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“Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.”

With this last installment of our summer-long series discussing William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” I want to focus just on that sentence, which may be the most pivotal thought in the essay. Life goes by quickly. One day you’re busy establishing your career, raising a family, enjoying your mid-life routine, and then you wake up and all of that is in the past. By then you’re busy with other things—grandchildren, hobbies, perhaps working—and you still have no solid blocks of time to sit down and write a memoir.

But the alternative to not finding the time to write a memoir is that you never write one, and all of those experiences you lived and emotions you felt never make their way out of your head to inspire and inform the generations that follow. You grow old never having taken the opportunity to review your life in a substantive, organized way that can give you insight into the lessons you’ve learned and the contributions you’ve made.

It does take a commitment—and, hardest of all, it takes getting started—to craft your story, something you can point to as your own perspective of the little chapters that combined to turn you into who you are today. Write your story before time runs out, before life writes your last chapter for you without having any input from the protagonist: you. Do it today.

As you write your memoir, you’re likely to periodically make choices about how much to reveal about yourself. That part’s easy: do whatever’s comfortable for you, because you’re the owner of your story. The harder question is how much to reveal about the other people in your life. You do not own their story in the same way that you own yours. Your friends and relatives may never forgive you for sharing what you know about them.

“Don’t worry about that problem in advance,” advises William Zinsser in his essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’ve been discussing here. “Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it…Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you have in mind a broader audience—a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. It also gives them their moment to ask you to take certain passages out—which you may or may not agree to do.”

Remember that, ultimately, this is your story. Zinsser continues, “You’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. Some of your relatives will wish you hadn’t said some of the things you said, especially if you reveal various family traits that are less than lovable. But I believe that at some level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons.”

The major “wrong reasons” Zinsser mentions are 1) whining in self-pity in order to feed your own need for attention; 2) including sordid details in an attempt to make your book more marketable because of the titillation factor; and 3) using your memoir to settle a score. Zinsser cautions memoir writers not to simply air old grievances. However, he concludes, “if you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.”

Continuing to share with you an essay I found helpful called, appropriately, “How to Write a Memoir,” here’s what author William Zinsser says about his dad’s only attempt at writing:

“Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his ‘style.’ He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty. He wasn’t sentimental about blood ties, and I smile at his terse appraisals of Uncle X, ‘a second-rater,’ or Cousin Y, who ‘never amounted to much.’”

An accomplished writer and the author of On Writing Well, Zinsser realizes that it’s that very amateurish “voice” that brings all of the charm to his father’s work: “It now occurs to me that my father, who didn’t try to be a writer, was a more natural writer than I am, with my constant fiddling and fussing. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you. The crucial transaction in memoir and personal history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions.”

That, WriteMyMemoir members, is great advice!