I’ve thought a lot about Frank McCourt and his engaging memoir Angela’s Ashes since hearing of his unexpected death yesterday. McCourt published Angela’s Ashes the same year I finished the family history of my Scottish grandparents. Until writing that book I hadn’t paid much attention to the memoir genre. Frankly, I can’t remember reading a memoir before Angela’s Ashes unless one counts Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. I must have been drawn to McCourt’s book because of all the attention it was receiving. Little did I realize  how that book would change my life.   

Writing my family history helped me see the value of leaving a record of one’s life. As I wrote about my grandparents’ lives, I keenly felt the loss of not having known them and hearing their story as they would have told it. I had my mother and two aunts who were valuable resources for factual material, but it wasn’t the same as being able to hear my grandparents’ version of what happened to them.  

That sense of loss led me to the conviction that I should motivate and help others write their life stories. I have written before about how I naively believed writing that one family history taught me enough to teach others. Of course, I soon realized I was in over my head and began looking for help. And there was Angela’s Ashes. It couldn’t have been more fortuitous timing. I learned so much from that book that helped focus my thinking.  Here was an ordinary man—not a hero or a celebrity—who had written about his life in such an engaging way that it resonated profoundly with people everywhere, selling millions of copies worldwide, winning a Pulitzer Prize.

I learned many things from Frank McCourt, but there are two that stand out.

1.  A person doesn’t have to be a celebrity to write an interesting life story. We’ve all had interesting lives. It’s just a matter of telling our story in an interesting way. Here’s how McCourt did it…

• He re-created incidents from his life and presented them as scenes so readers felt they were living his experiences along with him.
• He re-created conversations that occurred decades before, thereby illuminating personalities by letting people speak for themselves. While there was no way he could duplicate exactly what was said in these conversations, they “ring true” all the same.
• He didn’t whitewash the flaws of difficult people but wrote about them honestly and fairly, showing both their strengths and weaknesses.
• Although people he loved often made his life miserable, he wrote about them with compassion and forgiveness, even humor, so he never came across as bitter or vindictive.

I continually stress these techniques in my classes and included them when I later wrote my life story writing  book—quoting McCourt frequently—because I think they’re essential to writing an engaging memoir. I thank Frank McCourt for showing the way.         

 2.  McCourt taught me something else: You’re never too old. You’re never too old to tell your story, a message I convey to my retirement-age students constantly. And, you’re never too old to embark on a new career path. McCourt published Angela’s Ashes when he was sixty-six—after three decades of teaching and at a time when most people retire. Then he published TWO more books after that!  What a role model he’s been for us. I came to teaching relatively late in life—after I had raised four children and filled spare hours with volunteer work. My last fourteen years as a teacher have been some of the most interesting and rewarding years of my life. The sense of fulfillment I’ve experienced from teaching life story writing has enhanced every other aspect of my life. Like McCourt, I consider myself a late bloomer.

As I’ve read many of the tributes to him these last two days, it’s apparent that others have Frank McCourt to thank for their personal success. For some time the publishing industry has experienced what many call a “memoir boom.” While I haven’t studied the phenomenon closely, I suspect Angela’s Ashes was the catalyst—giving courage to countless others to write and publish their stories.  

I’ve felt unsettled ever since hearing the news of McCourt’s death, keenly feeling the loss of someone who has been important to me and regretting that I wasn’t able to tell him.  But I can tell you. Blogs can serve all kinds of good purposes.

As a teacher I’m always looking for new ways to help my students remember experiences from their past to develop story ideas. In one effective classroom exercise, I ask students to draw the floor plan of their childhood home, sketching in where the walls were, drawing little boxes to indicate furniture placement. My students are always surprised how many memories come flooding back–memories of incidents both good and bad,  holiday celebrations, the smell of their mother’s cooking, the feel of the sofa upholstery, conversations with relatives, feelings of happiness, inadequacy, fear, etc. Try this exercise sometime. It’s amazing the number of story ideas that will come to you.

On another occasion I asked my students to bring to class a souvenir from their high school days. Some complained that they hadn’t saved anything, so I told them to draw a picture of something they’d like to bring if they still had it. A few followed my suggestion, bringing in a drawing of a cherished trophy that had been lost, a special dress made in sewing class, a beloved jalopy that had been restored. Sometimes the act of drawing can resurrect more memories and feelings than the actual, tangible piece of memorabilia.

My drawing exercises prompted one of my students, Alice, to think about all the beautiful dresses her mother had made for her when she was growing up, and the dresses she had made herself as a fledgling seamstress. Alice no longer possesses these dresses, but she remembers them in detail, so she drew them from her memory and wrote brief stories about them that capture a bit of her past. For example…

“My best friend Lois and I made dresses alike in eighth grade Home Ec. They were made of a tiny yellow gingham check fabric with an embroidered border print of pastel flowers. We modeled them together at the Mother-Daughter Tea. Lois never sewed again. I put her zipper in for her, as she was very behind schedule. She got a D on it. I got an A, with a thank you from the teacher for helping Lois.”

“Mama made this dress and won a blue ribbon at the grange. The fabric was a crisp cotton in a wild striped print. I don’t recall just how the sleeves ended. The colors were pink, yellow, black, and white. The yoke and collar were white pique. The three buttons looked like three yellow daisies. The yoke was trimmed in the latest thing: jumbo bright yellow rick-rack. Mama wore her thin black patent leather belt with it. About 1956.”

 Alice found this exercise a valuable way to revisit a time in her past she hadn’t thought about in years. The process of sketching her dresses cemented them in her memory the same way writing about them would have.

 Experiment with this expercise. Draw the floor plan of your childhood home, or a later home that was memorable.  Or how about your grandparents’ home? The first home you bought after you married? Your playhouse? Your doll house? Your erector set monstrosity? Your science fair project? Your back yard? Your first car? The layout of your school? Your church? Your neighborhood? Don’t stew about making your drawings artistic creations. Be loose and have fun with the project. Let your mind drift back to the past and as memories come to you, jot them down as possible story ideas.

When I ask my students to draw their childhood home in my class, I then assign them to go home and write about that house, while the memories are still vivid in their minds. You should do the same. Capitalize on the emotion your sketching generates and use it to write a memorable, engaging story.

Try it and let me know how it goes.