‘Memoir Project’ encourages you to tell a story, but with purpose

There’s a telling art to memoir writing.

And nowadays, everybody seems to want to write about their life. But too often that telling gets bogged down with excess baggage and loses direction. Marion Roach Smith wants to change that with her new book, “The Memoir Project — A Thoroughly Non-Stardardized Text for Writing & Life.”

Ms. Roach Smith is a St. Lawrence University trustee who lives and teaches writing in Troy. She’s an alumni of the SLU class of 1977 and a former staff member of the New York Times and is a contributor of essays to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Her previous books are “The Roots of Desire — The Myth, Meaning and Power of Red Hair” and “Another Name for Madness,” which drew on her experiences as her mother battled Alzheimer’s disease.

Besides scores of self-published biographies and memoirs, Ms. Roach Smith noted there’re 20,000 websites created every hour, with most of them about people talking about themselves.

Ms. Roach Smith encourages people to write about their lives. She just wants them to do it well.

To do that, consider her “cheeky bird theory of life.”

Her father, while on a family vacation in the Caribbean, gave the name “cheeky birds” to the animals that flew to their hotel patio and selected what morsels of food to take.

“This is what you are now allowed to do,” Ms. Roach Smith writes in “The Memoir Project.” “Glide into the banquet and that is your tale and take what you need from the feast.”

In other words, she said in a phone interview from her Troy home, “Just tell me one story at a time. Then we can get to the other ones.”

Those stories are important, she said, and not just for their writers.

“We don’t need to know everything about each other,” she said. “But wouldn’t it be wonderful if people would write the story of their marriage, the birth of their children or the history of their family?”

Ms. Roach Smith teaches writing at a variety of venues. Her weekly memoir classes at The Arts Center of the Capital Region concentrate on short-form memoir. Her classes instruct how to write “with purpose.” She said many students tell her they want to write their memoirs.

“I try to get them to write instead a memoir; something about their lives,” she said. “To go small and take it one experience at a time. That allows you to write with more purpose than simply documenting the day-to-day and datebook mentality that a lot of people have about memoir.”

Ms. Roach Smith has experience in what to leave in and out of a memoir. In 1983, while working as a news clerk for the New York Times, she pitched a story idea to an editor about a little-known disease. In that same year, the magazine published “Another Name for Madness.”

“The first first-person account of Alzheimer’s in the mainstream press, it resulted in a contract for a book,” she writes in “The Memoir Project.” The day after the article appeared, she was on NBC’s “Today” show.

While researching her Alzheimer’s book (“Another Name for Madness”) for Houghton Mifflin, she had to portray the book’s subtitle: “The Dramatic Story of a Family’s Struggle With Alzheimer’s Disease.” She learned a lot about her mother while researching the book, including an affair and her battles with alcoholism. Those parts were left out.

“What I am doing here is the same thing you must do as you write memoir,” she writes in her new book. “I am taking inventory of all my stories, acknowledging that many more exist, while looking for only those that fit this particular assignment.”

Ms. Roach Smith said everybody has a story to tell, even if it’s not as dramatic as a mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. The story genre could range from personal essay to an op-ed piece for the local newspaper.

“Pick something you like and go after it,” she said.

Ms. Roach Smith said a variety of factors have caused a boom in memoir writing.

“There is this online power of finding information that wasn’t available to us before,” she said. “There’s house histories, town histories and there is family history and the ability to be in touch with one another.”

She also credited the popularity of scrapbooking, which reflects the interest of people capturing personal history and stories and a baby-boom generation that’s not shy about talking and writing about themselves.

“There’s a combination of forces,” she said. “I think it’s healthy. I don’t think everybody should publish, but I absolutely believe everybody should write. It’s the single greatest portal to self-discovery.”