How to Use Genealogy in Memoir

As a memoir coach, memoir teacher and memoir editor, I spend a great amount of time talking people out of writing mere genealogy. When new to memoir, most people confuse the genre with autobiography, where who begat whom is pretty much a standard, included topic. Not so in memoir, or so I thought until I recently delved into Ancestry dot com and had an experience that caused me to weep at the keyboard, as well as gain insight into how to use genealogy in memoir.

The Difference Between Memoir and Autobiography

What is the difference between autobiography and memoir? This is a crucial jumping-off place for all discussions about content. The way I teach memoir here at The Memoir Project, autobiography is one big book that tells your entire life story, whereas memoir takes on one aspect of that life.

Memoir has sub-genres within it. These include blog posts, essays, op-eds, long-form essays and books. Here at The Memoir Project, I teach that memoir is an argument-based format written from one area of your expertise at a time. Looked at that way, you can have a writing life, writing in all of those forms, including an endless number of book-length memoirs, since each will be written from a different area of your expertise.

What is An Area of Expertise when Writing Memoir?

Each of us has perhaps twelve areas of expertise. I define these as what you know after what you’ve been through. For instance, after 15 years of caregiving my mother, whose Alzheimer’s disease began when she was 49 years old, I know that caregiving requires boundaries, and when I write and publish from my caregiving area of expertise, that is what I am arguing. To do so, I begin the piece with the price of not having any boundaries, include my awakening to the idea of boundaries, and end the piece by healthfully applying boundaries in my life and living behind their benefit. Those are my three acts.

Another area of my expertise is gardening. I have gardened for 30 years, though I would never give professional gardening advice. If you want that, go see my big sister, Margaret Roach, America’s premier garden writer. From my area of expertise, and after all my years of gardening, what I know is that gardening enriches the soul.

Then there are my beloved dogs. I have lived with twelve, though never more than one at a time. When I write and publish from my area of expertise that is dogs, I always argue that dogs do things for people that people cannot do for themselves.

See how this goes? What are your areas of expertise, and what are you willing to argue from that area of expertise?

Perhaps you drop off a child every day at the bus stop and experience grave anxiety each time you do so, in no small part owing to the gun violence in America. That would make a good op-ed.

Maybe, like I was, you are a caregiver, but your patient is a spouse, and the dynamic of your love for one another has been expanded or contracted under the demands of long-term care. That might make a good book-length memoir. Perhaps your spouse has chosen to pursue a right to die path and you are not yet on board. This dilemma is one explored by this writer in her book-length memoir.

What Goes into a Memoir?

A good piece of memoir is about something universal as illustrated by your deeply personal experience. And if you know the Memoir Project, you know The Memoir Project Algorithm. It is expressed like this:

It’s about x as illustrated by y to be told in a z

The x is the universal, the y is your deeply personal tale, and the z is always the form – blog post, essay, op-ed, long-form essay or book.

What goes into your story are scenes curated from your life that show the reader your transcendent change from when you had an issue, to how you learned to change it, and what life looks like when you did.

How to Use Genealogy in Memoir Writing?

Choosing who gets to appear in a piece of memoir is a tough dilemma. We start off thinking that a piece of memoir is like one great big, gracious public swimming pool, where everyone is invited, when, in fact, every piece of memoir is more like a small, perfect, hot tub built for two. What’s your role in this metaphor? Life guard. You must decide who gets in the water. Cram everyone into that hot tub and it becomes an overcrowded mess where no one – most particularly the reader – gets what they came for.

Ancestors can be tricky. They are dead, so you’d think that they cannot lobby to get a place in your tale. My experience working with writers reveals that the dead can be more stubbornly demanding than the living when shoving their way into a tale. Much of this has to do with sentimentality where, in fact, sentiment needs to rule.

What do I mean by that? Knowing the intent of your piece, and what you want it to say, will keep you from dumping in too many people. For this, use the algorithm and a fine, well-structure argument to guide you. Writing from one area of your expertise with a solid algorithm and argument will allow you to precisely choose who gets in and why.

