Remarkable Life Memoirs celebrated a milestone birthday recently, with a spectacular banana cake from NYC’s Two Little Red Hens.
(Sure, it was tiny, but that’s because we also had Susan’s stellar amaretto mocha pie. God forbid we should have only one dessert!)
The number 2 reflects a lot more than the duration of our partnership (and our dessert options, and the name of our favorite bakery). It also represents how Remarkable Life’s two founders joined forces to create something that’s much more than the sum of its parts.
In short, we owe our success to teamwork. It’s a joy to work with trusted colleagues, and we are well matched in terms of publishing experience—between us, in fact, we have a combined 60 years! (And that’s not counting the know-how of our crackerjack support team devoted to proofreading, genealogy, translation, map making, family tree creation, printing, and binding.)
But our most important partners are the clients who bring passion and meaning to what might have been a dry, functional publishing factory. We form an emotional bond with our memoirists and their families, and that was as true on Day 1 as it is today.
We hold hands with them. We pass tissues. We scan photos at cozy kitchen tables and laugh over a bottle of wine shared on an airy porch. We interview children and grandchildren. We mourn those lost long ago to war and illness and pure bad luck. We shake our heads over uncanny coincidences and spine-tingling weirdness.
And when we place the finished book in their hands and hug goodbye, it’s always with the feeling of having made a warm, intensely human connection—because our work, in the end, is about real people. Not fiction, not abstractions, not Photoshopped smiles and airbrushed perfection.
We’ll take real-life stories any day. Thank you for allowing us to share them, in all their messy, teary, remarkable glory.
—Samantha & Susan
Previously published on Remarkable Life Memoirs, October 5, 2018.