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Memoir writing helps recall happier times in our lives

By Carl Heintze

Everybody's writing their memoirs these days. Even me. Memoir writing suddenly has become big publishing business--not mine, I hasten to add--and it also is the business of the meek and lowly, the average Joe and Jane.

Memoir writing classes, often offered by senior centers or adult education schools, teach you how to get the most out of your memories and how to get them down on paper.

And, it turns out, writing one's memoirs isn't simply sitting down and putting words on paper. For most of us have pretty dull lives when you come right down to it, lives just like almost everyone else. The trick is to make an ordinary life seem unordinary, if that's the word--either funny, harrowing, entertaining or in some way worth reading.

Those who teach people how to write their memories down have little tricks to make the job easier, better and more interesting, although I must confess they can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. They can't make what is essentially humdrum into something that's not.

I'm not sure what brought on this surge of remembrance. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Americans are living longer and in better circumstances. That gives them enough leisure to sit and remember and then to sit and write down the remembrances.

I think probably the times have something to do with it, too. We tend to remember the past as better than the present and perhaps even more appealing than the future. The past of most seniors, who are the biggest contributors to the memoir scene, lives somewhere in the '30s and '40s.

Life in those decades was slower, the country itself was younger and the rest of the world hadn't rushed in, as it did on Sept. 11. Memory is a tricky instrument with which to deal with the past, however. It makes us forget the bad parts and remember the better days. In truth, the '30s and '40s, even if they now seem charmed, were times of terrible trauma and conflict.

The United States was suffering through the Depression in the '30s. It lay like a pall on the land, blackening almost everything. Social and political ferment continually disrupted things: sitdown strikes, civil unrest, race riots, lynchings--you could make a long list.

The '40s weren't any better. They were filled with World War II, and though the war, in the end, came out all right, it cost a huge sacrifice in human life, material and industrial output. We made it, perhaps by the skin of our teeth, and sailed into the Cold War.

Not many folks seem to want to resurrect memories of the Cold War. Instead those who write memoirs look back to the days of the Depression and of the war with a nostalgia that often is deceiving. Still, it is the only lode a lot of us have to mine when it comes to writing about our pasts, and so we do, making what were essentially leaden times into gold.

Maybe that's the way memoir writing has always been. After all, Casanova can't have been all that great a lover, though his memoirs would make one think so. And Henry Adams, who wrote the great American memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, could not have found the past quite as discouraging as he makes out in his two volumes of remembering.

Perhaps writing memoirs is as much process as it is substance. In the act of recalling what our lives have been like when we were younger and healthier and maybe even happier we get a chance to relive them without all the fatigue and pain they might have had when we first experienced them. We burnish off the rough spots and shine up the dull ones, and in the process we set down a memorial. It gives us a chance to be reborn again in a way. Who could ask for more than that as we get older?

Not me, anyway.

And there's one other reward for memoir writing. It keeps away for a while longer the specter of all older folks, the encroachment of Alzheimer's disease. Memoir writers haven't yet lost their marbles and their memories.