Why write memoirs?

People sometimes call the work we do “vanity publishing,” but I resist the label. There is more vanity in one best-selling author than in all the clients we have served in more than two decades. Our clients don’t write and publish their memoirs out of vanity; they do it out of love.

Why write a memoir?
Because for the generations to come, you are a bridge to the past. If you are old enough, you are perhaps the last person alive to remember certain people who were vitally important to you. And you would like to preserve their stories, their teachings for future generations. Stories, teachings . . . when we write memoirs, they are the same thing. Stories about the past teach us simply, without preaching. The best memoirs don't preach, they spin tales, they captivate, they entertain.

Let me tell you one story about my grandfather, Dan Bull. Better yet, here it is in Granddad's words, just as all memoirs are written, in the words of the person doing the remembering: “Our eldest child, Dan, was born in November 1914, during our second stay in Seattle. One day when he was six years old, he was killed at our home on 26th Street in Minneapolis by a car that the children pushed out of the garage. Dan was the only one old enough to know that what the children were doing was wrong, and he stood in front of the car, trying to hold it back. Because the alley had a slope, the car carried him across the alley and smashed him against the opposite wall. He died that afternoon in his mother's arms in the hospital. He was a wonderful boy, and I've often thought he was too good for this world.”

I bet that for my grandfather typing and Xeroxing that one paragraph was as important as anything else in his little manuscript. His eldest son, his namesake, Dan Bull, lived only six years, but in Granddad's words, he lives on for me and for my children's children. That's it. That's why we do what we do.