You don’t have to be rich and famous to write a memoir

You don’t have to be rich or famous to write a memoir. Ordinary people write memoirs, too, and that’s good because the world needs more memoirs written by regular people. Families need more memoirs written by their relatives.

If you, an ordinary guy, publish a memoir, people won’t likely stop you on the street and ask if they can take a selfie with you. And you’ll probably need to keep your day job—and that’s because you probably won’t land a deal with a traditional, big-name publisher. Here’s why: Ordinary people’s stories seldom bring in a lot of money—and money is the bottom line for big publishers.

Don’t let that discourage you. Nowadays, everyday memoirists have several publishing options, thanks to the self-publishing industry. Another option is to print your book at a local printshop. Or you can write your stories for kids and grandkids and put them in three-ring binders along with photos.

Henri Nouwen observes: “There is much emphasis on notoriety and fame in our society. Our newspapers and television keep giving us the message: What counts is to be known, praised, and admired, whether you are a writer, an actor, a musician, or a politician.

“Still, real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility.

“Some of the greatest works of art and the most important works of peace were created by people who had no need for the limelight. They knew that what they were doing was their call[ing], and they did it with great patience, perseverance, and love.”  (Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey)

Don’t let fame and fortune be your primary goal because—believe this:

Your story is important.

Studies have shown that kids are more stable

and successful if they know their family’s stories.

(I suspect that’s also true for those who are no longer kids.)

Stories are among God’s most powerful and effective tools. Your story can be among God’s most powerful and effective tools.

There’s a reason you don’t see spreadsheets and charts and bullet points and graphs in the Bible. Research shows that stories impact humans in ways other types of information don’t.

The Bible is full of stories because of the ways our hearts and minds respond to stories. We engage with a story’s message more than we do with databases and tables and lists.

Peter Guber explains:

“Stories . . . are far more than entertainment. They are the most effective form of human communication, more powerful than any other way of packaging information. . . .

“Without stories,” Guber continues, “we wouldn’t understand ourselves. [Stories] . . . give us much of the framework for much of our understanding. . . . While we think of stories as . . . something extraneous to real work, they turn out to be the cornerstone of consciousness.” (Read more at Writing your memoir: A sacred calling.)

You’ll like what Morgan Harper Nichols says:

“Tell the story of the mountain you climbed.

Your words could become a page

in someone else’s survival guide.”

Some of you might not have children, but you have friends, colleagues, neighbors, cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, friends from high school and college, former sweethearts—on and on.

Your memoir can benefit those people, and more.

The big question is this:

Will you write your story?

Or, if you’ve started writing your memoir,

will you finish writing it?

And place it into the hands of others?

Kathleen Pooler’s new memoir, Just the Way He Walked

A few months ago, my friend Kathleen Pooler published her second memoir, Just the Way He Walked: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Healing. Congratulations, Kathy!

I was honored that she asked me to write an endorsement for her book, which I’m happy to share with you here:

“The deeper I read into Kathy’s story, the more I wanted to cry out to God, ‘How much should one person have to endure?’ Battling Stage Four Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, for decades she also agonized over her son’s drug and alcohol abuse.

“Kathy’s unfailing love for her son prompted everything she did to help him, yet he kept having relapses. Often driven to despair, she didn’t understand that her enabling hindered him from taking responsibility for his actions and choices.

“Kathy wrote: ‘It would take years and many Al-Anon meetings and prayers for me to break my addiction to his addiction and be able to set firm boundaries for myself and him.’

“Throughout it all, Kathy never stopped loving her son, always had hope for him and for herself, and always trusted God.

“Because her heart’s desire is to offer hope to those dealing with addictions, Kathy offers a wealth of materials at the end of her memoir. They include sixteen lessons she learned over twenty-three years, several pages of resources for parents of addicted children, and book discussion questions.

