how to write an essay about memoir

How to Write a Memoir: Examples and a Step-by-Step Guide

Zining Mok  |  January 29, 2024  |  26 Comments

If you’ve thought about putting your life to the page, you may have wondered how to write a memoir. We start the road to writing a memoir when we realize that a story in our lives demands to be told. As Maya Angelou once wrote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

How to write a memoir? At first glance, it looks easy enough—easier, in any case, than writing fiction. After all, there is no need to make up a story or characters, and the protagonist is none other than you.

Still, memoir writing carries its own unique challenges, as well as unique possibilities that only come from telling your own true story. Let’s dive into how to write a memoir by looking closely at the craft of memoir writing, starting with a key question: exactly what is a memoir?

How to Write a Memoir: Contents

What is a Memoir?

• Memoir vs Autobiography

Memoir Examples

Short memoir examples.

• How to Write a Memoir: A Step-by-Step Guide

A memoir is a branch of creative nonfiction , a genre defined by the writer Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.” The etymology of the word “memoir,” which comes to us from the French, tells us of the human urge to put experience to paper, to remember. Indeed, a memoir is “ something written to be kept in mind .”

A memoir is defined by Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.”

For a piece of writing to be called a memoir, it has to be:

• Nonfictional
• Based on the raw material of your life and your memories
• Written from your personal perspective

At this point, memoirs are beginning to sound an awful lot like autobiographies. However, a quick comparison of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love , and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin , for example, tells us that memoirs and autobiographies could not be more distinct.

Next, let’s look at the characteristics of a memoir and what sets memoirs and autobiographies apart. Discussing memoir vs. autobiography will not only reveal crucial insights into the process of writing a memoir, but also help us to refine our answer to the question, “What is a memoir?”

Memoir vs. Autobiography

While both use personal life as writing material, there are five key differences between memoir and autobiography:

1. Structure

Since autobiographies tell the comprehensive story of one’s life, they are more or less chronological. writing a memoir, however, involves carefully curating a list of personal experiences to serve a larger idea or story, such as grief, coming-of-age, and self-discovery. As such, memoirs do not have to unfold in chronological order.

While autobiographies attempt to provide a comprehensive account, memoirs focus only on specific periods in the writer’s life. The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

Autobiographies prioritize events; memoirs prioritize the writer’s personal experience of those events. Experience includes not just the event you might have undergone, but also your feelings, thoughts, and reflections. Memoir’s insistence on experience allows the writer to go beyond the expectations of formal writing. This means that memoirists can also use fiction-writing techniques , such as scene-setting and dialogue , to capture their stories with flair.

4. Philosophy

Another key difference between the two genres stems from the autobiography’s emphasis on facts and the memoir’s reliance on memory. Due to memory’s unreliability, memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth. In addition, memoir writers often work the fallibility of memory into the narrative itself by directly questioning the accuracy of their own memories.

Memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth.

5. Audience

While readers pick up autobiographies to learn about prominent individuals, they read memoirs to experience a story built around specific themes . Memoirs, as such, tend to be more relatable, personal, and intimate. Really, what this means is that memoirs can be written by anybody!

Ready to be inspired yet? Let’s now turn to some memoir examples that have received widespread recognition and captured our imaginations!

If you’re looking to lose yourself in a book, the following memoir examples are great places to begin:

• The Year of Magical Thinking , which chronicles Joan Didion’s year of mourning her husband’s death, is certainly one of the most powerful books on grief. Written in two short months, Didion’s prose is urgent yet lucid, compelling from the first page to the last. A few years later, the writer would publish Blue Nights , another devastating account of grief, only this time she would be mourning her daughter.
• Patti Smith’s Just Kids is a classic coming-of-age memoir that follows the author’s move to New York and her romance and friendship with the artist Robert Maplethorpe. In its pages, Smith captures the energy of downtown New York in the late sixties and seventies effortlessly.
• When Breath Becomes Air begins when Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Exquisite and poignant, this memoir grapples with some of the most difficult human experiences, including fatherhood, mortality, and the search for meaning.
• A memoir of relationship abuse, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is candid and innovative in form. Machado writes about thorny and turbulent subjects with clarity, even wit. While intensely personal, In the Dream House is also one of most insightful pieces of cultural criticism.
• Twenty-five years after leaving for Canada, Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to sort out his family’s past. The result is Running in the Family , the writer’s dazzling attempt to reconstruct fragments of experiences and family legends into a portrait of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. (Importantly, Running in the Family was sold to readers as a fictional memoir; its explicit acknowledgement of fictionalization prevented it from encountering the kind of backlash that James Frey would receive for fabricating key facts in A Million Little Pieces , which he had sold as a memoir . )
• Of the many memoirs published in recent years, Tara Westover’s Educated is perhaps one of the most internationally-recognized. A story about the struggle for self-determination, Educated recounts the writer’s childhood in a survivalist family and her subsequent attempts to make a life for herself. All in all, powerful, thought-provoking, and near impossible to put down.

While book-length memoirs are engaging reads, the prospect of writing a whole book can be intimidating. Fortunately, there are plenty of short, essay-length memoir examples that are just as compelling.

While memoirists often write book-length works, you might also consider writing a memoir that’s essay-length. Here are some short memoir examples that tell complete, lived stories, in far fewer words:

• “ The Book of My Life ” offers a portrait of a professor that the writer, Aleksandar Hemon, once had as a child in communist Sarajevo. This memoir was collected into Hemon’s The Book of My Lives , a collection of essays about the writer’s personal history in wartime Yugoslavia and subsequent move to the US.
• “The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.” So begins Cheryl Strayed’s “ The Love of My Life ,” an essay that the writer eventually expanded into the best-selling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail .
• In “ What We Hunger For ,” Roxane Gay weaves personal experience and a discussion of The Hunger Games into a powerful meditation on strength, trauma, and hope. “What We Hunger For” can also be found in Gay’s essay collection, Bad Feminist .
• A humorous memoir structured around David Sedaris and his family’s memories of pets, “ The Youth in Asia ” is ultimately a story about grief, mortality and loss. This essay is excerpted from the memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day , and a recorded version can be found here .

So far, we’ve 1) answered the question “What is a memoir?” 2) discussed differences between memoirs vs. autobiographies, 3) taken a closer look at book- and essay-length memoir examples. Next, we’ll turn the question of how to write a memoir.

How to Write a Memoir: A-Step-by-Step Guide

1. how to write a memoir: generate memoir ideas.

how to start a memoir? As with anything, starting is the hardest. If you’ve yet to decide what to write about, check out the “ I Remember ” writing prompt. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s memoir I Remember , this prompt is a great way to generate a list of memories. From there, choose one memory that feels the most emotionally charged and begin writing your memoir. It’s that simple! If you’re in need of more prompts, our Facebook group is also a great resource.

2. How to Write a Memoir: Begin drafting

My most effective advice is to resist the urge to start from “the beginning.” Instead, begin with the event that you can’t stop thinking about, or with the detail that, for some reason, just sticks. The key to drafting is gaining momentum . Beginning with an emotionally charged event or detail gives us the drive we need to start writing.

3. How to Write a Memoir: Aim for a “ shitty first draft ”

Now that you have momentum, maintain it. Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write. It can also create self-doubt and writers’ block. Remember that most, if not all, writers, no matter how famous, write shitty first drafts.

Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write.

4. How to Write a Memoir: Set your draft aside

Once you have a first draft, set it aside and fight the urge to read it for at least a week. Stephen King recommends sticking first drafts in your drawer for at least six weeks. This period allows writers to develop the critical distance we need to revise and edit the draft that we’ve worked so hard to write.

5. How to Write a Memoir: Reread your draft

While reading your draft, note what works and what doesn’t, then make a revision plan. While rereading, ask yourself:

• What’s underdeveloped, and what’s superfluous.
• Does the structure work?
• What story are you telling?

6. How to Write a Memoir: Revise your memoir and repeat steps 4 & 5 until satisfied

Every piece of good writing is the product of a series of rigorous revisions. Depending on what kind of writer you are and how you define a draft,” you may need three, seven, or perhaps even ten drafts. There’s no “magic number” of drafts to aim for, so trust your intuition. Many writers say that a story is never, truly done; there only comes a point when they’re finished with it. If you find yourself stuck in the revision process, get a fresh pair of eyes to look at your writing.

7. How to Write a Memoir: Edit, edit, edit!

Once you’re satisfied with the story, begin to edit the finer things (e.g. language, metaphor , and details). Clean up your word choice and omit needless words , and check to make sure you haven’t made any of these common writing mistakes . Be sure to also know the difference between revising and editing —you’ll be doing both. Then, once your memoir is ready, send it out !

Learn How to Write a Memoir at Writers.com

Writing a memoir for the first time can be intimidating. But, keep in mind that anyone can learn how to write a memoir. Trust the value of your own experiences: it’s not about the stories you tell, but how you tell them. Most importantly, don’t give up!

Anyone can learn how to write a memoir.

If you’re looking for additional feedback, as well as additional instruction on how to write a memoir, check out our schedule of nonfiction classes . Now, get started writing your memoir!

26 Comments

Thank you for this website. It’s very engaging. I have been writing a memoir for over three years, somewhat haphazardly, based on the first half of my life and its encounters with ignorance (religious restrictions, alcohol, and inability to reach out for help). Three cities were involved: Boston as a youngster growing up and going to college, then Washington DC and Chicago North Shore as a married woman with four children. I am satisfied with some chapters and not with others. Editing exposes repetition and hopefully discards boring excess. Reaching for something better is always worth the struggle. I am 90, continue to be a recital pianist, a portrait painter, and a writer. Hubby has been dead for nine years. Together we lept a few of life’s chasms and I still miss him. But so far, my occupations keep my brain working fairly well, especially since I don’t smoke or drink (for the past 50 years).

Hi Mary Ellen,

It sounds like a fantastic life for a memoir! Thank you for sharing, and best of luck finishing your book. Let us know when it’s published!

Best, The writers.com Team

Hello Mary Ellen,

I am contacting you because your last name (Lavelle) is my middle name!

Being interested in genealogy I have learned that this was my great grandfathers wife’s name (Mary Lavelle), and that her family emigrated here about 1850 from County Mayo, Ireland. That is also where my fathers family came from.

Is your family background similar?

Hope to hear back from you.

Richard Lavelle Bourke

Hi Mary Ellen: Have you finished your memoir yet? I just came across your post and am seriously impressed that you are still writing. I discovered it again at age 77 and don’t know what I would do with myself if I couldn’t write. All the best to you!! Sharon [email protected]

I am up to my eyeballs with a research project and report for a non-profit. And some paid research for an international organization. But as today is my 90th birthday, it is time to retire and write a memoir.

So I would like to join a list to keep track of future courses related to memoir / creative non-fiction writing.

Hi Frederick,

Happy birthday! And happy retirement as well. I’ve added your name and email to our reminder list for memoir courses–when we post one on our calendar, we’ll send you an email.

We’ll be posting more memoir courses in the near future, likely for the months of January and February 2022. We hope to see you in one!

Very interesting and informative, I am writing memoirs from my long often adventurous and well travelled life, have had one very short story published. Your advice on several topics will be extremely helpful. I write under my schoolboy nickname Barnaby Rudge.

[…] How to Write a Memoir: Examples and a Step-by-Step Guide […]

I am writing my memoir from my memory when I was 5 years old and now having left my birthplace I left after graduation as a doctor I moved to UK where I have been living. In between I have spent 1 year in Canada during my training year as paediatrician. I also spent nearly 2 years with British Army in the hospital as paediatrician in Germany. I moved back to UK to work as specialist paediatrician in a very busy general hospital outside London for the next 22 years. Then I retired from NHS in 2012. I worked another 5 years in Canada until 2018. I am fully retired now

I have the whole convoluted story of my loss and horrid aftermath in my head (and heart) but have no clue WHERE, in my story to begin. In the middle of the tragedy? What led up to it? Where my life is now, post-loss, and then write back and forth? Any suggestions?

My friend Laura who referred me to this site said “Start”! I say to you “Start”!

Hi Dee, that has been a challenge for me.i dont know where to start?

What was the most painful? Embarrassing? Delicious? Unexpected? Who helped you? Who hurt you? Pick one story and let that lead you to others.

I really enjoyed this writing about memoir. I ve just finished my own about my journey out of my city then out of my country to Egypt to study, Never Say Can’t, God Can Do It. Infact memoir writing helps to live the life you are writing about again and to appreciate good people you came across during the journey. Many thanks for sharing what memoir is about.

