How to write a memoir
A memoir is one piece of a life. The work is choosing the piece, and then deciding what to leave on the floor, which is harder than any of the writing that follows it.
What stops most memoirs
The thing that stops most memoirs is not the blank page. It is your brother.
You get four chapters in, you arrive at the year the family came apart, and you understand that the year belongs to four other people who did not agree to be in a book. So you soften it. Nothing forces this. You do it on your own. Then the next chapter, because it leads back to the same house. By chapter nine you are writing around the one thing you sat down to say, and the draft dies of politeness.
Writing a memoir is mostly a sequence of decisions about what you will put on a page your family can buy. The craft questions come second. What is a memoir, how long is a memoir, how to start a memoir, whether the thing you have is a memoir or a novel with your name on it: those are answerable, and none of the answers will save a draft that has already flinched.
So this page runs in that order. What separates memoir from autobiography, since the two get confused and the difference decides how much of a life goes into the book. Then the six decisions that shape yours. Then what to leave out, which is the part nobody warns you about. Then six memoirs worth reading for their structure rather than their story.
Memoir vs autobiography
Both are true accounts of a life, written by the person who lived it, and both are held to the same rule about invention. The difference is how much life, and what decides the order.
| What differs | Memoir | Autobiography |
|---|---|---|
| How much of the life | One piece of it. A marriage, an illness, four years at a job, one summer. | The whole run, from the earliest thing you remember to the desk you are writing at. |
| What sets the order | A question. Scenes are chosen because they answer it, so a memoir can skip a decade in a line break. | Time. Events arrive roughly as they happened, and a missing decade reads as an omission. |
| What it does with memory | Reconstructs and compresses, and says so in a note at the front. You were there, and your account is the record. | Leans on the record too. Letters, dates and other people's testimony, checked against your own. |
| Who gets to publish one | Anybody whose piece of life is worth reading, which is why most first books in this form are memoirs. | Usually somebody whose name sells the book before the writing does. |
| What a reader is there for | To recognise something of their own life in yours. | To find out about you, because they already know who you are. |
| Usual length | 60,000 to 90,000 words, shorter than most people expect. | Longer, often past 120,000, because a whole life takes longer to tell. |
Memoir vs biography is the easier question. A biography is the one you do not write, because somebody else writes it about you, from the outside, and they do not need your permission to do it.
Six decisions before chapter one
Settle these before you outline. Most memoir writing advice opens with a numbered process, and the process is not the part that makes the book.
What it is about, which is not what happened
What happened is the divorce, the diagnosis, the year on the boats. What the book is about is the question underneath it, and you have to be able to say that question in one sentence before you plan anything. Write the sentence on a card. Each scene then has a job, which is to move the question or to go, and you can build the chapter order around it with a novel outline the way a novelist would.
Which years
Pick the smallest window that holds the change. Maya Angelou ended her first book at seventeen and wrote six more volumes afterwards, which is the opposite of what a first draft usually tries to do. A memoir that opens at your birth is not a memoir. Choosing the window is also how to start a memoir, because the first scene is the earliest one inside it, and where to start a story applies here with almost no adjustment.
Whose story it is to tell
Your childhood is also your brother's childhood, and he remembers a different one. He is not wrong. You have a right to your version. You do not have the right to present it as the only version, and a reader can hear which one you think you are writing. Say inside the text where your memory thins out. Admitting you are not sure which summer it was buys you credit on the pages where you are certain, and that credit is what carries a reader through the chapter you cannot prove.
How badly you will let yourself come off
While Jami Attenberg was writing her memoir, the writer Rosie Schaap told her she needed to write herself as the biggest jerk in the book. Take that as the test. A narrator who is right in every scene is a narrator the reader stops trusting, and readers forgive most things faster than they forgive being managed. Sol Stein made the same point as a rule for nonfiction generally, which was that he would not write anything inoffensive.
Dialogue you cannot remember
You may not invent it. That is the hard line. One contrived line of dialogue is enough to make an editor doubt every fact in the book that they cannot go and check for themselves, which is most of them. What you can do is reconstruct, keep the speaker's own grammar and their swearing, cut the parts that were boring, and say at the front that this is what you have done. Stein's version of the rule is blunt. If you find yourself inventing dialogue, write a novel.
When it stops being therapy
Attenberg prefers to look at an incident in the rearview mirror rather than in the middle of the intersection, which describes the problem better than any rule about how long to wait. One essay took her four years. Written sooner it would have come out raw and thrilling and wrong. She makes the case for the other option too. Write the thing down and put it away. If what you want is the question and not the exposure, you can still write a book about your life without putting yourself in it. Hand the question to somebody invented and write the novel.
What to leave out
Another friend, Samantha Irby, told Attenberg to be ready for the people in her world to have read the book already, down to the man at the checkout in her grocery shop. Take that as an instruction to decide in advance, and in cold blood, which relationships you are prepared to spend. It is not an argument for softening the pages.
