergraduate students; and more recently to Baby Boomers through San Francisco State University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, OLLI site.
The first step is to gather together as many old letters, journals, photos, and other resources as you can easily locate.
Then, focus on emotionally loaded moments from your past. Just try to write one scene that captures what it was like to live through one of those moments.
The next day, jump to another emotionally compelling incident and try to write about that. Do this every day for a week.
The moments do not need to connect together, at this point. They can be random scenes from your life.
After a week, this exercise should trigger other memories. These may involve more complexities than the first set of memories. You may also start dreaming about memories, or find they come to you when you're doing something else.
Pay close attention to these randomly accessed memories, these discoveries of what your brain has been storing away for years or decades.
Many memoir writers who follow this method end up discarding their initial wave of memories -- the stories they had thought they wanted to tell, in favor of the more complex, and often less resolved material that floods into the vacuum once they've swept the initial layer of memory away.
This is just a rough outline of the course I teach, I'll flesh it out in the weeks to come, and republish it as more robust guide to memoir-writing at some point in the future.
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