"As for how to actually organize your memoir, my final advice is, again, think small. Tackle your life in easily manageable chunks. Don’t visualize the finished product, the grand edifice you have vowed to construct. That will only make you anxious."
Good advice. Here's an excellent article by author William Zinsser, one of our favorite "writing coaches," courtesy of The American Scholar. In it, he describes the personal history his father wrote and what it meant to him.
Zinsser appreciates his father's honest writing style:
"Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his “style.” He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty....
"When you write your own family history, don’t try to be a “writer.” It now occurs to me that my father, who didn’t try to be a writer, was a more natural writer than I am, with my constant fiddling and fussing. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere."
About privacy issues:
"What about the privacy of the people I write about? Should I leave out things that might offend or hurt my relatives? What will my sister think?
"Don’t worry about that problem in advance. Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it—now. Don’t look over your shoulder to see what relatives are perched there. Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue.
"Finally, it’s your story. You’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past."
{C}{C}Enjoy! You can read the article here. For further reading, we suggest On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
