Writing in Retirement is an Ideal Way to Share Life Experiences With Your Loved Ones
to anyone who has first hand knowledge of the period, event or persons you are writing about.
You must also remember that the process of selecting people and events for your memoir is highly subjective. There is no real way to overcome this bias other than to make a concerted effort to strive for objectivity. Expert memoirist Lawrence P Gouldrup, PhD, writes, “As we experience life, we mentally distinguish between those events and personalities that are insignificant trivia and those that have been important and memorable to us….we constantly bring our own private experiences into focus by seeing events and people in certain patterns.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that while striving for balance and accuracy, the memoirist shouldn’t add greater depth and meaning to an incident by personalizing its impact. Whether a situation elicited joy,
