Life Story Links: April 22, 2025
“There’s basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.”
—Isabel Allende
Vintage postcard depicting an illustration of The Museum of Natural History in New York City, circa 1920, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.
Our own stories…
WHAT WE REMEMBER
“It can be intensely rewarding to remember more of your life, but it takes time; if you don’t have time, you don’t experience the rewards, and so you become less inclined to prioritize the enlivening of your own past.”
FROM REFLECTION LAGOON TO FAMILY GATHERING PLACE
“Memories are bridges to the past, guiding us in understanding who we are and shaping where we’re headed,” film biographer and StoryKeep founder Jamie Yuenger shares at the “Remembrance Island” stop on the wonderfully imaginative voyage of reflection mapped out here (it’s worth the trip!).
A GUIDE TO THE ART OF JOURNALING
“Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self.” Read an excerpt from The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad, releasing this month…
…Then get a glimpse into Jaouad’s first intimate book event: “I began to feel relaxed and grounded, amused by what I was remembering and delighted by the way my memories led to other long-forgotten memories.... Journaling with these lovely humans was a resounding reminder of how soul-soothing and expansive it is to spend time on the page.”
WHAT HAPPENS TO OUR JOURNALS WHEN WE’RE GONE?
Would Joan Didion have wanted the world to see her notes on therapy? Readers can decide when Notes to John, which shows the writer grappling with guilt and vulnerability, is published next week. I pondered the question of what to do with one’s journals a while back, too.
Our family’s stories…
ECHOES THROUGH TIME
“That document you’re staring at? They touched it. Their hands were there. Their hopes were fresh. Their future— your past—was unwritten.” Why you feel connected to ancestors you’ve never met.
BE A FAMILY HISTORY DETECTIVE
There’s way more to family history than clicking on digital hints and scouring online genealogy sites. Last week, I shared three ideas for tracking family history clues IRL.
FINDING HIS ROOTS
As his hit PBS series Finding Your Roots closes its 11th season, the Emmy-nominated historian and celebrity genealogist Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explores his own family history.
‘I SEEK A KIND PERSON’
“Julian Borger’s haunting, revelatory book exists in the shadow of a parent who, like many survivors, spoke little about his past. Part of Borger’s task is to illuminate that anguishing tension between forgetting and remembering.”
In pictures
AN ODE TO VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY
A family photo taken in 1950s Cape Town mirrors another from 1970s Kyoto or 1930s Rome. They are fragments of a collective memory, silent witnesses to what it means to live—to love, to grow, to remember.”
THE GIRL IN THE MIDDLE
“With her name in hand, I found her story—buried deep in legal files, memoirs, government records, and fading family memories.” Historian Martha A. Sandweiss on the history held within a single photograph.
Short takes
