Is There a Method to Our Memoirs?

A good friend asked me yesterday whether I use a method, a formula, or a stock set of questions when working with a memoir client. The short answer is no.

The longer answer is, I used to think I needed such a method. When I started out in the mid-1980s, with a minor flair for writing and a love of people, I assumed there must be a science to creating memoirs—interviewing a client and then editing the interviews into the narrative that they would write if they were writers.

Then I worked with my first dozen clients and realized that there is no method and can be none, or not what anyone would call a method. If I had to define my non-existent method, it would be: Turn on the tape recorder, shut up, and listen. Here's why.

When you start talking about your life story, as my clients do with me, you are remembering your life in the way only you remember it. More important than the facts of your life are the ways you string these facts together, the sense you make of them, the narrative you have constructed. When you begin telling me your life story, you are taking me down a trail that you cleared and blazed. Only you know where it leads.

Let's say you begin to tell me about your first year at an Ivy League college, and I jump in cheerfully and say, “Oh, I went to ___________.” Believe me, I did this kind of thing frequently when I was starting out over 20 years ago. It was a mark of my insecurity, I suppose, an effort to prove that I belonged, or at least that I understood where my client was coming from. This might have comforted me, but as a method it failed. Why? Because it pushed my client off their path.

The moment I interject a comment or question, I am diverting you from the story as it would occur to only you. I am pushing you away from your memoir.

But what about the inevitable questions that come up in the course of an hour interview? I write them down and save them until the end of the session. That way, I interrupt you as little as possible.

Now, this short post may make my job sound easy! But then we haven't begun to talk about editing these memories, have we? Maybe next time . . .