AND FINALLY We should all write our life stories

A WHILE back I had a long email from Susan B, recounting the story of an extraordinary life full of drama, trauma, unhappiness, making do, discoveries, faith, upsets, quarrels, volunteering — to a new love and marriage in her 50s.

It wasn’t a problem but she concluded: ‘Should I write a book? A lot of my friends think I should, but how would I go about it?’

Some weeks later Susan wrote again. She’d just read somebody’s problem on the page. ‘...OMG — enough said . . . Bel, just don’t bother reading mine or think of featuring it in the newspaper because obviously the likes of poor Richard need your help and advice more than me.’

This column often works for people by putting their own issues into perspective. Yet the only question Susan had asked me was about writing a life story — a question I’ve been asked before.

A warning first. It sometimes distresses me a little that people put a lot of work into writing a memoir and then expect it to be published, only to be bitterly disappointed.

Private printing (or using Amazon for this purpose) is always a possibility, but not if you then expect your hard work to be rewarded in any way other than the satisfaction of seeing your (costly) book on your own shelf.

Yet I agree with the Russian poet Yevtushenko who wrote, ‘No people are uninteresting’, likening our individual fates to ‘the chronicles of planets’.

Each person is a star in their own story, although obviously some lives are more exciting than others.

So yes, write out your own life story, for the love of doing so. Believe me, it’s a fearful slog getting words on to the page — and I do this for a living!

But if you have children, write it for them, just a neat typed document in an ordinary binder, so that your individual history (with plenty of detail and description) remains in the family when you have gone. A wave to the future.

Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Scottish Daily Mail, 20 Waterloo Street, Glasgow G2 6DB, or email bel.mooney@dailymail. co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.