Before sitting down to interview my ninety-five-year-old grandfather, I had never considered the word ‘legacy’.
My grandfather has always been a natural-born storyteller. Sit beside him on the porch while he’s in his favourite rocking chair, and he will take you back to rural Alabama in the 1930s, when dirt roads had wagon ruts and children ran barefoot through red clay yards. He brings stories to life, making you jump in your seat as he mimics the sound of P38 fighter planes flying low over his elementary school. He can even make your stomach rumble when he talks about his mama’s rice-and-tomato-gravy bowls – a staple during the Great Depression.
Even though I write memoirs professionally, I had never written down my own grandfather’s stories. One day, I felt a sense of urgency, seemingly out of nowhere, and I knew it was time to get them down on paper.
At first, he resisted.
“Who would want to hear from me?” he kept saying. He genuinely couldn’t understand the point, so I had to insist on having some interviews.
I told him, “Just trust me, okay? It’s going to be something special.”
Somewhere in the middle of the process, something shifted, and he began opening up about feelings he had never named before. He reflected more carefully before he spoke, weighing certain memories and thinking, how should I tell this one?
One afternoon, after he read a passage I’d drafted in which he talked about a girl he once loved in Italy, years before my grandmother, he paused and looked up from the manuscript in his hands.
“I know we talked about that,” he said slowly, “but could we actually remove it from the book? I’ve been thinking lately, this is my legacy. I want to leave behind what matters the most.”
He said the word ‘legacy’ with such soft-spoken dignity that I beamed at him. He’d realized that this memoir was never really for him. It wasn’t a confessional that had to include every chapter of his life. It was for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who would never see a wagon track or hear him tell these stories in person. And he only wanted to talk about how much he loved my grandmother.
There is often a suspicion that writing about your own life is self-indulgent, egotistical or even exhibitionist, but, as a species, we have always told stories about ourselves. Around fires. Across kitchen tables. In letters from war. In journals tucked beneath mattresses. Storytelling, therefore, is actually the inverse of vanity. It’s about human connection.
In the end, my grandpa understood that what we were creating together was not a vanity project or an ego trip but an inheritance.
What gets lost when you don’t write it down
I studied folklore in college. At its heart, folklore is about continuity: the passing down of values, songs, sayings, crafts and hard-earned understanding from one generation to the next.
I once heard an African American man tell a story about his grandmother, who used to sing him African hymns when he was a young boy. It was the memory of a long-forgotten homeland that had been sung in secret for generations of slavery in a language no one in the family could speak anymore. These ancestral echoes were braided into his childhood, and they carried his family’s history.
Now she is gone.
The songs are gone, too.
The man now remembers only fragments, like time splinters. He wanted to pass the hymns to his own children, but he couldn’t. That is how legacy disappears. Through silence.
I’m sure there are photographs in your own cupboards right now, with faces frozen in sepia and names scribbled on the back – if you’re lucky. The context of these fading ghosts in the darkness – who they were and why they mattered – might already be thin, and without intentional preservation it will only get thinner and thinner, until those family stories are forgotten completely.
Memoir as stewardship
We live in a world of constant change – technological, cultural, geographical. Families fan out and traditions soften over time. We are not as woven into the story of our ancestry as we once were, but memoir creates a tether. It can become a sort of hearth to which future generations can return for warmth, orientation and belonging.
When my grandfather used the word ‘legacy’, he reframed his entire project. Now, he was writing to hand something forward, like building a bridge toward the next generation:
Here is how I made sense of the world.
Here is where I stumbled.
Here is what I learnt.
Here is what truly mattered when all was said and done.
A memoir composed solely of accolades and achievements would be thin (and, perhaps, quite dull). The highest peaks of one’s life only glow because of the lantern-deep valleys that lie beneath them. There is no life untouched by them, and it is in those low places – times of illness, loss, financial strain, failure or heartbreak – that wisdom can take root. The famous songwriter Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack… in everything. That’s how the light gets in”. Similarly, there is vulnerability in memoir writing because it demands honesty.
These reflections become cultural artifacts that hold moral frameworks, emotional truths and lived history. They are each a selfless offering of continuity to your loved ones, not a bid for applause or a quest for validation.
Children and grandchildren may not need to know every last detail of your career or the size of your house. But they may desperately need to know how you endured grief, how you chose a partner, why you forgave someone or what you feared – and then what you did anyway.
In the end, memoir is not about personal recognition at all; at least, it shouldn’t be. It’s about orientation and continuity, stewardship and legacy – leaving behind a map, a marker, a wayfinding tool for those who come after you. It’s about ensuring that when the songs would otherwise be forgotten, when the wagon tracks have long been paved over, when the names on the backs of photographs begin to blur, someone can still turn a page and remember.
Written by Bailey, LifeBook Memoirs ghostwriter
