Life Story Links: March 28, 2023

“The great stories are alive.”
—Ariel Burger

Vintage photo of a young girl, with other children in background, in a vacant lot behind tenement housing in East Harlem, New York City. Photograph by Rómulo Lachatañeré, courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Preserving our legacies

“BOOKS HAVE MY HEART”
Last week I answered a question I’m often asked: Why life story books, and why coffee table books in particular? Why not video? Why not audio?

PARTS UNSPOKEN
“It requires a certain level of trust for someone to be vulnerable and share their story. The person at the center of this exercise becomes the subject of their own life.” A look at educational biography.

MEMORIAL REFLECTIONS
How do you want to be remembered?, Patricia Charpentier, a Florida–based life writing teacher, asks in this short piece written after a funeral stirs questions of legacy.

NARRATING OUR LIVES
“Over the years, I have realized a parenting inversion: Just as we narrate our children's lives when they're quite young, our children eventually narrate our lives when we're quite old.”

First person reads worth your time

WHEN A ROAD ENDS
“I wrote the kernel of this piece over ten years ago, and still work to make sense of parts of this story,” Marjorie Turner Hollman writes in this piece on life-changing events in her own life, and lessons learned along the way.

UNLIKELY OASIS OF PEACE
“I am sometimes not sure which is the more remarkable: that life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life.” This excerpt from Patrick Bringley’s memoir takes place at The Cloisters in upper Manhattan.

HOW WE SEE AGE
“The first person who portrayed old age for me was my grandmother, my father’s mother, Erma King Aldrich, the woman who bore my last name, the woman I called Nana, the only woman in my family who made me feel loved.”

Memoir notes

THE ‘FIRST JOB MEMOIR’
In this piece looking at the evolution of the “first job memoir,” one author “sees her job as simply a job, rather than as a crucible for forging her identity,” while others take different approaches to their work narratives.

SELF PORTRAIT
“For a writer so relentlessly suspicious of the accounts we give of ourselves, and so attuned to the meager defenses we muster against self-exposure, memoir is a risky medium.”

ON THE THEME OF AGING
“The mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of changes is, after all, one of the most interesting questions of philosophy.” Grace Paley on the art of growing older.