Life Story Links: November 5, 2024

November 5, 2024 Dawn M. Roode

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
—Wordsworth

Vintage postcard with an illustration of the New York City riverfront, circa early 1900s; from the personal ephemera collection of Dawn Roode.

Where are the stories?

‘TELL ME MORE’
“By mastering the art of follow-up questions, you become a skilled facilitator, drawing out details, emotions, and lessons that make each story unique and deeply personal.” How to level-up your family history interviews.

SNIPPETS OF HIS BOYHOOD SLIPPED OUT
Though her father was always reluctant to tell stories from his youth in Russia, “little things would drop out...and I’d think, ‘Oh, that’s a good story.’ All the while I was compiling the evidence,” Sheila Baslaw says. The 92-year-old has released a children’s books highlighting one of those family stories.

SHARED FAMILY MEMORY
“I pointed to a picture and asked, ‘What was her name again?’ He closed the book and softly said, ‘I don’t remember. And now there’s no one I can ask.’” Jill Sarkozi on how to answer family history questions when family elders are gone.

Memories made physical

THE FAMILY PHOTO LIBRARY
“One risk of photographing your life is that you’ll create an illusory version of it, a selective visual record that reflects your wishes rather than reality.” Joshua Rothman on what you can learn from photographing your life.

THE REAL VALUE OF ALL THAT STUFF?
“As one of my first clients aptly put it, they hired me to ‘prevent the boxes that went unopened and unsorted from my grandparents' house into my dad's attic, from going unopened and unsorted into my attic.’” Clémence Scouten offers up concrete advice for what to do when personal memorabilia becomes part of an estate.

LEAN INTO YOUR SENTIMENTAL SIDE
“Your life and memories deserve to be preserved in beautiful ways.” Crafty influencer Martina Calvi is inspiring a resurgence in scrapbooking—the good, old-fashioned glue-and-paper kind.

A WINDOW TO HISTORY
In Ruth Hunduma’s short documentary The Medallion (watch it here), the story of Ethiopia’s Red Terror is told through a family artifact and a mother’s memories.

SYMBOLS OF THE STRUGGLE
“For some reason, we never once took a family portrait with all three generations in one frame. But we had the corkboard, testament to the things that mattered to us across eight decades.” How protest pins taught the author about her family history.

A VAULT OF CREATIVITY
“The Bob Dylan Archive had long been a subject of rumor and legend.... It was kind of hard to picture Mr. Don’t Look Back himself boxing up old notebooks for posterity. But if he didn’t, someone did.”

Of memoir and memoirists

GIRL MEETS WORLD
“You sometimes buy high heels but you never wear them, because who wants to be caught by shoes in which she can’t run away.” Read a beautiful excerpt from My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss.

STAR STORIES
“Candid, intelligent books that reveal the humans under the headlines, the dark side of the spotlight, and the epic stories that the tabloids could never capture”: Oprah Daily rounds up the 25 best celebrity memoirs of all time.

ORIGIN STORY
“Over the years, I’ve often been asked about my upbringing, my time at Harvard, and co-founding the company. Those questions made me realize that people might be interested in my journey and the factors that influenced it.” Bill Gates’s memoir, Source Code, will be out in 2025. (Meanwhile, Gates disputes much of an author’s reporting in a new biography about him.)

‘LEFTOVER LOVE’
“Over the years she told me her stories and I told her my stories. Both of us recognizing and accepting the way they rhymed and the way they didn’t.” A story about intergenerational friendship.

‘MEMORIES OF DISTANT MOUNTAINS’
A peek inside the illustrated notebooks of memoirist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, arranged by the author not in chronological order, but emotional order.

...and a few more links

Short takes

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