Our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.
Here's Why You Should Start Writing Your Memoir Now (And Be Making Photo Albums)
When I was young we had slide shows. My dad sorted and collected trays upon trays upon trays of negatives that he would load up on Saturday nights. He'd hang a sheet in the living room, dim the lights and sometimes put on some background music (on his boombox!). He'd set the projector on our coffee table atop stacks of his old Naval Academy yearbooks to get the height just right. I still remember the slight chemical smell as the projector bulb heated up and shot the images across the room. Growing up, these slide shows were better than going to the movies. It was our favorite family event as we got to relive past vacations and trips. One of our dad's favorite sayings was "See you did have a happy childhood, I've got the pictures to prove it."
Along with his careful curation of projector trays, he also made stacks and stacks of scrapbook albums. The binding of each puffy album described the event in black or red magic marker: Okinawa 80-83, White Sulphur Springs 91, Yuma, AZ 79-81. Inside each album is a carefully narrated, often pithy description of the events and activities captured there. Some albums would be tongue in cheek (think along the lines of the Calvin n' Hobbes comic strips where Calvin would layer his imagination on top of actual events). I recall one album with a spy motif from when relatives visited us in Morocco. He'd also add apropos comics, articles, and letters to the editors to accent the pictures.
My entire childhood lays frozen between the pages. Four by six memories captured between thousands of sticky photo mounting corners. Growing up I've paged through these albums so many times that I'm no longer sure if I remember the actual event or the version I've seen hundreds of times in the album.
Today something sad is happening--it's the facebookification of our memories.
Facebookification does two nefarious things, it oversimplifies and it oversaturates.
Special/keystone events are relegated to one line headers (i.e., oversimplication) that are nearly impossible to find or look back upon. What will the scenario be like twenty years from now? Hey Macee, here's your 4th birthday, let me just look back 16 years on my timeline and try to find the pictures.
Here's a test, try to find an event from three years on your Facebook timeline...not a user friendly experience, n'est-ce pas. Certainly not like looking back in a physical photo album or scrapbook. Then, once you find an event there might be 50 pictures in the album. Why? Because it's easy to hit the upload button, you don't need to actually look through the pictures and find the best ones that actually capture the moment or that tell a story.
More importantly, looking back it's hard to separate (and then locate) the insignificant "noise" events (i.e., out on a family walk--check out the beautiful sky here) from the substantive ones (i.e., Jackson's first steps!).
This is because Facebook doesn't care about your family history. It wasn't made for thoughtful reflection on the past. It was built for a history, but only the history of the last five minutes.
Which brings me to Stories by John Armstrong.
Unfortunately, Armstrong has chosen not to try to publish his striking memoir of short vignettes that span the course of his memorable life. Armstrong has been a reporter, editor, civic leader, and until his retirement in 2008 was the publisher of the Bay Area News group. He has a newspaper copyboy during JFK's assassination and met Martin Luther King and Pope John Paul II (along with about 100 other notable figures). He and his wife Sandy have been invited to vacation with Audrey Hepburn; he's been scolded by Kissinger at the height of the Cold War and personally witnessed to by Billy Graham. While these stories are entertaining, the real gravity in the collection comes from the emotional honesty of Armstrong in his self-examination as he deals with growing old, Alzheimers, and memory loss amidst an enduring faithfulness with the love of his life. The depth of this level of emotional honesty laid bare on the pages are unlike anything I've ever read.
I've had the good fortune to know John Armstrong as Emily's jovial and thoughtful godfather. In person, John has that special combination of intelligence, recall, jocularity and humor that makes him the life of any party, dinner, car or elevator ride.
His book is easily one of the more influential tomes that I've read (ever) and prompted my greater reflection on the nature of memories, (family) history and relationships. Whether Armstrong acknowledges it or not, Stories is really written as a gift to his family and friends.
As children our parents exist in a plane wholly separate from our intimate, specific knowledge of them. As teenagers that plane further warps and separates the two parties. As we grow into adulthood that relationship shifts and our planes of existence converge but that quarter century delta--that previous distance can never be closed or gained. A memoir likes this, however, does much to lessen the psychic effects of that gap. This type of collection cracks open that secret door to our parents' history and gives us the chance to share in the legacy of memories. Every family has those funny, sad, angry or touching stories from our past--those memories that get retold each Thanksgiving or Christmas, rehashed and remixed over the years and decades--but without being written down they all eventually fade and lose their luster.
Rudyard Kipling once said that "if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." Personally, as I've grown older, and as I watch my children grow, learn to walk, learn to speak in front of my very eyes and as I see my parents and grandparents grow older, I start to realize all the more the value of a family's history. As I recall the stories my own grandmother would tell, I realize that I've already lost some of the details of those stories. My own children will never get to meet my grandmother who passed away several years ago--they will never know the smell of her thick perfume, they will never crunch away on her 'emergencies'--the candies she always carried in her purse for us. Even now, I struggle to recall the punchline to her "toothbrush" joke--one that used to bring us to tears.
Ultimately, Stories stands as a call for each of us to write it down--to carpe historia. In Stranger than Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk (of Fight Club fame) perfectly captures the crucial elements in writing a book as he instructs that "A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart." John Armstrong's book takes that notion a step further as we get to share in a good life--one littered with decades with laughter but also moments of tears and years of heart-breaking courage.
I'll close by urging you to take a moment at some point today or tomorrow and jot down one memory from your childhood.
It may only be a few sentences but write it down somewhere that you can return to it and add to it with other memories in the future. One day, more than anything those pages will be a gift your children and grandchildren can cherish forever.
