Noemi, Matilda, Hilda, and Silvia Haigazn, 1926.
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When I think about family memoirs, I think about Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians, to name just three. I think about a class I took in my MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop taught by author and faculty member Barrie Jean Borich where I learned the term we-moir as a different approach to me-moir.
I think about my current work-in-progress, my investigative journey into my Armenian grandmother Matilda’s life in Turkey before, during, and after the Genocide.
What I’m writing could be classified as a we-moir but I believe family memoir is more accurate. Or perhaps the way to look at it is we-moir is the genus, and family memoir is the species. A family memoir often covers a long period of time and multiple generations, can include geography, culture, history, any larger forces that act upon the family story, like genocide, for example. A family memoir, an engaging narrative, differs from a family history, a plain litany of facts and timelines.
As the narrator, my search—for facts, for understanding—is the narrative force that drives the story, complete with my longing to know, with obstacles that stand in the way of my knowing, and the meaning I make of this investigation into my family history. But I am not the direct subject. The story I am telling is above all about my Armenian family, specifically my grandmother and her two sisters. Thus, a family memoir.
These thoughts are in no way definitive of family memoir, just my thinking about it to date.
All of this leads me to four books, we-moirs all, and perhaps all could also be called family memoirs, especially the first two. Each is also something more, reaching outward with larger themes, turning inward with the particular experiences and viewpoints of their narrators.
The first two books are similar to my Armenian family manuscript in the use of archives and artifacts to construct a family story, to solve a mystery, to find the limits of what can be known.
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Indiginity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)
When a social media post of an unknown photograph of her grandmother prompts questions about her character, including an accusation of being a communist spy, Ypi visits the archives in Albania and Greece to try to find answers. Besides the documents she finds, she also utilizes her memories of the stories her grandmother told her to construct whole scenes from her grandmother’s life before Ypi was born.
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Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice by Laura Kalpakian (University of New Mexico Press, July 7, 2026)
In June 1969, Kalpakian’s nineteen-year-old brother Doug enlists in the Army and arrives in Vietnam. Horrors ensue. Fourteen months later, Doug accepts an Undesirable Discharge and returns to the US with PTSD, mental illness, and drug addiction. Due to the status of his discharge, Doug is denied all veteran’s benefits. His father believes the Undesirable Discharge is unwarranted. Fifty years later, when Kalpakian finds an envelope of letters in the family safe, she uses the documents to piece together her father’s battle to secure justice for his son.
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In a lovely case of serendipity, two of my MFA mentors have books out this year, both, in different ways, addressing the caretaking and loss of elderly parents.
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Love You, Bye: A Daughter’s Journy in Essays and Poems, by Brenda Miller (Skinner House Books, 2026)
This book maps Miller’s evolving relationship with her parents throughout her life and during their final years when she cared for them. She reflects on saying the final goodbyes to those you love.
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Lights Falls on Everything: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility by Rebecca McClanahan (University of North Carolina Press, 2026)
McClanahan was the primary caregiver for years for her parents, dealing with the physical complexities of their aging in addition to dementia. This book chronicles the practicalities along with the grief and unexpected joys of eldercare.
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Brenda Miller and Rebecca McClanahan have a free online event on May 12, 1pm PT/4pm ET. There will be writing prompts! Register here.
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