Memoir is a true story told by the person who experienced it. It is fact – or as close to fact as we can come with our fallible memories – and is therefore considered nonfiction. But sometimes book coaches who coach memoir use the tools of fiction to help their writers write great books and sometimes we use the tools of nonfiction. What’s behind this reality?
I believe that memoir is one of the toughest genres to write, to sell, and to coach, because it demands skills and tools from both the fiction and the nonfiction side. I am speaking here about writing memoir with the hope of getting it published – which is to say, read and embraced by people who don’t know you. Writing memoir because you want to remember something, or process something, or make sense of your life, or share it, or leave a legacy for your family is a different endeavor altogether. But if you are writing because you want strangers to engage with your story, and learn from it, and become immersed in it, and inspired by it, you have to approach it with a different mindset.
What Exactly Do I Mean by Memoir?
What exactly do I mean by memoir? Different people have different ideas, so it will be helpful to sort it out. What I don’t mean:
- The Story of My Whole Life. This is an autobiography and usually only very famous people publish them.
- A Random Collection of Interesting Vignettes from My Life. This is what people like David Sedaris and Tina Fey write but they get to do it because they are David Sedaris and Tiny Fey. We pay attention because they are who they are. Unless you are truly gifted and/or have a large platform and/or want to self publish, you will have a very hard time getting a collection of random vignettes published and read.
- A Collection of Personal Essays From My Life. Personal essays rely on the writer’s experience — stories from their life — but they are designed to offer commentary on something, either individually or taken as a whole. I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell is an excellent example of a book like this. Each chapter in the book is a meditation on a near death experience she had. Taken together, they add up to a powerful point about the fragility of life. Glennon Doyle’s Untamed would also fall under this category. This is a difficult structure to pull off.
- A Self-Help or How-To Book That Includes a Few Stories From My Life. A straight how-to book would be something like Zinn and the Art of Road Bike Maintenance by Leonard Zinn or Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Venderkam. These books might include a few stories from the author’s life, but they are explicitly designed to teach and so we think of them as how-to books.
- How-to or Self Help That Includes a Lot of Stories From My Life. Many books combine memoir and how-to in a hybrid structure. Books like Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott or How to Be An Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi are explicitly designed to teach and inspire — how to live the life of a writer, how to be anti-racist — but also includes extensive stories from the author’s life to illustrate the point the book is making.
A Specific Story From My Life — Narrative Memoir
What we are left with if we leave all these other kinds of memoir aside is a memoir that is A Specific Story From My Life. This is what most writers mean when they say they want to write a memoir. They want to take an idea from their life — a specific story or a thread of an idea about something that happened to them — and they want to share their story with others who might benefit from it. The intention of this writer is not to capture their whole life on the page, but to reflect and share a slice of it, and to do so in a way that captures a reader’s attention.
Cheryl Strayed wrote a narrative memoir when she wrote Wild. When Breath Becomes Air, Educated, Eat, Pray Love, and A Walk in the Woods are all narrative memoirs. Readers may have learned a great deal from these stories, but the writer’s primary intention was to tell an engaging, educational, entertaining tale, not teach us how to do something.
Using the Tools of Fiction
In the best narrative memoirs, the writer has figured out a way to see themselves as the protagonist of the story. They have managed to step outside of the events of their lives – the facts of their lives – to see the arc of change or transformation they have experienced, and they have captured that arc on the page.
We think we know everything about those author’s lives because we read the memoir they wrote, but we don’t a thing about them, really: we only know what they chose to tell us, what they pulled from their lives to trace a specific arc of change. Scene by scene, using the tools of fiction, they made a character of themselves and let us into that character’s mind and motivation as the great novelist’s do.
Those tools include writing dialogue that gets at what is not being said as confidently as what is; learning how to show the scene instead of telling us about it; getting emotion on the page in a way we can experience it; and letting us inside the character’s thoughts and fears, lies and motivations, hopes and desires.
The danger with writing narrative memoir using only the tools of fiction is that too often memoir writers only focus on the story – the plot, what really happened – and not on the point or the purpose of that story. Reading a memoir like this is akin to reading someone’s journal, and not usually anywhere near as engaging as you might think.
So the question the narrative memoir writer needs to ask is: How will I make sure that my memoir isn’t self-serving? How will I use my story to illuminate a larger truth or universal point for an audience of readers who will care?
For that, using the tools of nonfiction work best.
Using the Tools of Nonfiction
When working with a nonfiction writer, a book coach starts by digging into the overarching purpose or point of the book. Whereas in fiction, we put the spotlight on character and story, on the nonfiction side, we put it on purpose and structure.
A memoir writer knows what happened and how it felt; they lived it. If you ask them to recite the events they are writing about – to slug them out on a timeline or in a bullet point list – they can do that. And they can no doubt speak eloquently about what it all meant to them, and what emotions were present at any given moment. They have spent a lifetime watching that movie in their head. But they have likely done very little work on what it might mean to other people – on what readers might take away from their tale, and on the best way to shape the material to give the reader the desired experience.
