Story, life-writing, memoir: Call it what you will, just get started on yours!

Amanda, age 1. Anne. Katy, my older sister.

We each have a story to tell and, says Anne Lamott of Bird by Bird writing advice fame, we are not responsible for hurt feelings of those who disagree with how we tell it. Nonetheless, I asked my mother recently to read a piece about my father that I plan to submit to an online magazine for a themed issue on fathers.

I was relieved when she gave me her blessing on the content and was appreciative of her feedback on the style in which I had written, though I disagreed with her comments on that point. It was a fine moment of respectful difference we shared as writers not as mother and daughter, and I will continue to work on the piece for submission next month.

As I am, so is my mother a writer. My mother is a writer and I have become one, too. Either sentence is true, though each tells the story from a slightly different perspective. The result is the same: We are both writers. Would I be a writer if she were not? Would she be writing the fourth instalment of her memoirs if I were not an enthusiastic writer these days, happy, so happy, to be editing her story? Who knows. But it’s interesting to contemplate who we might be if our parents were not who they had been and who, over the course of their life, they had become, which is why I am so delighted that Mum is writing this fourth instalment.

She opens with her life in post-WWII England, before meeting the man she would marry. So, it’s all about Mum as Anne Penfold, a person without the constraints of marriage and motherhood, and with the responsibility of earning her own living. She goes on to describe how she and Dad met and then their early life together, before leaving England for Canada in 1953. It is all fascinating to me, as Mum’s words round out the fullness of her story which I know first-hand, of course, only from the vantage point of daughter. For this new knowledge and appreciation, Mum’s memoir is invaluable to her three children, but also to anyone who knows her now but didn’t know her then.

To tell our story is to claim it, to own it, and, crucially, I believe, to respect it by making sense of it. Maybe we write it for our eyes only, or maybe we write it to share with family, or maybe to share it more widely if we tell it by laying our individual experiences against a larger context that a wider circle of readers might find interesting. Regardless, putting words on the page is a powerful way to bring new meaning for ourselves to the life we are living and to encourage a refined understanding for those around us of how we came to be who we are today.

Getting started on the telling is as simple as deciding to do so, to stop worrying that it may not be important or interesting enough to bother with, and to embrace the experience of wandering down memory lane to see what the trip brings up. You may be surprised at what you uncover about yourself, and I guarantee that your readers will be thrilled you have made the effort. I’ve said it before on this blog and I’ll say it again: We don’t have endless time. Seize the moment and the day — and the pencil. Tell your story. Begin today.

NOTE: You need not write four instalments as my mother has done. You can start with just 100-word micro memoirs on a topic. Or capture moments in a mere 50-word piece. Memory comes in simple fragments, in bits and bobs that describe a period in one’s life, as full-length books, and everything in between. Your story is yours to tell and it is worth telling no matter how you form it.

NEWS: I had another 50-word fictional story published the other day. You can read it here.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.