We’re not particularly good at talking about our feelings in my family, but we do write books, and after my dad wrote his memoir four years ago, at age 88, I felt I understood his biggest life decision. Thankfully, he had told his story well, as too few authors of family memoirs do.
It’s common for elders to want to record their lives in books intended for their offspring and descendants. Often, these family authors seem to think that because of their audience, quality doesn’t matter. They don’t need an editor or to do revisions.
That doesn’t make much sense. If you are writing for future generations, what impression do you expect to make with a bad book?
One of the many things I admire about my dad, Eric Wohlforth, is that when he gives himself a task, he does it right. His book went through many drafts. I edited it five times.
Of course, I knew the underlying story. I’ve often retold the tale of his move from Brooklyn Heights to Anchorage, Alaska, in 1966. He gave up a career as a Wall Street lawyer for a two-man firm in a frontier town. It was a brave, almost crazy move, and it set the course of all our lives.
This decision proved fortuitous, although no one thought so at the time. Dad became an important part of Alaska history just after it became a state. He wrote many of Alaska’s financial laws and had a hand in creating some of its most important institutions, including the $80 billion Alaska Permanent Fund.
What I didn’t know was how doubts and regrets helped push him. He feared that his legal career would stagnate as a cog in the Wall Street machine.
The Alaska move had always been a mystery to me. Its brashness didn’t fit with my perception of dad’s prudent and judicious character (the qualities that make him so valuable as a lawyer and a leader). I learned it was his shot to join a new world when he felt he had missed key chances in the old one.
Part of my job as an editor was to draw out some of the stories behind these feelings—to help bring to life that monumental decision.
Writing is not at all like talking. Dad is gifted with dry wit and has wonderful comic timing, but in the early drafts, his humor was not coming through. The set-ups were too abrupt. As he worked on that, the funny stories started to land, or he deleted them. And he made many other changes that turned his book, A Life Listened To, into a read that has charm and verve and will be read by members of our family for generations to come.
One common excuse for bad writing for family is that you don’t have to be interesting to a captive audience. But future generations don’t have to read your family memoir.
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