To Publish or Not to Publish?

I’ve been recording my memories in an informal memoir written with my children as the intended audience, I recognize that my life hasn’t been as hard or as tragic as the ones chronicled in some of my favorite memoirs, but it has been interesting. I took my first trip across the Atlantic when I was six and my family travelled to Amman, Jordan to spend the school year. Four years later, we lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, for most of a year. Although living abroad isn’t as unusual as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, it’s still not a common childhood experience. And living with my father was exciting in other ways, as well.

The question is, should I use the “get-it-all-down” manuscript as source material for a memoir aimed at a wider audience? If I do, I will need to choose a theme, develop a structure, and decide which memories and events to use, since much of what I am recording for my children wouldn’t interest people who don’t know me. Writing a memoir for publication would be a far more difficult project than simply recording my memories for my children.

Fortunately, there is help at hand. I learn best by example, and I have read many good memoirs over the years. My favorite is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Then there is Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston, which inspired my first middle-grade historical novel, and The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, which goes beyond The Diary of Anne Frank in providing insight into the horrors invoked by the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands.

I’m also grateful for the help provided by my good friend and writing colleague, Janine Harrison, in an October 26, 2017 post she did for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog. If you are interested in writing a memoir, check it out at http://indiana-writers-consortium.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-space-between-giving-voice-to-real.html.

At this point, the most important task is to make a record of my life in case something happens to my memory.

But I’m not ruling out a formal memoir.

__________

Daddy took the picture at the head of this post in September, 1957. Mama, my brothers, and I are posing in our cabin on the HMS Nova Scotia as we crossed the Atlantic Ocean.