When You Die, Your Library Burns Down
But Don’t Fear: Here’s a Simple Method for Preserving the Stories Only You Can Tell
For years, my daughter, Celeste, has asked me to write an autobiography. It’s true, I have had very interesting life events:
the time I drowned and was resuscitated by a lifeguard;
a 47-year marriage to my husband Dan who became a quadriplegic the last nine years of our life together;
financial devastation due to $6 million of medical bills;
the loss after Dan’s death of my only piece of property—burned to ashes due to a catastrophic wildfire;
three major faith crises (which involved digging through ashes of another sort).
Oh, and I’ve written or cowritten over two dozen published books and thousands of published articles. Some of my life is chronicled in those works, bits and pieces. Surely I could write about my life for my family.
Except, I couldn’t.
It’s not that I dislike memoirs. I treasure them. Right now I’m in Book Two (of Six) of the Nobel Prize-winning Winston Churchill’s first-person account of World War II (almost 5,000 pages). It’s one thing to read about the mechanics of history. It’s much more meaningful to read what the history makers as they were pulling the levers.
But to write my own puny personal history?
First, where to start? With my own birth, the product of the doomed marriage of a brain-injured war veteran and the society princess who eloped from Tennessee to the wilds of Lamy, New Mexico? Maybe further back—grandparents who raised them?
I faced what people tell me all the time: People know the stories of their lives, but each one is stymied with the prospect of telling the story of their life. Always, where to start?
When I was contemplating my overwhelm, I came across a unique book called Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The subtitle made me laugh out loud: “I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.”
The book’s description calls it “a memoir in bite-sized chunks.” Genius, I thought. Sure enough, the stories in it, instead of being arranged chronologically, were arranged like encyclopedia entries. One of my favorites, under “B” for Brother:
My brother, who grew up with three sisters, was I won’t say how many years old when he finally realized he did not have to wrap the towel around his chest when he came out of the shower.
See what I mean? Genius!
I immediately began dissecting this book to find out how it worked, and how it would work for me. And as soon as I began, others asked me to show them how, too, and that’s how I started teaching The Biopedia© Method. (It’s also called Map My Life: A Ten-Minute Memoir.)
The Parts of a Biopedia: 3 Ts
T is for Tell. I recently heard a statement that stopped me in my tracks. “Every time an elderly person dies,” wrote African historian Amadou Hampâté Bâ, “an entire library burns down.”
The backbone of any memoir is the stories. But memoir writers often get hung up with two things: keeping track of those stories, and trying to string them together. I teach people to corral their ideas on 3x5 cards (or a digital equivalent) where they write down just the idea using this KTS formula: Keywords, Title, and a “Single, stabbing point.”
Why just a card and not the whole story? Because once you start remembering stories, they come in floods of memories! You just need reminders you can come back to, and write the brief stories later.
This first step is why I call Biopedia “The Ten-Minute Memoir.” It encourages people to preserve their ideas, and to keep them brief and focused to prevent overwhelm. Then, in chunks of opportunity on your schedule, you write the items. Short. One story at a time.
Here’s one I wrote under “I” for “Intubation” for my own Biopedia. I stripped it down to just dialogue and a few details but it shows my husband’s irrepressible personality.
(First complete conversation after four months of coma and intubation, when the tubes came out)
Dan: “I want.”
Dan: “I want. . . “
Ryan and Celeste [our children]: “What do you want, Daddy?”
Dan: “I . . . I . . . I dunno. Suggest something.”
T is for Timeline. With Biopedia’s individual entries, you don’t have to worry about extensive backstory. But on the other hand, as Rosenthal’s book showed, for context people can anchor their stories to a timeline, and avoid having to repeat a lot of “setting” details.
A timeline can be as simple as a list with dates of life events. Some of my students (especially military personnel) have used maps and labeled deployments with dates. Other timelines can focus on significant events, awards and accomplishments, and so on.
T is for Time Capsule. In my classes, I encourage people (especially those who don’t keep journals) to set aside some time to record what they do in an ordinary day. Any day.
