You Met Grandma at a Keg Party? The Rich Order $100,000 Memoirs for Family Only.

Some just want their heirs to know they worked hard for their money, while others are more forthcoming; ‘My one and only acid trip’

By Rachel Louise Ensign, Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2025

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A new generation of wealthy retirees is commissioning their own memoirs. They’re not trying to reach the bestseller list. Many of them just want the kids to know how hard they had it.

The ghostwritten memoirs can run hundreds of pages and cost up to $100,000. An entire ecosystem of writers and high-end self-publishers has emerged to meet the demand.

Some reveal family secrets (Grandpa’s acid trip, anyone?). Most gloss over drama like divorces and alcohol issues and focus on uplifting narratives about their humble upbringings and the sweat and tears that enabled the comfortable lives of their intended audience: their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Rudi Pauly, 92, paid $12,000 for a 185-page book about her life and family history from LifeBook Memoirs. The book, “From Menzingen to Lake Chelan,” starts off with her German immigrant grandparents living in a sod dugout on a Nebraska farm at the end of the 19th century. Five of the couple’s 14 children died, including two in a lightning strike. 

Pauly and her late husband, Jim, were the majority owners of a Washington state fruit business that packed two million boxes of apples and cherries a year. 

“I wanted my kids to realize the sacrifices made by the family which led to our personal lifestyle today,” said Pauly, who has three sons, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “I think that could be so lost.”

Genealogy has long been a popular hobby. But wanting to share one’s own personal history is different from researching the family tree. 

LifeBook Memoirs offers packages that currently run between $18,000 and $42,000. The U.K.-based company sends an interviewer to the subject’s home a dozen or more times, then a ghostwriter turns those recordings into a narrative. The company now publishes hundreds of books a year. 

Pauly got 30 copies of her book: 10 in hardcover and 20 in paperback. She gave them as a Valentine’s Day gift to family members when she was hosting them at her ski home in Sun Valley, Idaho. Writing a book that didn’t offend anyone “was probably the hardest part,” she said.

Her granddaughter, Chelan Oldemeyer, said she was struck by a story about the family auctioning off their belongings. “It reminded me of how humble her roots are,” said Oldemeyer, 33. “It may be why she loves to travel and have a little bit of glamour.”

Cleveland-based KeyCorp’s wealth management unit offers clients with $10 million or more in assets a free ghostwritten memoir, alongside traditional banking products. The 30-40 page books are included in a suite of softer services and meant in part to ease clients’ fears that their heirs won’t understand the value of hard work.

When clients get a windfall, “the first thing they say is, ‘I don’t want this to ruin my family,’” said Carey Spencer, the wealth unit’s national director of family governance.

Client Betty Kemper’s book details her journey from Ohio farm girl to mother of five and founder of a senior-care company. One tidbit: When her future husband John, the son of a prominent local businessman, invited her to a country club, Betty had to ask her mother what it was. The memoir includes a bullet-point list of the things John enjoyed during his final years with Alzheimer’s, like listening to weather reports on a hand-held radio.

Kemper, 83, gave the memoir to her family last Thanksgiving and Christmas. It prompted questions like “When you were growing up on the farm, did you ever have fun?” She’s considering adding a section or writing a new book to answer them.

Alec Quig got his professional start interviewing artists for Bomb magazine in New York and then spent a decade giving private tours of New Orleans. Now he’s a professional ghostwriter who charges up to $100,000 for a memoir. 

Quig does multiple two-hour interviews a week with each client, usually over a video chat, to try to draw out interesting information, a process he describes as “poking at bruises.” 

He tries to keep clients from slipping into what he’s dubbed “the kids these days syndrome,” where they talk disparagingly about the generations they’re trying to reach. 

Morgan Brookfield, 84, wrote about 200 pages of his own memoir before hiring Quig. An Episcopalian, he wants his book to encourage his children and grandchildren to embrace spirituality. 

Quig took Brookfield’s manuscript and cut down the minutiae of his years as a banker, focusing instead on the ethical quandaries he faced in the job. He refined a section about a spiritual awakening that Brookfield had while canoeing in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and moved explicit references to Christianity to the epilogue. 

“He’s made it readable,” said Brookfield, who hopes to give the memoir to his family for Christmas. 

While some subjects carefully skirt past embarrassing or difficult periods, others embrace them. 

Ed Wallace, who owned Harley-Davidson dealerships, used ghostwriters for two previous books: one about his values, one about his business experience.  

“From Dysfunction to Function,” the 76-year-old’s third ghostwritten book, includes vignettes like “My Two Nights in Jail” and “My One and Only Acid Trip.” His 55-year-old son, also named Ed Wallace, had never heard some of these stories.

“I lived a sheltered life,” the younger Ed Wallace said, laughing. 

KeyCorp client Ken Munsch, who ran animal-feed and pet-treat businesses, gave his book to his family on Christmas 2023. “I didn’t realize you and grandma met at a keg party,” grandson Hayden Desserich said at dinner that evening. Munsch, 73, hopes his grandkids are also interested in the book’s lessons on being a successful entrepreneur. 

One concern is whether the kids and grandkids will read the book at all. The founders of R360, a network for wealthy people, offer a personal video documentary as part of its $70,000-a-year membership. One member who died recently has a QR code with a link to the video on her tombstone. 

“It’s a treasure,” said Angel Alvarez, an R360 member, of his 40-minute video, which came with hours of raw footage of interviews with his mom before she died in February at 99. 

Nonmembers can pay for a documentary from R360’s team—for $40,000 to $70,000.

Source: Rachel Louise Ensign, Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2025