Saving Our Lives: Volume Three-Essays to Launch the Writer in YOU is a book of personal essays and writing advice designed to entertain readers and to encourage writers. Hoffman fashions her opinions, experiences and life stories into essays on a variety of topics with the intent of convincing readers that their opinions, experiences and life stories are valuable and worth saving-one small piece at a time.
Volume Three continues the work begun in Saving Our Lives: Volume One-Essays to Inspire the Writer in YOU and Saving Our Lives: Volume Two--Essays to Release the Writer in YOU with thirty-seven new essays and three-hundred and fifty new writing prompts. Essays cover everything from quirks to crochet, crushes to coiffures, cats to COVID and from concerts to climate change--with a little singing, traveling, rock collecting and reminiscing thrown in for good measure. The message here is that there is value in the details of our lives, if only we can find ways to focus on them, capture them and save them for all time. Hoffman has found a way to do just that and uses her book as an example of how all of us can save our stories if we are committed to the task.
Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to Saving Our Lives: Volume Three-Essays to Launch the Writer in YOU.
"When my first daughter was born, I asked my mom to fill in a page about herself in the baby book. She said no, that she hadn't done anything worthwhile. Now that she is gone, I think about all the things she could have told me about being a child of immigrants, about surviving the depression, about growing up with paternalistic brothers, about being disowned by her family for marrying my father, about enduring a difficult marriage thereafter, about motherhood, about her prejudices, her politics, her philosophies, her vanities, about widowhood, about aging, about facing death. She had so much to teach.
Mommy's problem was that she never felt that she distinguished herself in the world-no diplomas, no fame, no awards, no money. This was the standard by which she judged the importance, the value of a life-at least a life that was worth immortalizing in words.
If this is the standard we use for deciding who should preserve their life stories and who should not, then we are dooming the world to irretrievable loss. We are gathering up the collective observations, experiences and knowledge of an entire age and placing them into in the hands of those few writers who are marketable for a moment. How sad this is to me. How profoundly sad.
All of our lives have value-even literary value. Maybe not to the whole world, but to someone. There will be someone who will benefit, someone who will care, someone whose life will be enriched by your literary existence. I am confident of that."
Volume Three is the final installment of the three-part Saving Our Lives series. Individually or as a set, the Saving Our Lives books provide both readers and writers with a fresh, entertaining and manageable approach to memoir--and life.
