Category: Family Memoirs
Memoirs about families, family wounds, and how family members feel about being the subject of memoirs.
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Lost Memories: A Daughter’s Memoir about her Demented Mom
Martha Stettinius chronicles their journey in the memoir Inside the Dementia Epidemic. The memoir works on multiple levels. First, is Stettinius’ attempt to make sense of her evolving relationship with her mother. Second, is the story of her growing need to find the best care possible. And third is her desire to share this important…
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A Memoir About her Father’s Secret Pain
Her father buried his memories so effectively over the years that the nightmares finally stopped. Then they were awakened by the terrifying events of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. This is one of the important aspects of this memoir. Even though his trauma occurred more than a half of a century earlier, it was…
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Mom of Troubled Teens Tells Her Side of the Story
A parent suffering through the rebellion of a child is an important, under-reported facet of family life. Most kids rebel to some extent, and despite all the suffering and confusion that parents must feel, most of the social attention to the matter is limited to half measures and shared confusion. “Live Through This” provides a…
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Color of Water, a memoir of race, family and fabulous writing
To write for strangers we’re supposed to limit ourselves to tighter timelines that focus on one particular aspect or period. Despite the broader scope of “Color of Water,” the book was fabulously successful, selling more than a million copies. How did this apparent autobiography earn such a prominent position as a highly acclaimed memoir?
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Interviewing is an Act of Love, Even After Memory Starts to Fail
And so it was with great interest that I recently heard that the StoryCorps is investigating this exact problem, trying to find the stories of those whose memory is starting to fail. The program is called the Memory Loss Initiative. To learn more, I interviewed Dina Zempsky, senior outreach coordinator of the initiative.
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To improve your memoir, break down the code
by Jerry Waxler My dad owned a neighborhood drugstore in north Philadelphia, and on the nights he was able to make it home for dinner, most of the conversation centered around him telling us about the menagerie of characters who streamed through the store and gave him endless raw material. We sat and dutifully listened,…
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Stories heal families
But Gretchen felt unable to tell the story because she was so angry with her dad’s irresponsibility and abandonment. She thought her anger would get her in trouble, so she decided to write it as fiction. That turned out to be a great choice, because the more she tried to tell the story, the better…
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Families are an ocean of memoirs
What a great idea, having a memory writing class, at a cemetery. And it’s the same cemetery where my brother was laid to rest, so the three of us will be together again for the first time in years, sharing memories about life in the family ocean.
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