I am a survivor of gun violence, having witnessed my adult son being shot 13 times by police in 2014. I have struggled with writing my memoir because I have a grandson who was 18-months old at the time of the tragedy and was also present, as was his biological mother and other family members. We all struggle with PTSD because of this atrocity. My grandson’s biological mother was instrumental in what happened and I am struggling to write the story in such a way as to not cast blame – thus my dilemma in writing the memoir. My grandson was later adopted by a local family in an open adoption and is still a big part of my life. I have considered just writing it and waiting until my grandson is old enough to understand all the family dynamics that were involved. Any advice on how I might handle this challenge in writing would be much appreciated.

I decided to use a ghost writer, and I’m only part way in the process and it’s worth every penny!

Hi. I am 44 years old and have had a roller coaster life .. right as a young kid seeing his father struggle to financial hassles, facing legal battles at a young age and then health issues leading to a recent kidney transplant. I have been working on writing a memoir sharing my life story and titled it “A memoir of growth and gratitude” Is it a good idea to write a memoir and share my story with the world?

Thank you… this was very helpful. I’m writing about the troubling issues of my mental health, and how my life was seriously impacted by that. I am 68 years old.

[…] Writers.com: How to Write a Memoir […]

[…] Writers.com: “How to Write a Memoir” […]

I am so grateful that I found this site! I am inspired and encouraged to start my memoir because of the site’s content and the brave people that have posted in the comments.

Finding this site is going into my gratitude journey 🙂

We’re grateful you found us too, Nichol! 🙂

Firstly, I would like to thank you for all the info pertaining to memoirs. I believe am on the right track, am at the editing stage and really have to use an extra pair of eyes. I’m more motivated now to push it out and complete it. Thanks for the tips it was very helpful, I have a little more confidence it seeing the completion.

Well, I’m super excited to begin my memoir. It’s hard trying to rely on memories alone, but I’m going to give it a shot!

Thanks to everyone who posted comments, all of which have inspired me to get on it.

Best of luck to everyone! Jody V.

I was thrilled to find this material on How to Write A Memoir. When I briefly told someone about some of my past experiences and how I came to the United States in the company of my younger brother in a program with a curious name, I was encouraged by that person and others to write my life history.

Based on the name of that curious program through which our parents sent us to the United States so we could leave the place of our birth, and be away from potentially difficult situations in our country.

As I began to write my history I took as much time as possible to describe all the different steps that were taken. At this time – I have been working on this project for 5 years and am still moving ahead. The information I received through your material has further encouraged me to move along. I am very pleased to have found this important material. Thank you!

Wow! This is such an informative post packed with tangible guidance. I poured my heart into a book. I’ve been a professional creative for years to include as a writer, mainly in the ad game and content. No editor. I wasn’t trying to make it as an author. Looking back, I think it’s all the stuff I needed to say. Therapy. Which does not, in and of itself, make for a coherent book. The level of writing garnering praise, but the book itself was a hot mess. So, this is helpful. I really put myself out there, which I’ve done in many areas, but the crickets response really got to me this time. I bought “Educated” as you recommended. Do you have any blog posts on memoirs that have something to say to the world, finding that “something” to say? It feels like that’s theme, but perhaps something more granular. Thanks for this fantastic post. If I had the moola, I would sign up for a class. Your time is and effort is appreciated. Typos likely on comments! LOL

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Write a Great Memoir: How to Start (and Actually Finish) Your First Draft

by Joe Bunting | 1 comment

Free Book Planning Course!  Sign up for our 3-part book planning course and make your book writing easy . It expires soon, though, so don’t wait.  Sign up here before the deadline!

When I first started writing my memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , about a real-life adventure I experienced with my wife and ten-month-old son, I thought it was going to be easy.

After all, by that point in my career, I had already written four books, two of which became bestsellers. I’ve got this, I thought. Simple.

It wasn’t. By the time Crowdsourcing Paris was published and became a #1 New Release on Amazon, it was more than five years later. During that time, I made just about every mistake, but I also learned a process that will reliably help anyone to start and finish writing a great memoir.

My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , as a #1 New Release on Amazon!

In this guide, I want to talk about how you can start writing your memoir, how you can actually finish it, and how you can make sure it’s good .

If you read this article from start to finish, it will save you hundreds of hours and result in a much better finished memoir.

Hot tip : Throughout this guide, I will be referencing my memoir Crowdsourcing Paris as an example. To get the most out of this guide and the memoir writing process in general, get a copy of the book to use as an example. Order your copy here »

But Wait! What Is a Memoir? (Memoir Definition)

How do you know if you're writing a memoir? Here's a quick memoir definition:

A memoir is a book length account or autobiography about a real life situation or event. It usually includes a pivotal experience in your life journey.

A key point to make is that memoir is a  true story . You don't have to get every piece of dialogue perfect, but you do have to try to tell the personal story or experience as best as you remember.

If you're looking to fictionalize your real life account you're writing a novel, not a memoir (and specifically a roman à clef novel ).

For more on the difference between a novel and a memoir, check out this coaching video:

How to Get Started With Your Memoir: 10 Steps Before You Start Writing

This guide is broken into sections: what to do before you start writing and how to write your first draft.

When most people decide to write a memoir, they just start writing. They write about the first life experience they can think of.

That’s sort of what I did too. I just started writing about my trip to Paris, beginning with how I first decided to go as a way to become a “real writer.” It turned out to be the biggest mistake I made.

If you want to finish your memoir, and even more, write a good memoir, just starting with the first memory you can think of will make things much harder for you.

Instead, get started with a memoir plan.

What’s a memoir plan? There are ten elements. Let’s break it down.

Get the memoir plan in a downloadable worksheet. Click to download your memoir plan »

1. Write Your Memoir Premise in One Sentence

The first part of a memoir plan is your premise. A premise is a one-sentence summary of your book idea.

You might be wondering, how can I summarize my entire life in a single sentence?

The answer is, you can’t. Memoir isn’t a full autobiography. It’s not meant to be a historical account of your entire life story. Instead, it should share one specific situation and what you learned from that situation.

Every memoir premise should contain three things:

• A Character. For your memoir, that character will always be you . For the purposes of your premise, though, it’s a good idea to practice thinking of yourself as the main character of your story. So describe yourself in third person and use one descriptive adjective, e.g. a cautious writer.
• A Situation. Memoirs are about a specific event, situation, or experience. For example, Marion Roach Smith’s bestselling memoir was about the discovery that her mother had Alzheimer’s, which at the time was a fairly unknown illness. My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , begins on the first day of my trip to Paris and ends on the day I left. You can’t write about everything, at least in this book. But you can write about one thing well, and save all the other ideas for the next book.
• A Lesson. What life lesson did you learn from this situation? How did your life change inexorably after going through this situation? Again, here you can’t write about everything you’ve ever learned. Choose ONE life lesson or emotional truth and focus on it.

Want to see how a premise actually looks? Here’s an example from my memoir Crowdsourcing Paris :

When a Cautious Writer is forced by his audience to do uncomfortable adventures in Paris he learns the best stories come when you get out of your comfort zone.

One thing to note: a premise is not a book description. My book description, which you can see here , is totally different from the premise. It’s more suspenseful and also less detailed in some ways. That’s because the purpose of a premise isn’t to sell books.

What is the premise of your memoir? Share it in the comments below!

2. Set a Deadline to Finish Your First Draft

Or if you’ve already finished a draft, set a deadline to finish your next draft.

This is crucial to do now , before you do anything else. Why? Because there are parts of the memoir plan that you can spend months, even years on. But while planning is helpful, it can easily become a distraction if you don’t get to the writing part of the process.

That’s why you want to put a time limit on your planning by setting a deadline.

How long should the deadline be?

Stephen King says you should write a first draft in no longer than a season. So ninety days.

In my 100 Day Book program, we’ve helped hundreds of memoir writers finish their book in just 100 days. To me, that’s a good amount of time to finish a first draft.

However, I wouldn’t take any longer than 100 days. Writing a book requires a level of focus that’s difficult to achieve over a long period of time. If you set your deadline for longer than 100 days, you might never finish.

Also set weekly milestones.

In addition to your final deadline, I recommend breaking up the writing process into weekly milestones.

If you’re going to write a 65,000-word memoir over 100 days, let’s say, then divide 65,000 by the number of weeks (about 14) to get your weekly word count goal: about 4,600 words per week.

That will give you a sense of how much progress you’re making each week, so you won’t be in a huge rush to finish right at the end of your deadline. After all, no one can pull an all-nighter and finish a book! Create a writing habit that will enable you to actually finish your book.

Keep track of your word count deadlines.

By the way, this is one reason I love Scrivener , my favorite book writing software , because it allows you to set a target deadline and word count. Then Scrivener automatically calculates how much you need to write every day to reach your deadline.

It’s a great way to keep track of your deadline and how much more you have to write. Check out my review of Scrivener to learn more.

3. Create Consequences to Make Quitting Hard

I’ve learned from experience that a deadline alone isn’t enough. You also have to give your deadline teeth .

Writing a book is hard. To make sure that you show up to the page and do the work you need to finish, you need to make it harder to not write.

How? By creating consequences.

I learned this from a friend of mine, writer and book marketing expert Tim Grahl .

“If you really want to finish your book,” he told me, “write a check for $1,000 to a charity you hate. Then give that check to a friend with instructions to send it if you don’t hit your deadline.”

“I don’t need to do that,” I told him. “I’m a pro. I have discipline.” But a month later, after I still hadn’t made any progress on my memoir, I finally decided to take his advice.

This was during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. So I wrote a $1,000 check to the presidential candidate that I most disliked (who shall remain nameless!), and gave it to a friend with instructions to send the check if I didn’t hit my final deadline.

I also created smaller consequences for the weekly deadlines, which I highly recommend. Here’s how it works:

Consequence #1 : Small consequence, preferably related to a guilty pleasure that might keep you from writing. For example, giving up a game on your phone or watching TV until you finish your book.

Consequence #2 : Giving up a guilty pleasure. For example, giving up ice cream, soda, or alcohol until you finish your book.

Consequence #3 : Send the $1,000 check to the charity you hate.

Each of these would happen if I missed three weekly deadlines. If I missed the final deadline, then just the $1,000 check would get sent.

After I put in each of these consequences, I was the most focused and productive I’ve ever been in my life. I finished my book in just nine weeks and never missed a deadline.

If you actually want to finish your memoir, give this process a try. I think you’ll be surprised by how well it works for you.

4. Decide What Kind of Story You’re Telling

Now that you’ve set your deadline, start thinking about what kind of book you’re writing. What is your story really about?

“Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through,” says Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project .

I think there are seven types of stories that most memoirs are about.

• Coming of Age. A story about a young person finding their place in the world. A great example is 7 Story Mountain  by Thomas Merton.
• Education. An education story , according to Kim Kessler and Story Grid, is about a naive character who, through the course of the story, comes to a bigger understanding of the world that gives meaning to their existing life. My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , is a great example of an education memoir.
• Love. A love story is about a romantic relationship, either the story of a breakup or of two characters coming together. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is a great example of a love story memoir, as it tells the story of her divorce and then re-discovering herself and love as she travels the world.
• Adventure/Action. All adventure stories are about life and death situations. Also, most travel memoirs are adventure stories. Wild by Cheryl Strayed is a great example, and Crowdsourcing Paris is also an adventure story. (You can apply the principles from our How to Write Adventure guide here , too!)
• Performance. Performance memoirs are about a big competition or a competitive pursuit. Julie and Julia , Julie Powell’s memoir about cooking her way through Julia Child’s recipes, is a good example of a performance memoir. Outlaw Platoon , about the longest-serving Ranger platoon in Afghanistan, is another great performance story.
• Thriller. Memoirs about abuse or even an illness could fall into the crime, horror, or thriller arena. (Our full guide on How to Write a Thriller is here .)
• Society. What is wrong with society? And how can you rebel against the status quo? Society stories are very common as memoirs. I would also argue that most humor memoirs are society stories, since they talk about one person’s funny, transgressive view on society. Anything by David Sedaris, for example, is a society memoir.

For more on all of these genres, check out Story Grid’s article How to Use Story Grid to Write a Memoir .

Three Stories

Note that I included my memoir in two categories. That’s because most books, including memoirs, are actually a combination of three stories. You have:

• An external story. For example, Crowdsourcing Paris is an adventure story.
• An internal story . As I said, Crowdsourcing Paris is an education story.
• A subplot . Usually the subplot is another external story, in my case, a love story.

What three stories are you telling in your memoir?

5. Visualize Your Intention

One of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve coached hundreds of writers to finish their books is that if you visualize the following you are much more likely to follow through and accomplish your writing goals:

• Where you're going to write
• When you're going to write
• How much you're going to write

Here I want you to actively visualize yourself at your favorite writing spot accomplishing the word count goal that you set in step two.

For example, when I was writing Crowdsourcing Paris , I would imagine myself sitting at this one café that was eight doors down from my office. I liked it because it had a little bit of a French feel. Then I would imagine myself there from eight in the morning until about ten.

Finally, I would actively visualize myself watching the word count tracker go from 999 to 1,000 words, which was my goal every day. Just that process of imagining my intention was so helpful.