When coaching a hybrid memoir or a how-to using the tools of nonfiction, we ask these kinds of questions:
- Who is the book for?
- What does that audience want? Education, escape, entertainment, solace, understanding, an experience of a particular kind of emotion, such as love or grief or fear?
- What other books are these readers already reading in this realm — Novels? How to? Other memoirs?
- What structure would best serve the story? This might include the question of whether or not a hybrid approach might work better (the way it did in Bird by Bird or How to Be An Anti-Racist, books that are part memoir, part manifesto, part how-to.) Many times people think they want to write narrative memoir, but what they really want to write is self-help or how-to; it is through the process of asking all these foundational questions that they come to the conclusion of what structure will best serve their story.
- How, specifically, do you plan to get the book into reader’s hands? How can you best connect to people who will respond to what you have to teach?·
It’s Not Either/Or
The way I am presenting things here – the fiction approach to memoir, the nonfiction approach to memoir – is an artificial conceit. When coaching memoir, I use all these tools. And, in fact, when coaching in any genre, I use all these tools.
In a how-to book or a historical biography or a collection of personal essays (nonfiction books), the author needs to know how to write a scene with a structure and dialogue that allows the reader to feel emotion. I was just working with an author who is working on a book on leadership that starts with a story from her own life. As written, it was very flat. We worked on how she can hold tension in the story by not giving away the conclusion too soon; on how she can give more context so that the emotional payoff is bigger on how she can let the reader into her motivations and desires in the moment. If you had been listening in on our conversation, you would have thought this writer was working on a novel.
When writing a novel, the author needs to know who her audience is and why they are coming to this work. She needs to know what else that reader is going to be reading on this topic, and what the best structure might be for containing the tale. I was just working with an author who is writing a middle grade book about religious identity, among other things. We have been talking about what kids this age hear in the news every day during these very fraught times, what their parents are talking to them about at the dinner table every night, what the role adults have in either shielding them from ugly truths or educating them about them. If you had been listening in to this conversation, you would have thought this writer was working on nonfiction.
Becoming a good memoir writer is about building your skillset so you know how to execute the book you envision, no matter how it is shaped and classified.
Are you writing memoir? Are you using the skillset of a novelist? What memoirs have made an impact on you as a reader?
About Jennie Nash
Jennie Nash is the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company that trains book coaches to help writers bring their best work into the world. For twelve years, writers serious about reaching readers have trusted Jennie to coach their projects from inspiration to publication. Her clients have landed top New York agents, national book awards, and deals with houses such as Scribner, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette. Jennie is the author of 9 books in 3 genres. She taught for 13 years in the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, is an instructor at CreativeLive.com and speaks on podcasts and at writing conferences all over the country. Learn more about being coached or becoming a coach on her personal website and at Author Accelerator.
Terrific post, Jennie! While I neither write nor read memoir myself, I’ve been talking with a memoirist whose forthcoming book deals with a similar topic as my own forthcoming novel. We’ve been chewing on exactly these questions, with an eye to doing a joint workshop on how and why a writer selects a particular genre as the vehicle for telling the story. Your intelligent and comprehensive post will be invaluable!
Thanks Barbara! What a cool conversation you’re having with your memoir-writing friend!
As a reader, my favorite memoir by far is Bob Dylan’s Chronicles – Volume 1. It offers such insight into his mind and the mind of artists in general. He may have played with the concept of truth in the details – because, as his fans know, he questions what is truth. Some of the details of a moment read like fiction but the reader has to believe the gist of the scene is how he remembers feeling, how his mind was working at the time, or at the very least, how it was working when he wrote it. It’s fascinating, not only for what it reveals about him but also for the connection he allows the reader to feel. It’s also like a guide to trusting your instincts, questioning authority and being open to what the universe may send you.
Ada, I have not read this memoir! I’m going to order it — it sounds like it’s right up my alley. It reminds me of The Things We Carried by Tim O’Brian — about the Vietnam war. You’re never sure what’s real or what’s not, which is his whole point.
I hope you enjoy it.
Jennie, what a timely and fabulous post. I am writing memoir and about 2/3 of the way through, still without a fully formed transformative arc. I don’t think that really happened until years later. I’m a late bloomer.
I struggle a bit with verisimilitude. I have no journals of that period, unfortunately, but there are numerous newspaper articles of these particular events and I have every desk calendar I ever used. So I can tell you the exact day something happened, and occasionally the exact time, but have no idea if I raked my fingers through my hair at that moment or took a sip of cappuccino. I’m likely to, so I put it in there, but I’m always wondering if it’s veering off non-fiction course, causing readers (should I be lucky enough to have them) to jeer at the insertion of actions I couldn’t possibly remember in such detail.
BTW, The Things We Carried is one of my favorite books. It brought an intimacy to the Vietnam War that nothing else has ever done for me.
