Vulnerability When Writing Memoir: The Expected and the Unexpected

By Irene Stern Frielich

I was sure I had thought it through. And in fact, I had. The problem was, I hadn’t felt it through.

Five years ago, when I started writing my father’s story, I had no idea it would transform into a memoir. I wanted to document what I knew of my father’s life as a Jewish boy during the Nazi period in Germany and in the Netherlands. He had shared very little of his story with me in person and he died in 1994, when I was a young adult.

I was able to piece togethe...