T
he stories we tell about ourselves change over the years. Life experience brings new perspective, and the self-portrait we paint with our own story lines seems to shift and change in our mind’s eye. It’s like a pentimento, a different picture slowly bleeding through the patina of a familiar painting. The old and the new images hang together in the frame, and may provide subtly different interpretations of the artist’s vision.

Examining one’s formative years with detachment and the insights of post-adulthood can reveal new perspectives when ideas long considered true begin to give way. Motives at last become clearer, and individuals once cast as villains in the life drama begin to be seen as allies and friends.

Writing teacher Natalie Goldberg points out that memoir (derived from the French word mémoire) is not autobiography. Memoir is an exploration of how memory operates in the human mind. Crafting a memoir offers a rich opportunity for finding the meaning in one’s story, and then sharing it with others.

In my first book, The Simi Pentimento, this Baby-Boomer looks back at his growing-up story, striving to understand the parental figures that shaped his early years. Bringing a late-life perspective to bear on his remembered story, he gains new insights into his family of origin, his lifelong quest for solitude, his slow recognition of his own tribe, and his capacity to sit in the fire of personal transformation.

In The India Journal (a working title), my aunt captures details of her life on the Bay of Bengal where, many decades ago, she worked for four years teaching health education to rural villagers. She intended to write a textbook or field guide for health educators working in foreign countries, but through her journal entries and letters home, a rich portrait emerged depicting life on the Indian subcontinent.