I want to add "story-telling" to my baby-boomer bucket list

I never really understood the importance of literature until after I retired in 2005.  I didn't get it.  I felt like fiction was a waste of time.  It was something set aside for the artsy-craftsy side who had an intellectual bent.

Can anybody who has tried to read Faulkner or Hemingway relate?  Learning about the symbolism in these two authors would drive me to distraction.  

That changed after I moved away from my day job and had more time to do some below the surface thinking.

I'm now fascinated by how authors explain a chunk of life through their work.  And I'm even more intrigued by how that's transferred from the pages of a book to a movie.  It takes some real skill.  

For almost a year, I've been trying to write my own story.  There's nothing so unusual about me, but I do have a story just like everybody else.  It's multi-layered and not unlike a lot of other people.  There's pathos, ethos and little bit of eros.  

I'm just a member of the first class of baby-boomers born right after World War II and raised by a single-mom who was the consumate survivor.  When I was barely a toddler my dad vanished pure and simple and never came back.  I found him when I was in my twenties.  There's been a lot of life that I've experienced.  Anything to be learned by others?  I think so.

Can I pull it off and make it readable and useful to others?  I'm trying.

What about the movie of my life?  Who'd play me?  John Belushi?  He's gone.  I'd be happy to have a story that my grandson, granddaughter and grandkids to be can read and learn more about their background.  And I'd be happy if somebody else could pick up some hope from it too.