As a memoir writer what we’re striving for is the emotional truth. It may not be possible that you remember if you drank a cappuccino that day but that fact likely doesn’t change the underlying emotional truth you’re describing in a given scene. This gives us some latitude with facts in an emotionally true scene and is one way that great memoir “borrows” the techniques of great story-telling, scenic detail, and dialog from fiction.
Thanks, Gretchen. That was helpful!
Memoir readers want the truth as best as you remember it. They are not looking for FACTS, per se. That is something different. As long as you are true to what you believe you remember, or true to the fact that you don’t remember, you will be fine.
Thanks, Jennie!
Hi Jennie, great to see you on WU. Of the many projects I have written, one is YES, a memoir. It focusses on my childhood, being one of three children who lost their father at the ages of 6, 3 and 3 months. It relates how a woman from the Sioux Indian tribe in North Dakota came to live with us, to help my widowed mother. It recalls the vacuum I found myself in not understanding the loss of a father at the age of three. One WU member who read a small section of it fell in love with that voice. I don’t know where I will take it and when. It has been a joy to write. Sometimes experimentation, just that pulling from our memory is exciting. Whether anyone reads it in the future, the journey for me has been a good one.
Hi Beth. I totally agree that there is joy in experimentation, and I love the story you are sharing here of finding your story and finding why it means something to you and finding your voice. It’s so powerful — even these few words you shared here!
There are SO many reasons to write, and you articulate one of the most common and the most profound.
As a book coach — or I should say the particular kind of book coach I am, which is someone focused on helping people who seek to be published — I am writing about that aspect of the work; the moment when you decide that you want to publish and you want to invite strangers into your work. It’s a different moment than the one you find yourself in now.
You may or may not be moving towards that moment with this work — and that hardly matters.
But once someone DOES get to that point where they want to develop something into a book that others can become engaged in, that’s really what I am talking about.
I hope that makes some sense.
Good luck with your work of writing this tale of your childhood loss; it sounds wonderful.
Thanks, Jennie. Your response is very encouraging and makes total sense. I will remember your words. Beth
Memoir is one of my favorite genres to both read and write. I’ve published one for kids on stuttering and I learned so much working with my editor. I’ve written about my conversion from atheism to Catholicism for magazines but there’s so much more I want to say; your article gives me much to consider. Thank you.
Some favorite memoirs: Confessions by St. Augustine, Complications by Atul Gawande, Kitchen Privileges by Mary Higgins Clark, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan, My Life with BOB by Pamela Paul (I started my own BOB) and for Christmas I bought Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.
Hi Jennie. I finished a memoir on my crazed high school years of shoplifting in the fall; I wrote about it here on WU:
https://writerunboxed.com/2020/09/29/missing-some-memories-i-might-have-stolen-them/
It’s written as narrative nonfiction, and having written a few novels, I did try to attend to story arc, character development (in this case, my own character’s decay), pacing and tone. It is fundamentally chronological, though not strictly.
My larger scheme was to show an extended period of lunacy in a white kid from a straight, middle-class, religious suburban home repeatedly behaving badly, the consequences, and some concluding looks in the mirror. (Oh, it’s amusing too.)
Many of my favorite memoirs are mentioned here, including Dylan’s Chronicles, The Things We Carried, and Angela’s Ashes. I also think A River Run’s Through It, though considered a collection of long, semi-autobiographical stories, is a memoir, and it is fabulous. Thanks for the post!
That’s “A River Runs Through It,” (dang apostrophe!), by Norman Maclean.
Thanks for mentioning Marion Roach Smith’s “Why Write Memoir right Now.” I subscribe to Jane’s email, but it was after the date of this article. I’ve been looking for pieces on memoir and this is one I can add to my file.
Ha! Yes, that’s a great one. I also love Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey — a similar-ish treatment of wild places.
Good luck on your story!
One of the best articles on memoir I’ve ever read!
Thank you for your kind words, Anne!
Wow! Jennie, you have presented a lot here. Thanks. It will take me a while to digest it all, if I can.
I’ve been writing memoir for a few years now but not published anything…yet. So far I have a short memoir, a medium length (like a novella) and just finished my most difficult work, a novel length “double memoir” wherein I and my wife to be (at the time) describe what happened when we met and after. Sometimes I present the narrative, sometimes she does. I think I’ve pulled it off while keeping the story moving and not convoluted, but won’t know for sure until I’ve gotten others to read it. This is scary because so far I’ve not found anyone to read it other than a cousin and a niece, neither who I would say was particularly interested in doing so. I’m seeking a critique reader – or two or three.
Neil, I highly recommend The Spun Yarn — a beta reader service. They have a method for giving your book to 3-4 readers and getting you standardized feedback within one month.
Good luck to you!
This is a good piece! I’d like to add on just a little something about memoir and its definition. The memoir definition is narrow and it shouldn’t hold back any memoir writer from writing their story. A memoir should not be disqualified as such because the writer needed, let’s say, a thirty-year chunk of their life (like I did) in order to tell their story, of making sense of that time using multiple experiences. Unlike autobiography, the memoir should have the elements of reflections and takeaways.