Friday, 13 January 2012

The Book of Jennifer

Also known as the book of me.
For Christmas, my best friend gave me this "do it yourself memoir" and I've started to fill out a few pages already. I'm hooked. It starts by asking questions about the very beginning of one's life. How your parents handled being pregnant with you. What the reactions were when you were born. I had a little help with those questions because a person doesn't tend to remember their infancy. I think my mom enjoyed helping me when I was filling this section out. I asked her most of the questions I didn't already know by email and she sent a lovely reply, recounting how she and my dad dealt with my birth and the first few days at home.

For the most part, I remembered my early childhood so I was able to fill that out without much help. So many memories I had stored away were being brought up again.
I'm currently working on my adolescence. A lot of the questions for that I have to write that that stuff actually happened in my 20's. First kiss? First steady relationship? Yeah, all that stuff happened about 2-3 years ago.

But I'm having a fun time writing about me. I keep a journal that I write about current events in my life, but this memoir will be my entire life from beginning to end. Something for my future children and grandchildren to read and know my entire life. Not just from the time I turned 21, which is what my journal currently is. My whole life. It's kind of scary because there are some questions that might bring up answers that I'm embarrassed to talk about, but I don't want to leave any blank page or a question unanswered unless it's not applicable to me (like adoption).
I sort of wish that my grandmother had something like this to share with us. It'd be interesting to know how life was in the late 30's and early 40's, and so on. I might give a book like this for my mom to fill out about herself. Both her parents have passed, so it might be hard to recount things about her infancy, but she will be able to keep her memories alive.

Would you ever keep a book about your life? Who would you let read it?

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