My friend Lynn and I have decided to embark on a new project: giving workshops to help people write their memoirs.

I have taught writing workshops before, but this one already has me jumping up and down in excitement because it’s different. Instead of being for people who already know how to write, we want to invite people who don’t already think of themselves as writers, because they have stories to tell just the same.

These are the really fun stories of our lives, the stories you tell in the car or recount over Thanksgiving dinner, or whenever you get a new close friend. In my family, they are the stories of the time my sister decided to cut off the bumps on her tongue with the scissors, and the day my brother sold his horrible-looking potty chair at the neighbor’s rummage sale. And the tale of my grandmother shooting my grandfather because he came home early from a business trip without telling her–well, that one always gets told too. It’s funny, mostly because she missed.

I think we’re all hungry for stories about where we came from and WHO we came from. We want the details about our parents’ upbringings and the story that would explain whatever made them think they belonged together, and why in the world they chose those jobs they chose, and why do they save string and keep the heat turned down to sub-livable temperatures?

And our kids want to know the same things about us!

I want to encourage people to write about the popular kids’ table in the lunchroom in middle school, and what they thought about when they looked outside their bedroom window, and who did they go to the prom with in high school, and who did they first have a crush on. The stories can go on and on and on: who was your next door neighbor, and your first pet that you truly loved, and when did you know what kind of work you really, really wanted to do, and when did somebody first make you so mad that you stood up for yourself in spite of the fact that you were scared?

See? Isn’t this going to be fun?

So anyway, if you live anywhere near Guilford, Connecticut, and you want to be in the workshop, you need to let us know. Email me right away! Today! The course starts next week.

Lynn and I are psyched about this. She’s a biographer who has written very cool biographies about Gregory Peck and Josephine Baker–the latter which was optioned for film by Diana Ross. She also used to write for the New York Times and worked for Christian Dior in Paris, and she’s gone everywhere and done everything, and is hilarious, to boot.

My contribution is that I write novels and for ten years wrote a column about my family life in the newspaper. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE the little details of people’s lives, the things they might forget. We both can help people shape the stories, get down all the details–and figure out what to write about in the first place.

And even if you don’t live close by and can’t take the workshop, take my advice and start writing these stories down for yourself. Keep a little book, and write down the funny things your kids say. You think you’ll remember them forever, but you won’t.

And like Bernie Siegel, the cancer doc says, just the act of writing down details of your life–even the painful ones–can be as therapeutic an exercise as going to therapy. Writing can heal us all.

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