Revisiting the historical narrative in a reported memoir

Sara Kehaulani Goo tells a personal story about Maui. Plus: what happens when your subjects don't like your story?

Sara Kehaulani Goo, author of "Kuleana"

August 22, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community,

I am away this week, so it seems like a perfect moment to hand the reins over to one of our Storyboard contributors. Here's a special guest post from acclaimed author, journalist, and recent Nieman Storyboard podcast guest Erika Hayasaki. —Mark

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As is the case for many journalists, Sara Kehaulani Goo’s decades-long career led her to far-flung places and new cities. She’s worked as a senior news executive who has helped lead media organizations such as Axios, NPR, and The Washington Post, where she was recently named President of the Creator Network. But for years, even while working with reporters covering the world’s biggest news stories, Goo felt pulled to return to tell a story of her family’s homeland on Maui. She long believed the dominant narrative about Hawaii needed to be corrected. But how would she begin to tell that story?

In 2019, the narrative thread found her. Goo learned that her family was at risk of losing its ancestral land, given to them by King Kamehameha III in 1848. “As a journalist, I was trained to keep myself out of the story,” Goo told me. “It took time and, honestly, life circumstances, to realize my family’s story was worth telling in my own voice, and that it could resonate beyond just me.”

There is a special kind of literary power and authority when a writer weaves their personal insights into a deeply reported story about a place they’re from or know intimately. Goo’s new book, “Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i,” invites readers to understand Hawaii’s broader, overlooked history through her family’s journey.

Goo’s braided book is one of several new narrative nonfiction releases I’ve enjoyed reading recently, written by journalists investigating larger historical stories in their own childhood backyards, including “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama,” by Alexis Okeowo, and “Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity,” by Joseph Lee, about Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are some key questions and tips that Goo shared with Nieman Storyboard for journalists to consider if they are thinking about writing a book that revisits a place from their past:

Who’s your audience? Whom are you writing this book for? The answer to this question matters because it will help you focus on what kind of publisher you are trying to target and how to focus your book. For example, you might have a target audience of a certain population in mind — think geographic location or identity or people who will relate to a certain stage in life.

What’s your story? A good story has a strong beginning, middle, and end. Sounds easy, right? Well, in a book, you may realize you don’t quite have all those pieces yet. In my case, I thought I had it figured out but it turned out I actually had more of my life to live and sort out before I had actually figured out the “end.” So my book wasn’t really ready. Maybe that’s where you are. Keep writing — it’s still material you can use for your book.

Who are your characters? Think about them and develop them more than you would in a typical feature story. Pick a few main characters and decide who are smaller characters. You have to do some serious editing (and be ruthless) about who makes a good character. When it comes to your own life, this could be easy or it could be hard.

Be patient with yourself. Expect that this process likely will take years, not months. The publishing business is slow. But you also only have one shot to do it right. So don’t rush it. You’re collecting string for your longest yarn ever. There will be times when you work hard at it for months and there will be months when you don’t work on it at all.

For more of my conversation with Sara, check out my newsletter interview with her.

Links of note

How do you handle it when people you write about get mad about what you’ve written? Raksha Vasudevan walks us through a story in which the subjects, to her surprise, didn’t like it. Vasudevan notes: “To shine on others a purely beauteous or monstrous light does nothing, serves no one.”
Naomi Kanakia shares an excellent interview with literary agent Alia Hanna Habib, who represents Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other nonfiction writers. Habib recently published a book on building a nonfiction writing career and offers this great piece of advice: “I don't think anyone should write a book because it feels like the next logical step. … Don’t approach it as part of a checklist of a brilliant career.”
Chloé Cooper Jones recently posted a Q&A with Kevin Nguyen, author and features editor at The Verge (who walked me through the story editing process at his publication a few months ago). Nguyen explains how he pitched and wrote his piece for The New York Times Magazine’s “Letter of Recommendation” on “How Interviewing Your Own Family Can Change Your Life.”
Tom Huang has worked hard over the past decade to make the Power of Diverse Voices: Writing Workshop for Journalists of Color one of the best writing workshops in the country. Free for participants, it trains journalists of color to harness the power of their voices through four intensive days at Poynter. The application deadline is Sept. 12 for the next session, which runs Nov. 11-14.

Signing off with words of advice for future book authors, first from novelist Isle McElroy, one of 11 writers who talked about “The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Published.” McElroy said: “My advice is to see the book as a moment in time, an expression of a self in amber, rather than a reflection of the person putting it into the world.”

And finally, from Sara Kehaulani Goo (who is also a mother of three) on finishing a book project: “My goal was to write one chapter a month. I gave myself a year to write the book, working every other morning from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m….I also gave myself incentives, like a reward at the six-month mark.”

Keep writing.

Erika Hayasaki
Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine
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