Life Stories

Recently, going through my old boxes of files, I came across a blue folder with 32 pages of a single-spaced typewritten manuscript. The author was my mother.

***

(I first published a version of this piece in 2006.)

Four years ago, my mother was offered the chance to take a class in "life stories," i.e., how to write a memoir or autobiography. She had asked me whether I thought this was a good thing for her to do and my answer was an emphatic "Yes." 

Over the next few months she produced a short manuscript that covered most of her life. My three sisters and I knew many of the incidents she wrote about, but 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.

Partly as a result of that experience, I began teaching memoir-writing, first to my students at Stanford, and more recently to seniors through San Francisco State University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

In theses classes, I’ve learned to recommend that the students should focus at first on the most emotionally loaded moments from their past. I suggest that they just try to write one scene that captures what it was like to live through one of those moments.

Then, the next day, to 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 first. For now, they can be random scenes from a life.

After a week, this exercise should trigger other memories. These may involve more complexities than the first set of memories. The writer may also start dreaming memories, or find they arrive when they're doing something else.

They should pay close attention to these randomly accessed memories, these discoveries of what the brain has been storing away for years or decades.

I’ve developed this methodology after reading many memoirs as well as whatever material I could find about how they were produced.

It turns out that many 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 stories, based on less-resolved material that floods into the vacuum once they've swept the initial layer of memory away.

***

I’ve just reread my mother’s story. On the final page in the very last line, she writes, “I am content.” A few months later, with us by her side, she passed away.

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