Any Interest

[Sunset]

A couple thoughts on this.

1) You may want to consider a "video autobiography", where you sit in front of a video camera and talk about your life through stories and anecdotes, etc. This could be in lieu of the book, or in addition to it. I feel that your kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids would be more captivated by this and would feel closer to you if they could see your face, hear your voice, look into your eyes, hear the emotion in your words. IMHO, they are much more likely to actually watch this and "connect" with it than they are to read a book that you wrote. And this segues into my next point...

....

That video idea sounds like a great one, after my dad died, years later I was sorting through some stuff, had a box of tapes in it. I played one of the tapes, expecting to hear music, and instead it was Dad's voice !!
It was really great to hear him again, as that is one sense that often is gone since photo's and written things don't convey it.

 

[Katiek]

Years ago my uncle made some audiotapes describing stories from his childhood. They were mainly for his wife, but he gave copies to his siblings as well. Years later I found the tapes and had them converted to digital files that I shared with the siblings who were alive then - unfortunately my uncle had passed.


Those tapes were a great gift from the past for his siblings. They loved hearing his voice again and reliving all the old memories.



It definitely helped that my uncle was a great storyteller who had interesting inflection in his voice when he told a story. So one tip if you do the recording is to try to make it conversational and not just reading from a written script.



Also, he told the stories like chapters in a book - discrete stories of a reasonable length with a start and finish to each "chapter".



He also managed to relate the old story to the present - letting his wife know why this story was important, or referencing a current event that reminded him of the older story.



If you are doing this on video, see if there are visual aids that enhance the story - perhaps pictures of some of the people involved, tangible objects that were involved in the story etc. In my uncles tapes, he had a story about learning to paint a picture - it would have been great if he had a videotape and could have shown the actual picture.



Good luck, I'm sure this could be a family treasure.

 

[Crewer]

More like Hillbilly Elegy than Educated. I'm a sucker for that type of book but I think few others are. As Sojourner said, few family members in DH's family read his grandmother's book or his uncle's book (I read them both 30 years ago ) and by now I'm sure no one reads them. When I mentioned it to his uncle's kids they said "Oh yeah, I kind of remember Dad wrote something.."

I thought my good friend who came here from Russia should write his autobiography. It could start "born in Siberia" because his father was told Stalin was about to send him there so he chose to go.. and it continued like that. I love those books. Good luck.