Here's Why You Should Start Writing Your Memoir Now (And Be Making Photo Albums)
When I was young we had slide shows. My dad sorted and collected trays upon trays upon trays of negatives that he would load up on Saturday nights. He'd hang a sheet in the living room, dim the lights and sometimes put on some background music (on his boombox!). He'd set the projector on our coffee table atop stacks of his old Naval Academy yearbooks to get the height just right. I still remember the slight chemical smell as the projector bulb heated up and shot the images across the room. Growing up, these slide shows were better than going to the movies. It was our favorite family event as we got to relive past vacations and trips. One of our dad's favorite sayings was "See you did have a happy childhood, I've got the pictures to prove it."
Along with his careful curation of projector trays, he also made stacks and stacks of scrapbook albums. The binding of each puffy album described the event in black or red magic marker: Okinawa 80-83, White Sulphur Springs 91, Yuma, AZ 79-81. Inside each album is a carefully narrated, often pithy description of the events and activities captured there. Some albums would be tongue in cheek (think along the lines of the Calvin n' Hobbes comic strips where Calvin would layer his imagination on top of actual events). I recall one album with a spy motif from when relatives visited us in Morocco. He'd also add apropos comics, articles, and letters to the editors to accent the pictures.
My entire childhood lays frozen between the pages. Four by six memories captured between thousands of sticky photo mounting corners. Growing up I've paged through these albums so many times that I'm no longer sure if I remember the actual event or the version I've seen hundreds of times in the album.
Today something sad is happening--it's the facebookification of our memories.
Facebookification does two nefarious things, it oversimplifies and it oversaturates.
Special/keystone events are relegated to one line headers (i.e., oversimplication) that are nearly impossible to find or look back upon. What will the scenario be like twenty years from now? Hey Macee, here's your 4th birthday, let me just look back 16 years on my timeline and try to find the pictures.
Here's a test, try to find an event from three years on your Facebook timeline...not a user friendly experience, n'est-ce pas. Certainly not like looking back in a physical photo album or scrapbook. Then, once you find an event there might be 50 pictures in the album. Why? Because it's easy to hit the upload button, you don't need to actually look through the pictures and find the best ones that actually capture the moment or that tell a story.
More importantly, looking back it's hard to separate (and then locate) the insignificant "noise" events (i.e., out on a family walk--check out the beautiful sky here) from the substantive ones (i.e., Jackson's first steps!).
This is because Facebook doesn't care about your family history. It wasn't made for thoughtful reflection on the past. It was built for a history, but only the history of the last five minutes.
Which brings me to Stories by John Armstrong.
Unfortunately, Armstrong has chosen not to try to publish his striking memoir of short vignettes that span the course of his memorable life. Armstrong has been a reporter, editor, civic leader, and until his retirement in 2008 was the publisher of the Bay Area News group. He has a newspaper copyboy during JFK's assassination and met Martin Luther King and Pope John Paul II (along with about 100 other notable figures). He and his wife Sandy have been invited to vacation with Audrey Hepburn; he's been scolded by Kissinger at the height of the Cold War and personally witnessed to by Billy Graham. While these stories are entertaining, the real gravity in the collection comes from the emotional honesty of Armstrong in his self-examination as he deals with growing old, Alzheimers, and memory loss amidst an enduring faithfulness with the love of his life. The depth of this level of emotional honesty laid bare on the pages are unlike anything I've ever read.
I've had the good fortune to know John Armstrong as Emily's jovial and thoughtful godfather. In person, John has that special combination of intelligence, recall, jocularity and humor that makes him the life of any party, dinner, car or elevator ride.
His book is easily one of the more influential tomes that I've read (ever) and prompted my greater reflection on the nature of memories, (family) history and relationships. Whether Armstrong acknowledges it or not, Stories is really written as a gift to his family and friends.
As children our parents exist in a plane wholly separate from our intimate, specific knowledge of them. As teenagers that plane further warps and separates the two parties. As we grow into adulthood that relationship shifts and our planes of existence converge but that quarter century delta--that previous distance can never be closed or gained. A memoir likes this, however, does much to lessen the psychic effects of that gap. This type of collection cracks open that secret door to our parents' history and gives us the chance to share in the legacy of memories. Every family has those funny, sad, angry or touching stories from our past--those memories that get retold each Thanksgiving or Christmas, rehashed and remixed over the years and decades--but without being written down they all eventually fade and lose their luster.
Rudyard Kipling once said that "if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." Personally, as I've grown older, and as I watch my children grow, learn to walk, learn to speak in front of my very eyes and as I see my parents and grandparents grow older, I start to realize all the more the value of a family's history. As I recall the stories my own grandmother would tell, I realize that I've already lost some of the details of those stories. My own children will never get to meet my grandmother who passed away several years ago--they will never know the smell of her thick perfume, they will never crunch away on her 'emergencies'--the candies she always carried in her purse for us. Even now, I struggle to recall the punchline to her "toothbrush" joke--one that used to bring us to tears.
Ultimately, Stories stands as a call for each of us to write it down--to carpe historia. In Stranger than Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk (of Fight Club fame) perfectly captures the crucial elements in writing a book as he instructs that "A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart." John Armstrong's book takes that notion a step further as we get to share in a good life--one littered with decades with laughter but also moments of tears and years of heart-breaking courage.
I'll close by urging you to take a moment at some point today or tomorrow and jot down one memory from your childhood.
It may only be a few sentences but write it down somewhere that you can return to it and add to it with other memories in the future. One day, more than anything those pages will be a gift your children and grandchildren can cherish forever.
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