A New True to Me: The Foundation for How I Got Here is a memoir built around a deceptively simple question: How do we really know the story of our own lives? At what point did you realize the book was becoming something very different from the memoir you initially intended to write?

Actually, until I was months into writing, I didn’t intend to write a memoir. I was simply answering questions provided by a Storyworth subscription, to collect discrete stories in a volume they would print and bind. The individual stories, in separate word processing files, wove themselves together like fabric through the language I used. The individual files were combined into a manuscript ten months after I began writing. An introduction was added, and I began wondering if I would ever offer the manuscript to a few friends and relatives. That was when my writing defined itself as a memoir, which simply evolved into the published book as I kept doing the next thing writing demanded I do.

Archive – The Writing of A NEW TRUE TO ME traces the evolution from the origin story to a post about discovering Literary Titans’ review on Goodreads on the day it was published (August 31).

You allow readers to see your earlier belief, the evidence that challenged it, and your revised understanding. Why was it important to preserve that process on the page?

The second question from Storyworth was, “How did you get your first job?” My answer was a walk through the jobs and my ancestral history that guided me to them. With seven days of steady writing, the response became nearly four thousand words, which was an extension of the first Storyworth question—What were your grandparents like?—response.

Then, months later, I was exploring records to describe my high school years. There, I discovered that stories I have told about my first jobs throughout my adult life were absolutely not true. This created a dilemma. What should I do about the factually flawed stories I believed and memorialized when I wrote about those first jobs?

On my first day of drafting the answer to the first question, I whimsically put a footer in the word processing document. “I made up a few things. There are some I forgot. It’s all true to me.” It appeared on every page of every draft until the manuscript became a book layout. To settle the dilemma, I lifted “true to me” from the footer and added “new.” A NEW TRUE TO ME became the title I intended for the collection of discrete stories printed by Storyworth.

Still later, as I edited the manuscript, I wanted to encourage potential memoir authors by displaying the path from beliefs to an understanding that is closer to objective truth, even if objective truth is not available. One of the reasons I felt encouraged to offer my manuscript to the world was the idea that it may help others write their own.

How did your definition of professional success change between your years in banking and your later career in financial planning?

Wow, at age seventy-eight and nearly five decades since I worked in a commercial bank, it is hard to remember my definition of success then. When A NEW TRUE TO ME discusses my high school and undergraduate years in the 1960s, it questions what the word “success” means, while acknowledging I’m still not sure about what I believed then. We were a generation troubled by what we saw as society’s definitions of success.

My definition of “success” as a financial planner, on the other hand, is clear and far more than “professional success.” When I heard financial planning described as a service to help people understand the intersections among complex financial services and optimize their use, I recognized that many people needed the service and I had skills well suited to helping clients. Then I recognized that commission-based compensation for financial planning resulted in abuse of clients. I was distraught. I launched my own firm to provide fiduciary financial planning, divorced from selling financial products other than my labor-intensive services focused totally on clients’ best interests.

At that point, the definition of success became clients who felt secure, with a clear understanding of their financial circumstances. Seeing new clients worried about their ability to retire comfortably, then retire ten to twenty years later with well-founded confidence that they were financially secure, was the definition of success for me.

What questions would you recommend someone ask when beginning to examine the stories they have always believed about themselves?

I’m not sure I have any better questions than the various services like Storyworth. My first was “What were your grandparents like?” Within ten minutes I had my first paragraph that included:

I start this by saying that I never really knew any of my grandparents well, except through the stories I was told. Whatever I say is, therefore, colored by interpretations by the people who told the stories and my memories of their telling, which, of course, is subject to me enhancing the readers’ impressions of me … So, here we go.

From there, I just kept responding to questions until I began creating my own titles for stories. That first paragraph was not edited in any way, I remember, through 3 ½ years of work on the manuscript.

For me, it is not the questions that count. It is the act of writing about one’s life that raises the questions that matter. Then you question what you wrote in the first draft, then question the edits repeatedly until you reach a true-to-you as of the date you feel satisfied. I had to extend that date multiple times when providence revealed new truths after I thought I was finished. Less than three months after I declared my satisfaction with the truth of the entire book, I have experienced discoveries that would have required minor editing if discovered before that date.

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