Review: You Don’t Have to Be Famous to Write a Memoir by Stephen Mark Silvers

The uncut account of a life well and truly lived, You Don’t Have to Be Famous to Write a Memoir by Stephen Mark Silvers is a free-wheeling testament to the unimportance of age and the timeless power of remembrance.

Beginning with over a dozen adoringly detailed chapters about each of his relatives, Silvers invites readers into the inside jokes, unforgettable anecdotes, and unwavering devotion of his family, from his first meeting of Grandma Bertha in Venice Beach to his sister’s theatrical passions and his father’s noble nature. Beyond painting a vivid picture of the people and places who raised him, the stream-of-consciousness prose reveals keen powers of observation, a sharp eye for emotional detail, and wistful wisdom, particularly from the lofty perspective of hindsight.

Although the memoir was written in 2024, many of its stories stretch back more than half a century, told with the casual wit and ease of family classics – tall tales lovingly recounted at every holiday or gathering. It reflects fondly on everything from character-building adventures in Boy Scouts and his nerve-inducing bar mitzvah to his job as a book-reading bag boy and his life-altering decision to teach English in Brazil instead of Peru.

Musing on his more than three decades living, loving, and assimilating in Brazil, he recollects amusing battles with language barriers, the patient courtship of his future wife, and his quietly impressive career as an educator and publisher. Humble, unpredictable, and unflinchingly honest, the memoir is an entertaining and inspiring guide for existing outside society’s traditional lines.

Reading like an intimate chronicle of someone who is trying to catch and categorize memories before they’re lost to old age and half-remembered nostalgia, the memoir does have broad appeal, given the author’s spirited honesty. The book is comprised more of intimate details of a life than universal proverbs, but it feels like being a fly on the wall of a stranger’s untold secrets. A lover of the arts, the author also peppers this globe-trotting, decades-spanning memoir with references to the author’s favorite films, directors, musicians, albums, and more, which continually reinforces the writer’s personality and critical mind.

While the author does preface the book with an apology for his tangential style of writing, the frequent interruptions and asides do make the reading experience somewhat choppy. At times, the parenthetical explanations are unnecessary or redundant, e.g., “Sérgio was the most mischievous (impish, difficult) of the three.” This is sometimes amusing and colorful, but it also tends to feel as if the author is padding out the narrative by repeating certain ideas and revelations. Conversely, the length is also uneven in certain places – the amount of text dedicated to three decades in Brazil, for example, seems abrupt in comparison to other, more extended eras of his story. That said, the section about Silvers’ life abroad offers some of the most insightful writing, particularly in regard to the experience of a dedicated, long-term expat.

In all, the memoir accomplishes precisely its aim, as suggested in the title: to shine a revelatory light on the extraordinary capacity of an ordinary life, which the author achieves with humor, endearing wisdom, and indelible insight.