Do I want to write a memoir?

Me and my kids--aren't they lovely?

I have grappled with the question posed by memoir and me before, but it came to mind again today when I read an essay on the current popularity of memoir. To the delight of booksellers, readers are lapping up life accounts by everyone from Michelle Obama to your neighbor down the street who, it seems, had a hidden life in her background.

I belong to a small but close-knit online group of women writers, many of whom are writing their memoirs. In fact, I sometimes feel like an outsider because I so carefully avoid the question of a memoir. But those who write them seem to have had some great trauma in their lives. One woman’s ex-husband kidnapped their children, still very young, and sent the mother a chilling note saying, “You’ll never find us.” Others have dealt with addiction—their own or a family member’s—and for one, an inherited, disabling disease in her children.

I on the other hand, tend to view my life as Pollyanna. Oh, there were a few rough patches—a heartbreaking end to my first true love, forced on us by circumstance but something that neither of us wanted; a family disruption when I married out of my faith (seems old-fashioned now, fifty some years later); a bitter divorce; more recently, a patch where one illness followed another. But in each case, I moved on to what I see as a life in the sunshine—four wonderful children that I raised mostly as a single parent, a rewarding and mostly successful professional life both as a publisher and an author; a busy, productive and independent retirement; and, a host of good friends, some newish, some dating back to elementary school.

Regrets? Maybe a couple: one is that I fought an almost lifelong battle with anxiety, but it is mostly tamed now, and I have learned to avoid the few situations that can trigger it—no, I will not drive over that high bridge! The other is only a maybe—being single for half my adult life was a disappointment—I always thought I would live out Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra” with its lines, “Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be/The last of life/For which the first was made.” Didn’t happen. But, as I reflect, singleness has been a genuine benefit, giving me a great, selfish freedom. If I were childless, I probably wouldn’t like my single state so much, but as it is, I get lots of love and hugs, and there are people who listen to me when I need an ear.

The essay I read says that in memoir the writer is essentially telling the reader, “This is where my life went amuck. This is where I lost the plot, and here’s how I got it back together again.” My trouble is that I don’t think I ever really lost the plot. Just as I like linear storytelling, I view my life in linear terms, always curving upward.

Sometimes I think of this almost-daily blog as my memoir. I have even culled a few posts that I think reflect who I am and what matters to me. I keep them in a file titled “Memoir.” Maybe I’ll revisit that file, see if I can add to it.

But back to the essay I read. The most important point it made was that we don’t have to be rich and famous to write our memoirs. One of my goals was to leave the world a teensy bit better than I found it. I think my children are a contribution to that goal—and maybe my books are too. And maybe that’s the stuff of memoir.