“Just the Way He Walked: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Healing is a book you’ll want to share with others in need of inspiration and mentoring through Kathy’s tenacious faith and hope.” (Linda K. Thomas)

Here’s another endorsement:

“If family alcoholism and the author’s physical illness were this story’s only focus, readers would miss the pot of gold at the end—a rainbow of hope, one metaphor in Kathy Pooler’s excellent memoir, Just the Way He Walked. Though no sunshiny fairytale, Kathy’s courageous story takes the reader through the ugly to reveal the beautiful, reason enough to keep turning the pages in anticipation of a happy ending. . . .” (Marian Longnecker Beaman, author of Mennonite Daughter: The Story of a PlainGirl)

And here’s the book description from Amazon:

“Just the Way He Walked: A Mother’s Story of Healing and Hope is a story of how one woman’s simultaneous battles of Stage Four Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and her young adult son’s addiction to alcohol and drugs test her resolve to never, ever give up hope. Written for parents, particularly mothers, of children who are addicted, this is a story of love, faith, hope, and breaking the cycle of addiction. Family relationships, father-son, mother-son, single parenting, the impact of addictions on families, and the need for education in breaking the cycle of addiction are all explored. The message of resilience and faith in the face of insurmountable odds serves as a testament of what is possible when one dares to hope.”

I hope you’ll recommend Just the Way He Walked

to friends, family, and your church’s staff and library.

It’s sure to be a rich resource for many.

And do Kathy a favor:

Leave a review on Amazon,

Barnes and Noble, and Goodreads.

Kathy is a retired family nurse practitioner and cancer survivor who’s passionate about sharing hope through storytelling. Several years ago, she also authored a memoir entitled Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Journey Away from Emotional Abuse.

You’ll want to follow her blog, Memoir Writer’s Journey (click on that link), and her author page on Facebook (click on that link).

Prepare to be amazed: What your process of writing can reveal

“What is your journey,” Rebecca S. Ramsey asks memoir-writers, “the big change you experienced that you want to share with the world?”

Rebecca’s question is important because memoir is about change, transformation. Your memoir needs to include your transformation.

Jon Franklin can help better understand what we call “the story arc.” He writes that a quality story “will consist of a real person who is confronted with a significant problem, who struggles diligently to solve that problem, and who ultimately succeeds—and in doing so becomes a different character.”

In other words, “A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.” (Writing for Story, Jon Franklin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a well-known pioneer in creative nonfiction)

So, the big question for you is:

What new person did you become

because of your experience?

Rebecca Ramsey asks it this way: “What were the little struggles and big struggles that got you from the beginning to end?”

You’ll need to articulate that in writing before your memoir will be ready to publish. But that’s easier said than done—many people struggle to identify those turning points and defining moments.

Rebecca herself admits the answers weren’t clear when she began writing her memoir, The Holy Éclair: Signs and Wonders from an Accidental Pilgrimage.

How did she figure out that transformation in her life?

After much work (writing The Holy Éclair took her ten years), she discovered this: Writing helped her answer those questions. Something about the process helped her recognize the ways her life changed.

You don’t need to have all the answers

before you start writing.

Give yourself time to discover your story and write it—

even if it takes ten years like it did for Rebecca.

Within the process of writing,

ask yourself Rebecca’s questions

and search for the answers.

They are there.

Don’t give up. You’ll find them!

Your stories can help others through the coronavirus pandemic

At a time like this, when people around the world are frightened and grieving over the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, your stories can inspire courage. And tenacity. And faith. And hope. And practical, ingenious solutions in trying times—but only if you share your stories.

Below is an account I included in a collection of family stories for my grandkids, hoping it will help them somehow, somewhere, someday, in the same way my grandmother’s and mother’s stories helped me in an especially trying time.

“Mommy, tell us a story about the olden days!”

I wonder how many times my mother heard those excited words from my little brothers and me over the years. And she enjoyed telling us stories from her childhood. We loved sitting close to her and imagining scenes she created for us.

Many of her stories were from the 1930s, set in southeastern Ontario, Canada, in a farming area known as Glengarry County, the home of a number of Scotsmen and their families.

The Depression hit their lives very hard. Mom tells of having to wear shoes that were too small, shoes that left her feet disfigured. Grandpa worked the family farm and he also served as the postman, but still money was scarce. They raised chickens and cows and grew vegetables but sometimes their cupboards were nearly bare. I imagine that was especially true in winter months.

I also know that my grandparents knelt to pray every night before bed. I’m certain they prayed to God to keep their four daughters from going hungry during those lean years.

