It’s probably easier to explain why it’s important to write memoirs than it is to explain why it’s important to read them. Writing one’s own story helps to pull together the parts of one’s life that are significant enough to validate that life, at least in the writer’s mind. Writing our own stories helps us to believe that we are preserving something about our lives that has meaning and which we want to share.
Every life is significant, and everyone has a story to tell. If we could all convey our stories, the ones from deep in the heart, the world would be a different place if only because we would all know ourselves and each other better, and our levels of understanding would increase exponentially.
Writing and reading memoirs help us to know who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be. We certainly continue to seek truth through science, but truth reveals itself also, often in profound ways, through poetry, drama, fiction, and essays by people of all ages, all races, and in all languages. Memoirs include all of those types of writing.
Reading other people’s memoirs connects us more strongly to the human family to which we all belong, and that need to create and share our own stories and read those of others goes all the way back to the caves of Lascaux and those smoky drawings about hunting. We as writers and readers are still hunters in a way, and we want those stories of emotional quest and discovery to be known.
--John Bolinger
