On Writing Well: Chapter 24 Summary & Analysis

Many people regret not learning more from their parents and grandparents. But through writing, people can create a record of their family lives for the sake of future generations. Zinsser explains that this can take the form of a formal memoir, an informal family history, or even oral storytelling. All are ways to preserve people’s memories before they die.

Zinsser remembers his father scribbling out his memoirs on a legal pad, then printing them and distributing them to his family. Even though he never revised or cared about his writing style, this is a valid approach to family history—in fact, it allowed his distinctive voice to stand out even more.

Zinsser uses his father’s experience to address some important questions about writing family memoirs. Memoirists sometimes wonder if they should write in their present-day voice or the voice they would have used in the past. Zinsser says that both these approaches can work, as long as the writer commits to one of them. He argues that memoirists should also record as much information as possible, including details that seem irrelevant but might be important to their descendants.

Next, many family memoirists worry about hurting other people’s feelings. Zinsser suggests writing everything down first and sorting through it later. It’s usually courteous to show people any sections written about them before publication, but ultimately, the memoirist gets to make the final decision about what to include. In the 1990s, many memoirists started using their books as an excuse to wallow in self-pity and whine about other people—Zinsser cautions against doing this, since these books weren’t interesting and caused plenty of problems for their writers. Plenty of successful memoirists write about their difficult childhoods and resentment, but they focus on healing and growth, not settling scores and portraying themselves as victims. In fact, the very act of writing a memoir can be a way for people to heal.

The hardest and most stressful part about writing a memoir is organizing it. Zinsser recommends first cutting down the scope—there’s no need to mention everyone in the family or cover an entire lifetime. For instance, one of Zinsser’s students was planning on interviewing all of her siblings for her memoir, but Zinsser advised her to skip the interviews and focus on telling her story. Another student gave herself the impossible task of visiting her father’s native village in Poland and reconstructing his experience during the Holocaust. Instead, Zinsser advised her to write about her own quest to understand her heritage, and the book ended up being far more powerful.

Memoirists should start with specific, vivid memories, because the fact that they remember them means they’re probably significant. For instance, Zinsser wrote a New York Times article about a mechanical baseball game he played with his childhood friends. Then, an executive at the company that made the game contacted Zinsser and invited him to play on one of the last existing machines. While this story is incredibly specific, it’s powerful because it represents a universal truth: “everyone had a favorite toy or game or doll.”

Similarly, in Writing About Your Life, his memoir and guide to memoir writing, Zinsser decided not to tell the full story of his service in World War II. Instead, he wrote about one significant moment from the war: traveling across North Africa in a boxcar. The most important stories aren’t about what someone did, but about how a situation made them who they are. One great way to start writing a memoir is to sit down for a few minutes every day and write about a different important event from the past. After a few months, a memoirist can lay out all their material and arrange it into an overall story.