Steve Bernstein, managing director of the security services division at Citigroup Global Transaction Services, regaled his young family with tales of his early years in Brooklyn in the 1960s and ’70s. His children and their friends enjoyed the stories so much that they cajoled Bernstein into putting his accounts of eccentric aunts and uncles into a book. When he returned to the United States after spending four years in Japan for the bank, he did just that, and 18 months later had produced his memoir, There’s a Book in Here Somewhere.
Settled into his 60-acre Virginia estate, Bruce Smart, a retired Continental Group chairman who was undersecretary in Ronald Reagan’s Commerce Department, found himself so busy breeding horses that he was losing touch with his family and friends. So he and his wife, Edith, culled through diaries, correspondence and accounts of their travels and prepared what is, in effect, a grand version of a what-we’ve-been-up-to-lately letter. What they eventually produced was not a mere dispatch, but a beautifully produced, 300-page, illustrated book, Indian Summer: A Memoir, which they shared with 750 people. Bennett Golub, a founding partner of BlackRock, an investment management company in New York, coauthored a memoir with his father, Aharon. “People don’t live forever, and my dad, who was getting on in years, had had an unusually interesting life,” Golub says. “The book covers only three eras: prosperous childhood in Poland and being orphaned and crippled during World War II, finally arriving in Palestine—he was one of the first legal immigrants in 1946—and putting his life together again in a kibbutz.” The result is the 350-page Kaddishel: A Life Reborn. Though written for private circulation, it was so well-received that it was later published commercially in Israel and will hit bookstores in the United States early this year.
TOP VIEW
Memoir writing has never been more popular, as the postwar generation of Americans and their adult children strive to record family histories for posterity. For amateur autobiographers and their loved ones, an entire industry has blossomed to provide writing, editing, production and publishing services. But memoirists should be forewarned that the process could involve establishing a serious professional relationship and may take months, even years. |
To most people, writing a memoir may seem like an esoteric undertaking, something they may dream about but shunt aside as a sign of age or immodesty—or a source of potential embarrassment. In fact, memoir writing, both commercial and private, is a burgeoning pastime. A Google search for “personal memoirs” returns more than 1.3 million hits. The local bookshop now has two or three shelves of tomes offering guidance on memoir writing, including one by best-selling, how-to-write guru William Zinsser entitled Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Writing a Memoir.
Indeed, the large number of people writing memoirs today has generated a cottage industry of ghostwriters, editors and book and multimedia producers. It has its own trade organization, the Association of Personal Historians, that has grown from 20 members to more than 400 in the past 10 years. May has been deemed Personal History Awareness Month and October has been designated as Family History Month.
New communications technologies—the click-on ease of word processing, the versatility of the Internet for research, the capabilities of electronic publishing to edit and design whole books and then print small quantities on demand—have unquestionably proven a critical factor in the growing interest in private memoirs. But the urge to commit one’s life to paper (or audiotape or film) may also have been nudged along by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, according to Lettice Stuart, president of the Association of Personal Historians, who writes memoirs through her New York company, Portraits in Words. “After 9/11, when I talked to people about the importance of telling their story—or getting their parents to preserve their story—for future generations, people would respond with remarks such as, ‘Yes, you never know when you’re going to be blown to bits by some crazy people in an airplane,’” she says. “I hear that kind of thing a lot—and our membership has doubled since 9/11.”
Bernstein notes: “I finished There’s a Story Here Somewhere in 1998 and was so grateful to have it, because it served as a tribute to my twin brother, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and died on 9/11.” Stuart speculates that the baby boom generation’s acknowledgment of the trials endured by their parents—the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam—has contributed to the surge in memoir writing. Members of this group wish to pass along a permanent record of these tribulations to their children. Some veterans of World War II also seem to have discovered a desire to commit their wartime exploits to paper and tape.
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