The material
People remember the argument and lose the year. They remember the coat and forget the street. A memoir can survive that. What it cannot survive is a writer inventing the street so the paragraph looks finished. The invented street is usually small. A shop name, a model of car, the weather on a day that mattered. Those are the details a family will catch, and once they catch one, they stop trusting the rest.
We start with what you actually have. A season, a person, a house, a stretch of years you keep returning to. Dates get checked when dates matter. Dialogue is the sense of what was said, not a court transcript, unless you kept one. If you only have the feeling of the room, the chapter can say that. A feeling is usable. A borrowed fact is not, even when it would make the sentence land.
If the street is gone, the book should say the street is gone. A borrowed street is how a memoir starts to lie.
What arrives
The child could not have written it. The adult finally can, and is a little afraid of being fair. The fear is useful. A memoir that punishes everyone in the house, including the person telling it, usually knows more than a memoir that has already decided who the hero was.
One long episode, not a whole life. The book gets stronger when it agrees to stay inside those years. The childhood before, and the decade after, can stay in a paragraph if that is all they did. Readers do not need your whole calendar. They need the stretch where the person changed, and the cost of that change.
You can write up to the door and not through it. That door is usually the book, not a failure of discipline. People hire us when they have forty pages that circle the same afternoon. We do not add more pages around it. We sit in the afternoon until it can be told without the protective sentence you have been using for years.
Your sister’s version will not match yours. We do not average them into a sentence nobody lived. The book can hold both, if you are willing to let hers stand as hers. What it cannot do is borrow her certainty and wear it as your memory.
Order of work
You talk. We listen for the scene you speed past and the one you tell twice. Those two usually belong in the book. The story you have told at dinner for twenty years is often the polished one. The version that arrives when you are tired is closer to the page we need.
A life is not a table of contents. We cut decades on purpose, and we show you the cut before we write into it. You should be able to see the years we are leaving out, and argue for one of them back, before a chapter has been built around the wrong door.
Before the long draft, a chapter you can hear. If it sounds like a stranger being tasteful, we stop and retune. Tasteful is the usual failure. It keeps the furniture and removes the sentence you would actually say. We would rather rewrite twelve pages than write two hundred in that voice.
Guesses get marked. You correct them. Silence is how a false detail survives into print. A note in the margin that says “I think the car was blue” is more useful than a clean paragraph that has already decided. You read those marks. We do not tidy them away between drafts.
What we will not do
Before you send pages
No. The gaps are part of the form. We mark them instead of filling them with a likely detail. A memoir that admits what it does not know is more trustworthy than one that remembers every Tuesday. What we do need is the scene you cannot get out of, told more than once, including the part you usually skip when a friend is being kind.
They often will. We talk early about who is alive, who is identifiable, and what you are willing to stand behind at a dinner you still have to attend. A lawyer is a separate conversation, and we will say when you need one. We are not that lawyer. We also will not talk you into a braver book than the one you can live next to.
A book about one stretch of years often takes four to six months once we are working. A life that tries to cover forty years takes longer, mostly because the cutting takes longer. The interviews are not the slow part. The slow part is you reading a chapter and discovering that the decade you thought was the book is only the hallway into it. We would rather tell you that than promise a season.
You do. Your name, the copyright with you, and no public credit for us unless you ask. The files come to you, including the interviews if you want them. If you want the paperwork before a document is opened, say so on the first call. We would rather sign that before we hear the story than after a chapter exists and everyone is attached to it.
When you are ready
That is enough to know if we are the right desk.
Call (833) 688-4166 or write [email protected].
The shelf
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