Two practical moves follow from it, and they are not equal. Changing names and identifying details is ordinary. It belongs in a short note at the front. Merging two people into one composite is not ordinary, several publishers will not accept it, and a reader who works it out treats it as a lie about the rest of the book. Change the name. Do not build a person.
Then cut the score-settling. It is harder to find, because it does not announce itself. The test is whether a chapter exists so that a reader will agree you were wronged, which is a use of a chapter that a reader can feel coming from about the second page. If it does, the reader feels recruited. A recruited reader puts the book down. The cheapest repair is to go and find the moment when the person you are angry with was right, and put it in. It costs you nothing you wanted, and it buys back the whole chapter.
Last, cut the things that are true and do no work. Most families have an anecdote that kills at the table and dies on the page, and it will be the last thing you cut, because it is the thing you tell best. It goes anyway. So does your own account of what it meant, which is the hardest of these to give up, because writing that passage is what made you feel finished. Doris Kearns Goodwin opened a biography of Franklin Roosevelt with the private ritual he used to fall asleep, imagining himself sledding as a boy, rather than with a summary of the presidency. One documented afternoon does the work of ten pages of conclusion.
None of this is a rule about honesty. You cut the anecdote because it is inert, not because it is untrue, and the test does not change from one cut to the next. Does this move the question the book is asking? If it does not, it belongs in the file where you keep the things you wrote to get them out of you.
Six memoir examples, read for structure
Read these for the shape rather than the story. Each one solves a problem you are about to have.
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
Mary Karr tells a Texas childhood in the child's voice while holding the adult's knowledge just behind it, so a reader understands what the girl on the page does not. The Liars' Club holds that double position for the length of a book, which is harder to sustain than it looks from one chapter. Karr later wrote The Art of Memoir, and that one is worth reading after a first draft rather than before one.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou stops at seventeen. What came after went into six further volumes, so the first book holds one arc and finishes it. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the argument against squeezing a whole life into one manuscript, and it is a stronger argument than any word count.
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
One year and one death. Joan Didion returns to the same evening over and over, because that is what grief does to a mind, and The Year of Magical Thinking is built out of the returning rather than out of a sequence of events. Steal this when your material has one obsession and no plot.
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
George Orwell fought in Spain for six months and wrote it up as narrative, then asked for the two chapters of political analysis to be lifted out of the story and printed as appendices instead. Homage to Catalonia is the model for what to do with the argument in your own book. It goes in the back, or it goes.
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov wrote the chapters separately for magazines across more than a decade and assembled them afterwards. Images that recur set the order, not the years. A memoir can be built out of pieces you already have, which is worth knowing if the thought of a chapter plan is the thing stopping you.
Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
Mark Twain writes about a job. The first half is the years he spent learning to pilot a steamboat, and the second is a return to the river twenty-one years later to see what had changed. An occupation is a window that a whole life is not, and most people have had one.
A memoir opening, before and after
Somebody sent in the first page of a memoir about growing up in Cork, and asked whether it was too slow to open a book with. The reader is Alistair Rowan McEwan, who edits nonfiction manuscripts inside Prosematter.
Drag to compare original and revised text
Questions & Answers
- What is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?
- A memoir covers one piece of a life and an autobiography covers the whole of it. The difference that matters once you sit down to write is what sets the order. A memoir is organised by a question and can skip a decade in a line break, while an autobiography follows time, so a missing decade reads as a gap.
- What should you not put in a memoir?
- Leave out the score-settling, the anecdote that only works out loud, and your own summary of what it meant. Leave in the parts that make you look bad. The first three are inert on the page and the last one is the reason a reader trusts you.
- What are common memoir mistakes?
- Three of them recur. A draft opens at birth. A scene is followed straight away by the writer telling you what it meant. Dialogue gets invented because the real words are gone, and that third one is the mistake an agent treats as a reason to stop reading the submission.
- Are memoirs hard to get published?
- Yes, harder than novels, because an agent has to answer why a stranger should care about this particular life. The answer that works is the question your book is asking, not the events in it, which is why you want that sentence before you draft.
- How long is a memoir?
- Between 60,000 and 90,000 words. Under 50,000 an agent reads it as an essay collection, and past 120,000 the usual diagnosis is two books stuck together.
- What are the five parts of a memoir?
- There is no fixed five, whatever a template promises. The parts that do recur are the life before the change, the event that starts it, the resistance to it, the cost, and the person you were by the end. A draft missing the fourth one reads as a report.
Put the first chapter in front of an editor
Write the scene you have been circling and give it to one of Prosematter's editors. The note will tell you whether the book is about what you think it is about.
Start the first chapterOpen a chapter. Everything it needs is already beside it.
The cast, the places, the rules you invented, the note you left yourself last November. Nothing to hunt for, nothing to keep in sync by hand — and with the friction gone, the days you write start adding up.