What is your intention? Where, when, and how much will you write? Imagine yourself actually sitting there in the place you’re going to write your memoir.

6. Who Will Be On Your Team?

No one can write a book alone. I learned this the hard way, and the result was that it took me five years to finish my memoir.

For every other book that I had written, I had other people holding me accountable. Without my team, I know that I would never have written those books. But when I tried to write my memoir, I thought, I can do this on my own. I don’t need accountability, encouragement, and support. I’ve got this.

To figure out who you need to help you finish your memoir, create three different lists of people:

• Other writers. These are people who you can process, with who know the process of writing a book. Some will be a little bit ahead of you, so that when you get stuck, they can encourage you and say, “I’ve been there. You’re going to get through it. Keep working.”
• Readers. Or if you don’t have readers, friends and family. These will be the people who give you feedback on your finished book before it’s published, e.g. beta readers.
• Professional editors. But you also need professional feedback. I recommend listing two different editors here, a content editor to give feedback on the book as a whole (for example, I recommend a Write Practice Certified Coach), and a proofreader or line editor to help polish the final draft. (Having professional editing software is smart too. We like ProWritingAid. Check out our ProWritingAid review .)

Just remember: it takes a team to finish a book. Don’t try to do it on your own.

And if you don’t have relationships with other writers who can be on your team, check out The Write Practice Pro. This is the community I post my writing in to get feedback. Many of my best writing friends came directly from this community. You can learn more about The Write Practice Pro here .

7. What Other Books Will Inspire You?

“Books are made from books,” said Cormac McCarthy. Great writers learn how to write great books by reading other great books, and so should you.

I recommend finding three to five other memoirs that can inspire you during the writing process.

I recommend two criteria for the books you choose:

• Commercially successful. If you want your book to be commercially successful, choose other books that have done well in the marketplace.
• Similar story type. Try to find books that are the same story type that you learned in step four.

For my memoir, I had four main sources of inspiration.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain; A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway; and Midnight in Paris , the film by Woody Allen.

I referred back to these sources all the time. For example, when I was stuck on the climactic scene in the memoir, I watched one scene in A Midnight in Paris twenty times until I could quote the dialogue. I still didn’t come up with the solution until the next day, but understanding how other writers solved the problems I was facing helped me figure out my own solutions for my story.

8. Who Is Your Reader Avatar?

Who is your book going to be for? Or who is the one person you’ll think of when you write your book? When the writing gets hard and you want to quit, who will be most disappointed if you never finish your book?

I learned this idea from J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote his novel The Hobbit for his three boys as a bedtime story. Every day he would work on his pages, and every night he would go home and read them to his sons. And this gave him an amazing way to get feedback. He knew whether they laughed at one part or got bored at another.

This helped him make his story better, but I also imagine it gave him a tremendous amount of motivation.

This Can Be You, Sort Of

I don’t think your reader avatar should be you. When it comes to your own writing, you are the least objective person.

There’s one caveat: you can be your own reader avatar IF you’re writing to a version of yourself at a different time. For example, I have friends who have imagined they were writing to a younger version of themselves.

Who will you write your memoir for?

9. Publishing and Marketing

How will you publish your book? Will you go the traditional route or will you self-publish? Who is your target market (check your reader avatar for help)? What will you do to promote and market your book? Do you have an author website ?

It might be strange to start planning for the publishing and marketing of your book before you ever start writing it, but what I’ve discovered is that when you think through the entire writing process, from the initial idea all the way through the publishing and marketing process, you are much more likely to finish your book.

In fact, in my 100 Day Book program, I found that people who finished this planning process were 52 percent more likely to finish their book.

Spend some time thinking about your publishing and marketing plans. Just thinking about it will help you when you start writing.

Start Building Your Audience Before You Need It

In the current publishing climate, most memoir agents and publishers want you to have some kind of relationship with an audience before they will consider your book.

Start building an audience before you need it. The first step to building an audience, and the first step to publishing in general, is building an author website. If you don’t have a website yet, you can find our full author website guide here .

(Building a website doesn’t have to be intimidating or time-consuming if you have the right guide.)

10. Outline Your Memoir

The final step of the planning process is your memoir outline . This could be the subject of a whole article itself. Here, I’ve learned so much from Story Grid, but if you don’t have time to read the book and listen to over 100 podcast episodes, here’s a quick and dirty process for you.

But First, for the Pantsers

There are two types of writers: the plotters and the pansters . Plotters like to outline. Pantsers think outlining crushes their creative freedom and hate it.

If you identify with the pantsers, that’s okay. Don’t worry too much about this step. I would still recommend writing something in this section of your memoir plan, even if you only know a few moments that will happen in the book, even recording a series of events might help as you plan.

And for you plotters, outline to your heart’s content, as long as you’ve already set your deadline!

Outlining Tips

When you’re ready to start outlining, here are a few tips:

• Begin by writing down all the big moments in your life that line up with your premise. Your premise is the foundation of your story. Anything outside of that premise should be cut.
• S eparate your life events into three acts. One of the most common story structures in writing is the three-act story structure. Act 1 should contain about 25 percent of your story, Act 2 about 50 percent of your story, and Act 3 about 25 percent.
• Act 1 should begin as late into the story as possible. In Crowdsourcing Paris , like most travel memoirs, I began the story the day I arrived in Paris.
• Use flashbacks, but carefully. Since I began Crowdsourcing Paris so late into the action, I used flashbacks to provide some details about what happened to lead up to the trip. Flashbacks can be overused, though, so only include full scenes and don’t info dump with flashbacks.
• Start big. The first scene in your book should be a good representation of what your book is about. So if you’re writing an adventure story (see Step 4), then you should have a life or death moment as the first scene. If you’re writing a love story, you should have a moment of love or love lost.
• End Act 1 with a decision. It is you, and specifically your decisions , that drive the action of your memoir. So what important decision did you make that will drive us into Act 2?
• Start Act 2 with your subplot. In Step 4, I said most books are made up of three stories. Your subplot is an important part of your book, and in most great stories, your subplot begins in Act 2.
• Act 2 begins with a period of “fun and games.” Save the Cat , one of my favorite books for writers, says that after the tension you built with the big decision in Act 1, the first few scenes in Act 2 should be fun and feel good, with things going relatively well for the protagonist.
• Center your second act on the “all is lost” moment. Great stories are about a character who comes to the end of him or herself. The all is lost moment is my favorite to write, because it’s where the character (in this case you ) has the most opportunity to grow. What is YOUR “all is lost” moment?
• Act 3 contains your final climactic moment. For Crowdsourcing Paris , this was the moment when I thought I was going to die. In a love story memoir, it might be when you finally work things out and commit to your partner.
• Act 3 is also where you show the big lesson of the memoir. Emphasis on show. Back in Step 1, you identified the lesson of your memoir. Act 3 is when you finally demonstrate what you’ve learned throughout the memoir in one major event.
• A tip for the final scene: end your memoir with the subplot. This gives a sense of completion to your story and works as a great final moment.

Use the tips above to create a rough outline of your memoir. Keep in mind, when you start writing, things might completely change. That’s okay! The point with your plan isn’t to be perfect. It’s to think through your story from beginning to end so that you’ll be prepared when you get to that point in the writing process.

Want to make this process as easy as possible? Get the memoir plan in a downloadable worksheet. Click to download your memoir plan »

That’s the end of the planning stage of this guide. Now let’s talk about how to write your first draft.

How to Write the First Draft of Your Memoir

If you’ve followed the steps above to create a memoir plan, you’ve done the important work. Writing a memoir, like writing any book, is hard. But it will actually be harder to not be successful if you’ve followed all the steps in the memoir plan.

But once you’ve created the “perfect” plan, it’s time to do the dirty work of writing a first draft.

In part two of our guide, you’ll learn how to write and finish a first draft.

1. Forget Perfection and Write Badly.

First drafts are messy. In fact, Anne Lamott calls them “shitty first drafts” because they are almost always terrible.

Even though I know that, though, any time I’m working on a new writing project, I still get it into my head that my first draft should be a masterpiece.

It usually takes me staring at a blank screen for a few hours before I admit defeat and just start writing.

If you’re reading this, don’t do that! Instead, start by writing badly.

Besides, when you’ve done the hard planning work, what you write will probably be a lot better than you think.

2. Willpower Doesn’t Work. Neither Does Inspiration. Instead, Use the “3 Minute Timer Trick.”

My biggest mistake when I began Crowdsourcing Paris was to think I had the willpower I needed as a professional writer and author of four books to finish the book on my own. Even worse, I thought I would be so inspired that the book would basically write itself.

I didn’t. It took not making much progress on my book for more than a year to realize I needed help.

The best thing you can do to help you focus on the writing process for your second draft is what we talked about in Step 4: Creating a Consequence.

But if you still need help, try my “3 Minute Timer Trick.” Here’s how it works:

• Set a timer for three minutes. Why three minutes? Because for me, I’m so distractible I can’t focus for more than three minutes. I think anyone can focus for three minutes though, even me.
• Write as fast as you can. Don’t think, just write!
• When the timer ends, write down your total word count in a separate document (see image below). Then subtract from the previous word count to calculate how many words you wrote during that session.
• Also write down any distractions during those three minutes. Did the phone ring? Did you have a tough urge to scroll through Facebook or play a game on your phone? Write it down.
• Then, repeat the process by starting the timer again. Can you beat your word count?

This process is surprisingly helpful, especially when you don’t feel like writing. After all, you might not have it in you to write for an hour, but anyone can write for three minutes.

And the amazing thing is that once you’ve started, you might find it much easier to keep going.

Other Tools for Writers

By the way, if you’re looking for the tools I use and other pro writers I know use, check out our Best Tools for Creative Writers guide here .

3. Make Your Weekly Deadlines.

You can’t finish your book in an all-nighter. That being said, you can finish a chapter of your book in an all-nighter.

That’s why it’s so important to have the weekly deadlines we talked about in Part 1, Step 2 of this guide.

By breaking up the writing process into a series of weekly deadlines, you give yourself an achievable framework to finish your book. And with the consequences you set in Step 3 of your memoir plan, you give your deadlines the teeth they need to hold you accountable.

And as I mentioned above, Scrivener is especially helpful for keeping track of deadlines (among other things). If you haven’t yet, check out my review of Scrivener here .

4. Keep Your Team Updated.

Having a hard time? It’s normal. Talk to your team about it.

It seems like when you’re writing a book, everything in the universe conspires against you. You get into a car accident, you get sick, you get into a massive fight with your spouse or family member, you get assigned a new project at your day job.

Writing a book would be hard enough on its own, but when you have the rest of your life to deal with, it can become almost impossible.

Without your team, which we talked about in Step 6 of your book plan, it would be.

For me, I would never have been able to finish one book, let alone the twelve that I’ve now finished, without the support, encouragement, and accountability of the other writers whom I call friends, the readers who believe in me, and most of all, my wife.

Remember: No book is finished alone. When things get hard, talk about it with your team.

And if you need a team, consider joining mine. The Write Practice Pro is a supportive encouraging community of writers and editors. It’s where I get feedback on my writing, and you can get it here too. Learn more about the community here.

5. Finally, Trust the Process.

When I walk writers through the first draft writing process, inevitably, around day sixty, they start to lose faith.

• They think their book is the all-time worst book ever written.
• They get a new idea they want to work on instead.
• They decide the dream to write a book and become a writer was foolish.
• They want to quit.

A few do quit at this point.

But the ones who keep going discover that in just a few weeks they’ve figured out most of the problems in their book, they’re on their last pages, and they’re almost finished.

It happens every time, even to me.

If you take nothing else from this post, please hear this: keep going. Never quit. If you follow this process from start to finish, you’re going to make it, and it’s going to be awesome.

I’m so excited for you.

How to Finish Your Memoir

More than half of this guide is about the planning process. That’s because if you start well, you’ll finish well.

If you create the right plan, then all that’s left is doing the hard, messy work of writing.

Without the right plan, it’s SO easy to get lost along the way.

That’s why I hope you’ll download my Memoir Plan Worksheet. Getting lost in the writing process is inevitable. This plan will become your map when it happens. Click to download the Memoir Plan Worksheet.

More than anything, though, I hope you’ll never quit. It took me five years to write Crowdsourcing Paris , but during that time I matured and grew so much as a writer and a person, all because I didn’t quit.

Even if it takes you five years, the life lessons you’ll learn as you write your book will be worth it.

And if you’re interested in a real-life adventure story set in Paris, I’d be honored if you’d read Crowdsourcing Paris . I think you’ll love it.

Good luck and happy writing.

More Writing Resources:

• How to Write a Memoir Outline: 7 Essential Steps For Your Memoir Outline
• 7 Steps to a Powerful Memoir
• The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith
• Crowdsourcing Paris by J.H. Bunting

Are you going to commit to writing a memoir (and never quitting, no matter what)? Let me know in the comments .