I promise them that the way they spend their time, what technologies they use, what showed their focus, will be a “slice of life” that will allow others in the future to see them in daily life. For instance, how differently would your grandmother have described shopping for and preparing food? Not the way you do, which you regard as “normal,” just as my granny salted hams and canned butterbeans.
The Stories We’d Only Whispered
Although KTSs and Biopedia entries will pop into your mind all the time, sometimes you might need a prompt to evoke something hidden in your past. One of the most stimulating prompts I give class members is this: “Write about something that happened in your life, or that of a family member, which could not be explained logically or scientifically.”
People of all faiths (and none) have such stories, things that shouldn’t die with the tellers. Examples:
The mysterious stranger who appeared on a highway out of nowhere to help a stranded relative.
Wartime rescues that “couldn’t have happened”—but did.
An “impossible” prayer that was answered.
Mothers-in-law (like mine) who lifted cars to save their children.
Ghost stories and UFO experiences.
Healings and supernatural messages.
All inexplicable—but they really happened.
Through a state grant, I recently taught about three dozen New Mexico military veterans how to write their experiences through Biopedia. Most served in Vietnam; some in more recent wars. More than any other group I’ve taught, these men and women had stories nobody could possibly know or, some thought, believe.
In most cases, PTSD had made them want to bury some of their experiences. But they found that by writing about them—if only for themselves—they could wrangle some of those feelings. With Biopedia, they didn’t have to worry about outlining a book or telling what happened before certain incidents. They could do it, in ten-minute chunks.
But in the writing, they got a bonus: most of those who wrote such entries got them published in an anthology by another state grant. One of the participants, Jim Tritten, Commander US Navy, Retired, said this:
Not everybody can tackle a full-length autobiography or memoir, but Latayne teaches people to write about the best parts—the stories! You don’t have to be an established author to learn easy techniques for keeping track of story ideas, and writing them in short-form and memorable ways. Her expertise and enthusiasm are contagious and motivating.
Tritten and his wife Jasmine later used the Biopedia concept to write their own full-length shared memoir, Around the World in 80 Years. (It includes the story of Jim’s healing of a hip injury as he heard a group of Orthodox nuns singing near the rim of the Grand Canyon. Inexplicable, especially since he’s not particularly religious.)
Of course, not everyone wants wide publication. Most of my students for years now have settled into the rhythm of writing their stories just for themselves and their families. Two of my students, Sherrie and Marie, are using the method to write specific letters to their children who were adopted as toddlers in China, giving them a history they would otherwise not have. Another student, Jodie, is using the method to write the cherished recipes of her Norwegian grandmother, along with reminiscences of cooking with her. Another student, Janie, is collating her own teaching strategies she developed to help slow learners conquer fractions and the mysteries of spelling.
All these are libraries which must not be allowed to burn down.
Don’t Wait
But these libraries aren’t just the stories of the elderly. Remember Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose Encyclopedia book sparked this all? She was already famous for children’s books when she wrote her version in 2005 of what I now call a Biopedia.
Remember how she said that she hadn’t “survived against all odds”? How oddly prophetic those words were, because twelve years later, at the age of 51, she suddenly died of cancer. Yet, the library of her short life still stands.
Tell your stories now, I admonish my students. Write them down. Don’t wait until you’re old. Like Amy, you might not “live to tell.”
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I come from a family of storytellers, and the stories we tell are of our lives. My younger sibling and I were my grandmother's youngest grandchildren, and on our birthdays, she would write letters of what she remembered of her life at the same age. Her mother handwrote a short autobiography, which sadly, was never finished, but it stops at the point where her daughter's letters begin. My substack writing is essentially the stories from my life.
Thomas De Quincey, who is best known for his brief memoir 'Confessions of an Opium Eater', has this to say about writing about oneself:
‘You will think perhaps that I am too confidential and communicative of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
‘The fact is, I place myself at a distance of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing to those who will be interested in me hereafter; and wishing to have some record of time, the entire history of which no one can know but myself, I do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable of making, because I know not whether I can ever find the time to do it again.’ - Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821
I have thought about those notes on 3 x 5 cards. The library does not burn down. Only the card catalog.