Today: “I don’t care.” Tomorrow: “That was life-changing.”

Your granddaughter is too young to really listen to or understand some of your stories right now—but one day she may need to hear them, to be nourished by the lessons and comforted by your shared experiences.

“I never knew any of this stuff about you, Mom,” the daughter of one of my clients said after reading her life story book.

From a family member of another client: “When I lost my job this year during the pandemic, I had a niggling sensation that my grandmother had gone through something similar. Then I remembered: I read about her experience in her book.”

“When we hear stories from family members about their experiences, we usually ruminate longest over the ones that feel the most familiar to us.”

When we hear stories from family members about their experiences, we usually ruminate longest over the ones that feel the most familiar to us.

If I am engaged to be married, perhaps I linger over my mom’s retelling of how she and my dad met. If I’ve just had a child myself, I’ll undoubtedly read with great interest the tales of their experiences parenting me and my siblings.

Some stories will feel foreign upon first reading. Your grandmother describing life in Brooklyn during the Depression; your grandfather recalling what if felt like to return from the Great War and no longer have a purpose. Even your parent losing a job when they least expected it—that is, until that story becomes relevant to your own experience, too.

Family stories have enduring value

Life transitions are some of the strongest fodder for memoir and personal history specifically because they bring about change—and change stirs all kinds of feelings and fears.

Transitions are the plot twists in our lives. And when they are unexpected, and they are happening to us right now, we feel unmoored.

But imagine if we had access to a story about the time our dad went through something almost exactly the same. He, too, felt unmoored. He, too, had no way of knowing how this transition in his life would play out.

Then 30 years later, he reflected about that time—his experiences, his feelings, the lessons he may have learned—and his stories made their way into a book. A book that now sits on a bookshelf in your living room.

While you may have flipped through that book a dozen times before, you want to reread it now. You crave remembering how his story turned out. It has a newfound relevance for you, and as such, it means so much more to encounter it at this time in your life.

“Transitions are the plot twists in our lives. And when they are unexpected, and they are happening to us right now, we feel unmoored.”

“In former times, knowledge was passed down from father to son and from grandparents to grandchildren,” Gianluigi Quentin has written. “Today, the focus is so concentrated on the future that there is a disregard for many of the important lessons of the past. This is why it is important that we elders write our memoirs—so that younger generations can learn from our experiences.”

Indeed, this is also why some stories will matter more in 10 years than they seem to right now: because our loved ones encounter them when they need them.

The stories of our modern lives—of transitions and ups and downs—“should tell us that the best way to respond to a period of personal upheaval—the close of one story, the end of one dream—is to push through the darkness, paddle through the torrents, persevere through the woods,” Bruce Feiler writes. “And to know: We’re not alone.”

What better way to let your descendants know they are not alone than to preserve your stories for them to learn from?