Summarize your memoir idea in the form of a one-sentence premise. Make sure it contains all three elements:

• A character
• A situation

Take fifteen minutes to craft your premise. When you’re finished, share your memoir premise in the Pro Practice Workshop for feedback. And if you share, please be sure to give feedback to three other writers. Not a member? Join us .

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

Work with Joe Bunting?

WSJ Bestselling author, founder of The Write Practice, and book coach with 14+ years experience. Joe Bunting specializes in working with Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, How To, Literary Fiction, Memoir, Mystery, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, and Self Help books. Sound like a good fit for you?

One of my book chapters has been accepted for publication, but I lack confidence in the accuracy of what I have written. I have completed the chapter, but I would appreciate your assistance in improving its quality.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

• 3 Rules to Write World-Changing Memoir - The Write Practice - […] Here are my three “rules” about how to write a memoir: […]
• 4 Essentials for Writing Memoir That Resonates With Readers - The Write Practice - […] How do you write memoir and tell a story that is compelling to you, but might not be to…
• 19 Tips on Writing Memoir from The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith - The Write Practice - […] Marion Roach Smith has solid advice on how to write your own stories. Let me share nineteen tips on…
• The One Secret to a Deeper Memoir - The Write Practice - […] if you’re wondering how to write a memoir, what if you interviewed people–friends, family, community members–about the events on…
• How to Unlock the Power of the Present Tense in Memoir - The Write Practice - […] Writing memoir in the present tense suits grief in ways that the past tense simply cannot provide. […]
• Read Memoirs to Understand Character Motivation - […] about you? Do you want to know how to write a memoir? Check out our complete guide, Write a…
• How to Satisfy Your Reader With a Great Ending - The Write Practice - […] you’re figuring out how to write a memoir or a novel, creating an ending that is satisfying for the…
• How to Write About Your Family… Without Getting Disowned - […] this it true, through writing my own memoir, I have come to find that we can handle these situations…
• Write a Great Memoir: How to Start (and Actually Finish) Your First Draft – Books, Literature & Writing - […] “When you’re getting started writing a memoir, don’t just start writing about the first thing you remember.Tweet thisTweet […]
• 10 Memoir Writing Prompts to Get You Started - […] to take the next step and learn how to write a memoir? Check out my complete guide, Write a…
• How to Write a Short Memoir Story : The Write Practice - […] Then, when you’re ready to write a full memoir, check out our complete guide, Write a Great Memoir: How…

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Writing the Memoir (Moxley): Introduction

• Introduction
• Tips for Writing the Memoir
• Annotated Memoirs
• Describing a Person
• Describing a Place
• Sample Topics and Essays

Introduction to Writing the Memoir

Teaching and writing the memoir .

            A memoir can be one of the most meaningful essays that a student can write and one of the most engaging essays for a teacher to read.  The spirit generated by the memoir can create class fellowship less attainable through subjects requiring pure analysis, description, or narration.  More than any other subject, a memoir demands that a student bring his sensibilities and experiences to school, and when that happens, it is virtually impossible for anyone to accept a mediocrity of passion.  Students and teachers are likely to treat writing as an experience in itself, a means for writers to understand their lives and for teachers to understand their students’ worlds.

              In Terrains of the Heart, Willie Morris writes,

  If it is true that a writer's world is shaped by the experience of childhood and adolescence, then returning at long last to the scenes of those experiences, remembering them anew and living among their changing heartbeats, gives him, as Marshall Frady said, the primary pulses and shocks he cannot afford to lose. I have never denied the poverty, the smugness, the cruelty which have existed in my native state [ Mississippi ].  Meanness is everywhere, but here the meanness, and the nobility, have for me their own dramatic edge, for the fools are my fools, and the heroes are mine too.

  As a young editor who left his native state for New York City, Willie Morris wrote prolifically about his hot Mississippi youth from the cold Northeast.  His essays on home preserve a way of life in the Delta—a complicated history marked by romance and violence—while he lived in a New York far removed from this past.  We sense when reading Willie Morris’s carefully crafted memories that he is coming to know himself through his writing and, in a broader sense, has resurrected a world that can help others understand their own lives.

            To both student and teacher, this is what I hope teaching and writing the memoir will give you:  a chance to investigate your past, your culture, and your lives in general, and in so doing, create a community of authors who delight in the struggle to write clearly, meaningfully, and correctly.

The Rationale

              By clicking here , or by opening the above tab, Annotated Memoirs, you will go to a list of six types of essays, each of which is hyperlinked to a sample essay and a discussion of it. 

              Each sample annotated essay will have the following:

1.  an introduction that comments on the type of essay and how it may generate good writing from young students;

2.  a link to the essay so you can open or print it;

3.  a discussion of the essay, called “The Craft of the Essay,” which explains the strategy in each paragraph or “part” of the essay so that the teacher and student can see how the memoir was crafted from the bare memory.  This section should encourage teacher and student to scrutinize the essay together during a read-aloud session to determine how they think the memory was turned into memoir;

4.  an “Assignment” section that gives the student some specific questions to answer that might help them see the further craft of the particular memoir.

Teaching Strategies

              As with any assignment, the teaching strategy depends on the size of the class, the amount of time allotted for the assignment, how much it is weighted, and so forth.

            Ideally, teaching the memoir should take 6-7 nights of homework.  These nights could be spaced over the course of two-three weeks.

            You could also make it a lighter assignment and cut it to 3-4 assignments, with only one rough draft, instead of the two I suggest.

Homework Assignment #1: 

              The teacher/class decides which category of memoir they will read together as a class to introduce the assignment.  For example, you may choose from the Annotated Memoirs to read the Writing about Death and Mortality assignment and its sample annotated essay “Death of a Pig” by E. B. White.  For this night’s homework, the students should print out the assignment and essay at home to bring to class as their text.  They should read the essay, read the “Craft of the Essay” discussion, and then answer on paper the questions under the “Assignment” section. 

            In class the next day, read the essay aloud (or as much of it as possible), go over the “Craft of the Essay” and finish the day having the students explain their responses to the “Assignment.”

            If there is any time left, you might get the students to discuss the topic, “Where does memory begin?” ( Click here for a passage from Willie Morris's Taps to get the ball rolling. )

  Homework Assignment #2:

              Open the  Sample Topics and Essays  tab to find numerous topics and sample essays.  Decide whether everyone is going to write the same type of essay or whether the topic will be open to a variety of memoirs.  Then read a few sample essays for the topic you choose. 

Written homework is to sit for 40 minutes and do a “fast write,” in which the student writes about half of the first draft of the memory, paying no attention to grammar, style, syntax, or organization. This assignment is to get the student to write or type 2-3 pages of his memory with some, but minimal, revision (the revision should take place after the fast-write).  Click on the tab, Tips for Writing the Memoir, for some help getting started after the fast-write.

            In class the next day, students will read aloud what they have written.  The object is to hear one or two inspiring accounts so that each student can “get the hang of the assignment.”  The teacher should be pushing everyone to develop his “voice.”   Again, see Tips for Writing the Memoir  for a discussion of voice and other terms.

  Homework Assignment #3: 

              Continue where the students left off in Assignment #2 and try to write 4-5 handwritten, or 3-4 typed, pages.  If someone does not like what he/she did in Assignment #2, then start anew.

            In class the next day, have the students read aloud their work.  By the end of this day everyone should have read his/her essay at least once, either on this day or the day before.  The teacher should keep track of who has read.  Again, note how distinct the students’ written voices are, and who is putting in moments of self-reflection and not getting hung up on chronological retelling.

  Homework Assignment #4:

              By this time the students should know the focus of their essay (in other words, what wisdom, revelation, or general idea that their essay is revealing) and should begin “crafting,” or creatively organizing, the memory to become a memoir.

            It is crucial that the student realize that facts are not solely important.  Good memoirs are a blend of fact and creation; this concept will be tough to defend, but the writers of memoir have flexibility regarding the facts of the memory, since it is the “truth” of the memory they are creating; sometimes the facts are too confusing or pallid to have the needed color to make a memory vivid.  For a memory to become memoir, it needs a larger-than-life appeal.  ( Click here for some comments by Dorothy Gallagher on fact versus truth in memoir. )

To craft the essay, for homework (5-10 minutes) try having them draw a timeline of the way the memory works; in class the teacher can draw the timeline of other successful sample essays.  They will see that many essays about a lost loved one starts at the funeral, flashes back to the life, and at the end returns to the funeral.  Flashbacks are crucial to building characters, dead or alive

            Also ask them to outline what they have written as best they can (10-15 minute assignment).  Then, looking at their outlines, they may see a way to restructure the telling of the memory to get the most out of it. 

            The students should be encouraged to imitate the structure of essays that resemble the one they are writing.

            With all this in mind, they should go back and begin writing a new draft for 30 minutes.  In class the next day, have them report on what they’ve changed and have them read some first paragraphs aloud.

    Homework Assignment #5:

              Finish draft number 2.  The students should be keeping track of their rough drafts, as their grade will be based as much on effort and process as on final product.  By now the essays should have incorporated a number of ways to build character, place, and their focus:  short dialogue, concrete descriptions, anecdotes, and moments of reflection.

            Have each student read his or her first 3-4 sentences.  Urge everyone to listen intently and decide which of these sentences should be the first one in the essay.  Frequently, the first paragraph or two can be cut.  It takes most writers about 100 or more words to get warmed up.  Remind them of the Truman Capote Rule:  “I believe more in the scissors than I do the pencil.”

  Homework Assignment #6:

              The final essay is due, approximately 4-5 typed pages.  The student should turn in at least two verifiable rough drafts and the final draft.  The teacher will have heard every student’s paper at least once and should have encouraged each student to drop by for 5-10 minutes during the last 4-5 days to discuss the progress of the memoir.

            The process of this assignment should be weighted as heavily as the final product.  I usually check that the student has written two drafts, contributed to class workshops, and has revised carefully by showing he has learned: 

  (1) to start strategically;

(2) to create the various characters through description, action, anecdote, and brief dialogue;

(3) to create place and atmosphere through concrete description, temperature, climate, and telling details;

(4) to build a strong focus through moments of self-reflection;

(5) to organize strategically, dividing his essay into many paragraphs, some short, some long;

(6) to unify his essay so that, although it may wander, it ultimately returns to some unifying point or image;

(7) to punctuate and write solid sentences that create a pleasing variety and rhythm.

• Willie Morris's "Taps"
• Comments by Dorothy Gallagher
• Next: Tips for Writing the Memoir >>
• Last Updated: Jan 18, 2024 11:10 AM
• URL: https://libguides.montgomerybell.edu/memoir

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How to Write a Memoir Essay

October 12, 2023

What is a Memoir Essay?

A memoir essay is a form of autobiographical writing that focuses on a specific aspect of the author’s life. Unlike a traditional autobiography, which typically covers the author’s entire life, a memoir essay hones in on a particular event, time period, or theme. It is a deeply personal and reflective piece that allows the writer to delve into their memories, thoughts, and emotions surrounding their chosen subject.

In a memoir essay, the author aims to not only recount the events that took place but also provide insight into the impact and meaning of those experiences. It is a unique opportunity for self-discovery and exploration, while also offering readers a glimpse into the author’s world. The beauty of a memoir essay lies in its ability to weave together personal anecdotes, vivid descriptions, and introspective reflections to create a compelling narrative.

Writing a memoir essay can be both challenging and rewarding. It requires careful selection of memories, thoughtful introspection, and skillful storytelling. The process allows the writer to make sense of their past, gain a deeper understanding of themselves, and share their unique story with others.

Choosing a Topic for Your Memoir Essay

Selecting the right topic is crucial to write a good memoir essay. It sets the foundation for what you will explore and reveal in your personal narrative. When choosing a topic, it’s essential to reflect on your significant life experiences and consider what stories or themes hold the most meaning for you.

One approach is to think about moments or events that have had a profound impact on your life. Consider times of triumph or adversity, moments of exploration or self-discovery, relationships that have shaped you, or challenges you have overcome. These experiences can provide a rich foundation for your memoir essay.

Another option is to focus on a specific theme or aspect of your life. You might explore topics such as identity, family dynamics, cultural heritage, career milestones, or personal beliefs. By centering your essay around a theme, you can weave together various memories and reflections to create a cohesive narrative.

It’s also important to consider your target audience. Who do you want to connect with through your memoir essay? Understanding your audience’s interests and experiences can help you choose a topic that will resonate with them.

Ultimately, the topic should be one that excites you and allows for introspection and self-discovery. Choose a topic that ignites your passion and offers a story worth sharing.

