About

The GAIR FAMILY LIBRARY is a blend of several of my lifelong skills: an uncanny memory for stories and inside jokes, a passion for autobiographical writing, and a sentimentality for the keeping and preserving of nostalgia.

For all of my life, I’ve had an insatiable desire to recall and regale old personal stories to anyone who would listen (and to many who wouldn’t). This archive serves as a home where I can slowly and deliberately catalog those stories, so that they’ll live on regardless of who’s paying attention.

Previously, the project was called SELF-ABUSE. The name had two meanings: it was a reference to both the “masturbatory” nature of the work and the endless toil I put myself through to mount it.

In the beginning, I imagined SELF-ABUSE as a hyperlocal, underground zine. It was to be a quarterly publication mainly for my friends and colleagues at my former National Geographic, full of articles and photos about whatever stories were happening with us in the office lately. I planned to spearhead the idea myself, but I knew I needed my friends’ help to bring it to life.

Unfortunately, there was absolutely no interest from anybody to read or participate in such a project. When I say no interest, I mean that when I would mention it, the group chat would go radio silent. They treated the pitch with all the seriousness that one would treat the babblings of a two-year-old.

Undeterred, I went at it alone, but I knew I couldn’t manage a quarterly zine. I decided to make it an archive of stories instead, not focused on the news of the week, but the logging of all possible stories ad infinitum.

For a while, the project continued as SELF-ABUSE, but then it went on to a more scholarly, reference-focused tone. The GAIR FAMILY LIBRARY is not just about Gair, or my family, or my friends, but everything my world touches. I will still use the old name for something else, though, so don’t steal it.