It’s all about money at the website moneycrashers.com, so blogger Michael Lewis included “make money” among his four reasons for writing a memoir. But his blog post was really a thank-you note to his late father for leaving a memoir for his family to read after his death. Lewis writes:
“During the last five years of my father’s life, he began a series of letters and memos to my younger brother and me about his life. Dad was not a famous man, nor a particularly accomplished man—at least, not by standard measures of success. Nevertheless, his letters chronicling a childhood during the Depression in the midst of the Dust Bowl, his experiences as an infantryman on the battlefields of Europe, and life in the 1950s were an incredible record of an extraordinary life and time in the history of America.’
This is exactly what we discover every time we publish a life story at Write My Memoirs. The personal memories documented in an ordinary person’s autobiography become fascinating from the modern-day point of view. When that ordinary person is your family member, the fascination grows even more intense. I’m not surprised that Michael Lewis organized his dad’s writings and bound them to make little books they could pass out to the rest of the family.
“Writing your autobiography is an opportunity to reach across the boundaries of time and space, set the record straight, honor the ones you love and celebrate the journey you have taken,” Lewis writes. “It is the chance to create your own time capsule; an opportunity to leave your handprints on the walls of human existence and to shout to the world, ‘I was here and I mattered!’”
Exactly. That’s what Write My Memoirs is all about: documenting that you were here and you mattered.