If you’d like to write a memoir, or, a true story based on your own experiences – it’s a good idea to get your head around the basics of this particular genre of creative non-fiction.

There’s a lot of questions and misconceptions about memoir floating about, so I thought I’d quickly clarify a few basics of the genre. But first – have you made time to watch my memoir masterclass? This will take you through the 3 most important pieces to the memoir-writing puzzle if you’ve been drafting or thinking of writing one! You can sign up to watch it via the image below or simply click here.

Is memoir biography or autobiography?

Memoir is autobiography (your story about yourself), but it’s not your life story. And it can involve journalism, biography (someone else’s story) and other hybrid writing styles, but the memoir aspect is the true, personal story that you’re sharing.
Is it your story? Your experience that you’re sharing? Then it’s memoir.

Here’s an example:

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America started off as an investigative piece into the wage reform act in America, which then became three years of Ehrenreich trying to live on the minimum wage in a variety of unskilled labour jobs. The reason it’s so powerful is because her personal experience is weaved among what could have been a dry journalistic piece.

Tip: Many memoirs start as a non-fiction or personal essay that are then stretched into a book-length work. Sarah Krasnostein’s award-winning The Trauma Cleaner started as an essay for Narratively. The Trauma Cleaner is a biography, but she weaves her opinions and reactions throughout rather than keeping it completely objective, so it’s a hybrid.
Most, if not all, memoirs are a blend with other sub-categories of non-fiction.
My own memoir, A Letter From Paris, is also a partial biography of my father. It was impossible to write about my experiences of getting to know him (after his death) without documenting his life. And it wouldn’t have worked if i hadn’t written it as a hybrid (the reader needed to know why certain hidden information was so important).

So for instance, Ehrenreich’s book could have been an incredibly boring treatise on laws around minimum wages and politics, instead you were thrown head-first into life as a fifty-something female factory worker / waitress / unskilled labourer in America.

But because it was written as a memoir (you came into the topic of the wage gap in the US through Ehrenreich’s personal story and experience), you better understand the way the law in America affects people on a personal level. Her book was particularly insightful into how, once someone is trapped in the poverty cycle, even with a PhD in biology – it becomes particularly difficult to break out.

Is memoir always written in the first person?

Mostly, but not always. Particular scenes and chapters may be written in the first person, but when you’re ‘widening the view’ to write about societal trends or key aspects of the story (perhaps you’re weaving in self-help, or health statistics), this is generally written in the third person. A number of really beautiful literary memoirs that have been released in recent years (published by small presses) have been written as though the main character (author) is almost fictional (Clownery by Paul Hunter is an example). Jill Stark’s High Sobriety is an excellent account of her year alcohol-free, but some of the more fascinating sections are when she weaves in cultural norms, history and country-specific alcohol data, social expectations and statistics, etc etc. This is straight reportage, but weaving it with her own experience makes it a memoir.

Literary memoir is a true story approached with all the structural and stylistic elements of a work of fiction. That’s what makes memoir so readable. 

What isn’t memoir?
  • Memoir isn’t a diary (although you may use your diaries to help jog your memory or use snippets for scenes as you write the draft of your memoir.)
  • Memoir isn’t your life story from birth to adulthood or death. This is one of the most common misconceptions people have about writing their memoir. It’s about one aspect of your life, or a journey or challenge or question or theme. Memoir is not your entire life story.
  • Memoir isn’t your autobiography – ex-US Presidents and Royalty and famous sports stars get to have their autobiographies written, but that’s not memoir.
  • Memoir isn’t a biography of another person, but you may blend biography with memoir. This is one thing I’ve had to explore in detail with my memoir, A Letter From Paris. A few reader reviews have mentioned how annoyed they were that I “kept” talking (! How funny, because the original feedback from my literary agent was to keep his material to a minimum!). It’s a memoir: It’s my experience of getting to know my dad. It’s not a straight biography, although in the process of my getting to know him, the reader does, too.
  • Finally, memoir isn’t made-up. It’s lived experience, written stylistically with the conventions of a traditional novel. This means chronology can be played with, flashbacks used, the structure follows story conventions and you can use alliterations and mise en scene (much like you would in a movie) illustrate a scene or feeling or turning point. Yes, it’s truth, but it’s truth of feeling, you’re after the most. Authenticity.
  • A memoir, as I teach and know it, is a book-length work of narrative nonfiction. This means the word count is at LEAST 65 000 words.
    Not 30 000 words. Not 40 000 words. at LEAST 65 000 words, preferably closer to 85 000 words. Take a look at literary memoirs that were written by FIRST TIME AUTHORS and do a rough word count if you want to check. You’ll see that even Cheryl Strayed’s WILD was close to 120 000 words! It’s a narrative, it must follow a deep and flowing plot trajectory.

  • Good memoirs show, just as much as they tell, a personal story. This is why when you’ve worked as a journalist for a number of years, it can be hard to shift into the deeply personal and creative writing mode it takes to write memoir. Journalists are taught “just the facts” in the exposition of a story (tell, don’t show). Memoir takes a lot more work, psychological deep-diving, and showing, not telling.
    Example: “It was very cold in the apartment” (Telling).
    “The frost on the windows gave the apartment a tomb-like quality: my breath steamed forth like i was in an enclosed space.”

     

Memoir is truth

“If I’d rather wear veils, I should write fiction. I write out of the sure knowledge that the more honest I am, the freer I am, and the freer I am, the happier I am.”

Kate Christensen, bestselling memoirist

Memoir is truth, and that’s why everyone loves to read it.

Yes, every piece of what we call ‘truth’ is filtered through our experiences, and you can change names and even time-frames to keep the story rolling along better (and avoid a defamation suit), but the goal with memoir should be to write as authentically and as honestly as possible, so that your truth resonates with others on a number of universal levels.

After all, the reason so many people read memoir is they want to know how you dealt with a particular problem or idea or experience on a detailed and personal level.

To explain it in the most simple form, memoir is a book-length work of personal writing where you focus on a particular lesson, theme, question or issue from your life, and come to some sense of conclusion or resolution about it at the end.

And this is exactly what I teach inside my comprehensive programme, The Art of Memoir. How to write a publication-standard, book-length work that is based on your lived experiences, from your own point of view.

 

 

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