A New England Upbringing: A Sugary Frosting – The Memoir Network | RSS

Writing Another Person’s Memoir: Can you use the first person pronoun?

Denis Ledoux — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 17:17:23 +0000

Shouldn’t writing another person’s memoir be called writing biography rather than writing memoir? You the writer are, after all, not the subject. Doesn’t that make it a biography? But, are there occasions when a biography can justly be called a memoir? In one of my books, A Sugary Frosting / Life in a 1960s Parsonage, […]

We Move to Athol

Martha Blowen — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 11:10:29 +0000

While I believe my father did well as minister in Hadwin Park, he was by nature a small-town minister. Coming from the working class, he was familiar and comfortable with working men and women. Or, I might say, he was comfortable being the educated man among uneducated people. His talent was working in a small, […]

Can Life Get Better in the Parsonage?

Martha Blowen — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 22:15:45 +0000

Life in Worcester for my family was a 1950’s middle-class existence. It is what I believe my father was striving for when he worked those years in Enfield, CT, after high school and before Bates, those years at Bates working at the telephone switchboard at Central Maine General Hospital, serving as kitchen and dining room […]

Is a Life Ever Too Ordinary for a Memoir?

Martha Blowen — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 10:17:51 +0000

Isolated memories that seem too ordinary for a memoir can be a challenge to incorporate into a memoir as they usually lack inherent drama. How to place early memories into a narrative so that they give a sense of the foundation of a life without turning the reader off. Let me know in the comments […]

My Uncles Rescue My Grandparents

Martha Blowen — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 11:25:27 +0000

My uncles came into the parsonage, made their announcement of the decision to remove my grandparents which was a fait accompli that they were not willing to discuss, packed my grandparents up and drove away with them. My parents were in shock. (more…)

My Mother Chooses Between Me and My Grandparents

Martha Blowen — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 13:48:24 +0000

This is an excerpt from the as-yet-unnamed memoir of Martha Blowen, my lifemate and business partner who died in 2008 of metastatic intraductal breast cancer. The previous post covered Martha’s premature birth and her family’s recent move to Worcester, Massachusetts, where her father had taken on to serve as minister of Congregational church there. (more…)

Coming Into This World

Martha Blowen — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 20:54:40 +0000

When you are both a story teller and a story keeper, in thirty-one years of co-habiting with someone who is very verbal, you get to learn many of her stories. A number of them you have heard not only because they are told directly to you as you went about your day—perhaps driving into town […]