Possible Memoir Essay Topics

• Childhood Memories
• Family Dynamics
• Life-altering Events
• Overcoming Societal Expectations
• Love and Loss
• Self-discovery and Transformation
• Lessons from Nature
• Journey from Darkness to Light
• Triumphing Over Adversities
• Life’s Defining Moments

Outlining the Structure of Your Memoir Essay

Writing a memoir essay allows you to share your personal experiences, reflections, and insights with others. However, before you start pouring your thoughts onto the page, it’s essential to outline the structure of your essay. This not only provides a clear roadmap for your writing but also helps you maintain a cohesive and engaging narrative.

First, consider the opening. Begin with a captivating introduction that hooks the reader and establishes the theme or central message of your memoir. This is your chance to grab their attention and set the tone for the rest of the essay.

Next, move on to the body paragraphs. Divide your essay into sections that chronologically or thematically explore different aspects of your life or experiences. Use vivid descriptions, anecdotes, and dialogue to bring your memories to life. It’s crucial to maintain a logical flow and transition smoothly between different ideas or events.

As you approach the conclusion, summarize the key points you’ve discussed and reflect on the significance of your experiences. What lessons have you learned? How have you grown or changed as a result? Wrap up your memoir essay by leaving the reader with a memorable takeaway or a thought-provoking question.

Remember, the structure of your memoir essay should support your storytelling and allow for a genuine and authentic exploration of your experiences. By outlining your essay’s structure, you’ll have a solid foundation to create a compelling and impactful memoir that resonates with your readers.

How to Write an Introduction for Your Memoir Essay

The introduction of your memoir essay sets the stage for your story and captivates your readers from the very beginning. It is your opportunity to grab their attention, establish the tone, and introduce the central theme of your memoir.

To create a compelling introduction, consider starting with a hook that intrigues your readers. This can be a surprising fact, a thought-provoking question, or a vivid description that immediately draws them in. Your goal is to make them curious and interested in what you have to say.

Next, provide a brief overview of what your memoir essay will explore. Give your readers a glimpse into the key experiences or aspects of your life that you will be sharing. However, avoid giving away too much detail. Leave room for anticipation and curiosity to keep them engaged.

Additionally, consider how you want to establish the tone of your memoir. Will it be reflective, humorous, or nostalgic? Choose your words and phrasing carefully to convey the right emotions and set the right atmosphere for your story.

Finally, end your introduction with a clear and concise thesis statement. This statement should express the central theme or message that your memoir will convey. It serves as a roadmap for your essay and guides your readers in understanding the purpose and significance of your memoir.

By crafting a strong and captivating introduction for your memoir essay, you will draw readers in and make them eager to dive into the rich and personal journey that awaits them.

Write the Main Body of Your Memoir Essay

When developing the main body of your memoir essay, it’s essential to structure your thoughts and experiences in a clear and engaging manner. Here are some tips to help you effectively organize and develop the main body of your essay:

• Chronological Structure: Consider organizing your memoir essay in chronological order, following the sequence of events as they occurred in your life. This allows for a natural flow and a clear timeline that helps readers understand your personal journey.
• Thematic Structure: Alternatively, you can focus on specific themes or lessons that emerged from your experiences. This approach allows for a more focused exploration of different aspects of your life, even if they did not occur in a linear order.
• Use Vivid Details: Use sensory details, descriptive language, and engaging storytelling techniques to bring your memories to life. Transport your readers to the settings, evoke emotions, and create a vivid picture of the events and people in your life.
• Show, Don’t Tell: Instead of simply stating facts, show your readers the experiences through engaging storytelling. Use dialogue, scenes, and anecdotes to make your memoir more dynamic and immersive.
• Reflections and Insights: Share your reflections on the events and experiences in your memoir. Offer deeper insights, lessons learned, and personal growth that came from these moments. Invite readers to reflect on their own lives and connect with your journey.

By organizing your main body in a logical and engaging manner, using vivid details, and offering thoughtful reflections, you can write a compelling memoir essay that captivates your readers and leaves a lasting impact.

Reflecting on Lessons Learned in Your Memoir Essay

One of the powerful aspects of a memoir essay is the opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned from your personal experiences. These reflections provide deeper insights and meaning to your story, leaving a lasting impact on your readers. Here are some tips for effectively reflecting on lessons learned in your memoir essay:

• Summarize Key Points: In the conclusion of your essay, summarize the key events and experiences you have shared throughout your memoir. Briefly remind readers of the significant moments that shaped your journey.
• Identify Core Themes: Reflect on the core themes and messages that emerged from your experiences. What did you learn about resilience, love, identity, or perseverance? Identify the overarching lessons that you want to convey.
• Offer Personal Insights: Share your personal insights and reflections on how these lessons have influenced your life. Were there specific turning points or moments of epiphany? How have these experiences shaped your beliefs, values, or actions?
• Connect to the Reader: Make your reflections relatable to your readers. Explore how the lessons you learned can resonate with their own lives and experiences. This allows them to connect with your story on a deeper level.
• Offer a Call to Action: Encourage readers to reflect on their own lives and consider how the lessons from your memoir can apply to their own journeys. Pose thought-provoking questions or suggest actions they can take to apply these insights.

By reflecting on the lessons learned in your memoir essay, you give your readers a chance to contemplate their own lives and find inspiration in your personal growth. These reflections add depth and impact to your storytelling, making your memoir essay truly memorable.

Crafting a Strong Conclusion for Your Memoir Essay

The conclusion of your memoir essay is your final opportunity to leave a lasting impression on your readers. It is where you tie together the threads of your story and offer a sense of closure and reflection. Here are some tips to help you craft a strong conclusion for your memoir essay:

• Summarize the Journey: Remind your readers of the key moments and experiences you shared throughout your essay. Briefly summarize the significant events and emotions that shaped your personal journey.
• Revisit the Central Theme: Reiterate the central theme or message of your memoir. Emphasize the lessons learned, personal growth, or insights gained from your experiences. This helps reinforce the purpose and impact of your story.
• Reflect on Transformation: Reflect on how you have transformed as a result of the events and experiences you shared. Share the growth, self-discovery, or newfound perspectives that have shaped your life.
• Leave a Lasting Impression: Use powerful and evocative language to leave a lasting impact on your readers. Craft a memorable phrase or thought that lingers in their minds even after they finish reading your essay.
• Offer a Call to Action or Reflection: Encourage your readers to take action or reflect on their own lives. Pose thought-provoking questions, suggest further exploration, or challenge them to apply the lessons from your memoir to their own experiences.

By crafting a strong conclusion, you ensure that your memoir essay resonates with your readers long after they have finished reading it. It leaves them with a sense of closure, inspiration, and a deeper understanding of the transformative power of personal storytelling.

Editing and Proofreading Your Memoir Essay

Editing and proofreading are crucial steps in the writing process that can greatly enhance the quality and impact of your memoir essay. Here are some tips to help you effectively edit and proofread your work:

• Take a Break: After completing your initial draft, take a break before starting the editing process. This allows you to approach your essay with fresh eyes and a clear mind.
• Review for Structure and Flow: Read through your essay to ensure it has a logical structure and flows smoothly. Check that your paragraphs and sections transition seamlessly, guiding readers through your story.
• Trim and Refine: Eliminate any unnecessary or repetitive information. Trim down long sentences and paragraphs to make your writing concise and impactful. Consider the pacing and ensure that each word contributes to the overall story.
• Check for Clarity and Consistency: Ensure that your ideas and thoughts are expressed clearly. Identify any confusing or vague passages and revise them to improve clarity. Check for consistency in tense, tone, and voice throughout your essay.
• Proofread for Errors: Carefully proofread your essay for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Pay attention to common mistakes such as subject-verb agreement, verb tenses, and punctuation marks. Consider using spell-checking tools or having someone else review your work for an objective perspective.
• Seek Feedback: Share your memoir essay with a trusted friend, family member, or writing partner. Their feedback can provide valuable insights and help you identify areas for improvement.

By dedicating time to edit and proofread your memoir essay, you ensure that it is polished, coherent, and error-free. These final touches enhance the reader’s experience and allow your story to shine.

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January 5, 2021

How to Write a Memoir: 7 Creative Ways to Tell a Powerful Story

by Brooke Warner

Originally published in The Write Life

Whether you curl up with memoirs on a frequent basis or pick one up every now and again, you know powerful memoirs have the capacity to take you, as a reader, for an exhilarating ride.

When I teach people how to write and sell memoir, we talk about how to tell a compelling story. While all memoirs are different, the best memoirs all have certain elements in common.

My goal with this piece is to review some of those common elements, so you can weave them into your own memoir.

How to write a memoir

If you’re planning to write a memoir, you’ll want to take your readers on a journey they won’t forget. In this post, we share tips for writing a memoir well, as well as plenty of memoir examples.

Here’s how to write a memoir.

1. Narrow your focus

Your memoir should be written as if the entire book is a snapshot of one theme of your life. Or consider it a pie, where your life represents the whole pie, and you are writing a book about a teeny-tiny sliver.

Your memoir is not an autobiography. The difference is that an autobiography spans your entire life, and a memoir focuses on one particular moment or series of moments around a theme. You want your readers to walk away knowing you, and that one experience, on a much deeper level.

Perhaps you are familiar with Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. This memoir focuses on Frank’s life as a first-generation immigrant child in Brooklyn. Angela is his mother, and much of the storyline focuses on her and how Frank saw her, as well as the role she played in trying to hold the entire family together.

2. Include more than just your story

Even as you narrow your focus, we also need to think bigger in our writing pursuits.

For example, if Hillary Clinton wrote a memoir about raising a child in the White House, she would be pulling in tidbits about how she handled the media, who she let visit her daughter during sleepovers and how she navigated the politics of parenting during her time in the White House.

Likewise, if Madonna was writing a memoir about reinventing herself after 20 years away from the public spotlight, she most likely would include what it felt like to return to the music scene and how she continued to travel and perform while raising her children.

How does this apply to you? Imagine you are writing a memoir about your three-week trek through the Himalayan Mountains. While the focus is on your trip, as well as what you learned about yourself along the way, it would be wise to also include other details about the place, your experience and your thoughts.

You could describe the geography and history of the area, share interesting snippets about the people and donkeys you interacted with, and discuss your exploration of life-and-death questions as you progressed along your arduous journey.

Your readers want to know about you, but it’s the backstory and vivid details that make for a powerful memoir.

3. Tell the truth

One of the best tips for how to write a memoir that’s powerful is to be honest and genuine. This is often tricky, because we don’t want to hurt or upset the people (our family and friends!) we’ve written into our books. But it’s important that you tell the truth — even if it makes your journey as an author more difficult.

When Shannon Hernandez wrote her memoir, Breaking the Silence: My Final Forty Days as a Public School Teacher, she knew she had a major dilemma: “If I opted to tell the whole truth, I would pretty much ensure I would never get a job with New York City Public Schools again.”

But she also knew teachers, parents and administrators needed to hear why great teachers are leaving education in droves and why the current educational system is not doing what’s right for our nation’s kids.

“I wrote my book with brutal honesty,” she said, “and it has paid off with my readers. It’s bringing national attention to what is happening behind closed school doors.”

One more note on honesty: Memoirs explore the concept of truth as seen through your eyes. Don’t write in a snarky manner or with a bitter tone. The motivation for writing a memoir shouldn’t be to exact revenge or whine or seek forgiveness; it should simply be to share your experience.

Don’t exaggerate or bend the truth in your memoir. Your story, the unique one that you hold and cherish, is enough. There is no need to fabricate or embellish.

4. Put your readers in your shoes

Powerful writers show, not tell. And for a memoir writer, this is essential to your success, because you must invite your reader into your perspective so she can draw her own conclusions.

The best way to do this is to unfold the story before your reader’s eyes by using vivid language that helps him visualize each scene.

Perhaps you want to explain that your aunt was a “raging alcoholic.” If you say this directly, your description will likely come across as judgmental and critical.

Instead, paint a picture for your audience so they come to this conclusion on their own. You might write something like this:

“Vodka bottles littered her bedroom, and I had learned, the hard way, not to knock on her door until well after noon. Most days she didn’t emerge into our living quarters until closer to sunset, and I would read her facial expression to gauge whether or not I should inquire about money — just so I could eat one meal before bedtime.”

5. Employ elements of fiction to bring your story to life

Think of the people in memoirs as characters. A great memoir pulls you into their lives: what they struggle with, what they are successful at and what they wonder about.

Many of the best memoir writers focus on a few key characteristics of their characters, allowing the reader to get to know each one in depth. Your readers must be able to love your characters or hate them, and you can’t do that by providing too much detail.

Introduce intriguing setting details and develop a captivating plot from your story. Show your readers the locations you describe and evoke emotions within them. They need to experience your story, almost as if it was their own.

While your memoir is a true story, employing these elements of fiction will make it far more powerful and enjoyable for your readers.

