November 10, 2025
At my mother’s eulogy, I told the story of a childhood spent playing in the woods and brook by our home in Massachusetts. Everywhere lay the possibility of adventure with days spent skating on the frozen twists and turns of the forest brook, catching polliwogs in the spring, building a backyard zoo, and evenings spent playing kickball with the neighborhood kids in the grassy field as the sun set. A lot of my childhood memories center around the idea of being outside in nature. Perhaps, I wanted to spend a frosty winter’s day outdoors or perhaps it was my mother’s idea of sanity when she needed an escape from a household of six children. It wasn’t a perfect childhood, but it was happy enough, and I thanked her for that. I remember my younger brother questioning after the funeral, “We had a happy childhood?” Maybe he was joking, and maybe he was not.
The idea of writing memoir seems to center around the idea that one has this fantastic sort of story to tell, one that the reader will be fascinated to hear. But, does a person need a dramatic story with an amazing transformation in order to have a story worth telling? Does it have to be a pager turner that leaves the reader marveling at a survivalist story? Or is it more about the author’s ability to show marvel at the mundane and to light up the intricacies of life that might otherwise go unnoticed.
I remember telling my students when we studied the writing of memoirs that if I knew my childhood was going to be the mine where I went to dig up interesting stories, then I would have had a more exciting childhood. Still, would I change anything? No! I am alive and well and very happy in the life I have created, but I did tell them it still wasn’t too late for them to add some adventures. Maybe it wasn’t the best advice a teacher could give to a bunch of impressionable young people.
We did not create our childhoods. They were given to us by people and by forces beyond our control. As memoirists, the best we can do is to try to make sense of the sometimes unexplainable. And if that clarity cannot be found, then we must live with the resolution that we did the best that we knew at the time considering the tools we were left with. Our grace now is to share in our long sought and heart felt words, the wisdom that came from those experiences.
