Image from the Church website.
I read Devout this week. That’s the memoir written by David Archuleta, who rocketed to fame on American Idol and was briefly the Church’s most popular Mormon before he left the faith. It was highly readable and I finished it in two days. I’ll write a full review for my next post. I didn’t finish it in time to write a review by today.
But it got me thinking about memoirs in general. Remember when we were encouraged to write our family history and research our ancestors? Especially the pioneer ancestors? I’ve got a stack of published books that make up my family history. One of my relatives became a publisher and the entire extended family benefited because he gathered up every family history ever written and put them in book form. It seems to me that we cherry-picked from those histories to tell the most faith-affirming stories. When I’ve sat down and read the entire memoir, it contains things that would challenge faith too.
I don’t hear much encouragement anymore to keep journals or research pioneer stories. I wish more women had left memoirs. In my family history, which goes back to Nauvoo, the written family histories focus on the men. I posted before about two polygamous brides in my family tree who didn’t leave much detail and I wish they had.
I’ve toyed with the idea of writing my own memoir. I have a story to tell. I want to be understood. I think that’s my biggest motivation — I want to be understood. I do have one memoir written by a ggg-grandmother who emigrated to the USA to join the Saints and then left the Church a few years after arriving in Utah. She tells a lot of her story, but she left out the reason she left the Church. I understand from asking around that it had to do with a business deal gone bad with a Church leader. I wish I had her full perspective on that, rather than just the oblique way she hinted at it.
Hawkgrrl wrote a memoir of her mission, The Legend of Hermana Plunge. It’s well-written and I was immediately right there with her, teaching the gospel in the Canary Islands. It was so authentic that it raked up a lot of feelings about my own mission that I hadn’t processed. Which goes to show the purpose of a memoir — to connect with others, to find commonality in our experiences. Memoirs matter.
So here are today’s discussion questions:
- In general, do you enjoy reading memoirs and family histories? (professionally published or not)
- Have you ever thought of writing your own memoir? It doesn’t have to be a long book, just typing a half dozen pages counts as a memoir.
- How honest do you want a memoir to be? I know I’ve set at least one memoir down because it felt more like a rant. But I also feel that memoirs that are only focused on the good stuff are hollow. (I felt that Archuleta struck a good balance in Devout. He gave enough details to give context, but it didn’t feel voyeuristic. And he treated everyone in his story with respect for their humanity.)
- Do you have family history on your bookshelf? Or on a website? How much research have you done into the stories of your family members? Interviewing your grandparents for a school project counts.
Wheat & Tares 
Thank you Ms. Janey for this post. I have found folks’ lives interesting in broad swaths – perhaps that is my YouTube mentality showing – but it is good to have a general quick view of a person’s lifetime.
In my retirement, I have set myself to entering the data from published obituaries into the genealogy databank maintained by the LDS Church at FamilySearch. While combing thru these obits, I am uplifted by the personal details also contained therein.
Here is a particularly inspiring example, from a farm girl-turned golden ager in Montana:
” Darlene had her own career teaching at Sunny Ridge Elementary school starting in 1971. She thrived on teaching. Her students learned to make applesauce on Johnny Appleseed Day and gingerbread people in December. She devised her own individualized spelling program before that was a popular method. Each year she read Charlotte’s Web to her class, striving to not cry during the ending. Darlene’s teaching style and mothering style were much the same. She was always approachable and kind, inspiring obedience through her great love.
Darlene looked forward to yearly trips back to the dairy farm to visit her parents and meet up with Dorothy’s family. Ever the farm girl, she loved being outdoors, including working in her yard and garden. She and Art loved camping at Cascade Lake and the Oregon Coast and skiing at Bogus Basin.
Darlene’s great loves beyond her family were children, birds, wildflowers, sewing, and knitting. She once had a hummingbird land in her hands while she was rescuing it from the garage—much to her awe and delight. She sewed her own wedding gown and thirty years later sewed her daughter’s–and the four bridesmaids’ dresses! ”
Either the Charlotte’s Web vignette or the picture of the gentle hummingbird would be a marvelous way to remember this gentle lady, and I am so glad that somebody wrote it down.
I don’t generally have any interest in reading memoirs of famous people. I don’t like, or understand, our cultural fixation with celebrity.
I have no memories of my mother, who died when I was 3 years old. I am lucky that she was able to record a personal history before she died, so I have her life story in her words including the audio tapes (converted to CD) that were used to create the history. My mom kept a near daily journal for the last 8+ years of her life. I’m not kidding, there’s 330+ entries per year, detailing buying new shoes for the kids, canning fruit, having kids, getting colds, and giving talks in church. Often just two or three sentences per day. I typed up most of her journals when I was in my 20s, but admit that I ran out of courage to do the last one. I was too nervous about every entry where she was tired, or something hurt, because I knew her cancer diagnosis was lurking. I suppose I should try to get that last volume from my Dad to complete the job.
I have started a personal history of my own. It’s 68 pages and only gets into my 30s, because I ramble too much. But I don’t worry too much about that. I’m aware it won’t ever be read by anyone but maybe my own kids or potential grandkids. I want them to understand who I was, how I thought and why I did things. I want them to understand that I ramble too much.
I’ve also started a memoir of my mission. I find it a compelling segment of life because it is two years that I experienced that no one else in my life was around for. The first draft is maybe 20% complete and I haven’t touched it for several years. It’s been a struggle to understand my audience and purpose with that one, and I’ve been meaning to have my wife read through the chunk that is most complete to try to get a feeling for whether I’m producing something worthwhile at all. But life is busy, and my relationship with the church has changed significantly since I started that one. I want it to be completely honest, but also capture my feelings at the time, not just my cynicism of the present.