To My Grandkids, I Was Just “Grandma.” They Had No Idea Who I Was Before Them.

My granddaughter came to me with a school project: “Where does our family come from?” I started to answer, and realized she didn’t even know the name of my village.

To all of them, I’m Nonna. The one with the Sunday sauce and the tin of pizzelle on the counter. That’s the whole picture they have of me.

But I was a whole person before any of them were born. I came to this country at seventeen with one cardboard suitcase and maybe ten words of English.

Those years made me who I am, and they will never know them unless I tell them. And one day it struck me: if I don’t say it, it just… goes. They’ll remember the sauce and none of the rest.

I didn’t want to be remembered as only half of who I was.

The Thing That Finally Got It Out of Me

I’d tried before. My daughter bought me a journal one Christmas. It sat in a drawer. Of course it did.

Then, one evening, I found something myself. After a lifetime of “someday,” I tried it because I wouldn’t have to write a single word.

It’s a service called Memowrite. You just answer questions, out loud or typed, whichever suits you. I did mine out loud, into my phone, the way I’d tell it at the table. About fifty of them, one at a time.

More than a million of these books have been printed. I wasn’t the only one who waited until someone finally asked.

A Real Team Made It a Real Book

I didn’t have to do it alone. Here’s how it worked:

My part:

✅ One question at a time, answered out loud at the kitchen table

✅ No writing, no word limits

✅ Skipped what I wasn’t ready to tell and came back to it later

✅ Read every page before anything was printed

Their part:

✅ Real editors put my answers in order and fixed my grammar

✅ Every chapter still sounds like me

✅ A hardcover with my own photos, up to 500 pages

But Would It Still Sound Like Me?

That was the part I worried about. I’m no writer, and I didn’t want a stranger smoothing my words into something that wasn’t me.

Here is one of my answers, the way I actually said it, and what the team turned it into.

That’s me. Minus the “um”s. They didn’t rewrite me. They found the sentence I couldn’t.

And nothing gets printed until you’ve read every page. If a line doesn’t sound like you, they redo it free until it does.

When my granddaughter read it, she said, “Nonna, this is exactly how you talk.” That was the whole point.

She looks at me a little differently now. Like there’s a whole person where the Sunday sauce used to be. There always was. And her school project got an A.

If You’ve Been Putting It Off, Let This Be the Sign

You know the parts of you I mean. The ones your family would never guess, the ones you assume there will always be time to tell.

You don’t need to be a writer. You don’t need perfect grammar. You don’t need to be good with phones. Help is there 24/7. You just need to start.

And yes, my grandkids will finally know the whole of me now. I think I needed to be known as much as they needed to know me.

It cost less than a nice dinner out with the whole family. And it’s the only place the whole of me exists now, for good.

If you want to hold it by Christmas, start this week. Once your answers are in, the book is printed and on its way within days.

You can always start “someday.” But the memories are sharpest now, and a book like this takes weeks to print.

Someday is how a life gets lost. This is the week to start.