For what it's worth, the way it is written is also a measure of your own interest in the subject matter. In my case, I have been asked dozens of times (maybe close to a hundred) to write a memoir of my childhood years. I have tried on a number of occasions to do it, but I don't find the material as interesting as other people do, or not for the same reason. Here is a tiny snippet of what I will not be writing about:
I have moved 56 times and attended 26 schools in my life. Most of the moves took place before I was sixteen years old. This is because my single mother parent was schizophrenic. She had paranoid delusions that she was being stalked by past boyfriends, the C.I.A., and any number of other bad guys. I became accustomed to being pulled out of school without notice, driving to a new town through the night, then enrolling in a new school in a new town the next day. Sometimes, my sister and I had new names to prevent our pursuers from finding my mother. My mother tried committing suicide more than once, including on one occasion by trying to drive head-on into oncoming traffic with my sister and I in the car.
My childhood was full of danger but also love. Our mother did love us, but had no idea how dangerous her decisions were. She let predators into our homes as boyfriends, more than one of whom abused my sister. She could be a very charming person and was physically attractive, but she also had a tendency toward alcoholism and a fiery temper. This led to the loss of job after job. Sometimes it was because "the other secretaries are replacing my typing with their own bad examples and then blaming it on me", and others because something gave her a fright and she'd make a snap decision to leave. She was courted by several wealthy men, but she became spooked in every case and we spent our time together in poverty. Sometimes, we were homeless.
On one occasion, my mother accepted the gift of a gun from one of her four ex-husbands. She once saw me in her room to say good night and almost killed me with it. My sister also came close to shooting me with it, though to this day I don't know why. I suspect it was because she expected me to protect her from our mom's boyfriends, though at the time I had no idea anything was going on. Later, my sister tried to strangle our mother to death, screaming "Don't you see? We have to kill her! Don't you realize how dangerous she is?" Needless to say, we had multiple encounters with the police coming to take my sister away, or to separate my sister and I from our mother. Our mom had a sixth sense for these the latter occasions, and always managed to clear out before the authorities arrived. My sister on the other hand, knows what it is like to be questioned by the police after almost shooting a police officer who broke down our door to save me.
After many adventures like this, and possibly because of the strangling incident, the police found our long lost father and we went to live with him. He was totally unlike our mother. Living with him allowed my sister and I to see just how different our lives had been from the norm, though I think she was always more aware of this than I was.
So that is the "boring" story that I have realized I cannot write. The reason is that the only thing interesting about it (to me) is that other people seem to think of it as fascinating. I enjoy watching the surprise on people's faces when I tell them how, for instance, my mother's penchant for nude beaches once led to me being sucked into an undertow that left me in a whirlpool a hundred yards or more off the Monterey coast. My mom, totally naked, bounced her way along the shore with her equally naked boyfriend, trying to find a way to save me. A conveniently placed spit of rock did the trick, from which my mom tossed her huge handmade denim bag, maintaining her grip on the strap. I grabbed the bag and was pulled to safety, as all her many prescription pill bottles and other things floated into the whirlpool and into oblivion.
The memoir I will write is about how I founded a successful computer graphics program at a small European university while I earned my PhD at King's College, London. That story is more interesting to me because it involved a challenge I understood: how can students be trained well in an industry that is notoriously ill-served by educational institutions? The process was "organic" to put it nicely, but by always keeping the student's interests in mind, our program developed a solid reputation in industry as one of the only schools in the world that was capable of turning out industry-ready graduates. At one European conference, a representative of Sony's game division said we were the only school in the world that knew how to solve that particular riddle.
I was deeply involved in every aspect of the school's creation, suffered from our missteps, witnessed every correction, and felt legitimate pride when our students went on to successful careers in industry. To me, the greatest reward I have ever received for anything I've ever done was a basket of flowers from the sister of one of these students. They had lost their parents, and the sister supported her brother by employing him at her small restaurant as he went through school. When he sat down after receiving his diploma, the man sitting next to him, a hiring manager from a major studio, handed him a contract on the spot. His sister burst into tears at that moment, their mutual hard struggle over.
So, to me, an interesting memoir must contain a level of commitment to the material that extends beyond whatever salacious qualities it may possess. I knew a man who wrote a book about a class action lawsuit that was fascinating. An elderly Holocaust survivor had turned confidence man and had bilked other Holocaust survivors of millions of dollars. How could such a man, who knew the horrors his victims had survived, subject them to such craven villainy? My acquaintance had all the material he needed to write a fascinating story, but in the end it was flat. There are some amazing memoirs about the Cultural Revolution in China and the advance of Communism across Asia. Some are more interesting than others. Many are filled with terrifying events experienced by small children. One of the better ones (in my opinion) "Falling Leaves" contains several of the dramatic elements found in other books in this genre, but the events depicted are notably less severe than those experienced by the authors of other books. In comparison, the author of Falling Leaves is relatively well-looked after, but she manages to create a mesmerizing memoir out of the dynamic between her and her French-Vietnamese stepmother, who has turned her father away. That book, in my opinion, is less about the Cultural Revolution than it is about a vain scheming woman and how she denied a stepdaughter her father's love. It is quite touching, but the backdrop of striking events could be stripped from it and it would remain a beautifully written intensely satisfying book.
