“Nobody would want to read about my mother. She wasn’t anybody.”
I hear that sentence, or something like it, in a lot of first conversations with families. The caller then spends twenty minutes telling me about a woman who crossed an ocean alone at nineteen, ran a business out of her kitchen and buried two husbands. (That one’s a composite, with the details changed.
The pattern is real.) Families are the worst judges of whether their own story is worth a book, and the beliefs that stop them are very consistent.
These are the ones I hear most, and what’s true instead. For the general myths about ghostwriting, such as credit, ethics and cost, see the truth about ghostwriting.
Does a family memoir need a famous or important subject?
No. A family memoir is written for the people who loved the subject and the people who’ll come after them. Your grandchildren won’t care whether their great-grandmother was important to the world. They’ll care that she was important to them, and they’ll want to know what she was like. I’d push this point hard with any family. Famous people get biographies whether they want them or not. The grandmother who held a family together through hard years gets a book only if somebody decides she deserves one, and I think she does.
Ordinary lives are full of extraordinary things nobody asked about. My own grandfather was known in the family as difficult and moody. It took a teenager asking about the war to learn he’d survived Corregidor and three years and four months as a prisoner of the Japanese. That story became Behind the Wire.
Does my parent need to remember everything for a memoir?
No. Nobody remembers everything, and a memoir doesn’t cover everything. It covers the moments that mattered. Gaps are normal, and a good ghostwriter works around them with letters, photographs, records and the memories of other family members, and tells the reader plainly where the record goes quiet.
Families who hold off until they’ve pinned down every date can end up with a stack of notes and no book. Start with what your parent remembers well and let the rest fill in around it.
Memory also improves with the right questions. People who say “I don’t remember much” often remember a great deal once someone asks about one kitchen, one job or one year. My article on interviewing an older relative covers how.
Is it too late to write a memoir for someone in their nineties?
No. Some of my memoir clients have been in their nineties, and late-life books are common in my practice. Doris Barker came to me in her late seventies wanting her lifetime of handwritten dreams preserved as a novel, and we finished Gators in the Soup shortly before she passed away. The only real deadline is the one memory sets, so starting beats planning.
Can you write a memoir about someone who has already died?
Yes. I’ve written memoirs from the papers of people who had died, interviewing their brothers, sisters and other family instead of the person. The book comes out a little different, since it leans more on how others saw the person than on their own account, but it can still be rich and true. Journals, letters and recordings they left behind carry their voice. My article on finishing a late parent’s memoir covers the process.
Does a family memoir have to include the painful parts?
You decide. Most family memoirs are stronger for including the hard chapters, because nobody has a perfect life, and the struggles make the rest mean something. But you choose what goes in, and a family chapter can come out if the people in it don’t want to be there. I had a client strike an entire family chapter from a book recently for exactly that reason.
Will the ghostwriter make things up to fill the story?
A good one won’t. Everything in a memoir should come from what your family tells the ghostwriter, what’s in the documents, and what the ghostwriter can verify. Where the record is thin, the book should say so instead of inventing scenes. The ghostwriter checks family legend too. Family legend had my grandfather on the Bataan Death March; his journal says he was marched into Manila instead, and the book follows the journal.
Does a family memoir have to be published?
No. Many family memoirs are printed in small numbers for children, grandchildren and relatives, and never sold.
Others turn out to have wider value, like an immigration story, a war experience or a slice of local history, and get published more widely later. You can decide after the book exists. My publishing services cover either path.
What if my family disagrees about the memoir?
Settle the decisions before the writing starts. Families disagree about which stories to include, how a parent is portrayed, and who has the final say. Name one person to make decisions, agree who owns the book and who pays, and share chapters with the people who matter most before publication. I’d push any family to do that before the first interview, because a disagreement handled early is a conversation, and one that surfaces at the end can stall a finished book for years.
What’s the one family memoir belief that’s true?
That waiting costs you. Memory fades, people die, and the relatives who could fill the gaps go with them. My grandfather’s stories came to me just in time, a few years before Alzheimer’s began taking them. If there’s a story in your family, start by recording it this month, even if the book comes years later. The belief I’d most like to kill is that there’s plenty of time. Families say it right up until the funeral, and afterward the questions nobody asked have no one left to answer them. When you’re ready for help, my memoir ghostwriting starts with patient interviews, and the Book Discovery Intensive ends with a sample chapter, without committing to the whole book. My ghostwriting services cover the full book.
