Norman Maclean, Memoirist

If you are past 70 or even 80 and have thought about writing down some memories but haven’t found the time or will or inclination, I have a name to give you strength: Norman Maclean.

You may know him as the author of “A River Runs Through It,” a story about trout-fishing in Montana on which the hit 1999 film was based. (Brad Pitt starred, Robert Redford directed.)

To me Maclean is the role model extraordinaire for the older memoirist.

Maclean (1902–1990) was a beloved professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he was ensconced teaching Milton and Shakespeare for 45 years. (That’s him in the photo, circa 1970.) After his retirement in 1973, having written only academic works on English literature, Maclean undertook to put down some “reminiscent stories.”

His reasons for doing so are interesting to me, as well as a small piece of advice he offered a friend in a letter.

You Belong to a Story

This week one of the Catholic Church’s leading writers, Fr. Robert Barron, rector of the Mundelein Seminary outside Chicago, was appointed auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. It was big news for those of us who follow and admire Father Barron’s work.

Coincidentally, I had just finished reading one of Barron’s early books, The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path (Orbis, 2002). Ordinarily, I don’t let my religious interests stray onto the pages of this blog, but there is a line in this book that seems so appropriate to the entire memoir venture that I felt moved to write about it.

Barron’s thesis is that living the Christian life involves three “paths.” Only the third path is relevant here: Chapter 3, Realizing Your Life is Not About You. Whatever its religious significance (charity, service, mission, being part of the “mystical body of Christ”) this path is one that I think most memoir writers find themselves on, sometimes to their surprise.

You think you are going to write your own story; and you find that it is not yours.

Telling Others’ Stories

A memoir is your own story, right? Not necessarily.

In thirty years of helping individuals record their memoirs, I have found that many, sometimes most of the stories people tell belong to someone else: a long-gone beloved grandparent, a father who recently died.

My clients are often moved not by pride or vanity but by something like filial piety: they know that if someone doesn’t tell their parents’ (or grandparents’) stories, no one will. He or she (the client) is the last bridge to precious family memories.

A few years back I was hired by a woman in her sixties to write the life story of her grandfather, who had died in 1920, before my client was born. The grandfather was a significant figure in family history but also something of a mystery. I was recruited to research and imagine his life as he had lived it.

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:

What is the Right Age for a Memoir?

When I founded Memoirs Unlimited in 1987, I built my portfolio one client at a time. Self-taught and -propelled, I took some years to draw a demographic conclusion: my typical client was eighty years old!

Until you hit eighty, I reasoned, you think you are going to live forever. But after eighty comes ninety and you think, what are the odds? If anyone has ever thought about writing down their life, an eightieth birthday is a good trigger.

That was the mid-1990s, about the time Mary Karr’s wonderful memoir The Liar’s Club became a best-seller and opened the publishing floodgates. Karr (pictured above) wrote her book about growing up in East Texas with alcoholic parents while still in her thirties. Today, every young writer north of twenty seems to have a memoir on their résumé.

What gives? Why suddenly all these youthful memoirs?

What Book Will Be at Your Bedside?

My favorite moment in thirty years of helping others write their memoirs occurred beside a deathbed. I was visiting one of my favorite clients, Dick P. He was flat on his back and very pale, but smiling as usual.

His wife was by his side. It was she who pointed out the book on Dick’s hospital side table: the memoir he and I had worked on together five years before.

“He shows it to everyone who comes in to see him,” she said. “Especially the pretty nurses.” It was a measure of the satisfaction his memoir had given Dick.

Getting Back At It

After finishing up my history of The Governor’s Academy in 2012 and walking the Camino de Santiago with my adult daughter, I have spent much of the past 30 months writing my own still unpublished memoir.

Now, at the beginning of 2015, I have decided to get back into the business of helping people write and publish their memoirs. In the days and weeks ahead, I will be posting more material here about this process and about incentives I plan to offer my first clients after a long layoff.

If you have considered writing your memoir and want help writing, editing, designing, and publishing it, give me a shout. See “What You Can Do” in the column at right. And check back at this page in the weeks ahead.

Memories of Dad on Veterans’ Day

Most of my memoir clients seem to prefer talking about their parents and grandparents than to talking about their own accomplishments. This desire to remember those who went before us—instead of bragging about our own stories—is especially keen on days like today, Veterans’ Day in the USA.

My father, David F. Bull, died in 2008, but I still remember him telling about serving during World War II. Dad was attached to an anti-tank company in the US Army during the push through France and into Germany in late 1944 and 1945. Born in 1925, Dad was just old enough to be drafted before war’s end.

How We Remember Others

In my work as a ghostwriter of memoirs, I am frequently impressed by the way healthy older people remember mostly the best about others. I think this is a conscious choice on their part—or the result of many, many tiny choices made through long lives. My clients, average age 80, seldom have bad things to say about others, especially those closest to them, and I have come to see this as the marker of a life well lived.

All Is Not Vanity

I am often asked if Memoirs Unlimited offers vanity publishing. My unequivocal answer is, No we do not.

It is true that our clients pay for the writing and publication of their books. We do not pay royalties like so-called trade publishers. But the term vanity publishing definitely does not apply to our clients.

What’s Your Story?

I have just completed a three-year project and, after a few weeks to catch my breath, I am looking for some new and interesting projects to work on.

With my daughter, Martha Bull, I researched and wrote the bicentennial history of Massachusetts General Hospital, due to be published in April 2011. The project was commissioned by MGH, the third oldest general hospital in the United States and the first and most prestigious of the Harvard teaching hospitals.

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.

One Thing Has Led to Another

In my last post, I explained how I jump-started Memoirs Unlimited with networking and how I soon realized that I had found my “sweet spot.” This time, I'd like to recall how that first memoir, for “Mr. Carter,” led to more than sixty projects over the past twenty years.

The simple explanation is, One thing led to another.

Memoirs Unlimited: A New Business Model

In 1988, with a new family (wife Katie plus two daughters, two-year-old Martha and four-month-old Marian) I decided to go into business for myself as a writer. I had writing experience, but no one I knew had ever applied writing to the business I had in mind.

I had decided to be what amounts to a ghostwriter and publisher for privately published memoirs. I would interview you (or your parent or grandparent); edit those interviews into a coherent first-person narrative; then publish a private edition with any features desired (hardcover? dust-jacket? photos?). Press runs would be as long or as short as you wanted: one thousand, one hundred, ten?

My Father’s Memoir

In the spring of 2007, my father and I took the last of our big trips together, to battlefields of the Civil War. We flew to Jackson, Mississippi, then worked our way back to New England by rented car, through Vicksburg, Shiloh, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Virginia, and Gettysburg.

Somewhere on this trip, Dad turned to me and said, "You know, I think I might like to do a memoir like you do with your clients." Dad was 81, going on 82, the median age of my client memoirists. Then he added the kicker, "Only I don't want to pay what your clients pay." Cheap old son of a gun!

"That's great, Dad," I said. "We'll think about it."

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?