Kevin Albert’s wife, Mary Albert, commissioned a memoir for him as a birthday gift the year that he retired. He published his book entitled Work Hard, Get Lucky: A Memoir with Modern Memoirs in 2021. This Commissioned Memoir included genealogical research and took 18 months from the day Mary first contacted us to the day books arrived on their doorstep. We asked Kevin and Mary to reflect on what the publication process was like for them, and what it has meant to share his books with others.
1. The opportunity to write a memoir was a birthday gift to you from your wife, Mary. In the opening pages of the book, you say that memoir-writing was not something you ever thought you would want to do. In fact, you say it even seemed a little “pretentious.” What made you change your mind?
Kevin Albert: I still believe it’s a little pretentious to think that anybody outside of my family and close circle of friends would want to read it. I wasn’t Paul Volcker, or Bill Clinton, or another famous person who contributed a lot to society overall. I’ve been successful, but I’ve been successful in a way that hasn’t necessarily been super meaningful for the rest of the world. So I decided to embrace a finite view of who might be interested in reading the memoir and thought about it in terms of the impact it could have on close associates, my family, and particularly my grandchildren, who are still young enough to learn lessons or get motivated about being successful in this world.
Then, by expanding the project to include genealogical research, I hoped the book would become more interesting for cousins and people who aren’t in the inner circle but are in the same family. Take, for example, my cousin in Texas, who actually helped provide documentation for the family history section. We got together with her at a family reunion in Wisconsin last August, and I finally gave a copy of the book to her in person. She really appreciates it.
2. Once you decided to do it, what were the main objectives you intended to accomplish in writing a memoir?
Kevin Albert: Initially and most importantly, I decided to try and elicit from the aspects of my life that were successful the reasons why they were successful, so that readers (particularly my grandkids) could benefit from this and be inspired by it. The second thing that came out of the whole process was that it made me remember people from much earlier in my life when I was growing up in Wisconsin and then when I went to college and graduate school in California. I hadn’t really maintained relationships with them, and talking about them in the interviews reminded me of the good times we had and the ways in which they helped me. I’m resolved to reach out to those people and try to reconnect. Finally, adding on the genealogy research was a great decision. I had never done any family history research before, and I think that anybody who does a memoir should include family history because it really makes it a complete package for subsequent generations.
3. Yours was a Commissioned Memoir, which means that we generated the initial text from a series of interviews with you, and then worked closely with you as we completed each editorial and design step. How did the creation process help you achieve the results you were looking for?
Kevin Albert: If I had just sat down to write a memoir on my own, it would’ve been a much different and less fulsome document. That’s because Modern Memoirs has developed a model for how to start with interviews and then edit the transcripts, and Megan [St. Marie, interviewer and editor] is very good at it. There’s a risk when you write a memoir and talk about all the good things in your life, the things you achieved, and so on, that it could seem a little braggy. It was painstaking to sit with Megan and have her go into every nook and cranny of my life—religion, schooling, siblings—but I probably would’ve skipped over a lot of that stuff on my own. She got a lot of material out of me that wouldn’t have otherwise come out. It was hard to deal with that raw transcript when they first transcribed all the material from the interviews, but then it just had to be molded to achieve the end result. After that initial work-through of the first transcript, it was really very straightforward and almost fun to hone it into the final manuscript.
4. In the foreword of the book, which Mary wrote, she says that you have a reserved demeanor and that her curiosity about you was a main factor motivating her to commission the project. Kevin, was there anything particular about creating a memoir that made it easier to open up and share your stories and insights with others? And Mary, how did the memoir satisfy your curiosity?
Kevin Albert: Well, you don’t really have any choice but to open up, right? Megan interviews you, and if you don’t answer the questions, you’re shooting the entire project in the foot because the process itself forces you to be responsive. Mary hasn’t ever been involved in the business world, particularly finance. I think that the main thing that she has always been trying to figure out is what I did every day for ten hours! I think some of that came through in this project with the specific things I cited, like creating the structure of a business development company for the first time. What readers should get out of the memoir is that I developed something that became a big deal on Wall Street, and that’s probably all they need to know. In a couple of instances, I helped either develop or create something that wasn’t there before and is still used today. I talk about how those things came about and I think that’s helpful. I also think it’s helpful that I included commentary on some of my colleagues who helped me in my career. Mary knew some of these people, and the memoir helped her to see them from a new perspective.
Mary Albert: Kevin and I have been married for 35 years and I have pretty much learned to understand his personality and behavior. He’s a man who keeps his feelings pretty close to his chest and has seemed reluctant to show nostalgia or reminisce. Through the memoir I learned so much about his earlier days and the many happy and interesting events of his life before we met. His genealogy record was fascinating. I just wish I had access to my own!
5. As your interest in learning more about your family history became sparked by the memoir-writing process, you expanded the project to have us conduct genealogical research. We presented the results in an extensive appendix in your memoir, as well as an online family tree. The appendix included a five-generation ancestor chart, a series of research summaries, photos and images of key historical documents, and an introduction that provided historical context. How did the genealogical research enhance the project for you?
Kevin Albert: I had never focused on family history at all, beyond recalling things my parents would drop on a one-off basis that I never pursued. Writing a memoir caused me to have more intellectual curiosity about my heritage and to see this curiosity satisfied. I’ve actually had a few people I don’t know reach out to me because they are linked into the DNA and family tree tools on the online family genealogy site.
Most importantly, however, is that the genealogy is very interesting to, say, a cousin who I haven’t seen in twenty years. It enhances the book for extended family who might read the family history section of the book and then also look to the first part for information or curiosity about me. “This guy that grew up in Wisconsin with us moved to New York—then what happened?” I would assume that if three generations from now, someone got really interested in our family history, it would be much harder to go back to find the information we documented from the 19th century and earlier. There are now enough copies of this book floating around in the family that the information will be there for anyone to use. I’m very happy to have done it and I talk it up whenever I can to people. There are other people in my network who certainly would have a story that is at least as interesting to tell.