6. Create an emotional journey

Don’t aim to knock your readers’ socks off. Knock off their pants, shirt, shoes and underwear too! Leave your readers with their mouths open in awe, or laughing hysterically, or crying tears of sympathy and sadness — or all three.

Take them on an emotional journey that motivates them to read the next chapter, wonder about you well after they finish the last page, and tell their friends and colleagues about your book. The best way to evoke these feelings in your readers is to connect your emotions, as the protagonist, with pivotal events happening throughout your narrative arc.

Most of us are familiar with the narrative arc. In school, our teachers used to draw a “mountain” and once we reached the precipice, we were to fill in the climatic point of the book or story. Your memoir is no different: You need to create enough tension to shape your overall story, as well as each individual chapter, with that narrative arc.

That moment when you realized your husband had an affair? Don’t just say you were sad, angry or devastated. Instead, you might say something like:

“I learned of my husband’s affair when the February bank statements arrived and I realized that in one month’s time, he had purchased a ring and two massages at a high-end spa.

Those gifts weren’t mine. He was using our money to woo another lady and build a new life. I curled up in a ball and wept for three hours — I had been demoted to the other woman.”

7. Showcase your personal growth

Speaking of narrative arc, the best way to accomplish that in a memoir is by showing how you, the main character, grew and changed as a person.

That experience you had carries more weight when you show how it affected not just that point in time, but the weeks, months and even years after. How did it change your approach to life? Did it change how you thought about others or yourself? Did it help you become a better or wiser person in some way?

This can be the hardest part of writing a memoir because it requires so much introspection. It’s also the reason why most writers can’t effectively write a memoir immediately after their life-changing experience; they need the passage of time to reflect on what that experience meant to them.

If you do this well, your readers will want to wrap themselves around you, root for you, help you get wherever you’re going on the life journey.

Read the rest of the article

And here's another helpful article on writing memoir from our friends at WriterUnboxed

Back to Write City Blog

Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of Write On, Sisters!, Green-light Your Book, What's Your Book?, and three books on memoir. Brooke is a TEDx speaker, weekly podcaster (of “Write-minded” with co-host Grant Faulkner of NaNoWriMo), and the former Executive Editor of Seal Press. She writes a monthly column for Publishers Weekly.

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Last updated on Apr 06, 2021

21 Memoir Examples to Inspire Your Own

Writing a memoir is a daunting endeavor for any author: how do you condense your entire life story into a mere couple hundred pages? Of course, you'll find plenty of online guides that will help you write a memoir by leading you through the steps. But other times that old adage “ show, don’t tell ” holds true, and it’s most helpful to look at other memoir examples to get started. 

If that’s the case for you, we’ve got you covered with 21 memoir examples to give you an idea of the types of memoirs that have sold well. Ready to roll up your sleeves and dive in? 

The autobiographical memoir

The autobiographical memoir — a retelling of one’s life, from beginning to present times — is probably the standard format that jumps to most people’s minds when they think of this genre.

At first glance, it might seem like a straightforward recount of your past. However, don’t be deceived! As you’ll be able to tell from the examples below, this type of memoir shines based on three things: the strength of the author’s story, the strength of the story’s structure, and the strength of the author’s voice.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. The woman who Toni Morrison said “launched African American writing in the United States,” Angelou penned this searing memoir in 1969, which remains a timeless classic today.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. Less of a singular memoir than a collection of humorous anecdotes framed around his life as a transplant to Paris, the star of this book is Sedaris’ dry voice and cutting humor.

A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby. Chacaby’s remarkable life — from growing up abused in a remote Ojibwa community to overcoming alcoholism and coming out as a lesbian as an adult — is captured in this must-read autobiography.

The “experience” memoir

One of the most popular memoirs that you’ll find on bookshelves, this type focuses on a specific experience that the author has undergone. Typically, this experience involves a sort of struggle, such as a bitter divorce, illness, or perhaps a clash with addiction. Regardless of the situation, the writer overcomes it to share lessons learned from the ordeal.

In an "experience" memoir, you can generally expect to learn about:

• How the author found themselves facing said experience;
• The obstacles they needed to overcome; and
• What they discovered during (and after) the experience.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Faced with the prognosis of terminal cancer at the age of thirty-six, Paul Kalanithi wrote an unforgettable memoir that tackles an impossible question: what makes life worth living?

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. An account of drug and alcohol abuse that one reviewer called “the War and Peace of addiction,” this book became the focus of an uproar when it was revealed that many of its incidents were fabricated. (In case you’re wondering, we do not recommend deceiving your readers.)

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. Adapted in 1999 into a critically acclaimed film starring Angelina Jolie, Girl, Interrupted enduringly recounts the author’s battle with mental illness and her ensuing 18-month stay in an American psychiatric hospital.

The “event” memoir

Similar to the “experience” memoir, the “event” memoir centers on a single significant event in the author’s life. However, while the former might cover a period of years or even decades, the “event” memoir zeroes in on a clearly defined period of time — for instance, a two-month walk in the woods, or a three-week mountain climb, as you’ll see below.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. In July of 1845, Henry David Thoreau walked into the woods and didn’t come out for two years, two months, and two days. This is the seminal memoir that resulted.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. The controversial account of the 1996 Everest disaster, as written by author-journalist Krakaeur, who was climbing the mountain on the same day that eight climbers were killed.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Immortalized as one of the classic books about mourning, The Year of Magical Thinking recounts the grief Didion endured the year following the death of her husband.

The “themed” memoir

When you look back on your own timeline, is there a strong theme that defines your life or ties it all together? That’s the premise on which a “themed” memoir is based. In such a memoir, the author provides a retrospective of their past through the lens of one topic.

If you’re looking to write this type of memoir, it goes without saying that you’ll want to find a rock-solid theme to build your entire life story around. Consider asking yourself:

• What’s shaped your life thus far?
• What’s been a constant at every turning point?
• Has a single thing driven all of the decisions that you’ve made?

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. Throughout an up-and-down upbringing complete with a debilitating battle with depression, the single consistent thread in this author’s life remained football and Arsenal F.C.

Educated by Tara Westover. If there’s one lesson that we can learn from this remarkable memoir, it’s the importance of education. About a family of religious survivalists in rural Idaho, this memoir relates how the author overcame her upbringing and moved mountains in pursuit of learning.

Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth. Now best known for its BBC adaptation, Worth’s account of her life as a midwife caught people’s imagination with its depiction of life in London’s East End in the 1950s.

The family memoir

In a family memoir, the author is a mirror that re-focuses the light on their family members — ranging from glimpses into the dysfunctional dynamics of a broken family to heartfelt family tributes.

Examples of this type of memoir

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat. A love letter to her family that crosses generations, continents, and cultures, Brother, I’m Dying primarily tells the intertwined stories of two men: Danticat’s father and her uncle.

Native Country of the Heart by Cherrie Moraga. The mother is a self-made woman who grew up picking cotton in California. The daughter, a passionate queer Latina feminist. Weaving the past with the present, this groundbreaking Latinx memoir about a mother-daughter relationship confronts the debilitating consequences of Alzheimer's disease.

The childhood memoir

A subset of the autobiographical memoir, the childhood memoir primarily focuses (spoiler alert!) on the author’s childhood years. Most childhood memoirs cover a range of 5 - 18 years of age, though this can differ depending on the story.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. The groundbreaking winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, McCourt’s memoir covers the finer details of his childhood in impoverished Dublin.

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl. Evoking his schoolboy days in the 1920s and 30s, the stories in this book shed light on themes and motifs that would play heavily in Dahl’s most beloved works: a love for sweets, a mischievous streak, and a distrust of authority figures.

The travel memoir

What happens when you put an author on a plane? Words fly!

Just kidding. While that’s perhaps not literally how the travel memoir subgenre was founded, being on the move certainly has something to do with it. Travel memoirs have been written for as long as people could traverse land — which is to say, a long time — but the modern travel narrative didn’t crystallize until the 1970s with the publication of Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia .

In a travel memoir, the author isn’t the star of the show: the place is. You can expect to find these elements in a travel memoir:

• A description of the place
• A discussion of the culture and people
• How the author experienced the place and dealt with setbacks during the journey

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Proof that memoirs don’t have to tell catastrophic stories to succeed, this book chronicles Gilbert’s post-divorce travels, inspiring a generation of self-care enthusiasts, and was adapted into a film starring Julia Roberts.

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux. A four-month journey from London to East Asia (and back again) by train, this is the book that helped found the modern travel narrative.

The celebrity memoir

The celebrity memoir is just that: a memoir published by a celebrity. Though many celebrity memoirs are admittedly ghostwritten, the best ones give us an honest and authentic look at the “real person” behind the public figure.

Note that we define “celebrity” broadly here as anyone who is (or has been) in the public spotlight. This includes:

• Political figures
• Sports stars
• Actors and actresses

Paper Lion by George Plimpton. In 1960, the author George Plimpton joined up with the Detroit Lions to see if an ordinary man could play pro football. The answer was no, but his experience in training camp allowed him to tell the first-hand story of a team from inside the locker room.

Troublemaker by Leah Remini. The former star of TV’s The King of Queens tackles the Church of Scientology head-on, detailing her life in (and her decision to leave) the controversial religion.

It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong. This is a great lesson on the way authors often write books to create their own legacy in the way they see fit. As history confirmed, Armstrong’s comeback success wasn’t entirely about the bike at all.

Now that you know what a memoir looks like, it’s time to get out your pen and paper, and write your own memoir ! And if you want even more memoir examples to keep being inspired? We’ve got you covered: here are the 30 best memoirs of the last century .

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18 Narrative and Memoir Essays

Narrative writing.

Human beings tell stories every day. We understand most of nature through stories. Though facts can be memorized, stories — the details, the description, the experience — make us believe.

Therefore, as we begin to study writing, we need to begin with the properties of the story. How do good storytellers make us believe? How can good writing draw a reader into a story? How can we harness the power of the story to make a point, even in a dry, academic context?

The purpose of narrative writing is to tell stories. This is a form we are familiar with, as any time we tell a story about an event or incident in our day, we are engaging in a form of narration. In terms of writing, narration is the act of describing a sequence of events. Sometimes this is the primary mode of an essay—writing a narrative essay about a particular event or experience, and sometimes this is a component used within an essay, much like other evidence is offered, to support a thesis. This chapter will discuss the basic components of narration, which can be applied either as a stand-alone essay or as a component within an essay.

Ultimately, narrative writing tries to relay a series of events in an emotionally engaging way. You want your audience to be moved by your story, which could mean through laughter, sympathy, fear, anger, and so on. The more clearly you tell your story, the more emotionally engaged your audience is likely to be.

WHERE DO WE FIND NARRATIVE?

We talk about narrative writing in many ways. Books will introduce it as Narration, Narrative, and Storytelling. Narrative creeps into most of the other kinds of writing we learn about, too. Persuasive essays use short stories — often called anecdotes  — to engage a reader’s attention and sympathy. Consider the difference between these two openings to the same essay:

Which opening makes you want to read more? The second one engages its readers with a story — and we’re hard-wired, as humans, to want to hear the end of a story.

Television plays on this characteristic all the time. Think of your favorite show and the maddening, brief preview that starts before the credits roll. It’s always a quick snippet that makes you stay tuned because the writers and producers know their audience will sit through several minutes of mindless commercials just to find out how the story will continue.

In our own writing, we can use stories in just the same way. We can draw our readers into our own experiences, even if they’ve never been through anything even similar to what we have, by telling our own stories.

HOW DO WE WRITE A NARRATIVE?

A narrative essay is a piece that tells one consistent, cohesive story. In academic writing, a narrative essay will also always convey a lesson, a moral, or a point that the writer wishes the reader to take.

When we say “moral,” some people think of after-school specials and having “good behavior” tips crammed down their throat. However, the most powerful lessons conveyed through writing are often done with great subtlety. True, the punishing pace of writing expected in a college course may not leave enough time to develop a nuanced story — no one is going to churn out War and Peace  or even  The Hobbit  in ten weeks — but not every story has to have the moral stated clearly, in bold font, at the very beginning.

Think about it this way: When you were a kid, if your grandmother had sat you down and said, “Listen. We’re now going to have a thirty-minute conversation about how it’s really bad if you start smoking,” would you have listened? Probably not. If, however, your grandmother took you to visit your uncle Larry, who had terminal lung cancer, and then casually mentioned as you left that Larry had been smoking since he was your age — would you get the lesson? Would you remember it? Do you remember better the 200 lectures you had as a teenager about not being a bully, or do you remember the one time that you witnessed its effects firsthand?

In a narrative, we want to pull that same kind of trick on our readers: get our point across, but do it in a way that engages the imagination and attention. Use the power of the story.

The narrative relies on the same components that all good writing does: it needs detail, clear organization, and a central purpose (AKA our friends Development, Organization, and Unity).

NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT: BRING THE DETAILS

Consider this passage from the very first Sherlock Holmes mystery, “A Study in Scarlet,” which describes a major character:

The author includes detail upon detail to describe this gentleman. He could have simply said, “He was dying from hunger and from thirst,” which would tell us everything we need to know. Instead, he describes how these feelings have had an effect upon the man — he is  gaunt , he’s starting to look like a skeleton, and he can barely stand without the support of his rifle.

Think of the best book you’ve ever read (or the best television show you’ve ever watched, or the movie you love), and you may be able to relate to this. Good description is the difference between hearing a game on the radio and watching it live in the stadium (or on a ginormous 3-D television). The very breath of life in a narrative will always be your ability to describe a scene.

This relies on the use of specific language. As you read through the revision section, you were encouraged to avoid phrases that your audience might find misleading. Consider this as you write a story. With every sentence, ask, “What does my audience know? What do they think?” If you say a car is “beautiful,” will your audience think of a 2018 Hybrid Honda Accord or of a 1966 Chevelle (pictured at right)? If there’s some doubt, change your words to reflect your meaning.

You may have heard the advice that asks you to “show, not tell” in writing. This is what we mean: be so descriptive in telling a story that the reader feels s/he is there beside you, seeing the swimming pool or the school’s front doors or the new car or the new child with his/her own eyes.

NARRATIVE ORGANIZATION

Narrative traditionally follows time order, or  chronological order , throughout. This seems obvious when you think about it — we tell stories in time order, starting (usually) at the beginning and working through to the end.

In an essay, pieces of the story can be organized into timespans by paragraph. For instance, if I’m describing a particularly harrowing day at work, I might have a paragraph just for the morning, and then a paragraph about my terrible lunch break, and then a paragraph about my afternoon.

Narrative essays usually can’t cover more ground than a day or two. Instead of writing about your entire vacation experience, study abroad month, two years of work at the plant, or 18 years living at home, focus on one particular experience that took place over a day or two. That’s enough for a reader to digest in a few pages, and it will also give you a chance to really lay in details without feeling rushed.

Sometimes, we start stories out of order. Many popular movies and television shows do this regularly by showing a clip of something that happens later before starting the whole show. If you’ve ever seen an episode of NCIS, you’ll be familiar with this technique: they start each section of the show with a photo of the ending scene, then start an hour or two before that scene in the live-action. Shows often jump to “One Week Earlier” between commercial breaks.

Think of the emotional impact that has upon you as a viewer. Again, it’s a trick the writers pull with their story to drive you through the boring/silly/pointless/insulting commercials so that you’ll stay with them. We want to know how the characters get to that end.

You can manipulate your audience in this way, too, but be careful; giving away too much of the ending may sometimes make a reader simply put down what they’re reading. It’s safer (though not always better) to just start at the beginning and write things down as they happened. Particularly in a first draft, sticking to the natural story order will be a good way to make sure nothing gets missed.

Chronological order , the order in which events unfold from first to last, is the most common organizational structure for narratives. Stories typically have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Certain transitional words and phrases aid in keeping the reader oriented in the sequencing of a story. Some of these phrases are listed below.

Figure 5.2 Transition Words and Phrases for Expressing Time

The following are the other basic components of a narrative:

•  Plot . The events as they unfold in sequence.

•  Characters . The people who inhabit the story and move it forward. Typically, each narrative has there are minor characters and main characters. The minor characters generally play supporting roles to the main character, or the protagonist.

•  Conflict . The primary problem or obstacle that unfolds in the plot, which the protagonist must solve or overcome by the end of the narrative. The way in which the protagonist resolves the conflict of the plot results in the theme of the narrative.

•  Theme . The ultimate message the narrative is trying to express; it can be either explicit or implicit.

Writing at Work

When interviewing candidates for jobs, employers often ask about conflicts or problems a potential employee had to overcome. They are asking for a compelling personal narrative. To prepare for this question in a job interview, write out a scenario using the narrative moved structure. This will allow you to troubleshoot rough spots as well as better understand your own personal history. Both processes will make your story better and your self-presentation better, too.

Narrative Anecdotes

An  anecdote  is a short, personal  narrative  about something specific. It is often used as a component in an essay, acting as evidence to support your thesis, as an example to demonstrate your point, and/or as a way to establish your credibility. It always has a point in telling it.

Elements of an Anecdote

1. Who, Where, When

Have you ever wondered why children’s stories begin something like this?

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, the teachers were revolting …

It is the start of a simple narrative. It also contains all the elements of a beginning to any narrative: when, where, and who. An anecdote, because it is short, will begin similarly:

One day, while I was sitting at a stop sign waiting for the light to change…

This little particle of an anecdote tells when, who, and where before the first sentence even ends.

Note : An anecdote sets up a particular incident; it does not tell about a long period of time.

2. What Happened (Sequence of Events)

Any narrative also includes a sequence of events. You should be able to read an anecdote and tell what happens first, what happens next, and so on. In the following anecdote, the bolded words suggest each event in the sequence.

Example Anecdote:

My first day of college I parked in the “South Forty,” which is what everyone called the huge parking lot on the edge of the campus. It was seven forty-five in the morning, hazy and cool. I walked across the parking lot, crossed a busy street, walked over a creek, through a “faculty” parking lot, crossed another street, and came to the first row of campus buildings. I walked between buildings, past the library and the student mall. I passed many quiet, nervous-looking students along the way. Many of them smiled at me. One trio of young girls was even chuckling softly among themselves when they all smiled and said “Hi” to me at once. By the time I got to my classroom, far on the other side of campus from the parking lot, I was smiling and boldly saying “Hi” to everyone, too, particularly the girls. Every single one of them smiled or responded with a “Hi” or made a friendly comment or even chuckled happily. It was my first day of college.

When I found the building I was looking for, a friend from high school appeared. She was in my first class! I smiled at her and said, “Hi!” She looked at me. She smiled. Then she laughed. She said, “Why are you wearing a sock on your shirt?” I looked down. A sock had come out of the dryer clinging to my shirt.

3. Implied Point

Most of us want to make sure that we “get the point across” to whatever story we are telling, assuming it has a point. To do this, we tend to explain what we are telling. It is sometimes very difficult to stop. However, stopping in a timely way allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Show, don’t tell

In the anecdote above, I am very tempted to tell the reader what I felt at the moment I realized that everyone was laughing AT me rather than just being friendly. For the ending, where the point is in this case, it is best to let the reader infer (draw conclusions, fill in the blanks) what happens implicitly rather than to state explicitly what the point is, or what the narrator felt, or anything else.

The more indirect you are about your object or place the better. In the anecdote above, it might be obvious that my object is a sock or my place is a parking lot. The point is, it is not an anecdote “about” a sock; it is referred to indirectly.

How do we show rather than tell? First, describe what you see (I don’t really see anything with “I was SO embarrassed…”) or what you smell, hear, or taste, but NOT what you feel. An easy way to check whether you are showing or telling is to go through your anecdote and underline the verbs. If the verbs are “be”-verbs (is, was, were, etc.) or verbs that describe actions we cannot see (“I thought…” “I believed…” “I imagined…” “it made me upset…” and so on) then you are probably telling. In the sentence above I used “walked,” “lecturing,” “ripped,” and “said.”

Most Common Question:

“What makes stories or anecdotes interesting and something I can relate to?”

Actually, it is a simple principle, even though it may not be obvious. We “relate” or “connect” most easily to situations we recognize and so fill in the blanks. If you “tell” me, for example, “I was SO embarrassed …” then you have not let me fill in MY embarrassment. On the other hand, if you “show” me a scene, it allows me to fit my own experience into it:

“I walked past the corner of the aluminum whiteboard tray while lecturing to a class. It ripped my pants. After a moment I said, ‘Class dismissed.’”

The writer of those statements, hopes the reader will fill in some similarly embarrassing moment without the writer clearly stating that this is what is supposed to be done. The connection, the act of “filling in,” is what people tend to refer to as “relating to.”

Interestingly, it does not even matter whether or not readers fill in what the writer intend for them to fill in; it is the act of filling in our own experiences that makes us “relate” to an incident. From a writer’s perspective, that means we should show rather than tell.

Second, resist the temptation to “explain.” Let the reader fill in the blanks! It is so much more personal when the reader participates by filling in.

Assignment 1

Write an anecdote that contains who, where, when, and what happens (a sequence of events). Think about an anecdote that  involves ,  alludes to, or otherwise includes your object or place ; it does not have to be “about” your place. It also does not have to be “true” in the strict sense of the word; we will not be able to verify any believable details if they add to the effect of the anecdote. Type it out. Keep it simple and to the point.

What are ‘clichés’ and why can’t we use them?

Clichés are figurative phrases and expressions that you have probably heard a million times. For our purposes, there are two kinds of clichés: the ones that jump out at you and the ones that we use without thinking.

If you are paying attention, you will notice that the two sentences above contain at least 3 clichés. You might also notice that clichés are best suited to spoken language, because they are readily available and sometimes when we speak, we don’t have time to replace a common expression with a unique one. However, we DO have time to replace clichés while we are writing.

The problem with clichés in writing is that they are too general when we should be much more specific. They also tend to tell rather than show. In the first sentence above, we have most likely heard the phrase, “have probably heard a million times.” In speech, that expression works. In writing, it should be  literal  rather than  figurative.  The first sentence is better this way:

Clichés are figurative phrases and expressions that we have heard so many times that we all share some understanding of what they mean.

Not exactly what you thought when you read it at the beginning of this answer, is it? That is why being  literal and specific  in writing is better than  figurative and vague  as a rule.

Here is a re-write of the second sentence at the start of this answer:

For our purposes, there are two kinds of clichés: the ones that are obvious expressions (like “You can lead a horse to water …”) and the ones that are not part of expressions but seem to “go” easily into a group of words (like “we use without thinking”).

The second type is more difficult to identify and eradicate. Usually it is a group of words we have heard before that doesn’t add anything to a statement. For example, instead of “We watched the donuts roll down the street every night,” you might be tempted to add to it this way: “We watched the donuts roll down the street each and every night.” Avoid clichés in your writing.

To see more see more commonly used clichés and for guidance on how to rewrite them, see this  handout (https://writingcenter.unc.edu/cliches/)from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Writing Center.

Some Other Rhetorical Tips

• To create strong details, keep the human senses in mind. You want your reader to be immersed in the world that you create, so focus on details related to sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch as you describe people, places, and events in your narrative.
• Create tension by making the reader nervous about what is going to happen through sentence structure, tone, and voice.
• Add dialogue to show the immediacy and drama of the personal interactions (re-creating conversations as necessary to make your narrative work).
• Name specific objects to re-create the scene by selecting details that leave the readers with a dominant impression of how things were.
• Show people in action by describing precise movements and dialogue to convey the action of the scene.

External Links:

“ Sixty-nine Cents ” (https://tinyurl.com/ybjasq9c) by Gary Shteyngart: In “Sixty-nine Cents,” author Gary Shteyngart describes a coming-of-age experience as a first-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant in modern America.

Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Reservation in Washington State. He chronicles his challenges in school, starting in first grade, in  Indian Education (https://tinyurl.com/hlshngr).

Sandra Cisneros offers an example of a narrative essay in “ Only Daughter ”  (https://tinyurl.com/yc4srod7) that captures her sense of her Chicana-Mexican heritage as the only daughter in a family of seven children. The essay is also available here  (https://tinyurl.com/y7hzxhz6).

 Annie Dilliard offers an example of a narrative essay in an excerpt, often entitled “ The Chase ” (https://tinyurl.com/ycsen7r4) from her autobiography  An American Childhood , outlining a specific memorable event from her childhood. This essay is also available  here  (https://tinyurl.com/y7udsl88).

NARRATIVE UNITY

The final consideration in putting together a narrative essay should be unifying it around a single theme or lesson. As you draft, you may already have this lesson in mind:  everyone should wear a seatbelt.  However, remember that your reader needs to make up her own mind. Don’t insult a reader by beating them up with your lesson, and don’t leave them guessing about the meaning of your piece by leaving it out completely.

Many writers include a paragraph of reflection after telling a personal story in an essay that lets a reader know, directly, the significance that the story has on the writer’s life. This can be a good way to get a lesson across. Showing what you’ve learned or found important in an event will provide the reader with a clue about the overall meaning of the story.

You should use “I” in a personal, narrative essay . There are types of academic writing where “I” is inappropriate, but this is not one of those times. In fact, the best narratives will often be the most personal, the stories that avoid hiding behind “you” or “they” and instead boldly tell the writer’s own story.

