Memoir Co-Author Services

Memoir Co-Author ServicesBooks That Preserve a Wealth of Experience

Turning Memories into Privately Published MemoirsWith Author Hawley Roddick

To create a personal/business memoir with a professional author, contact Hawley Roddick: www.HawleyRoddick.com 2

Why Commission a Memoir?

Most young people know more about how today's couple of the month met than how their own parents or grandparents met.

Too few people know their grandmother’s maiden name or what their grandfather did.


Good News

Memoirs are increasingly popular today, thanks in part to baby boomers who realize that if they don’t pass on their wisdom, it will be lost when they are gone.


Personal Treasure

You acquire many treasures in a lifetime, but none is more valuable—or more important to people you care about—than your experience.

By sharing your experience in a memoir, you influence how you are remembered.


Hindsight and Foresight

Your memoir is a map of where you have been and sharpens your focus on where you still want to go.

In a sense, by writing your past, you write your future.


Family Wealth

Charles W. Collier, Harvard’s seniorphilanthropic adviser, sees family wealth as:

Human capital: family members. Intellectual capital: family members’ ability to

learn, communicate, and make joint decisions. Social capital: family members success at

engaging with society.

Working with a professional author on your own memoir returns high dividends on all these aspects of family wealth.


Family Business

Families can combine their history with the history of their family business, in order to:

Pass on their principles (along with their business assets) to future generations.

Clarify criteria for managing and distributing wealth.

Spotlight who and what matter most (and why).


Business Benefits

A business biography can also: Underscore why the firm stands out from

competitors. Support recruitment by chronicling achievements

and career opportunities. Acknowledge the people who make the firm what it

is. Increase market share by personalizing the firm.


Memoir Myths

Some lives aren’t interesting enough for a memoir.

Reality Check: Mark Twain said, “There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility.”

It takes a big ego to write a memoir.

Reality Check: It takes humility and generosity to share life lessons and to admit that others will gain from them.


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One More Memoir Myth

Creating a memoir takes too much of my time.

Reality Check: You can count on Hawley Roddick, the author of both novels and nonfiction books, to save your time by writing your story your way.


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The Big Picture

We: Have been telling our stories for

thousands of years. Owe it to our families to preserve our

wealth of memories. Can increase market share if we have a

business and record its story. Will enrich future historians with our

personal and professional histories. Gain insights from our memoir that will

help shape our future.


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Passing the Torch

The storytelling impulse is ancient — early humans painted images on cave walls that depicted their experiences.

After we acquired language, shamans served as oral historians and were the keepers of our stories.

Then we developed writing and circulated our stories more widely.

Since the invention of printing and film, we can share our stories with many more people than ever before.


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Gilgamesh The world’s first epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh,

anticipates Noah’s flood. Inscribed in cuneiform on 12 clay tablets, it is our first

biographical book and perhaps our oldest written story.

It originated in Ancient Sumeria, probably between 2750 and 2500 BCE, and tells the adventures of the historical King of Uruk (in what is now Iraq), who was said to descend from, and be in contact with, beings from outer space.

Translations are available in bookstores.


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Early Biography Around 3000 BCE, the life stories of Egyptian pharaohs

and other rich men were carved on their tomb walls. In the Egyptian New Kingdom (1400-1500 BCE),

mummies held their autobiographies to help prove in the afterlife that they had been good people.

The first surviving woman’s autobiography was dictated by (or ghostwritten for) Ahuri, daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh; she admits in it that she can’t write.


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A Great Biographer “Plutarch (born Boeotia Chaeronea) was a Greek

essayist and biographer who died in 120 CE. His great work is The Parallel Lives comprising 46 surviving biographies arranged in pairs (one Greek life with one comparable Roman) and four single biographies.

“As a biographer Plutarch is almost peerless, although his facts are not always accurate. Since his purpose was to portray character and reveal its moral implications, his technique included the use of much anecdotal material.”

— www.bartleby.com/65/pl/Plutarch.html


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Biography in the West

Circa 45 B.C., Julius Caesar wrote "Commentaries" that are a kind of memoir

About 399, Saint Augustine’s Confessions were the first Western autobiography.

In the 16th century, Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini dictated his Memoirs — the first nonreligious autobiography to achieve the stature of art.

In the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions set a new level for candor.


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A Famous Biographer

James Boswell wrote the Life of [Samuel] Johnson [1709-1784], a book that, in the centuries that followed, received mixed reviews. The great 20th century literary critic Edmund Wilson, for example, thought Boswell "a vain and pushing diarist."

This biography illustrates both the virtues and vices of a recording in diary form the subject’s life as it unfolds. We are still reading it.


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Early Autobiography in the USA

The Puritans brought religious autobiography to the colonies.

The first autobiographical narrative written by an American Indian, which broke loose from Puritan restraint, was A Short Narrative of My Life by Samson Occom (1768), published posthumously.

In 1789, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano compares African and American cultures. The author and his sister were kidnapped in Africa as children and were brought here as slaves.


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Evolving Autobiographical Form

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sensationalized stories told of being held captive by Indians or fleeing from a brutal husband or slave owner. These were not necessarily factual.

In the first half of the twentieth century, academics belittled autobiography as a subgenre of literature.


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The New AutobiographyToday, autobiography has gained respectability even in academia, and some of our best authors have written autobiographies (often drawing on narrative elements of fiction). For example: Maya Angelou Maxine Hong KingstonAugusten Burroughs Anne LamottCarlos Castaneda Mary McCarthyLillian Hellman Henry MillerChristopher Isherwood Philip Roth


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Memoirs of Life and WorkOthers whose memoirs mingle their life and careers include:

Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State) Arthur Ashe (Wimbledon winner, men’s singles ) Jill Ker Conway (President, Smith College) Katherine Graham (Publisher, Washington Post) Andrew S. Grove (Chairman, Intel Corp.) Robert Mondavi (Founder, Robert Mondavi Winery)


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Legacy of a LifetimeDid your parents and grandparents leave you the stories of their lives?

If so, are you grateful? If not, do you wish they had?

If you own a company, is there a written history that supports public relations and long-term planning?

Is your legacy complete?

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Memoir Co-Author Services