Memoir writing – using mementos & linked events

A memoir can be anything that records your life. A written memoir is just one of many options.

Photographs, if you have a lot of them, supplemented by written stories is another method to capture your life memories. You can use your photos in an album with pages of text to accompany them or build a comprehensive and colourful scrap book using photos and images of significant artifacts you have saved.

Do you have ticket stubs from events you attended? Brochures of places you have visited? Lovely notes from friends, colleagues or clients? Anything you value can find a place in your memoir and will tell part of your life story.

One of my personal treasures is a small chapbook that I created in nursery school before I left Holland. I’m looking for an interesting way to use it to tell the story of the major life event of moving from Europe to Canada when I was five years old.

The story of that move, and all that it entailed are critical to who I grew up to be. It has a historical as well as personal context. My emigration was part of a larger picture of post-war emigration of Dutch citizens to Canada in the early 1950′s. There were also important family dynamics and issues to this move that continued to impact my life for many years.

Part of the story is also surely the visit to my beloved grandmother, 38 years later when I was on book tour, to honour the promise I made as a five year old to tell her about my life in Canada. Between these two events there are many stories and I can create a memoir using just these two life markers and filling in as much or as little as I like.

Do you have any linked life events that you can use to build your memoir? How will you go about it?