Memoir Help

If you’ve recently retired, or have some time on your hands, this may be the time to look back at your life. To take a serious look, rich in memory, with fresh insight, to see how you became the person you are, and then quite literally to hold that knowledge in your hand.

To write a memoir.

When you’re still in the thick of it, your life can seem like a jumble of one crazy thing after another. But at a certain point you can recollect the past in some tranquility and start to put the disparate pieces together into a clearer picture. All those wild adventures, crazy swerves, hairy moments, and brilliant moves—not to mention the wild infatuations, lost loves, and, with luck, long stretches of romantic bliss—probably seemed random at the time. Now is the time to discern the larger pattern that defines your essential character. Triumphs and disasters, joys and sorrows—all of them combined to make you you.

A you to be captured in a coherent and compelling narrative of sufficient depth and candor that it reveals the fullness of you--your career, personal life and outside interests—all of the parts fitting together to make an integrated whole that, thrillingly, you can now see.

Writing is hard, and writing a life is harder still. But it can be wonderfully engaging and provocative. Let me help! Either by assisting you as editor, writing coach, or sounding board, or by taking full charge of the keyboard myself. Either way, I’d be your teammate, drawing out your recollections of your life (which I can supplement with further research and consultations if you like) from your earliest memories up to the present moment.

As you can see from this website, I have written about just about everything under the sun as a journalist, novelist and historian, so I should be able to find my way around your story. I have published my own much-admired memoir, In My Blood, which you’ll find on the “In My Blood” tab above, and have co-authored or ghostwritten many others, which you’ll find under the “Collaborations” option at the “Other Work” tab.

The final manuscript might be a brisk twenty-five pages or a detailed two hundred and fifty. Whatever feels right to you. I can also help ascertain if the book might be of interest to a trade publisher, or if it should be privately printed in a limited edition for friends, colleagues and family. If the former, I can help prepare the pitch. And if the latter, I have a team in place to put your manuscript up online in an elegant PDF or turn it into a handsome printed book in whatever quantity you like.

A memoir is not for everyone, but it can be an immensely valuable experience to review your life with an astute, sensitive interviewer who is also a skilled, much-published writer to capture it in full—and then convey it to others, now and for all time, that they may know you, and remember you, better. It is a gift you can give to yourself, or others might give to you.

Rates available on request. Contact me at john@johnsedgwick.biz.