How to Choose Characters for a Piece of Memoir

What does each person bring to the tale? What contribution do they make to proving your argument? What role do they play here? These are the questions you must ask.

I spend a lot of my time as a memoir editor talking people out of long strings of who begat whom for the very simple reason that we, the readers, cannot relate to mere ancestry. We have no context. Your role is to give us that context. How? Your argument is the best measurement of the territory you intend to cover in a single piece of memoir. After crafting one, you can more easily choose who of the myriad living and dead creatures in your life will best provide proof of that argument.

I think I had almost developed too thick a skin against genealogy, having rejected most arguments in favor of its draw. That is, until recently, when I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole of Ancestry dot com, only to emerge two, 12-hour days later, with a wild pack of dead relatives I never knew I had.

But what to do with them?

In my dead relative bender I met people with Biblical names, pioneers who trekked out of Vermont and founded a tiny town on the St. Lawrence River in the 1700s, and located the many places where my favorite grandfather lived in Manhattan while he somehow supported himself as a professional gambler. I saw photos of my mother’s journalism honor society and her high school sorority. I could go on and on, though I will not since I know it is of limited interest to you.

So, when do our relatives become of interest to anyone else? Only when they contribute to the story at hand. Only when they make a point that only they can make.

When I work with writers, I always suggest they pretend they are back in their primary school auditorium. You know the one. In my case, it had heavy green velvet curtains, a piano at stage right and was lined with fixed squeaky, wooden folding chairs. What was yours like? Now sit down in the front row and be the director of the piece you are writing.

Pretend that all of your characters are off-stage, waiting for your cue to deliver their lines. Call them to the stage, one at a time, as needed, and bid them to deliver only those lines assigned to them. When they do, thank them and tell them they can go. That is who you are in this writing life, as well as who they are. They are no longer in control of their own actions or words. They do not dominate your tale. Instead, each has a pre-determined role (remember that argument) and set of lines that drive your argument forward. We are not interested in their side of the story. We are interested in your side of the story and what role they played there, and what they can do to illuminate the reader about your area of expertise.

How to Control Your Characters When Writing Memoir

That paragraph just above is all about how to control the characters in your life when writing memoir. And control is yours, but you must take it. When you do, things shift. And even in cases of abuse, when writing from the worst possible human experiences, the control of the narrative is no longer in the hands of someone else. It’s in yours.

Feel that shift? Good. Now use it every time you write a piece, and keep those characters offstage until you know exactly what you want from them.

So let me bring onto the stage the man who made me weep, and let’s assess his purpose here in this piece.

I’ve written about Alexander Johnstone before. In purely genealogical terms, he is a second great-grandfather. In life he was a ships’ rigger in Liverpool, England, who drowned in the Mersey River in 1865. He plays a medium-sized role in a book I wrote about the history of red hair after I was able to have a photograph produced (see above) from a beloved glass slide passed along in my family. He served nicely in that book on red hair as a marker for the genetic material that produced my own hair color and how that genetic mutation, as it’s now considered, traveled down two sides of my family.

Yesterday, while still on Ancetry, filling in the names and dates of various people along the way, I remembered that photograph and how it has been sitting on my shelf for years and then, as I held it, all the people whose names I now know, whose birthdates and christening dates, marriages, immigration histories and deaths dates I had just witnessed and recorded, came forward, as did the great sense of protection they had brought to harboring the glass slide of the ship’s rigger whose death must have plunged them into poverty and mayhem. And what I felt was their connection to this relic, as they had passed it hand over hand to me. And as I downloaded the photo and placed it up for public view to share with the many people who, these generations later, share his genetic material, I heard myself say aloud to him, “Now you are immortal,” knowing well the eternal life bestowed on a photo once it is placed online. And then I wept.

He was called onto the stage. He spoke his lines. I have already used him in a book. Will I use him in a story?

I think I just did.

Do you need more of him for this purpose? I don’t think you do.

How to use genealogy in memoir? Sparingly. Precisely. With purpose. In all, on argument.

Write well.

Want more? Join me in my live online classes.

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Keep in mind that we are always keeping a list of those who want to get in the next Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their memoir finished in six months.

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