What is Your Legacy?

When I was twenty-three, I took a workshop, one of those personal growth things that began to be popular in the 1960s. The leader of the workshop asked us, all younger than thirty, to write our obituaries. Imagine, he said, that you have lived a long life and have died and are now writing your story. What does that story say?

It was a good exercise, although my prediction that I would found the New Boston Theatre School with a certain business partner proved incorrect.

In a way, I tried to recreate this experience for a men’s group that I led this Wednesday evening. Though all of them were under fifty (um, except me), I suggested that they look at their lives as I have found my typical memoirs client tends to look at his or hers.

Developing My Syllabus

As I’ve written, I am teaching a course on memoir for the first time this fall. My approach is for students to read one or two short excerpts from published memoirs each week; to discuss these in class; then to apply the lessons learned by writing reflective personal pieces about their own lives, as short as a single paragraph.

We will introduce the course by reading a “complete” memoir by my favorite non-fiction writer, Norman Maclean. Titled “Retrievers: Good and Bad,” the piece manages to tell the story of the writer’s upbringing, along with key developments in his family’s life, all in eight pages. It does so by looking at the past through a singular lens: the retriever dogs Maclean’s father used for hunting.

From here on, the course will fall into three sections, reflecting three phases of one’s life—and therefore of one’s memoir: The Gift, The Call, and The Return. I have selected four memoirs for each of the three phases and plan to draw from others in class.

In part 1, The Gift, we will read from:

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?

My Beacon Hill Seminar

In October and November 2015, I will be teaching an adult education course titled “Memoirs: Reading Others, Writing Yours.” The two-hour class will be offered once a week, on Mondays, 1–3 p.m., October 19–November 30, in the King’s Chapel Parish House at 64 Beacon Street in Boston.

As they say, space is limited!

My course is presented by Beacon Hill Seminars, a longstanding membership organization of people with “a vigorous interest in continuing their intellectual growth.” There are twenty courses in the fall catalog.

I was invited to teach as the founder of Memoirs Unlimited and presumably as someone who knows about working with mature adults on crafting narratives of their lives. Other courses cover the sciences, art history, music, literature, and philosophy.

My approach is my own, dreamed up out of whole cloth.