Memoir, the Mirror, and Living a Good Life

For most of my career as a law professor I have written “scholarly” books, which require precision, argument, evidence, and footnotes—lots of footnotes. In scholarship, the scholar is not supposed to be the point. The idea is the point. The scholar-author is a vehicle for a claim and its support. The “I” is a distraction, sometimes an indulgence, occasionally an embarrassment.

(Finding the Emotional Center of a Memoir.)

Recently I shifted gears. First with A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, a memoir about my career path from growing up in working-class Calumet City, Illinois, to becoming a constitutional law professor who has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court. Now I have written Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, about my years as a prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.

When people hear about these two projects, they assume I decided to become a storyteller. That’s not quite right. I decided—late in life, and somewhat against type—to become a witness. And I discovered that memoir is not just a different way of writing. An honest memoir forces you to ask: What did you do? Why? What did you omit? What did you rationalize? Where were you afraid? Where were you vain? Where were you lazy? Where did you get lucky? In short, writing a memoir is accountability—first and foremost to yourself.

As a lawyer, I learned about moral accountability not from books. I learned it by watching a prosecutor do her job.

In my second year at Harvard Law School, I interned for Alice Richmond, an assistant district attorney in Boston. We were working on a murder case when we came upon exculpatory evidence that could help the defense. At such a moment, every prosecutor will feel the tug of competitive instinct: disclosing this will make the case harder; maybe it isn’t “that important”; maybe it can be explained away; likely “no one will ever know.”

The law is not ambiguous about it. Brady v. Maryland requires disclosure. But the point is not that a Supreme Court case exists. The point is that you want to win.

Alice insisted there was no choice. “Every morning,” she told me, “I have to look at myself in the mirror.”

That line lodged in my mind in a way that doctrines rarely do. It’s not lofty. It’s not rhetorical. It is an accountant’s standard—an everyday audit. Your own reflection is the tribunal you can’t escape. And memoir is another.

In writing A Life for Liberty and Felony Review, I came to realize that a memoir is a mirror you hold up to your own past. What you put on the page—and what you leave off—is what you are willing to see when you “look at yourself” with the benefit of time. The Alice Richmond episode is only one of many such moments and lessons in Felony Review, but it captures the discipline the book returns to again and again.

In a scholarly book, you can be wrong and still be respectable so long as you are careful and candid. In memoir, you can be “right” about events and still fail the reader if you evade yourself. Writing Felony Review forced me to decide, not whether to fabricate, but whether to soften a truth—the truth about myself.

All this has led me to give people two pieces of advice.

First: Everyone should write their memoir, even if only for their family. Not because everyone’s life is dramatic, but because everyone’s life is consequential. A memoir is a gift of explanation: “This is what I thought I was doing when I did what I did.” Families will cherish this because your history is part of theirs.

Second—and more importantly—everyone should live their life as though they are going to write a memoir. If you knew that one day you were going to tell the whole story honestly—warts and all—you would want to have stories of which you are proud, not stories of which you are ashamed.

If you live your life knowing you will one day write a memoir, you start asking not merely whether you can justify a choice, but whether you would want to tell it later without evasion. You begin to care about the story you are writing with your life. You do not have to wait for judgment day. Writing an honest memoir makes you your own judge—deciding, now, which stories you will one day be able to tell without flinching.

This is not about moral perfection. Every life contains mistakes and blind spots. But there is a difference between a life whose story is one of occasional failure honestly confronted, and a life whose story is one of persistent rationalization. The former can be told with candor—and even pride. The latter requires concealment, including from oneself.

When I wrote Felony Review, I committed to telling the bitter along with the sweet. The temptation in memoir is not usually to fabricate; it is to curate—to omit the revealing detail, to polish motives, to preempt judgment. That is why Alice Richmond’s mirror test matters: Memoir makes you reflect on your life.

The mirror is not a perfect judge. But it is always there. And if memoir teaches anything, it is this: Sooner or later you will face your own reflection—whether on the page, or in your own memory. The only real question is whether you will like and approve of the person looking back.

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