Two long-time, well known Newton residents have recently written and published book-length memoirs. The two memoirs are not at all alike. But in deep conversations with both John Stewart and Bob Burke, I have seen that the experience of writing a memoir had changed each of them.
John Stewart: My Life, Parts One and Two
John and I sat chatting in his living room as his wife, Lucia, made coffee in the kitchen. On the coffee table in front of us were two copies each of Stewart’s memoirs, My Life: Part One and My Life: Part Two.
Published in 2018, Part One of John’s memoir begins on December 15, 1932 with his birth in Lowell General Hospital. The subsequent chapters dive into the chronological sequence of his life, from childhood, to his attending Lexington High School, his time in the Army, Boston University, careers, love, family, and so on.
“On the surface, my story is not terribly dramatic. I’ve never done anything with huge public implications, and there are no radical shifts involved: a rise, for example, from terrible poverty to immense wealth, from poor health to great heights of mental or physical triumph, or from tragedy, corruption, or struggle to success upon success.
“Yet, clearly we all have an interesting, maybe even fascinating, and certainly unique, tale to tell, for our lives are inevitably filled with a massive array of events, relationships, environments, atmospheres, and situations and an assortment of ‘course-changing’ moments or delusions, big and small, planned or accidental.” (My Life: Part One, page 1)
After an early career in Washington, John had the opportunity to move back to Massachusetts and work at the new John F. Kennedy Library. He worked there for 33 years before his retirement, which is when the seed of writing a memoir was planted.
“When I left the Kennedy Library, I took with me, with their permission, quite a few papers that I had used in the 33 years,” he said. “They were my personal files, and I had just become convinced that I should write the story of my life. It just seemed like the logical thing to do at the end of my working life, my career.”
John didn’t begin to actually write the memoir until later in his retirement. While he was originally planning to write one book to encapsulate his whole life, time and pressure pushed him to split the works into two.
“I intended to write one book, but I wasn’t making the kind of progress I hoped to make,” he said. “Then people kept bugging me, ‘You said you were going to write a book. Where is it?’ And so I decided in 2018 to divide the story. Logically it was divided in 1969 because that’s the year I left Washington to come back to Massachusetts.”
But at the very moment we sat down at his coffee table, John lightly poked at the first of his memoirs on the table and told me that he wasn’t happy with how they turned out.
“This first one especially reads like a report,” he said. “Just ‘these are the facts,’ I did this, I did this, I went here, I went there, and so forth. There’s no ‘you know me in a very, very personal way.’ ”
But despite his remarks, John said that by detailing his childhood, there was inherently more of his personality in it, and he wished he would have gotten more into the negatives that shaped his life.
“Looking back now, it had more of an impact on my personality than I’ve ever really admitted,” he said. “But again, that’s in part suggesting that I would love to be able to write a detailed memoir, something that seriously gets into my personality and how and why I developed the way I did as a child.”
The level of detail that goes into writing a memoir, while some find daunting, he finds comforting. John said that while an account reveals a striking amount about someone’s life, airing out the good and the bad helps him lead an honest life.
“Some people are afraid to do it. …But I’ve got nothing to hide. Well, I have a few things to hide, yes, but I err on the side of telling more than I probably should,” he said. “It’s a great thing to do, just to understand yourself. As simple as that. It’s part of knowing who you are and what you’ve done. What can be more important than that?”
In total, John printed 250 copies of each of his books, which solidified his personal gratification of culminating his life’s stories, as well as being able to share them with others.
John’s sharing of the books was particularly important to him. Pointing at a photograph on the wall showing his large extended family from before he was born, he said that he hopes he can leave a documented legacy on his family’s history, something that he never got from his past relatives.
“I would give anything to know more about the people in that picture, my grandparents in particular,” he said. “[The memoirs] accomplished the goal of leaving a document for the people – my family and my family who come after me. Hopefully there’ll be another umpteen generations of Stewart and hopefully these little books will stick around.”
Bob Burke: Finding Myself
Bob decided to take a different route when it came to the structure of his memoir. While traditional accounts, such as John’s, follow a chronological order with periods as chapters, Bob decided to document his life through 121 short stories that all contributed to the larger picture of his life.
