Memoir - when is the Right Time to write?

How long should you "wait"?

Sharing my memoir Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days With ALS with a group of hospice volunteers in Ladner, B.C., last October. Caught mid-word, it appears. Or am I thinking…?

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In Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, her third chapter is filled with reasons why NOT to write a book that scrutinizes your very self. Her number 3 on a “pop quiz” she’s created to determine if you are “ready,” is this:

If the events you are writing about are less than seven or eight years past, you might find it harder than you think. Distance frees us of our former ego’s vanities and lets us see deeper into events.

Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir, p. 28

It occurred to me, talking with dozens of new graduates from the volunteer orientation at the Hospice, that I am now into “7-8” years. The thought made me revisit this idea of WHEN in the writing of memoir.