1. What is your earliest memory? Why do you think that one has stuck?
2. What about childhood do you wish you could remember? What about childhood do you wish you could forget?
3. Do you trust your childhood memories? Does it matter to you if they are accurate?
4. When it comes to memory, what is the difference is between accuracy and truth?
5. What are the implications of memory’s fallibility in daily living, relationships, work, and the law?
6. How do your childhood memories inform your parenting?
7. If you carry a “big story,” how has it affected your identity? Are there ways you feel like an outsider in some circles and an insider in others?
8. How do you go about discussing or writing about topics that are traumatic, taboo, or painful?
9. What is the motivation to tell a true, personal story to a wide audience?
10. If you could write someone’s life story other than your own, whose would it be?
Suzanne Farrell Smith 