Everywhere I look on social media, people are being encouraged to “tell their story.” You won’t get any pushback from me on this advice. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard:

“I wish we knew more about Mom’s childhood.”

“Did dad ever tell you about his time in Vietnam?”

“I think Uncle Charlie had a ‘still’ in the basement.”

Or: “I’d love to leave some stories for my kids, but I’m no writer.”

And lately: “They gave me one of those gift boxes where I get a question every month. But frankly, it’s a lot of work. I’d really rather talk to someone.” That last one got me. My sister has not touched hers!

I’ve always loved stories, and I love asking questions. So I found myself being pulled back to what I’ve done in one form or another for most of my career: helping people tell the stories that mean something to them.

That’s how May I Tell Your Story happened. I help people create the memories they want to share.

It turns out most people don’t want a worksheet. They want a human being who is actually listening. Someone who follows the thread instead of a script. Someone who hears the interesting thing buried in the thing you thought was interesting.

I learned this years ago, when I began doing publicity for entertainers. I kept seeing biographies that read like insurance forms: born here, studied there, credits include X, Y and Z. But many of these people had lived very interesting lives. So I started writing narrative biographies—their actual stories, with a little panache.

One of my favorites was a singer named Bob Griggs, whose life had more plot twists than most television series. He moved to Los Angeles as a kid right after the Zoot Suit Riots. He became a regular on a TV Hootenanny show. His drinking buddies knighted him at a bar, where he became “Sir Robert Charles Griggs.” In 1973, he recorded a cult, sci-fi-adjacent country album featuring a Moog synthesizer. He eventually got sober and sang jazz into his eighties.

Try fitting that into “veteran vocalist with decades of experience.”

A life story doesn’t have to be a 300-page memoir, either. It can be a single story that has never been told before. A series of interviews. A collection of family recipes. A video. An obituary. A eulogy. Sixteen short chapters about the feel of clay and metal in an artist’s hands.

I spontaneously wrote a memoir of the (original) Empire Diner when I read the news that it was closing in 2010. I had worked there as a waitress from 1977 to 1982. A lot of my personality was honed there – those were wild days! I wrote a stream of conscious piece that came to the attention of the New York Times, and they published it in the Diner’s Journal. It was just a short, vivid memory piece.

Recently, I worked with a magnificent artist who had lost her sight. We didn’t write a conventional memoir. Instead, we created a sense-memory piece about her life as an artist: hard materials and soft ones, weight and balance, the physical rituals of the studio, sounds and tools. Some chapters were only a paragraph or two.

It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever helped create. And it looked nothing like what most people think of as a “life story.”

Tina DeVaron is a singer/songwriter/pianist and PR client who wrote a gorgeous song about saying goodbye to her youngest son when he left NYC for France to teach. I said, “Let’s tell a bigger story,” and we decided to create a video. We chose photos which we combined with live action of Tina performing the song in a Piano Atelier in Hastings-on-Hudson. A wonderful filmmaker, Evan Seplow, directed it.

That’s a memoir, too. Just not on paper.

Maybe I’m especially attuned to this because I started out in my adult life as a singer. A singer or actor interprets someone else’s words: you find the emotion that rings true, then inhabit the story in performance. It turns out that’s not so different from sitting across from someone and helping them find the words that sound like them.

Then there are the stories that really shouldn’t wait.

Obituaries and eulogies are much easier to write when you’re not writing them in the middle of the emotional chaos of a death. I know this firsthand.

Recently, my dear friend’s mother died. She was a remarkable public figure who’d had a global presence in her field. She had been declining for some time when she became very ill, very quickly, and passed. So I was pressed into service to write an obituary, and my friend and I pieced one together – while she was grieving. We got it done. It was good. But as I worked, I thought: This is hard on her, we should have done this sooner. Fortunately, my friend had interviewed her mother about 10 years ago, and so we had those videos as source material too.

You never really know which detail will turn out to be the one everyone wants to remember. Maybe it’s the war story. Maybe it’s the recipe. Maybe it’s the song about your son leaving for a far-off land.

Maybe it’s the mysterious still in Uncle Charlie’s basement.

You just have to ask.