“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
—Oscar Wilde

The Craft of Ghostwriting (or Whatever You’d Like to Call It)

CHANNELING THEIR VOICES
“Readers just want the truth, particularly in a memoir. And they can really sense when they’re getting it. So I’m mostly hanging out, waiting for the truth to come out and reveal itself.” Michelle Burford on why she prefers to be called a “story architect” rather than a ghostwriter.

THEN AND NOW
Even before co-founding NYC–based Remarkable Life Memoirs, Samantha Shubert was in the business of helping tell empowering life stories. Here she shares a story about how a plum copyediting job inspired her, plus details on her company’s new hybrid memoir/cookbook offering.

Family History, Personal History

FINDING THE JOY
There are plenty of lists of generic family history interview questions around, but this one offers up an array of topics both silly and fun to add some levity to any probing personal history conversation.

STORIES OF BLACK EXPERIENCE
A Connecticut author describes her profound feelings upon reading an ancestor’s obituary—“I cried when I found out what his life was like, being enslaved, wanting to escape, wondering who he left behind”—and encourages Black families to study their genealogy to find personal stories of tragedy and triumph.

THE SHAPE OF US
“What is it that makes us, us?” Kat Nicholls asks in this piece that explores the role our memories play on our identity, and what happens when they’re taken from us.

END-OF-LIFE THOUGHTS
Most of the academic studies social psychologist Michael Ent was able to find were focused on practical aspects of support for the dying rather than on trying to harvest their wisdom—so he undertook a study to see what was on their minds.

PANDEMIC PIX
In an effort to preserve imagery from the Covid-19 pandemic, the Library of Congress’s ‘rapid response’ collecting has already secured special projects from nationally recognized artists and photographers. Now they have extended an offer to citizens across the country to submit their own pictures of pandemic experiences.

Lots of Great Memoir Reads

THE PRICE OF INNOCENCE
“I am a first-generation immigrant…but my real identity, the one that follows me around like a migraine, is that I am the daughter of immigrants,” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes in this evocative piece about waking up from the American dream.

A FITTING LEGACY
Deborah Orr never got to see her memoir, Motherwell, become a bestseller, as she died before its publication. In a recent podcast Damian Barr reads an excerpt from this “book about how a deeper understanding of the place and people you have come from can bring you toward redemption.”

IN THE WAKE OF DEVASTATING LOSS
“I feel it in me, that uncomplicated, devastating happiness; it is as true and tactile as anything I’ve ever felt. But behind that feeling lurks the panic that the world can drop out from beneath your feet at any time, because that’s true, too.” Read an excerpt from Emily Rapp Black’s memoir Sanctuary.

LEAVING HOME
“The way my father tells it, my mother was wrong and the police were wrong and my memories were wrong.” Memoirist Danielle Geller tells the story of a life by what was left behind in this excerpt from her new book, Dog Flowers.

BEYOND THE GREAT SILENCE
“Over many years I came to understand that I had been infused part of my father’s traumatic history. Why this happened I do not know. All I do know is that it became the dark ghost inside me, the lining of my heart, the stones of my kidneys.” Jonathan Lichtenstein on writing through the silences of a lost family history.

IMPORTED FROM DENMARK
“I bring news of Tove Ditlevsen’s suite of memoirs with the kind of thrill and reluctance that tells me this must be a masterpiece,” Parul Sehgal writes of The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency, translated from the Danish.

Personal History Through Obits

AN ALL-STAR HUMAN
"It was supposed to be the greatest triumph of my life, but I was never allowed to enjoy it,” Hank Aaron said of his storied baseball career. "The only reason that some people didn't want me to succeed was because I was a Black man." Sports Illustrated and The New York Times laud a legend and a gentleman.

AKA LAWRENCE ZEIGER
An intent listener during his CNN interviews, Larry King was fond of saying, "I've never learned anything while I was talking." King, who conducted 50,000 interviews according to the BBC, is quoted by the LA Times as saying, “For this to all happen to a Jewish kid from Brooklyn is a damn impressive thing.”

...and a Few More Links

• New “memory safe” product safeguards your digital and physical memories.

• John Waters learns that his ancestor owned slaves.

• A counselor speaks to the importance of memories and offers tips on how to preserve them.

• Presidential biographies, and presidential mythologies

• Preserving memories one flower at a time

• Early Snapchat employee debuts Yoni Circle, a social storytelling app for womxn.

• Project Memory Co. creates photo books with journaling elements.

Short Takes