Reply to Read my Dad's memoir; description of my childhood was a gut punch

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am a book editor who has worked on a number of memoirs over the course of a 30 year career. People who are driven to write memoirs, unless it is because their experience is so particular that they are the only one in the world who could convey it, are almost without exception highly narcissistic. Even if there are products being marketed to encourage them to do so, normal people with healthy-sized egos do not feel driven to create this sort of record of themselves.[/quote]
I'm PP whose husband did the marketed memoir. To me, its just the modern age version of those "A Grandmother Remembers" books with each page having several questions. I treasure the one I had my grandmother fill out 40 years ago, with the advantage the answers are in her handwriting. Stuff like "Tell me how you met Grandpa" and "Did you have other boyfriends?". Loved her answer on that one - "Oh Yes! Lots of boyfriends!" Then she listed their names, haha. She was born in 1912 and married in her late 20s, and she was very beautiful and popular.

I also helped a 95yo lady at my dads assisted living record her memories. She just thought she had an interesting life. It was so meaningful to her because she remembered every address she had lived as a child. I promptly googled and she delighted in seeing how those places looked now. I asked her about the depression and she said she had no memory. Then she said, oh, that must have been why they moved in with relatives and her father's patients started paying him with celery and chickens. She worked at a switchboard and was one of the first people in her town to hear that WW2 was over. It took us a year of me visiting weekly and taking an hour to transcribe what she remembered. I sent it all to spotify and had a "book" printed. By the time I finished, she unfortunately had died, but her daughter and adult grandchild were so grateful for the book.[/quote]

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