“This is more like Charles Dickens’ memoirs and Nathaniel Hawthorn’s ‘Passages from the American note-books’” he said. “They didn’t list their accomplishments, they listed their observations that stuck with them throughout their lives, and that’s what I tried to do in the memoir. It’s mainly things I’ve observed and things that have influenced me in my life.”
He discovered that his Newton Highlands neighbor, Andrew Szanton is a professional memoirist and memoir coach. Through many sessions of talking about Bob’s life, Andrew helped him write his memoir. Szanton got his start in memoir writing after working in an Oral History Program at the Smithsonian Museum in D.C. There, he discovered his passion for telling stories and honoring individuals’ lives, and combined with his love for writing, found his calling in writing memoirs.
“I am a person who loves words, loves to write, loves stories, always loves to hear other people’s stories, loves to think about how to tell stories, and I love people,” he said. “It seemed logical to do memoirs. It’s a little bit like being a psychiatrist, a storyteller, and a best friend. It feels very intimate.”
Born in 1937, Bob’s a Newton native through and through. After going through the Newton Public Schools system, he graduated from Tufts University. He then worked in Naval intelligence, then worked in the Environmental Protection Agency both in Washington D.C. and around New England.
But early on in his narrative, before he goes into any details about his life, Bob makes his diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) clear, in his fifth chapter, “A Disability That Had No Name.” Bob dealt with ADD throughout his entire life, which Szanton said he wanted to make clear early on, in order to flip his narrative from one of struggle to one of success.
“The most emphatic thing he said in the first conversation we had is that people don’t understand that so-called learning disabilities include abilities,” Andrew said. “He felt that there were things he could do better than the average person, that his brain was different, but not worse than other people’s, and that there was too much focus on what his brain doesn’t do as well, and not enough about what his brain does better.”
In addition to his ADD, Bob sheds light on his struggles with alcoholism throughout his adult life. His decision, however, to place emphasis on this journey was to demonstrate that he overcame his struggles.
“There was just some really sad stuff about his drinking, including he was sort of drunk as his mother was dying,” Andrew said. “And I said, ‘Are you sure you want to put this in?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I want to put it in. Because it’s not going to be just that. It’s also going to be me getting serious about AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] and getting off and I’m so proud that I’m sober.’”
Bob recalls the experience of joining AA after years of addiction. He said that part of why he wanted to tell this story in whole was because he wanted people to understand that the illness is not limited to stereotypical “lunatics,” rather, it can happen to anyone.
The memoir as a whole reveals Bob’s story in such depth — a testament to honesty and commitment to healing his narrative.
“I’m 88 now. You reach a stage in life where you’re just not afraid,” he said. “What can anyone do to me? Only good can come of it. If anyone is so aggressive that they think this is the mark of being sinful or something like that, you know it’s not.”
But even before the memoir, Bob said that everyone, to some extent, finds themselves, and that as he continues through life, he has relinquished any fear of being anything other than authentic. And as he now struggles with ailments, he said that his strength has led him to success.
“Before then, I pretty much found myself,” he said. “I lost any sense of being jealous of other people’s success or the view that I could have done more, even though I know I could have done more, it doesn’t matter. If I do feel good about one thing, it’s how I handle my illness. I have not once felt sorry for myself. I’ve been very happy.”
Bob’s memoir, Finding Myself: The Memoir of Bob Burke, begins:
There’s a geologist somewhere who wrote a book about how improbable the journey is that each one of us makes. This geologist fellow noted that if all the people who’ve ever been born, in the whole history of the world, filled two cups of sand, then all the people who could have been born would fill the Grand Canyon – twice.
Yet each one of us is here on earth.
We have no right to be here – yet here we all are, every one of us winners of a lottery with near-impossible odds.
I’ve been here since 1937, I’m in my 9th decade, and I have to approach my life with enormous gratitude. Sure, there are things I regret – but, for the most part, it’s been a wonderful ride.
Come along, and I’ll tell you about it.
Finding Myself: The Memoir of Bob Burke, Preface
Bella Ishanyan is a Fig City News student reporter, Massachusetts High School Journalist of the Year, and a freshman at UMass Amherst.
