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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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writing an old family story

Writing An Old Family Story

I was one of those fortunate children to have known well both sets of grandparents. My Ledoux grandparents lived upstairs for most of my growing up while by Verreault grandparents lived 10 miles away. Because of this, I’ll admit writing an old family story is somewhat easy for me as I heard so many of them when I was child!

My grandmother Marie Bilodeau Ledoux was the first to leave us. That was almost 60 years ago November 23, 1964.)

The following story is drawn from a booklet I wrote in 2001. It tells about le bonhomme Sept-heures who was also the bane of my childhood. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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memories of my grandfther

Memories of My Grandfather

My grandfather William Ledoux would be 133 years old were he alive today. I would like to take a moment to honor his life by sharing some memories of my grandfather.

His early years

He was born in Lachine, Québec, on February 17, 1889, the oldest of what would be a family of six children. His mother was 20 and his father 19 at the time of his birth. The family moved from Lachine, then a small town, to Montréal when he was quite young. He grew up in Montréal in an apartment on Papineau Street. Papineau is a major artery today, but in those horse-and-buggy days, it must have been quieter. Two brothers and three sisters followed him in the next 11 years.

My great-grandfather Georges was a blacksmith in those days when there was a big need for blacksmiths. He was however in the last decades of this work as soon the automobile would be coming to replace the horse.

Healing a child

An interesting story about my grandfather’s family was how, in those days, women from the Kahnawake Iroquois reservation on the south shore of the St Lawrence would come to Montréal where they would seek temporary jobs with the women who lived in the apartments. My great-grandmother, a housewife supported by a blacksmith husband, was by no means a wealthy woman. The Indians were even less so. They would come looking for jobs like doing laundry, washing the floor, cleaning out a room.
One day, my great-grandmother Aurélie, had a sick baby on her hands when somebody knocked at the door. My grandmother went to the door to see who it could be. It was an Indian woman seeking employment. My grandmother said, “Oh, I just can’t talk to you now. I have a sick baby. He has just had a convulsion.”

The Iroquois woman asked, “Does madame have any onions?”

My great-grandmother said, “Yes, I do.”

The stranger replied, “Madame, I know what to do for your baby.” The woman entered the apartment and she and my grandmother took some onions and cut them into little pieces and they lay them on the mattress of the bed where they then placed a sheet. They put the child on the sheet. The story has it that the child got better and never had convulsions again.

My own healing

Later on, when I was a baby myself in 1947-1948, I had convulsions. My grandmother who had the story many times from her husband said to my mother, “You have got to place Denis on a bed of onions.”

My mother, being more modern than my grandmother, resisted but, after yet another convulsion, she felt rather desperate to have some remedy to my situation so she said, “Okay let’s do that.”
She and my grandmother sat down and prepared a bag of onions. They lay me on that bag of onions and that was the last time I had convulsions.

Coming Down to the US

In time, my great-grandparents decided that they could not continue their life in Montréal. My great-grandfather had an uncle who lived in New Bedford or Fall River, Massachusetts. This man told my great-grandfather Georges that if he and his family come down to the United States, he would help him to get settled with his family. My great-grandfather decided to take his uncle up on this kind offer and he made his way down to Fall River around 1900.

In Fall River, there were many Canadian immigrants. My great-grandfather spent a decade as a blacksmith but, as time went on, blacksmithing became less and less of a viable occupation. decided to become a mechanic. As a blacksmith, my great-grandfather Georges had many hands-on skills and he decided to become an automobile mechanic. (Many blacksmiths became mechanics.) He had a garage which a cousin of my father told me was the last building on the old road to New Bedford. I have never seen this building but one day I will go down and check it out. My father’s cousin said it was no longer a garage, but when you look at it, you could tell that it had once been a garage.

That is how my grandfather came down to live in the US. My grandparents met on a blind date and were married in 1912. They had five children. I have more memories of my grandfather (and grandmother) elsewhere on this site

My grandfather died on December 23rd 1972. He was a wonderful grandfather and I feel very fortunate to have known him. I have written these memories of my grandfather for family and for you, dear reader. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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becoming an American

Becoming an American—Why Not?

DL— Stories about immigration and citizenship form the backbone of our great American story as much today as in past times.  My ancestors were among the millions who came here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here is an excerpt about becoming an American from We Were Not Spoiled, the memoir of my mother Lucille Verreault Ledoux as told to me. For many more excerpts of my mother’s life, click here.

Memoir Writing

Joseph Verreault

My father had not come to the US to stay, but that’s what happened. After working here for a number of years first to support himself and then his growing family and eventually buying an apartment building that was his family’s home, it must have seemed obvious to him that this is where he would spend the rest of his life. So, why not give in to becoming an American citizen? Thinking this way, he was able to make the decision be an easy one. He was a practical man with a lot of responsibilities.

Becoming An American

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Point of View in a Memoir

The Wrong Point of View in a Memoir Can Throw the Story

In 1996 and 1997, I composed about 200 pages of a memoir of my high school years and then it wasn’t going anywhere more than where it had been—mired in facts and details with no spirit. What I didn’t know was it had a wrong point of view problem

I merely stored it in various computers for years.

In the fall of 2013, I completed my mother’s memoir (We Were Not Spoiled). Because I was looking for a writing project I might devote myself to next, I picked up the high-school memoir again.

(Lest you think that I went to a high school like yours, let me assure you that I did not. I attended a Catholic high-school seminary. No, I’m not writing about sexual shenanigans—there was none of that whatsoever. I am writing about my life there between 1960 and 1964 and how it shaped me. This theme of identity is usual stuff for a memoir, but the setting is exotic in many ways and not at all usual. Almost none of you who are reading this have “been there”—trust me.)

Suddenly, after more than a decade and a half, the memoir spoke to me again!

“Write me! Write me!” it shouted. The text seemed “alive” again. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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Lachine Massacre

Franco-American History and The Lachine Massacre

The following post on the Lachine Massacre, drawn from my work in progress Here to Stay, a history of my 17th-century Canadian ancestors, has been republished on a racist, race-baiting site. I have asked them to take it down, but they have not done so.

I did not give them permission to use the post to attack Native Peoples. I do not endorse nor condone the racist tone of the site and do not give permission to any racist site to reprint our articles.

This post was intended to be a piece of history – and in no way a derogatory comment on the Iroquois. Both sides had their share of cruelty and savagery.

While the Iroquois attack was brutal and devastating, I have written the same about my ancestors’ attacks on the English in New England: Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine.  These are just two sites that were savagely attacked by the French and their Algonquin allies. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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The Pacific Theater

Crossing the Pacific to Reach the World War 2 Theater

This excerpt is from Business Boy to Business Man the memoir of Robert Verreault as told to Denis Ledoux. The memoir was published in 2013.

The military would never tell servicemen where we were going during World War 2, but it was a fairly easy bet that we were headed for Hawaii as a first leg to the Japanese front. The night before we were to board our ship, I had supper in San Francisco with the girlfriend of one of my friends. It would be the last time in a long while that I would have a home-cooked meal.

In the morning, my buddy and I headed out to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard where the ship we were to head out on had undergone some repairs. Like many other ships used by the Americans, this one was a foreign ship that had been more or less stranded far from its homeland and was now helping in the anti-Axis war effort. We were to board it at the yard and begin our trip from there. We reported in and then, hoisting our duffle bags onto our shoulders, took our place to board. There was a long line of men, thousands of men. The line moved slowly, the duffle bags grew heavy. It seemed that when finally we put them down to rest, the line moved again and we’d lug the bags once more. Eventually, we reached a narrow gangplank and walked up it to the ship’s deck. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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