Life Story Links: March 18, 2025

“You’re not off the hook from inspiration’s demands and rewards just because the story happens to be true, or just because it’s about your life.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert

Vintage postcard depicting an illustration of flower beds in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, postmarked 1906, from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.

Family history faves

ON AND ON AND ON AND ON…
Tracing your genealogy is an ongoing endeavor, so how do you create preservation projects that can actually…well, get finished? Last week I wrote about family history project creep and how to manage it.

‘I FOUND SO MUCH’
“There were photos of my grandpa I'd never seen alongside military documents displaying his signature. I calculated his age at every turn, finding context for family stories and drawing comparisons with my life.”

WHICH ONE IS BEST FOR YOU?
Family Tree magazine does an updated deep dive into genealogy websites, comparing the big four—Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, Findmypast, and MyHeritage—feature by feature.

PATCHWORKS OF MEMORY
“Mama say, ‘I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.’” Lisa Gail Collins on stitching love and loss.

FAMILY STORY PRESERVATION PLATFORM
“As someone who wishes I had more recordings of my own parents' stories, I immediately saw the value,” Mark Cuban says of technology platform Remento, which garnered a deal on Shark Tank. Watch the full segment here:

First-person writing—tips and inspiration

‘FIRSTBORN GIRLS’
“Recently I heard a woman say that fear does not save you from dying, it keeps you from living. I feel the same way about writing one’s truth.” Bernice L. McFadden on writing her first memoir.

JOURNEYS AWAY FROM HOME
“The question of form and its relationship to a life lived interests me as a writer and as a border crosser, as my father’s son and as a father myself.” A (long) thoughtful piece on migration by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

GALVANIZED TO KEEP TELLING HER STORIES
“It was here, through my writing, on my own terms, that the people I loved would meet me to bear witness. It was here that I could speak my truth, and I would find my own healing and purpose.”

‘I SEE IT AS A WITNESS NARRATIVE’
“I’d given up on this memoir, but for some reason I opened up the file one day a couple of years ago. The story still compelled me, so I thought I'd try to publish parts of it.”

Miscellaneous storytelling

DIARY KEEPING, LITERALLY
“I stopped feeding more pages into the fire after making acquaintance with the self who wrote them. It felt like killing her somehow, to destroy evidence of who she had been. Maybe she still had things to teach me.” Memoirist Dani Shapiro on what to do with her years worth of diaries.

THE NATURE OF STORIES
The approach of new research “is a significant departure from previous studies of life stories—here, we are really homing in on the ability to craft a compelling narrative from minimal material.” And the findings show that strong storytelling skills can dramatically improve someone’s well-being.

DEEP DIVE INTO ONE MEMOIR
“While she seemed concerned that memory is slippery and false, she was, in fact, teasing herself and the reader by appearing in all earnestness to be searching for the real truth.” In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy created herself on the page.

‘LUCKY TO HEAR THESE STORIES’
“Are you taping this whole thing? Jaysus, you’ll have to sensor the lot of it, so you will.” Chicago–based personal historian Nora Kerr shares a few quotes from Irish storytellers in honor of St. Paddy’s Day.

Worth a watch

‘BECAUSE I’M WORTH IT’
Documentary filmmakers interviewed influential advertising copywriter Ilon Specht “about her legacy and her life. While only 17 minutes long, each frame packs a punch.”

NO TASTE LIKE HOME
“As a son of immigrants, I know that food can tell you more about who you are and where you’ve come from than you ever imagined,” host Antoni Porowski says of unlocking the past through culinary adventures in his new series. Read about how he helps six celebrity guests learn about their ancestors through recipes, and watch a preview below:

TIME FRAME
In 1864, as the new art form of photography was gaining popularity, someone had the forethought to trace the last living Revolutionary soldiers and take their photographs. Don N. Hagist, author of The Revolution's Last Men: The Soldiers Behind the Photographs, talks about the real stories of these veterans. Listen in:

Feats of research

RECOVERING THE PAST
“Even if a person didn’t donate stacks of papers to a library with comfortable chairs and a good scanner, every life intersects with public record keeping and every life of achievement leaves a wide and deep impact on others.” On writing biography without an archive.

FROM 2,600+ BOXES IN THE ARCHIVES…
A Century of The New Yorker, a new exhibit celebrating the magazine’s century-long influence at the New York Public Library through February 21, 2026, is “a reminder that history is never static and that the stories we tell—as well as the ones we choose to leave out—matter.” Glimpse behind the scenes of how curators scoured the archive and chronicled 100 years of history below: