Turning Remembered Life into a Memoir: STENHOUSE Author Promo

Guest Post: Turning Remembered Life into a Memoir: What Writing STENHOUSE Taught Me

By M. G. Judge, writing as Bill Rectangle

Memory does not arrive neatly divided into chapters.

It arrives as flashes: a street corner, a school corridor, the sound of a record playing, the feel of a football at your feet, the first computer that seemed impossibly futuristic, a family phrase you have not heard for decades, or a friendship that suddenly feels as immediate as it did when you were twelve.

That was the first challenge I faced when I began writing STENHOUSE: Growing Up in Edinburgh and Beyond. I was not starting with a researched historical subject and then looking for a narrative. I was starting with a lived life and trying to work out how to shape it without making it feel artificially tidy.

The most important decision I made was that my own lived experience would remain the single source of truth behind the memoir. I could check dates, places and public facts where that was useful, and I could talk to family and friends when memories overlapped, but I did not want outside research to overwrite what I genuinely remembered.

That distinction mattered. A memoir is not a court transcript, and memory is not a database. What matters is being truthful about what you remember, what you know, and where there may be uncertainty.

Memory needs structure, but not too much structure

At first, I had memories rather than a book.

Some were large and obviously significant. Others were tiny: going outside with friends, music, skating, school, early computers, football, local characters, family routines and the countless ordinary moments that made up an Edinburgh childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The temptation is to keep only the dramatic moments because they appear more “important”. I found the opposite was often true. The ordinary details were what made the world feel real.

So I began organising memories roughly by age, place and period. That gave me a chronological spine, but I tried not to force every chapter into the same shape. Some memories needed room. Others worked better as short snapshots.

The structure had to serve the memory rather than the memory serving the structure.

The emotional decisions are often harder than the writing

Writing about yourself also means writing around other people.

Family, friends, teachers, neighbours and people you knew briefly all become part of the landscape. That creates a responsibility. A memory may belong to you, but another person may appear inside it.

I found myself repeatedly asking: Why am I including this? Does it add something meaningful? Is it fair? Am I describing what I genuinely experienced, or am I claiming to know what somebody else thought or felt?

Those questions became an important part of the editing process.

Memoir does not require pretending that everything was perfect. Difficult memories belong in a life as much as funny or affectionate ones. But there is a difference between honesty and unnecessary exposure. Sometimes the strongest editorial decision is to leave something out.

Small details can carry an entire period

One of the themes that emerged naturally in STENHOUSE was the transition from an analogue childhood into the digital world.

I did not begin with a grand theory about technological change. I simply remembered what it felt like.

We grew up largely outside, made arrangements without mobile phones, bought music physically, spent time in streets, parks and friends’ houses, and watched home computers move from something exciting and unusual into something increasingly central to everyday life.

Because I later built a professional career in IT and technology, I can now look back and recognise how significant that transition was. But when writing the memoir I tried to preserve the viewpoint of the child who did not yet know where technology was going.

That became an important craft lesson: do not give your younger self knowledge they did not have at the time.

The adult writer can provide context, but the remembered child still needs room to see the world as it appeared then.

Reading — and listening — exposed what editing on a screen could not

A major part of my review process was hearing the book rather than only reading it.

I personally narrated the audiobook, and that exposed awkward sentences, repetition, pacing problems and passages that looked fine on a screen but did not sound natural when spoken aloud.

Before publication, my partner and I also went through the book from beginning to end, discussing it chapter by chapter while listening to the audio version. That was enormously useful because it forced me to experience the work as a reader or listener would — continuously, rather than as an author endlessly jumping between individual paragraphs.

By that stage, I had also had feedback from a small group of trusted family and friends. Their role was not to rewrite my memories for me, but to tell me where something was unclear, where a chapter dragged, or where a moment that felt obvious to me needed more explanation for someone who had not lived it.

You have to accept that memory is human

Perhaps the biggest lesson was accepting that remembered life will never behave like perfect data.

Two people can remember the same afternoon differently. A year can be clear while a month is uncertain. A street can be vivid while the exact sequence of events has blurred.

The answer is not to manufacture certainty.

I became more comfortable using the natural language of memory: “I remember”, “as I recall”, “around that time”. Those phrases are not weaknesses. Used honestly, they tell the reader what kind of truth they are being given.

The goal was never to claim that my childhood represented everybody who grew up in Edinburgh. It was to preserve one ordinary life carefully enough that other people might recognise pieces of their own.

Ordinary memory is worth preserving

When I began STENHOUSE, I was writing my first memoir in my late forties after spending decades in a very different professional world.

I had also struggled with written language when I was younger, so becoming an author was not something I had always assumed I would do.

That made finishing the book especially meaningful, but the deeper value has come from what happened afterwards. Readers have contacted me because a place, a song, a school experience, an early computer or simply the atmosphere of growing up before the internet unlocked one of their own memories.

That is why I now believe ordinary memoir matters.

History is not only major events and famous people. It is also how families spoke to one another, where children played, what music came through the bedroom wall, how communities felt, what technology entered the home, and the small routines nobody thought were historical while they were living them.

The craft of memoir is partly about shaping those fragments into a coherent story. The emotional work is learning what to keep, what to question, what to leave out, and how to remain fair to the people who share the edges of your memories.

But underneath all of that is something simpler: paying attention to an ordinary life before the details disappear.

Title: STENHOUSE: Growing Up in Edinburgh and Beyond 

Author: Bill Rectangle

STENHOUSE: Growing Up in Edinburgh and Beyond

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About the Author

M. G. Judge writes under the pen name Bill Rectangle. His first memoir, STENHOUSE: Growing Up in Edinburgh and Beyond, recalls family, friendship, school, music, youth culture, early technology and everyday life in Edinburgh during the 1980s and early 1990s. He independently authored and self-published the book through White Hat Media and personally narrated the audiobook.

Official STENHOUSE website: https://www.whitehatmedia.org/