Real Life Stories in Words

I met my first memoir, sort of, in high school--the day we read excerpts from Samuel Pepys' diaries in a literature anthology, 11th grade. That encounter started me on a lifelong love of memoirs, published journals, and letters.

As an avid reader of fiction, I'd read plenty of stories about real and fictional characters, but a story of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the telling of it was new stuff for me.

Soon thereafter, I discovered The Diary of Anne Frank, then Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

Letters between mothers and daughters, published journals (my first May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude), letters between friends and lovers, and memoirs of unknown women became my favorites. May Sarton and others showed up just in time to give me hope of a good solitary life prior to and during my divorce.

My passion for reading memoir, writing my own, and teaching first-person narrative to my students began in the 70s and has always been my go-to genre.

Back when I was teaching at U.T.S.A.,  the powers that be in academic circles admonished writing instructors to avoid assigning personal writing.  I rebelled and started every semester with personal writing as a way to capture the interest and enthusiasm of my students and it worked. Years later, when I run into former students, they tell me it was their favorite part of the course.  They even imagine that I might remember a particular story they wrote--and I sometimes do.

Last night, Pam gave me two beautiful books--one from the library and one as part of my birthday present.  Ironically, they are similar in content and I'm reading them today.

The library book is called Having The Last Say/ Capturing Your Legacy in One Small Story by Alan Gelb.

The gift book is called Words in Pain: Letters of Life and Death by Olga Jacoby--who wrote a series of letters to her doctor as she was dying in 1913.  On the cover is a beautiful portrait of young Olga and inside is very personal and memorable--as she wrote knowing she would die young and leave her husband and four adopted children.  Pam had read excerpts of this book on Brainpickings and she knew I'd like it, and I do--very much.