The Puzzle of Memoir Memories

“ HE WHO BELIEVES THAT THE PAST CANNOT BE CHANGED HAS NOT YET WRITTEN HIS MEMOIRS.”  Torvald Gahlin For those of us who are tackling the challenging task of writing our memoir, it seems our primary purpose is to to dig deep into our past to find our truths and  then make some sense of  them so as to provide a source of entertainment and inspiration to the reader.   Creative writing teacher and author Maureen Murdoch in her book Unreliable Truth claims that “the job of writing memoir is to find one’s truths (page 12) ,citing that”the importance of memoir is the meaning we make of our lives, which is subjective” (page 16). She likens our memories to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that need to be reassembled. I have been...