One Pitfall of Success

My career at Memoirs Unlimited has been a great gift. I have helped write and publish the memoirs of fifty good and successful people. I have sat with presidents, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists, and I have learned from their stories.

Along the way, I have been asked to chronicle the histories of several major New England institutions including the region’s oldest and most distinguished hospital, its longest-lived boarding school, and a Greater Boston real estate company remarkably entering its fifth generation of family management.

It’s an honor to be entrusted with these stories and others, and to know that I have told them effectively. I harbor only one regret. It’s simple:

Because I have relied on this business to feed my family and keep a roof over our heads, I have almost always worked with people who, if not wealthy, were at least very comfortable. There have been only a couple of exceptions, including the memoir of a priest whose parish wanted to honor him. In that case I agreed to work pro bono.

Otherwise, my career has been spent entirely in the well-paid service of the well-to-do. Everyone has a story worth telling, as my early promotional materials claimed, but not everyone has the money to keep me—and my family—comfortable.

This is one of the reasons I have entered a masters in ministry program offered by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. In the time left to me, with new training and credentials, I’d like to put my talents to a different kind of service.

I have allowed myself to imagine that there might be a niche, a small out-of-the-way corner, where my “memoir thing” could help the poor (using poor in a broad sense, as in the Beatitudes maybe). I have cooked up one idea still in development—an end-of-life service in conjunction with palliative care. Recently another, different possibility has appeared.

For the moment it remains a question without a clear answer: How can this skill that I have developed in the service of the well-off serve the poor?

I am still asking.