Nearly every abandoned memoir starts the same way: "I was born in…". Three pages of vital records, two school memories, and the project falls asleep in a drawer — exhausted before reaching the only thing that mattered: the scenes. Here is why chronology is a trap, and where to start instead.
Starting at the beginning seems logical — which is why everyone does it, and why everyone stops. First, because your earliest years are the ones you remember least: you open your great project with the poorest material. Second, because chronology turns writing into an obligation to cover everything: each year becomes a box to fill, and the empty boxes weigh on you like debts. You don't write your memoirs the way you fill out a form.
Close your eyes and reach for your childhood: what comes isn't years, it's scenes. A kitchen, a smell, the voice of someone who's gone. That is how memory is stored — in moments, each calling up the next, in glorious disorder. Writing your memoirs means following that disorder: capturing the scene that surfaces today, then the one it wakes, without asking where they'll go in the book. Order is assembly work — it happens at the end, and it becomes easy once the scenes are written.
And while you dig through the past, the present — the part of your life you know best, the densest in true detail — is evaporating too. In ten years, today will be as blurry as the rest. The most profitable move for your memoirs isn't digging harder backwards: it's stopping the leak. A few sentences each evening, three questions are enough — and you'll find that a scene from today often wakes, by ricochet, a thirty-year-old memory you thought was lost. Write that one down too: it just paid you a visit.
That is exactly the bet Fablier makes: each evening it interviews you with three questions; overnight, its pen turns your answers into a literary chapter. You live, it writes — and your book grows chapter by chapter, with recurring characters and weeks closed by retrospectives. The memoirs of your old age are already being written: they start tonight.