I remember one of my mother’s stories more vividly than others. She told about a time when their parents’ food supply had dwindled down to almost nothing, and they worried terribly. On one of those days, Grandma cooked a pot of soup for their family of six. I can picture her slicing up carrots and potatoes, and maybe an onion, maybe a piece of meat, or a soup bone. Maybe she put in dried beans, too.

Mom told us that the next day, all Grandma had for her family was that same soup but it wasn’t enough, so she added a carrot or two. The next day, the soup was still all they had so Grandma added a potato, or maybe an onion. This went on day after day and eventually Grandpa got a paycheck from the post office so they could buy groceries.

My mother must have thought of those days often when she was a young adult because sometimes our family had almost no food in our cupboards. Mom followed in her mother’s footsteps: She poured out her needs to God and she boiled a pot of soup. Each day she stretched it by adding an extra carrot or potato or onion, or maybe some of her canned tomatoes, while she told us the story of her mother stretching their soup in the same way back in the ’30s.

I grew up, married, and two years later had a baby, Matt. Twenty-two months later, our daughter Karen arrived more than a month early, unhealthy, and we ran up big medical bills. My husband, Dave, was a first-year teacher and our new health insurance wouldn’t cover Karen’s birth or extended hospital stay. 

In those days, 1971, Dave earned $7,200 a year, and we paid $90 a month for an old rental house. We had to be extremely frugal. I had one dress, one pair of jeans, one T-shirt, and I had scraped up enough money to buy turquoise polyester knit fabric to make myself a pants-suit.

We ate the cheapest food, never went to movies or restaurants, never spent money on hobbies. We bought only necessities, but money was still scarce.

In those days, we had no credit cards to see us through such times. Instead, we had to live within our means (which is not a bad thing; more people should try living that way).

In February, 1972, after we paid our bills on the first of the month, we had $28 left to buy food and everything else for the rest of the month. I was worried. I was stressed.

However, thanks to my mother’s story, I knew we could present our needs to God and that with His help we would make do with what we had, just like my mother and her mother before her. I assembled a big pot of soup: I had a soup bone with a little meat on it. I added carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and maybe some peas or corn. Each day for a week I thought of my dear grandma and my mother as I added a new ingredient—maybe rice or another potato or carrot.

And, indeed, we did make it through that week, and the rest of the month, until Dave got his paycheck the first of March.

God said,

“Be very careful never to forget

what you have seen the Lord do for you.

Don’t forget them as long as you live!

And be sure to tell your children and grandchildren.”

(Deuteronomy 4:9)

That’s what my grandmother and mother did!

My grandmother had shown her daughter, my mother, how to trust God and make the best of the resources He had given them. My mother remembered her mother’s example, trusted God, and made the pot of soup stretch, and, perhaps most importantly, she told me the story of how God provided for them. Because of that, I handled my own little family’s need for food in the same way they did—I trusted God and stretched our soup with the resources He provided. (From Come and Listen: Let Me Tell You What God Has Done for Me [Psalm 66:16] by Linda K. Thomas)

What stories can you write for your kids and grandkids about your grandparents battling on—not giving up—through heartbreaking times? How did God give them strength and courage to persevere?

What stories can you tell about your parents’ tenacity in confronting overwhelming challenges? What stories can you write about yourself when you were younger? What helped your parents and you trust God for what seemed impossible?

Did your great-grandparents live through the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918? How about the awful Great Depression? Do you know their stories?

What stories can you write for your family about World War I? Pearl Harbor? World War II? The Vietnam War? The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—9/11? What was God’s role in the midst of those desperate times?

Your stories could make all the difference

in the way your family members tackle their own calamities.

Write your stories!

Writing your memoir: “A lump in the throat and a deep, wordless feeling”

Prolific writer Frederick Buechner says that when he writes books, they “start—as Robert Frost said his poems did—with a lump in the throat . . . with a deep, wordless feeling for some aspect of my own experience that has moved me.” (Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation)

Do you know that “deep, wordless feeling” that longs to find its way from within you and into black and white on paper?

