“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more sneakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are to be sure a miracle every way—but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
—Jane Austen’s Fanny Price, Mansfield Park

Recent Autobiographical Writing Worth Your Time

“A VERY GOOD LIAR”
“My mother is home from the hospital after being sick, and I want to stay close to her. It is a beautiful day outside, but I would rather be here, inside with her, than outside playing. I am seven, in the second grade.”

RECOLLECTIONS OF HER MOTHER
“Years later, while staring out my Brooklyn apartment window, [my mother] said with genuine bafflement, ‘I assumed you kids would be exactly like me. It horrified me that you weren’t. You were a separate narrative.’” Bex O’Brian on her wildly permissive mother.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AN APOLLO MISSION WALK
“Pulling a two-wheeled, rickshaw-like contraption for their tools and rock samples, they set out confident that they knew just where the crater was—‘right over that way,’ as Mitchell put it.” A captivating third-person look at what it was like to walk on the moon in the summer of 1971.

On Film

A RECORD OF PIONEER LIFE
Lora Webb Nichols created an intimate record of Wyoming in the early twentieth century including what “might be the largest photographic record of this era and region in existence.” Browse not only her photographs but also transcripts of her diaries (1897-1907) and an unfinished manuscript for her memoir, I Remember, via the American Heritage Center.

ONE MAN’S QUEST FOR HAPPINESS
Filmmaker Morgan Neville, who “specializes in unknotting the real story from the public narrative,” says it was helpful that he never met the subject of his most recent documentary, Anthony Bourdain.

What Gets Remembered

LET THE MEMORIES BEGIN
After months in lockdown, we all seem keen to “make memories”—memories that “will become, we hope, stories we will tell and retell, cherished flashbacks that will become part of our personal history.” But can we really ‘make’ them?

TELL YOUR STORIES, IN SPITE OF IT ALL
Two things no one tells you about writing your own story: that it can be really hard (but it’s still worth the effort), and that your family members might not care (but they will, one day)

Heartfelt Possessions Hold Memories

A PRICELESS MEMORY BANK
“While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a captioned photograph is worth at least double that.” Ally Bunbury on the comfort to be found in memories and remembering.

THE BOOK OF OUIDA
“I felt a bit of her soul attached to those objects, talismans that would make me feel like I was closer to her,” HGTV star Erin Napier says of her grandmother’s things. But it was finding her Mammaw’s handwritten recipes that was the real family treasure.

ARTIFACT, RESTORED
“An amateur genealogist, he cared less about preserving the Book of Psalms…than the family history—the first of it penned by his great-great-great-great-grandmother.” A man’s 250-year-old family Bible is brought back to life—and good for another century.

USED WITH LOVE
“Not only do heirlooms matter more when they have a story, but they are treasured when we associate them with love,” writes Elizabeth Thomas, a personal historian based in Salt Lake City. How to continue infusing those objects with love? Use them, of course!

...and a Few More Links

• Prince Harry to publish memoir next year that he calls “wholly truthful.”

• Family History Library reopens after long pandemic closure.

• Library's vintage postcard collection is a timeline of Phoenix history.

• Archivists at the University of Michigan-Flint campus hope to write history books from the perspective of “real” people.

• Memoir review: Crossing the River: Seven Stories that Saved My Life by Carol Smith

• Personal history gift ideas for celebrating the trailblazing women in your life

Short Takes