Life Story Links: July 9, 2024

“Because right now there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty

Vintage baseball card of George Herman (Babe) Ruth issued by Big League Chewing Gum in 1933, courtesy Library of Congress Digital Collection.

Ways we remember

THE SUBTLE ART OF DIARY KEEPING
“Those people who don’t destroy their diaries must have some secret need or wish for them to be read, a need or wish which affects what is written in varying degrees.” Helen Fielding considers the place of confessional narrative in today’s literary landscape.

ARE YOU A REMEMBERER OR A FORGETTER?
“My father, who is a Rememberer, says his nostalgia often borders on unbearable. If he thinks of his cousin, who died years ago, he can slip into a memory of the two of them at 6, playing hide-and-seek in their grandfather’s house. It sounds beautiful and excruciating at once.”

ON WRITING MEMOIR
“When my writing reveals something about my life that I didn’t see until it appeared on the page—that’s a great surprise.” Memoirist Rachel Zimmerman answers Sari Botton’s questions about the craft.

DIVING WITH A PURPOSE
“How can finding and telling the lost history of the slave trade help me, as a Black American woman, figure out where I belong—and to whom I belong?” Storyteller and diver Tara Roberts is helping document some of the thousand slave ships that wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean.

Love, loss, and memories

FINDING SOLACE IN STORIES
“No one could have guessed that A Family Story would also become our companion in grief. We leaf through it when we miss dad, when we need to hear his voice, or if we want to share family stories with our kids.”

PERSONAL PODCASTS
“With today's technology, we can all record our loved ones in some form, and I would encourage people to do so, in whatever way they can.” A look at how some families are turning to audio recordings to remember lost loved ones.

‘A GENTLE MAN’
Memoirist Joe Wilkins remembers: “In all my boyhood memories, my grandfather shines. What kept me close to him? What let me so completely trust? What had me listening so that even now I hear his voice?”

Biography & memoir

AN INVITING AND NUANCED CONVERSATION
Sara B. Franklin, at once friend and oral historian to her subject, Judith Jones, grappled “with how to tell the story of a person with a life as textured, documented, and purposefully invisible as Jones’s” in the new biography, The Editor.

SELF AS LENS
Writing about the radicalism of the ’70s in her new memoir, 1974, helped Francine Prose come to grips with who she was and who she is now.

CELEBRATING THEIR QUEER FAMILY HISTORY
“It is through these conversations I discovered what a rare and complex person he was, the intense draw he had.... With determination, I brought my uncle’s story out of the shadows.”

EMOTIONAL CATHARSIS
New York–based biographer Alan D. Bergman discusses the unexpected outpouring of emotions subjects may experience while sharing their life stories.