A memoir doesn't need to be good. It needs to be yours.

There's a quiet fear that stops people from recording their stories, and it's worth saying out loud: they think it has to be good. Complete. Well-written. A proper book — the kind you'd be a little embarrassed to hand someone if it wasn't.

I want to take that fear away, because it gets the whole point backwards.

Think about what you actually treasure from someone who's gone. It's almost never the polished stuff. It's a voicemail you never deleted. A birthday card with three clumsy sentences in their handwriting. The way they told the same story every Christmas while everyone groaned. None of that is good writing. All of it is priceless, for one reason — it's unmistakably them.

That's the whole job a memoir has. Not to impress anyone. Not even to be complete — no life fits in a book, and the gaps don't matter. It just has to be you, in your own words, saying things the way you'd actually say them.

A perfect, ghostwritten account of your life that doesn't sound like you is worth less, to the people who love you, than a rambling, half-finished one that does. The grammar isn't the point. The you is the point.

So if you've been waiting until you have something impressive to say, or enough time to do it properly, or a better way with words — you can stop waiting. There's no bar to clear. The messy, ordinary, in-your-own-voice version isn't a lesser version. It's the one they'll want.

That's also why I'm not worried about the stories people tell into MemoirTalk being too plain or too scattered. Plain and scattered is what real memory sounds like. The app isn't trying to make you sound like a writer. It's trying to keep you sounding like you.

— Jeff

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