AN INNOVATIVE MEMOIR

In teaching memoir writing, I invariably find the Number One reason people want to write a memoir is to preserve memories for their children and grandchildren. Since they aren’t thinking in terms of best-sellers nor do they want to invest large sums of money, the solution is to create a do-it-yourself project.

That’s the route a Florida man took.

Warren Adamsbaum , a Boca Raton retiree, was a soldier during World War 11. A dutiful son, he wrote hundreds of letters to his parents to assure them, as he says now, “that I was OK.”

When he came home after the war his father presented him with an album in which he’d pasted every one of those letters. For years the album lay on a shelf, the pages beginning to crumble. Looking at those papers his late father had so carefully saved, Warren decided to put together a memoir that would “save the essence of those letters.” But he was perplexed about how to do it. A collection of them would have given the facts, but he felt there were too many mundane details. What finally came to his mind was an unusual format: Write about his experiences, interspersing selective letters.

He focused his memoir solely on the war years, 1943-1946. It took him several years to write and organize the manuscript, but what treasured – and even humorous- memories it conjured up, such as his mother’s guilty certainty that the stomach ailment he rashly wrote home about must have been caused by the tinned salami she sent him six months earlier! And dramatic images like marching into a captured German town and seeing white towels and sheets flown from every window as symbols of surrender. Adding copies of treasured items such as his Honorable Discharge, Warren ended up with more than 300 pages. He dedicated the manuscript to the memory of his parents.

Warren wanted the memoir to be shared only with family members and close friends.. Taking the pages to a local store he ordered 36 copies. The cost was a few hundred dollars, but the reward was gold, including praise from the sole war buddy he was still touch with.

“I worked hard and long,” Warren says “but I feel very proud of myself.”

There may be an additional reward down the line. Warren continued to be an avid letter writer, but the recipient has been his only grandson. The two live far apart, so Warren maintained a close bond via a multitude of letters and, later, E-mails. “I just learned that Andy has saved quite a few of them!” (A future family memoir?)

P.S. Do you have a story about writing a memoir? Let me know at ahosansky@gmail.com and perhaps you’ll see yourself here, too.

WEBSITE: www.annehosansky.com
BOOKS: “Widow’s Walk” – available through iUniverse.com; “Turning Toward Tomorrow” – Xlibris.com; “Ten Women of Valor: – Amazon.com and CreateSpace.com. Also Amazon Kindle.

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