There is a box of my mother’s books in my office I have not been able to open. On personal libraries, marginalia, and why books are the real heirlooms.
Memoir & Life Story
I was a child processing death in the late 80s, before anyone had language for it. So I wrote. Here is what writing actually does to grief.
I wrote a book about grief while my mother was dying. It is good, and it is staying in a drawer. The five real reasons not to write the book yet, from thirty years of getting other people theirs.
Every memoir, every leadership book, every story drawn from real life runs into the same wall: the people in your story are real. Your ex-partner. Your difficult parent. The colleague who betrayed you. The mentor who changed your life. The client who became a friend. Writing about them is not optional — they are the story. But writing about them carelessly can create legal exposure, damage relationships that matter, and produce a book that feels like a score-settling exercise rather than a genuine piece of work. Here is everything I know, after thirty years, about how to do it right.
In thirty years of ghostwriting, I have never once worked with someone whose story wasn't worth telling. Not once. The problem was never the story — it was always the belief that the story was ordinary. Here's why the wisdom that feels most obvious to you is precisely the wisdom other people are desperately looking for, and how to know when you're ready to stop being the only person who has it.
We’ve all got stories to tell—incredible ones, if you ask me. But, turning those stories (a.k.a. life lessons) into a bestselling book can feel like trying to translate your puppy’s barking into coherent sentences.
