“A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,’ and part of the art is in the curation.”
—Maggie Smith

Documenting our lives for posterity

IN THE WAKE OF A GRANDFATHER’S DEMENTIA
“The crippling fear of letting memories pass me by has caused me to over-compensate by over-documenting my life, as if clinging desperately to souvenirs in a futile attempt to escape the cruel bounds of time will stop me from forgetting.”

AN EPISTOLARY FRIENDSHIP
I don’t know anything about the American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, but I delighted in reading descriptions of their decades–long correspondence in this excerpt from A Chance Meeting: American Encounters by Rachel Cohen.

PORTRAITS OF A NEW REALITY
“They’ve been telling their own story really, I’ve just been holding a camera,” Polly Braden says of the women forced to flee Ukraine in the face of war who she has been photographing for the past two years. “They are safeguarding the next generation of Ukraine.”

WRITING RITUALS
“I always wondered if she knew someone was watching, if there was a tiny performative aspect to the ritual, or if she was just so caught up in her work that she didn’t care that she had illuminated her sacred space.” Mia Manzulli on living next door to Joyce Carol Oates.

Recent memoir writing of note

STIRRING HER LANGUAGE SPIRIT
“I was set apart, and in that distance was a kind of longing, failure, and hollowness. A need for my own stories,” Jamie Figeuroa writes on reclaiming the Spanish language in this excerpt from her new memoir, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico.

MLK BIOGRAPHER HONORED
The New-York Historical Society awarded its American History Prize to biographer Jonathan Eig, whose King: A Life “presents the civil rights leader as a brilliant, flawed 20th-century ‘founding father.’”

MORE THAN A TRAVEL MEMOIR
“Through writing, I really was able to realize how many experiences I never digested,” Helen Sula says. “I like learning and unlocking a part of myself I wasn’t in touch with before.”

Ways we remember

STORIES BEHIND THE STUFF
Boxes of old letters, family photos, and mementos from a generation ago can feel like a burden if they’re passed down without context. Recently on the blog I shared ideas for what to do with them.

IN DEFENSE OF IMMIGRANT FOOD MEMORIES
“What if all I have of my grandmother now is a gold bracelet in a box that she reluctantly gave me on the eve of my wedding (and often asked for it back) and a handful of memories, some of which I can viscerally taste when I prepare and eat the same food she made for me as a child.”

JOURNALS, NOTEBOOKS & DIARIES
How a diary is distinct from autofiction is one of the many questions Jhumpa Lahiri explored in a recent course she taught at Barnard about the diary as an art form. Here, she shares the reading assignments from that syllabus.

RootsTech recaps and reflections

FAMILY HISTORY FINDS YOU’LL LOVE
The last week of February I traveled to Salt Lake City for my first in-person RootsTech experience. While I’ve got a notebook filled with family history tips and tricks I’ll inevitably share later, for now I have rounded up my four favorite finds from the genealogy conference.

THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
If RootsTech 2024 made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that AI’s impact on the family history industry looms large. One recent player: Passagist has announced “an AI-powered biographer designed to document personal life stories.”

LIMITATIONS OF LIFE STORY TECH
‘Digital life story’ tools are invaluable for memory care residents, but “no matter how well-meaning, some tools simply were not user-friendly or they included audiovisual components that overwhelmed some older adults rather than enhance their experience,” a recent study finds.

HOW LOVE AND CONNECTION FUEL MEANING
“While AI and other technology have come a long way, this personal story shows why people recording people in person is irreplaceable,” Rhonda Lauritzen says in the introduction to this two-and-half-minute video on the undeniable power of connection and its place in family history storytelling:

...and a few more links

• Film biographer Whitney Myers of Sacred Stories has aggregated some of the best interview questions (and resources for great questions!) in one place—worth bookmarking if you’re interested!

• Two new digital service companies—Inalife and Folklory—help preserve legacies.

• How smell is a powerful link to emotional memories

• Debbie Brodsky on the key to telling your organization’s story on video

• “Elderly people...were an integral part of my childhood, and only now have I realized what a special blessing that was.”

• New memoir follows life with an eating disorder

• From The New Yorker, the best bio-pics ever made

• Bryan Cranston to narrate Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story

• Review of Chicago museum show, “A Little Truth—Fact and Fiction in Family Photography”

• Who was Charles Booth, and what are his poverty maps?

• Anthony M. Kennedy to reflect on his life and his years on the Supreme Court in two-volume memoir

Short takes