On Memoirs.

Okayyyy! This week's reading was more like it!  While I found the author to be standoffish and a bit conceited last week, this week I found him to be warm and extremely helpful.  At first, when I started reading the examples he provided in chapter fourteen as ways to draw the reader into the simple story of a memoir, I thought he was going to go on and on with his name-dropping lists again.  What I found, though, was wonderful insight and helpful excerpts to refer to when thinking about my own memoir.  I actually even think I'd like to do his short exercise of writing three to five pages a day on a single memory from my life and elaborate on it.  He's made an excellent case for getting a personal story down on paper for later generations to absorb and learn from.

This week's reading really hit home for me because about two and a half years ago, I lost my grandfather with whom I was very close.  In fact, he and his mother helped raise my brother and me while my mom worked two jobs as a waitress to support us by herself.  When he was young, he got ringworm -- and the cure for that fungus was radiation.  Unfortunately, this treatment gave him brain tumors that ate away at his short-term memory and then his long-term memory...then it took his life.  I was only twenty when he passed and I realized then that I knew almost nothing about his life or his mother's (my Nana's).  They only ever made short, biting comments about the past, but they always chose their words carefully and never divulged more than a few sentences.  If I ever asked questions, they'd just shake their heads and purse their lips, then move on to talk about something on TV (the TV was always on at their house).  Shortly after my grandfather passed, I spent the holidays with my grandmother (my mother's mother and my grandfather's ex-wife).  I asked her about his and his mother's life and she said they acted the same way around her, never really sharing much.  What she had come to the conclusion of, she shared, after the few glimpses into their lives she got, was that my great-grandmother's family was probably Jewish and got caught up in the holocaust.  My father had the same assumptions based on their style of language and certain behaviors.  This now feels like something I should look into as it was such a huge part of history and possibly such a huge part of my family's history.  It might explain a lot.

After reading chapter 24, "Writing Family History and Memoir," I was inspired to get an ancestry.com account and make a family tree.  The chapter says that as a child, you tend to dismiss the stories that your elders share with you and only when a person has a child of their own, and begins to feel maturity sneaking up on them, do they become interested in those stories again.  That's why, at twenty-three, I'd like to make the most of the life and stories that my family has left.  Further, I'd like to record my memories as they're happening rather than having to dig them back up and start from scratch years later.  These chapters have inspired me to take a deeper look at myself and at my family and record everything I know because it's the closest I can get to taking photographs and I'd love for my children's children to know and understand who we are.