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How to Develop a Memoir

Excerpt from My Memoir French Boy: I come into the world.

DL: “I Come Into the World” is an excerpt from my memoir French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood. The use of Canadien, the French version of Canadian, in this text as everywhere in the memoir is to distinguish an English-speaking Canadian from a French-speaking one without resorting to the term French Canadian. [When was […]

How to Develop a Memoir

Interview with Denis Ledoux French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood

DL: The following interview I conducted with myself is available to anyone wishing to reproduce it in a blog, on a website on in print media. We ask only that you let us know  you are using the piece.
Q. Can you tell our readers what French Boy is about and why you were impelled to write your book? What was driving you to spend the time, energy, and money to get this book out into the world?
A. I wrote impelled by a strong desire to record the life of my community—the Francophone Canadian-American community of New England. This is a book about life in Franco-America in the 1950s. It uses my life as an organizing principle. A good memoir is not only about the individual who is its presenting subject but it is about something bigger, about some whole that the memoir subject is part of. I want to celebrate our experience. I do not want the world to forget we were here.
 
Q. Can you tell us how long it took from the time you conceived the book to the time you had it published? How many years did you spend in active writing? Were there long breaks in between active writing periods? If so, what happened to get you writing again?

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Lewiston, Maine, 1960

Preparing to Leave Home

In the summer of 1960 when I was thirteen, my mother drove me into Lewiston to Vincent & Leblanc’s on Lisbon Street at Ash Street. There, in a shopping spree that was unprecedented, she bought me more new clothes than I’d ever had at any one time.