I have moved 56 times and attended 26 schools in my life. Most of the moves took place before I was sixteen years old. This is because my single mother parent was schizophrenic. She had paranoid delusions that she was being stalked by past boyfriends, the C.I.A., and any number of other bad guys. I became accustomed to being pulled out of school without notice, driving to a new town through the night, then enrolling in a new school in a new town the next day. Sometimes, my sister and I had new names to prevent our pursuers from finding my mother. My mother tried committing suicide more than once, including on one occasion by trying to drive head-on into oncoming traffic with my sister and I in the car.
My childhood was full of danger but also love. Our mother did love us, but had no idea how dangerous her decisions were. She let predators into our homes as boyfriends, more than one of whom abused my sister. She could be a very charming person and was physically attractive, but she also had a tendency toward alcoholism and a fiery temper. This led to the loss of job after job. Sometimes it was because "the other secretaries are replacing my typing with their own bad examples and then blaming it on me", and others because something gave her a fright and she'd make a snap decision to leave. She was courted by several wealthy men, but she became spooked in every case and we spent our time together in poverty. Sometimes, we were homeless.
On one occasion, my mother accepted the gift of a gun from one of her four ex-husbands. She once saw me in her room to say good night and almost killed me with it. My sister also came close to shooting me with it, though to this day I don't know why. I suspect it was because she expected me to protect her from our mom's boyfriends, though at the time I had no idea anything was going on. Later, my sister tried to strangle our mother to death, screaming "Don't you see? We have to kill her! Don't you realize how dangerous she is?" Needless to say, we had multiple encounters with the police coming to take my sister away, or to separate my sister and I from our mother. Our mom had a sixth sense for these the latter occasions, and always managed to clear out before the authorities arrived. My sister on the other hand, knows what it is like to be questioned by the police after almost shooting a police officer who broke down our door to save me.
After many adventures like this, and possibly because of the strangling incident, the police found our long lost father and we went to live with him. He was totally unlike our mother. Living with him allowed my sister and I to see just how different our lives had been from the norm, though I think she was always more aware of this than I was.
So that is the "boring" story that I have realized I cannot write. The reason is that the only thing interesting about it (to me) is that other people seem to think of it as fascinating. I enjoy watching the surprise on people's faces when I tell them how, for instance, my mother's penchant for nude beaches once led to me being sucked into an undertow that left me in a whirlpool a hundred yards or more off the Monterey coast. My mom, totally naked, bounced her way along the shore with her equally naked boyfriend, trying to find a way to save me. A conveniently placed spit of rock did the trick, from which my mom tossed her huge handmade denim bag, maintaining her grip on the strap. I grabbed the bag and was pulled to safety, as all her many prescription pill bottles and other things floated into the whirlpool and into oblivion.
The memoir I will write is about how I founded a successful computer graphics program at a small European university while I earned my PhD at King's College, London. That story is more interesting to me because it involved a challenge I understood: how can students be trained well in an industry that is notoriously ill-served by educational institutions? The process was "organic" to put it nicely, but by always keeping the student's interests in mind, our program developed a solid reputation in industry as one of the only schools in the world that was capable of turning out industry-ready graduates. At one European conference, a representative of Sony's game division said we were the only school in the world that knew how to solve that particular riddle.
I was deeply involved in every aspect of the school's creation, suffered from our missteps, witnessed every correction, and felt legitimate pride when our students went on to successful careers in industry. To me, the greatest reward I have ever received for anything I've ever done was a basket of flowers from the sister of one of these students. They had lost their parents, and the sister supported her brother by employing him at her small restaurant as he went through school. When he sat down after receiving his diploma, the man sitting next to him, a hiring manager from a major studio, handed him a contract on the spot. His sister burst into tears at that moment, their mutual hard struggle over.
So, to me, an interesting memoir must contain a level of commitment to the material that extends beyond whatever salacious qualities it may possess. I knew a man who wrote a book about a class action lawsuit that was fascinating. An elderly Holocaust survivor had turned confidence man and had bilked other Holocaust survivors of millions of dollars. How could such a man, who knew the horrors his victims had survived, subject them to such craven villainy? My acquaintance had all the material he needed to write a fascinating story, but in the end it was flat. There are some amazing memoirs about the Cultural Revolution in China and the advance of Communism across Asia. Some are more interesting than others. Many are filled with terrifying events experienced by small children. One of the better ones (in my opinion) "Falling Leaves" contains several of the dramatic elements found in other books in this genre, but the events depicted are notably less severe than those experienced by the authors of other books. In comparison, the author of Falling Leaves is relatively well-looked after, but she manages to create a mesmerizing memoir out of the dynamic between her and her French-Vietnamese stepmother, who has turned her father away. That book, in my opinion, is less about the Cultural Revolution than it is about a vain scheming woman and how she denied a stepdaughter her father's love. It is quite touching, but the backdrop of striking events could be stripped from it and it would remain a beautifully written intensely satisfying book.