My Sister’s Keeper and the scrapbook filled with memories

For those who saw the movie My Sister’s Keeper, didn’t you love the scrapbook young Kate made for her family? The dying girl pasted up a scrapbook so filled with photo cutouts you could hardly see the background paper and added comments so bare that yet pulled strings of memories and feelings out. This is a movie and obviously the scrapbook was professionally done, but we can sure take away some ideas from it.

Everyone has their own style of scrapbooking, but those with tidy or sparser styles may like to experiment with that collage look. After all, a scrapbook only has so many pages, why not fill them to the max? Kate’s pages carried many photos of one theme on one page. She had a set of pages devoted to each member of her family. Many of the photos were close-ups with the backgrounds cut out to focus on faces. The result was a fun circus of eye candy and a sweet remembrance of laughter and tears.

Kate’s scrapbook was meant for her immediate family with whom she experienced all of her short life’s events with, so she did not have to add the where and when details. The comments she added were sparse and poignant, but they were all that was needed. Most scrapbooks are done to capture memories of children who might forget, of family events to permanently preserve them, perhaps for generations, so the details need to be added. But, that shouldn’t stop us from filling around the facts, the stories, the written down feelings.

The movie My Sister’s Keeper may be controversial because the ending is different from the book, and because it just doesn’t seem very realistic, but if you rent or buy it, do a freeze-frame and take a long look at how the scrapbook was done. Maybe you’d like to take notes for the next time you scrapbook, or perhaps use some of those techniques in photo albums – think of each slot for a photo as a tiny scrapbook page. Don’t over do it, just do what you want for your taste.

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About moonbridgebooks

Co-author of Cherry Blossoms in Twilight, a WWII Japan memoir of her mother's childhood; author of Poems That Come to Mind, for caregivers of dementia patients; Co-author/Editor of Battlefield Doc, a medic's memoir of combat duty during the Korean War; life writing enthusiast; loves history and culture (especially Japan), poetry, and cats
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