Books! Writing, Editing, Publishing, and Reaching Readers

Chapter Three: Life Stories

The next chapters in this series will describe the nonfiction categories I know best: memoir, biography, history, and books based on original reporting and journalism.

A logical place to start with writing books is memoir. Why? Because of all the nonfiction genres, it is far and away the most common. The only requirement is that it is a book written by you, about you, your recollections, what material you can amass to support your story, and your willingness to write knowing that you may reveal things that only those closest to you already know.

Every life story has an arc. Whatever your arc has been, there comes a point when an instinct or an encouragement to record your experiences becomes appealing.

I almost always urge writing a memoir, recognizing the challenges and limitations to be encountered. A memoir is a version of your life, as portrayed as only you can.

In setting up the framing for my own memoir, An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen (published in 2021), I wrote this:

“As an editor and publisher, I have encountered memoirs of all kinds — bracing, illuminating, mean, kind, boring, revelatory. I have published the memoirs of some of the most famous people in the world: presidents of the United States and Russia, first ladies, those responsible for waging war and peace, billionaire philanthropists, advisers to the high and mighty, political prisoners, celebrated athletes, and journalists of every sort. I have encountered authors who were too self-deprecating and others who were comically self-aggrandizing.

“I know from memoirs.”

I started considering a memoir years before it was published. I approached the topic as a reporter, which is what I am and always have been by instinct and curiosity. I went back through my own life, compiling as much detail as I could, chronologically and in themes: background, growing up, education, and the evolution of my career as a journalist and then in book publishing. I also wrote about family, community, and a chapter I called “Wrinkles,” in which I reflected on the inevitable aspects of life that are, in one way or another, complicated.

What was surprising and in its way exciting was to discover how much I was learning that I either had not known or had not explored beyond surface, family legends rather than the precise details. My parents, Marta and Jozef (in the U.S. they were Martha and Joseph) were Polish, Jewish, and from well-to-do, well-educated families — and, in my mother’s case, one that was somewhat celebrated.

A majority of American Jews, I had found over the years, tended to assume that they are descended from the parts of Russia and Eastern Europe known as the “Pale of Settlement,” where Jews lived mainly in villages and smaller cities and practiced simple trades. In historical terms, they seemed mostly similar and, to their American descendants, not terribly interesting. (This is a generalization. There were exceptions of course, but not a great deal of exploration in most cases, I believed.)

In this period, when violent pogroms and antisemitism reached a peak, millions of Jews managed to make their way to the United States. Their descendants told the stories from the time of their family’s arrival as immigrants. An upward trajectory in American society was the norm.

This was not the case for me, and with the help of genealogists and several relatives who had embarked on a similar quest, I traced my family back to the 1740s. For example, I found out where my family name, Osnos, came from — it is an Old Testament name derived from Asenat, the wife of the prophet Joseph. This was a revelation that enabled me to understand that other families had versions of the same name (Osnes, Osnoss) but were not related to us and may not even have been Jewish.

My mother’s family was exceptionally colorful, stretching across a spectrum from the founder of the French automobile company Citroen to friendship with the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin in Zurich. A very gifted Polish cousin, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, wrote In the Garden of Memory, a brilliant family portrait that became a classic in Poland (I eventually decided to publish it in the U.S.), which was invaluable in providing historical background.

Most important, I was able to explore the story of how my parents managed to leave Poland after the Nazi invasion of 1939 and eventually make it to India, where I was born, and then to the United States. I was four months old and in a basket when they arrived, so I grew up almost entirely in a country that my parents had come to in their late thirties.

I had only known the outlines of that story and had never really made the effort to learn more because my parents, my brother, and I were focused on our lives as they unfolded in the U.S., rather than what had come before.

In some respects, I learned that as close as we were, with the same DNA, we were a family with two different life-framing experiences that I was finally uncovering and the differences that resulted.

My first reader, Lisa Kaufman, a former editorial colleague and friend, told me that the manuscript was anecdotal, by which she meant shallow, when context and judgment were required. I sent the manuscript to a literary agent who had asked to see it, and her dismissive (I thought) opinion was that the book was meant for “family and friends,” and not to be widely read.

This is a frequent trope about memoirs, suggesting that the only people who would care enough to read it already know who you are. And yes, that is a core audience for any memoir. But deeper examination of any life story can unearth detail and emotions that make a difference in depth and potential interest.

I wrote additional drafts, adding as much detail as I could to expand the book’s substance. I would write these drafts in notebooks, with a pen, which felt less intimidating than to do so on a computer — and more personal than they would become on my laptop.

I then sent the manuscript to Paul Golob, another former colleague, whom I acknowledged in the book as having “extraordinary editorial finesse.” He gave the manuscript a thorough going-over, urging more of some things and less of others. Ultimately, I devised a way to publish the memoir, making it available for sale through an imprint my wife and I established called Platform Books LLC.

There are many more ways to distribute books now than is generally understood, and I will explain them later when I describe the publishing phase of the book process.

I made rules of my own: Be especially careful in describing people in the book who will eventually read it. Something as small as a typo in a name can be offensive to the person so misrepresented. Lists of people are tricky because only the people who might have been left off will really care. And, in my case, I avoided vengeance, settling old scores (even where it might have been deserved), by blurring the identifiers of my wrongdoers.

Satisfying as retribution can be, it too often veers into pettiness.

As to describing people’s personal attributes, I learned a lesson when I published a book by Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts called Speaking Frankly. I suggested that he describe the kind of people in the constituency that elected him, and he refused, telling me that few people are comfortable being portrayed in clichés about their class or appearance.

In describing other people, it’s often best to recognize that there are ways of writing that can satisfactorily make your point without overwhelming the story or being elusive, as long as they are, in your own perspective, honest.

I chose not to say things about living people that they did not already know about themselves.

And finally, I solicited a sensitivity read from a younger editor, a woman, recognizing that my terminologies may have become outdated. Terms like “girlish” or “pretty” have a different aura in the twenty-first century than they had in the past, and may seem demeaning rather than descriptive.

Fashion and style in language evolve, and what might once have been acceptable can become offensive.

I often recommend taking notes or keeping a journal, not necessarily for a memoir but because, with the precipitous decline of actual letter writing, preserving experiences for the future is a form of legacy. Consider how much of what we know about history comes from correspondence and diaries. I don’t think email will be anywhere as memorable.

Any self-examination carries the responsibility to be as completely honest as possible, realizing the risks entailed from revealing things that have previously remained private.

In the years since writing my memoir, and as a result of having done it, my understanding of character and temperament, including my own, has continued to develop and deepen. My sense is that this is often the case with those who write memoirs.

A memoir is a legacy rendered on your terms.