I think everyone should write their memoirs. They needn’t be books or anything. They can be weekly YouTube videos. Or, voice notes to yourself. Or, a series of fictitious sitcom episodes based off of real characters and events.1
Writing about ourselves gives us the opportunity to take a break from living our lives and focus on observing our lives for a change. Especially the day-to-day stuff.
We often take time to reflect and contemplate over the big things. Whom to date. Whom to marry. Which job offer to accept. Which enemy to obliterate. But it’s the smaller things that constitute a major part of our lives. A hot cup of coffee in the morning. A good workout session. A tiny gesture by a loved one. A successful Duolingo session. Some dog poop that has to be cleaned. They often remain ignored.
When we read about someone else’s life we often wonder, “Wow! That person’s life is so interesting!” Yes, they are interesting. It’s only because they took the time and put the effort to look at their lives more intricately. Writing our memoirs gives us the opportunity to do exactly that. It helps us realise (and by extension appreciate) how interesting our lives are.
Writing someone’s lifestory is a task we often associate only with celebrities. And very old people. But we’re all writing our stories in the background nonetheless. Every day we weave intricate narratives about who we are, where we’re going, and why certain events unfolded as they did. We may never publish them. But we’re writing them in our minds in any case.
You may think, “Even if I write one, nobody will want to read my memoir.” Here’s where you are mistaken. I don’t have any record of my great-grandfather’s existence, except for his name.2 Had he written a few pages about what it was like to be him and what it was like to live in a small city under the British rule, I would have been eternally grateful.
As someone who reads a lot of history and writes nonfiction, I cannot tell you how many times I have wanted to read a memoir that doesn’t exist. Most likely because many of these people whose memoirs I want to read did not consider themselves noteworthy. But the thing is, literally everyone is worthy of note.
As the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, “We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions. Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favour of your being born. The huge planet would be the odds against it.”3
Very few of us write about themselves. Those of us who do are strikingly harsh narrators of our lives. We hint to ourselves that we’re morons. Hopeless. Uninteresting. It’s because we introspect only when we’re down and low, wrapped in a blanket of despair and sorrow, and our reserves of optimism are running dry.
In these moments, it’s natural to feel as distraught and damned as Shakespeare’s Macbeth who, upon learning of his wife’s death, exclaimed at a pitch of agony that man is a cursed creature.4
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
In such extreme moments, it’s too easy to look back over the years and feel that our lives have been meaningless. When the chips are down, we take stock in just how much things have gone wrong. How many errors there have been. How many unfulfilled plans and frustrated dreams we’ve had.
If we ponder upon the meaning and value of our lives only in moments of great sorrow, loss, or agony, we only get a distorted view of life. However, if we engage in these reflections in other occasions as well, we get to tell a very different story. A far kinder and more balanced story with the very same sets of facts.5
It’s super super important to write your story in moments of joy. Especially in moments of joy. Here’s some advice from Kurt Vonnegut: “I urge you to please notice when you are happy and exclaim, or, murmur or think, at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”6
Documenting your life shouldn’t influence how you live it. If you start living your life a certain way so that it looks good on paper, you’re missing the whole point.7 The whole point of writing a memoir is not only to bear witness to your life’s events, but also to make sense of them. This process of “making sense” involves interpreting them.
Events have no meaning on their own. If you look at an unfavourable event (such as a breakup or a job loss) with the lens of humour instead of drama, the meaning would change.8 Writing memoirs is all about interpretation and reinterpretation of events. That’s what makes them different from a mere chronological account of your life.9
The neuroscientist and author David Eagleman has a beautiful quote: “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”10
At some point in the future you and I will be gone. After a while, the people who knew us (or at least knew about us) would also be gone. And with them, so will our story, our memory, and our name. We’ll die the third death. It’ll be like we never existed. Never mattered.
I think one of the ways we try to cope with this eventuality of “not mattering in the long run” is by pursuing societal status. If we’re rich, successful, famous (or a combination of them), we increase our odds at not being forgotten soon enough. At least, we increase our odds of being remembered more than the average human being. This is one of the reasons we procreate. This is also why we write memoirs.
Memoirs aren’t necessarily truths. They are a perspective of the truth told from the point of view of the author. They can be a story told by a kind and smart individual. Carrying significant meaning. Like many life stories. They can be about a well-meaning, imperfect person facing challenges and, occasionally, succeeding a bit in some aspects. They don’t have to be a story told by a fool.
The point of writing a memoir is not to merely document your life. It’s about making an honest attempt to authentically interpret your life. It’s about making a statement that echoes in the future as well as in the present. It’s about declaring to yourself. And the world. “I exist.”
Or, a series of weekly essays which is secretly a memoir.
In comparison, I don’t even know the name of my great-grandmother.
This quote is from The Black Swan. Even though Taleb is generally perceived as this savage and ruthless mortal being (thanks to his prose and tweets), sometimes even he has one or two nice and uplifting things to say. Provided you put him in the right context, and omit what’s said before and after.
Growing out, Macbeth was my favourite play by Shakespeare. I did not read it in its original unfortunately. (Our school taught Julius Caesar. Another classic. Which I had read in its original Shakespearean English.) But I’ve always found Macbeth, especially Lady Macbeth, to be one of the most complex and intriguing characters ever written.
You could give your life’s story to a John Green, a Matt Haig, a R. K. Narayan, a Ruskin Bond and come up with very different yet honest narratives.
Personally, I have found it very helpful. Otherwise, the happy moments just kind of float past without acknowledgment, and only the hard times get dwelled upon.
Documenting life shouldn’t influence how you live it. If you start living your life a certain way so that it looks good while documenting it, you’re missing the whole point. This is exactly what YouTube vloggers to. They turn their lives into an entertaining content generation machine. That’s not how it should be done.
Which particular lens you decide to put on depends on what kind of person you are and how you generally look at things. Interpretation also carries the weight of emotional memory, which is not always accurate. To keep memory distortion to the absolute minimum, it’s better to document events as and when they happen. This keeps things most authentic. There would be occasions when you have to write about events that happened a long time ago. If it’s an emotionally loaded event, you might want to get some external validation. If that’s not possible, do the best you can. Just don’t lie to yourself. You are the audience of your memoir, and one shouldn’t dupe their audience. Having said that, it’s your story. So you get to write it in the best possible way. It might have flaws. It may not always be accurate. But it sure as hell must be honest.
Even if you don’t plan on turning your life into a content-generation engine to entertain others, there’s a slight possibility that since memoirs are in general meant for external consumption, it might still have some bias or external influence. The best way to keep that to a minimum is to write it for someone who knows you well. Your parents. Your siblings. Your friends. They shouldn’t think you’re a phoney. You are encouraged to take liberty in how you interpret your life’s events. It can be a comedy. A tragedy. A drama. Or, a tragicomedy. I would say that it’s expected off of you.
This is from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Here’s a word of advice. If you’re even remotely interested in neuroscience, read everything written by Eagleman. Start off with The Brain. Then move on to Incognito. Then go to Livewired.