If so, you’ll find encouragement and inspiration from Donald Murray’s words in The Craft of Revision:

If you haven’t yet begun to write your memoir,

begin today!

Write so you can discover what you want to say,

and then rewrite to make sense of that

“deep, wordless feeling,”

and share your story with others.

Family secrets and Michele Norris’s memoir: Not with anger, but with hope

Whether you know it, or like it, your family and its history played a role in making you the person you are today.

Even family secrets—secrets you could hardly envision—helped shape you. 

Imagine Michele Norris’s shock when she set out to write a book about racism in America and stumbled upon layers of family secrets that, in their keeping, had a profound influence on her childhood, the person she became, and the way she raised her children.

Nationally recognized Norris, journalist and former host of NPR’s All Things Considered, spoke at our local university’s dinner honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and legacy.

She learned from her uncle in 2008—years after her father’s death—that police officers shot her father during the ugly years leading up to the Civil Rights Act. Her father had never told her. 

After her uncle’s surprising disclosure, other relatives told more stories from that era, stories Norris had never heard.

That inspired her to research roles her family played, as a “non-confrontational family,” in America’s painful race-related issues. That investigation led to what she calls her “accidental family memoir,” The Grace of Silence.

She learned that the shooting occurred when her father, Belvin Norris, had just returned to Birmingham, Alabama, from World War II.

“He’d served in the Navy and he returned to a city full of Black veterans who had fought for democracy overseas and were eager to get a taste of it on their home turf. What they faced, instead, was a wall of white resistance. . . . They still faced old rules about segregation and carefully defined roles.”

In that era, too many Blacks were beaten, murdered, and denied voting rights.

Norris’s research revealed that only six days before her father’s shooting, another Black veteran, Isaac Woodard, still in uniform, was beaten and blinded by Batesburg, South Carolina, police.

“The story, subsequent trial, and swift acquittal of the officers caused a national sensation,” writes Norris in an NPR article.

“The Woodard case had a direct impact on President Harry Truman’s decision to integrate the military.”

The events of that period led Michele’s father to turn his back on the past, move north, raise his children in a white neighborhood, and keep earlier racial incidents a secret—even from his wife.

“Why would he hide it from his children?” asks Michele.

And why did her many relatives, all of whom knew the stories, keep them secret?

The questions haunted her.

“I’m pretty sure . . . that I would have ordered my steps in life differently had I known this,” Michelle says. “I might have been a different adult. I certainly would have been a different child.”

Over time, she came to understand that her father kept the secret “not with anger, but with hope.”

Her parents “wanted their children to soar, so they chose not to weigh down their pockets with personal tales of woe.”

“Our parents tell us what they think we need to know,” she continues, “and my father didn’t think I needed to know that. He wanted to make sure that my path forward was uncluttered by his pain, so he chose not to tell me about this. And that explains the title of the book . . . The Grace of Silence. That is the incredibly graceful act.”

“. . . I expect that the ones who came before us—

black and white—

had things they had to keep still about . . .

just like me and Miss Cora.

Things we had to do, whether we liked it or not.

And then we never speak of them again.”

(Augusta Trobaugh,

Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb, book description)

Do you know your parents’ stories?

Your grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ stories?

Probably some of your ancestors,

like Michele’s,

made hard decisions and sacrifices

to ensure that their pasts didn’t hold you back.

Their stories, their choices, and their secrets

have profoundly shaped who you are today.

Michele concludes with something for all of us, especially memoirists, to think about:

“History is made in all kinds of little ways,

a hiring decision, a school bus ride . . . .

I bet that some of the elders

who sit at your family table

might be sitting on stories of their own.

“Those stories, those individual stories

are so easily lost if we are not willing to . . .

listen to those who might be willing to share their legacy

if only someone is willing to take the time to ask.”

(Michele Norris)

Ponder: What’s the significance of the folks who came ahead of you?

“. . . All the folks who came ahead of us

are like the brown roots of a big old vine

growing close to the porch,

and even though those roots are way down

deep in the ground

where we can’t see them,

they’re still there. Always.

And we grow from them, our whole lives,

and then, if we’re lucky, others grow from us.”

Augusta Trobaugh, Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb

Think about such things. 

(Philippians 4:8B)