Life Story Links: April 8, 2025

“There is an ancient Zulu greeting: Sawubona. It literally means, ‘I see you.’ Sawubona implies, ‘I know you. I recognize your worth, passions, pain, strengths, weaknesses, and life experiences.’ Isn’t that the goal of every human interaction?”
—Gina Vild

vintage postcard with handwritten note from new york city to massachusetts recipient postmarked 1920 — Vintage postcard with handwritten note addressed to a recipient in Winchendon, Massachusetts, postmarked from New York City in 1906, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.

On telling our own stories

HOW GHOSTWRITERS CAN HELP
“It is truly a special moment when someone else accurately and authentically captures our own life.... Such is the mission of a ghostwriter, offering catharsis to an author while giving readers a gripping story to read.”

CLOSE—BUT NOT TOO CLOSE
In a recent post I shared two questions to ask yourself to determine if you have enough emotional distance (and why you need it) to write about your life.

BUT DOES IT MOVE THE STORY FORWARD?
“Revenge writing in memoir is never, ever a good, or valid, creative intention.” Elissa Altman shares the three questions she asks herself before writing about someone who has harmed her.

WHO LISTENS TO YOU?
“More than one interview subject has teared up and needed to pause once they get going during our interview sessions—once it dawns on them that I am not going to interrupt them, and that I am listening intently.”

WE’RE ALL STORY KEEPERS
“Whether it’s a 90-second video or a three-page story or a full book, really the core of it is, How did life change you?” says personal biographer and ghostwriter Rhonda Lauritzen in this recent TV interview.

Memoir miscellany

‘FOLLOW YOUR MIND’
“I vote for letting everything tumbleweed together over multiple drafts and editing on the printed page (edit, print, edit, print) and recording out loud to see if it’s working.” Diane Mehta on writing her new memoir-in-essays.

PIECES OF A LIFE, RECLAIMED
“When I got to the end of the memoir, I realized the story I’d written wasn’t the one I’d intended to write,” Samina Ali says. “What emerged as well was a full-throated love letter to the vital act of storytelling.”

BEYOND DOCUMENTING EXPERIENCES
“This is memoir braided with interview, feminist journalism, dreamscapes, and the occasional excellent recipe,” Ariel Gore shares in an interview. “It’s about how a diagnosis becomes part of your story but doesn’t have to be your whole story.”

TRACING FAMILY MIGRATION
“There are so many choices to be made when we set out to tell the stories of others based on documents and interviews.” In conversation with Caroline Topperman, author of the hybrid memoir Your Roots Cast a Shadow.

LOST, FOUND, KEPT
“I have learned through my long writing practice to trust my voice. It’s the wisest part of me and I always listen to it, particularly in my early drafts when I’m excavating for the truth.”

A MEMOIR OF BODIES AND BORDERS
“In the realm of records, her trace has always been slight. Born without a birth certificate in the days of British rule, her name was first written in 1955,” Sarah Aziza writes of her grandmother. And of her father: “With before locked away, he did not see his life as aftermath.”

TALKS WITH BUBBE
“I’ve seen the way one small nugget can lead to another, and just how much of a world can live within a single detail. I’ve really learned that from listening to [my grandmother] and how she tells her stories, seeing what details stay with her.” Listen in as Marion Roach Smith talks with Brooke Randel about writing her new memoir:

The historic record, memory, and research

ARCHIVES OF ARCHIVES
In the wake of the firing of “the head of the National Archives and Records Administration,...whose motto is ‘the written word endures,’” librarians and guerrilla archivists are trying to save our country’s history.

PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY
“Editor and New Yorker Reuel Golden had the pleasure of diving into the Atlantic archives” for the retrospective coffee table book 75 Years of Atlantic Records from Taschen.

FROM ASHES TO ART
“It’s better than anything I could have salvaged. This is something that comes only from a place of love.” Seventeen artists around the country help California wildfire victims preserve memories through custom home drawings:

LAYER UPON LAYER…
“What is the obligation of the people who came after—those who survive the survivors—who carry the story, who carry the residual trauma and haunted memories of their families?” For years, her friend’s father asked her to recount his childhood escape from the Nazis. Why did it take this journalist so long?

Finding the past

THE PERFECTLY IMPERFECT WAYS WE REMEMBER
In Memory Lane, two psychologists lay out the vagaries of how we remember, proposing that “memory is like a Lego tower, built from the ground up, broken down, put away and rebuilt each time it’s called to mind.”

MORE ON EPISODIC MEMORY
One of the co-authors of that book was recently interviewed on the following podcast: “If somebody’s memory doesn’t accord with yours, they’re not necessarily lying. They might be mistaken, or you might be mistaken.”