Briarcliff Manor Public Library

The memoir you keep almost writing

Everyone past seventy has a book in them, and most of the books stay there, stuck on the mechanics. Where to start, how to organize sixty years, and the terrible first blank page. The machine does not write your memoir, your voice is the entire value of the thing, but it removes every mechanical excuse. The method that worked for me is the interview. You tell the program to act as a biographer, and to interview you about your childhood, one question at a time, waiting for my answer each time, following up on whatever seems richest. Then you talk, typing or out loud, in whatever order things come, the bakery on Sixth Street, the winter of the polio scare, the way your father whistled. After a few evenings of this, you ask it to organize everything you said into chapters, keeping your exact words wherever possible. What comes back is your life, in your phrases, arranged. Then the real work, yours alone, deciding what stays. Some cautions. Tell it once, early, keep my exact wording, and check that it did. Read each chapter aloud, because your ear catches what your eye forgives. And keep the file backed up in two places, a lesson I learned the hard way with the recipes. The machine is the amanuensis, the patient scribe in the corner, and the story was always yours. The grandchildren are waiting. Sixty years is worth an evening a week.

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