Memoir Philosophy

What will be lost when our stories die with us? Incidental yet somehow important information: insights, jokes, favorite recipes, genealogy. Gone will be the living connection with the past, the future, and the present. Creating a memoir is an opportunity to engage in a dynamic, if not dramatic, process of recollection and integration, a process that can deepen and expand our own lives and those of generations to come. Memoirs underscore our values of connection and tradition.

What tradition? The singularly human tradition of telling our stories to the group, most immediately to the family.

Philosopher Nathan Rotenstreich has said that "tradition" supposes a relation to "something documentary." Over time, the European aristocracy and the American upper class have created a legacy of commissioned portraits of family members, a painted genealogy. A good portrait captures the visual manifestation of a person’s interior life, through the expression of the subject’s posture, the light or lack of it in the eyes, the shape of the mouth, the set of the jaw, and through the subject’s choice of how to present him- or herself to the world through clothes, hairstyle, jewelry, props, and setting. The artist serves as the medium through which something of the character of the individual is revealed and, if talented, will capture the look, gesture, or posture that reveals the essence of the subject.

A portrait, however, cannot record the complex history of the life of an individual or of a family. A memoir does. The personal historian serves as the medium through which the quality of a life in the past and present is transmitted to the future. In a portrait, the outward appearance of a subject is preserved for the family and its future generations, and hopefully, something of the subject's interior life emanates from the painting. In a memoir, the interior life of the individual is preserved. The document is there to be held, read, and intimately encountered in the present and in the future.

Journalist Joan Didion said, "We tell stories in order to live." It has been found that telling stories benefits the storyteller as well as the listener or listeners, reader or readers. What is there in the telling that is so critical to living? The act of revealing our interior life, our perspective on events, and our insights appears to affirm the spirit, the soul, and the heart. In gathering up the scattered fragments of the remembered past and giving them a lasting form, the teller also recollects the forgotten past and uncovers important patterns in his or her life’s direction.

A memoir reveals not only the interior life of the memoirist but also of the family. If, indeed, life is a continuum, telling about ourselves adds our experiences to the stream of memories that flows through our families and through time. Sharing what we have experienced is an act of love, and an act of faith in the ongoing nature of our shared history. A memoir synthesizes family life into a meaningful record.

The fragmentation of families, gaps of inattention, and passage of time may cause stories to disappear within one or two generations. Today, many of us are too busy to stop and listen to one another. We no longer gather around the hearth, telling each other our stories. We even consider them unimportant or uninteresting. According to social theorists, this absence of stories is creating a profound sense of alienation. It is a collective "amnesia " that imprisons younger people in an emotional isolation that is radically different than the actual isolation of living apart. We are increasingly becoming strangers, yet aware of the instinctive need to know and be known by our families, an impulse to nourish our roots and bridge the generations.

The importance of the past to humankind can be observed in the eager delight with which a very young child listens to the brief history of his/her life as a baby. Children drink in stories of what their parents were like as children, and find the mistakes and accidents hilarious. We need to know who we are connected to, how we are connected, what it means to be who we are. We need to believe in our own humanity and our significance within the human community. We need our stories: they lift us out of our isolation into the arms of affirmation.

A memoir ensures the traditions of a family and may help ensure the tradition of family itself. The future arrives every second, demanding a revised present. The past imbues us with stability, inherent in transmissions passed along from generation to generation, and brings that quality into our rapidly changing lives.

The memoir is a three-way conversation between the past, the present, and the future, an act of faith and love that will nurture the soul of your family.