I Have a Story in This Place! — How to Write a Great Memoir by Mapping Out your Memories

Try mapping out your memories! Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

You can find many useful prompts—probing questions to answer—on this site and elsewhere online to trigger memories and help you write your stories. Another alternative is to MAP THEM OUT, a fascinating way to bring out stories you might not thought of including in your personal history, important stories, because they are iconic to you.

First, picture your childhood home. I had two. Some people have one. Some have many, having moved around with a parent in the military or sales or a global corporation or for other reasons. Picture any one of those houses.

Okay, now move around that house in your mind and as you do, see what stories present themselves.

I’ll start on the front lawn of our first house in Danville. I loved that house, a simple one-story ranch-style home at the end of a long gravel road in a friendly neighborhood. (I didn’t love our second house!)

A lawn stretched from the cement walkway along the house, beneath the large picture window from the living room, bordered by trimmed jasmine bushes along the house, all the way to the driveway, which snaked around in front of the lawn to the garage on the side of the house. The front walk was bordered with raised red-brick garden boxes, planted with marigolds—I remember those—and other flowers, I’m sure. On the other, smaller side of the walkway in front of my brother’s bedroom window was our white peach tree. It grew the juiciest, sweetest peaches I’ve ever eaten. I remember marveling that we grew something so delicious at our own house. It didn’t come from the grocery store! Fifty years later, I still hope the white peach or nectarine I buy at the store will taste as good. It rarely does.

That tree became even more important to me when we moved to our next house, a monstrosity in a country club, and my parents stopped working in the garden, wanting less maintenance. All the skinny fruit trees planted in the back—an attempt—died within the first couple of years and were never replaced. I missed that white-blossomed peach tree and our vegetable garden on the side of the house with tall corn stalks and tasty red tomatoes. I missed planting flowers together as a family in the brick planter boxes. It never happened again.

It was such a joy then during the pandemic in 2020 when my husband and I began working together to repair and beautify our backyard. He also had wanted minimal maintenance when we moved into our first house together. And we had a very small yard there. Now we have this lovely garden that we created together, a warm and inviting and fun place to relax and bring friends. It feels like love.

I think my brother feels the same, though we’ve never talked about it. At his house in Moraga, he has planted multiple fruit trees and goes OCD over his vegetable garden seasonally.

With my brother and one of my best friends, Ginger, on the front lawn of our old house.

Back to that front lawn of our little ranch-style house. It was a nice long stretch of green grass, where once or twice my dad engaged my brother and me in tickle wars. I remember him on his knees, a big smile on his face as we each came back for more and more tickles, rolling around on the grass giggling wildly. What a wonderous thing! The touch of a caring parent. It may have happened only once. It may have been a few times—I don’t know anymore—but the joy and feeling of love in that moment is giant and sustaining to this day.

We also played airplane with him. He laid on his back with his feet and hands in the air. When it was my turn, I would grab his hands and hoist myself up to rest my belly on his feet. Once balance was achieved, I’d let go of my dad’s hands and throw my arms out on my sides, my wings, as I flew suspended in the air (well, upon his size 15 feet!) for as long as we could manage it. Crashing was fun though, since it usually meant falling on my dad laughing.

In contrast, that front lawn also appeared in a later childhood nightmare. I stood still upon it as snakes covered the entire stretch of green, wriggling their way towards me. It felt very Freudian in retrospect. I believe the dream occurred as puberty took over my body, making it unrecognizable with breasts and curves and oily skin and hair that took me a long time to get used to.

Our front door at the “old house” was either a dark brown wood or painted black. There was a small landscaping area beside the front walk leading to the door, all of it shaded by eaves. I don’t remember what was planted there, a hardy tree of some sort, a ficus probably, but the groundcover was all small rocks, gray and white. It was there I found Spooky, a rather scrawny black kitten we had only had for a few months, stiff and lifeless. I remember the shock, the sadness, and especially my shame—which I had plenty of back then though I didn’t have a name for it. I had dressed Spooky up in doll clothes, a little dress and hat. Had I killed our kitten? My parents said he was probably sick to begin with. Fearful, I never told them my concern. What if they said yes, that it was my fault? Shame can layer itself. Once it is inside us, a parasitic thing, it can thrive on other experiences too, kept silent and secret.

Don’t shy away from the harder memories. They may be emotional, uncomfortable to recall. But in talking through them and reflecting on them and not keeping them secret and contained inside you, their power dissipates. And real, they can be very informative and meaningful for others. Photo by Zane Lee on Unsplash

Look at that! Several stories, and I haven’t even opened the front door yet!

The coolest thing about these stories is that they aren’t just the turning points, big moments in life, the graduations and marriages. Those are important to include in a full autobiography, definitely. But these simpler, daily life moments are ICONIC, often fascinating and yielding unexpected results. They SHOW who we were and are, our family dynamics, personal values and priorities. They paint meaningful pictures of the forces that shaped our lives. And, they take the readers there with us, truthful and real.

It’s like a treasure map of stories!

Give it a try!

And, of course, Stories to Last is happy to be your tour guide if it’s hard to get there on your own.