NARRATIVE OUTLINES

The typical narrative essay follows an outline that should seem like common sense:

• Paragraph 1: Introduction
• Paragraph 2: Event #1
• Paragraph 3: Event #2
• Paragraph 4: Event #3
• Paragraph 5: Conclusion

This outline is flexible. Perhaps the first event in your story will take significant space to describe; it may need 2 paragraphs of its own. Maybe there are smaller events that happen within the larger events. Maybe for your piece, it makes sense to jump right into the story instead of spending an introduction paragraph to give some setup. What matters most is that a reader can easily follow the piece from beginning to end and that she will leave with a good understanding of what you wanted the reader to learn.

Student Sample Essay

My College Education

The first class I went to in college was philosophy, and it changed my life forever. Our first assignment was to write a short response paper to the Albert Camus essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” I was extremely nervous about the assignment as well as college. However, through all the confusion in philosophy class, many of my questions about life were answered.

I entered college intending to earn a degree in engineering. I always liked the way mathematics had right and wrong answers. I understood the logic and was very good at it. So when I received my first philosophy assignment that asked me to write my interpretation of the Camus essay, I was instantly confused. What is the right way to do this assignment, I wondered? I was nervous about writing an incorrect interpretation and did not want to get my first assignment wrong. Even more troubling was that the professor refused to give us any guidelines on what he was looking for; he gave us total freedom. He simply said, “I want to see what you come up with.”

Full of anxiety, I first set out to read Camus’s essay several times to make sure I really knew what was it was about. I did my best to take careful notes. Yet even after I took all these notes and knew the essay inside and out, I still did not know the right answer. What was my interpretation? I could think of a million different ways to interpret the essay, but which one was my professor looking for? In math class, I was used to examples and explanations of solutions. This assignment gave me nothing; I was completely on my own to come up with my individual interpretation.

Next, when I sat down to write, the words just did not come to me. My notes and ideas were all present, but the words were lost. I decided to try every prewriting strategy I could find. I brainstormed, made idea maps, and even wrote an outline. Eventually, after a lot of stress, my ideas became more organized and the words fell on the page. I had my interpretation of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and I had my main reasons for interpreting the essay. I remember being unsure of myself, wondering if what I was saying made sense, or if I was even on the right track. Through all the uncertainty, I continued writing the best I could. I finished the conclusion paragraph, had my spouse proofread it for errors, and turned it in the next day simply hoping for the best.

Then, a week or two later, came judgment day. The professor gave our papers back to us with grades and comments. I remember feeling simultaneously afraid and eager to get the paper back in my hands. It turned out, however, that I had nothing to worry about. The professor gave me an A on the paper, and his notes suggested that I wrote an effective essay overall. He wrote that my reading of the essay was very original and that my thoughts were well organized. My relief and newfound confidence upon reading his comments could not be overstated.

What I learned through this process extended well beyond how to write a college paper. I learned to be open to new challenges. I never expected to enjoy a philosophy class and always expected to be a math and science person. This class and assignment, however, gave me the self-confidence, critical-thinking skills, and courage to try a new career path. I left engineering and went on to study law and eventually became a lawyer. More important, that class and paper helped me understand education differently. Instead of seeing college as a direct stepping stone to a career, I learned to see college as a place to first learn and then seek a career or enhance an existing career. By giving me the space to express my own interpretation and to argue for my own values, my philosophy class taught me the importance of education for education’s sake. That realization continues to pay dividends every day.

Most People Don’t Understand Memoirs  

In 2006, James Frey wrote a memoir about parts of his life when he was under the influence of drugs called  A Million Little Pieces , and after Oprah had him on her show to discuss the book – it was featured in her popular book club, of course – she was told that he “lied” about certain parts. Well, he didn’t lie. Memoirs contain what we remember. What we remember isn’t always “fact.” What I always say is that if you have all of your family members report what happened at a family gathering – like a birthday party or Christmas – whose report would be correct? No ones! That’s what a memoir is. It’s still nonfiction because it’s what the person remembers, but it’s not false on purpose. If I remember that my sister responded to me in a snotty way one day and my other sister didn’t think so, no one is correct. It’s just my memory versus hers.

Now, typically, memoirs encompass just a chunk of someone’s life, like when James Frey wrote about his drug years, but sometimes, some famous person in their 70s (or older) will write his/her memoir. No matter what, it’s simply what they remember, and I suppose if someone’s on drugs or has an awful memory, the stories could appear to be false. But they aren’t. That’s why they say, “life is stranger than fiction.”

Memoirs are part of the nonfiction category of literature; they contain a lot of description and detail, and they are typically very, very personal in content.

The Bits and Pieces of Memoir

The memoir is a specific type of narrative. It is autobiographical in nature, but it is not meant to be as comprehensive as a biography (which tells the entire life story of a person). Instead, a memoir is usually only a specific “slice” of one’s life. The time span within a memoir is thus frequently limited to a single memorable event or moment, though it can also be used to tell about a longer series of events that make up a particular period of one’s life (as in Cameron Crowe’s film memoir Almost Famous ). It is narrative in structure, usually describing people and events that ultimately focuses on the emotional significance of the story to the one telling it. Generally, this emotional significance is the result of a resolution from the conflict within the story. Though a memoir is the retelling of a true account, it is not usually regarded as being completely true. After all, no one can faithfully recall every detail or bit of dialogue from an event that took place many years ago. Consequently, some creative license is granted by the reader to the memoirist recounting, say, a significant moment or events from his childhood some thirty years, or more, earlier. (However, the memoirist who assumes too much creative license without disclosing that fact is vulnerable to censure and public ridicule if his deception is found out, as what happened with James Frey and his memoir,  A Million Little Pieces .)

Furthermore, names of people and places are often changed in a memoir to protect those who were either directly or indirectly involved in the lives and/or event(s) being described.

Why read memoirs?

To learn about other people’s lives and their thoughts about events that have occurred.  Memoirs are a personalized look at history.

How to write memoirs?

Reflect n your life. write what you remember about events that matter to you from your unique point-of-view.

Dialogue is another way to bring life to your writing. Dialogue is conversation or people speaking in your story. An engaging dialogue goes beyond what is simply being said to include descriptions of non-verbal communication (facial expressions, body movement, changes in tone, and speed of speech) and characterization. The way people speak and interact while talking reveals much about them and the situation.

Writing a natural-sounding dialogue is not easy. Effective dialogue must serve more than one purpose – it should:

• Drive the plot forward,
• Reveal information about the characters, and
• Build tension or introduce conflict.

Sample Dialogue

“So, what was it really like?” I asked.

“I’ve told you. It was amazing.”

I shifted to my side so I could look at her. “You have to give me more than that,” I insisted, “and not the mom and dad version.”

Liv mirrored my move to her side and propped up her head with her arm. Her blue eyes searched my greens, looking for the right words. “I shouldn’t–”

We broke our gaze as we heard our mom call for us. Once again, I didn’t get the truth.

Basic Dialogue Rules

• “I want to go to the beach,” she said.
• He asked, “Where’s the champagne?”
• “That is,” Wesley said, “that neither you nor me is her boy.”
• Even if the speaker says only one word, with no accompanying attribution or action, it is a separate paragraph.
• Start a new paragraph when you wish to draw the reader’s attention to a different character, even if that character doesn’t actually speak.
• For internal dialogue, italics are appropriate.

Example Memoir

Chocolate Can Kill You

Just when you think your life could not get any better, the Great One Above throws you for a loop that causes you to think upon your life, yourself, and your “little” obsession with chocolate. I am somewhat ashamed of this story, but it taught me so much. I still remember Alisa’s face when I came crying into the Valley City gym, I can hear Dad’s echoing “Are you OKAY?” consistently in my mind as if it had been a childhood scolding, and I see the image of the snow coming at me at 70mph every time I drive on a highway now.

In 1997, the morning after Valentine’s Day, I took off to see my sister in Valley City. She was there because of a wrestling meet. She is one of their prized assistants and without her, they would never get to see how goofy they look in tights. It was a crisp morning, and I cannot remember if I filled the bronco’s tank, but I did purchase a Twix bar before heading out on I-94. I vaguely remember thinking, Gee a seat belt would be good, even though the roads were as clean as they could have been in a North Dakota February. On that ten-degree morning, I met up with no one on the highway.

I was just bee-bopping along the left side of the road, listening to the radio and singing aloud as if I was Mariah Carey. It was at this time that I chomped into my first Twix bar.

In an attempt at a different radio station or something or another, I dropped the last bar between my legs onto the floor of the black beastly bronco.

This is where I become a stupid human. I tried to recapture the chocolate bar thinking, or maybe not even thinking, It will only take me a second. Whoever has said that seconds count in any accident WAS RIGHT! All of a sudden, I look up to see that I am driving 70 mph into the median’s snowdrifts. I cranked the wheel, thinking I could just drive back onto the highway. I mumble a few swear words and realize I am going 70 MPH IN A VERY DEEP SNOWDRIFT! I take my foot off the accelerator and while the front end slows, the back end has accumulated too much energy or velocity (a good physics question) and begins to lift upwards. I close my eyes, cross my arms across my chest, and crouch back into my seat and start to feel the bronco as well as myself turn and twist and hover for what seemed an eternity in slow motion. I did not open my eyes once.

And then all of a sudden, the small jolted car lands- PLOP – ON ITS WHEELS! My chair has completely reclined, and I sit up seeing smoke coming from my engine. I forget how to work my car and instinctively get out as if to show God I am alive. I stand on top of the drift becoming taller than my boxy 4×4. There are small dents in the front where you would open the hood but that is the biggest damage I can see.

“Are you OKAY?” An old couple are parked and honking at me from the other side of the highway going towards Fargo. They tell me to come with them and turn off the engine. I grab my parka and make my way through the snow to sit down in the back seat of the long car and take in that old people smell. This is when I quietly cry.

“You did a flip! It’s amazing you walked away from it,” says the old man and I think to myself sarcastically to calm down, Yeah I tried to do that. I ask them to take me to Valley City trying not to sound three and a half. Another major thought echoes What will Dad say?

They turned around at the next available bridge which was a mile away and the lady told me the exit so I could give it to the people that will tow my little bruised bronco. They talked to themselves as I tried to think of what exactly happened, how glad I was to be alive, and how I felt about it. Once inside the gymnasium, I found Alisa’s eyes and she instantly frowned and looked scared.

“Did you and Jason fight?” No, I try to say but I am crying in front of a large crowd who all seem more interested in me now than the matches. I sit down beside her and say:

“I did a flip… the bronco… flipped … it did a 360.”

“The bronco did a WHAT! ARE YOU OKAY!” She panics. I go to call Dad as she tells her friends, and they also feel sympathetic and are quite amazed. I don’t know how I managed to remember my calling card number, but I reached Mom and Dad just waking up. Once again Dad frightens me with his voice and vows to be there as soon as possible and tells me to call the highway patrol.

I was the only accident that whole day on the highway, I think, so I looked pretty silly.

Mom and Dad showed up an hour later. Mom was half-awake, and Dad looked like he’d been chugging coffee left and right. They had seen the bronco being towed incorrectly towards Fargo, so Dad feared the transmission was screwed up again much less the rest of the car. We took off for Fargo and stopped at the spot seeing the tracks lead into the snow, then 25 feet of no tracks, and suddenly a large indentation where the bronco had sat down.

Once at the Mobile on I-29, Dad jumped into the bronco to try to start it. It revved right up. I shook my head and thought of the motto, Built Ford Tough. Only the alignment and steering was off from me trying to turn it back onto the road, and the steam I had seen was the radiator fluid splashing onto the hot engine.

We had to meet with a highway patrolman, so the bronco could get a sticker and photos could be taken. I also, fortunately for the taxpayers, had to pay a Care of Vehicle bill of thirty dollars which means that the government basically can fine someone for trashing his/her own vehicle. This pissed me off incredibly after a day like I had just had. My mom had to remind me though that at least it wasn’t a medical bill.

The highway patrolman reminds me how valuable it was that I had had a seat belt on because I would have for sure gone through the windshield with that type of event and all the tossing that I had endured. That does not make replaying this event in my memory any better. As if God was saying: “No, not yet.”

It’s a common joke to not let me eat while I am driving.

That day made me incredibly grateful for my life, and for the people who came to my aid, especially my parents for spending their whole Saturday with me. Whether we were trying to contact the highway patrolman, paying the tower and the ticket, or comforting me- they never complained. Who knew chocolate could lead to such a life-threatening, yet philosophical day?

Time to Write

Purpose:  This assignment will demonstrate the understanding of how to write a memoir

Task: This assignment frames a single event for the memoir essay.

Write a Memoir Essay.  This essay should clearly identify a significant event or series of closely tied events that convey the significance of that event or has somehow shaped your personal perspective.  Remember that you are writing for an audience that doesn’t share your knowledge of the event(s), people, setting, etc. It is up to you to make your memoir come to life.

Key Features of a Memoir:

• Invoke the 5 senses
• Use narrative suspense
• use metaphor
• include significant details
• provide descriptive language
• use effective dialogue
• include transitions

Key Grading Considerations

• The rhetorical purpose is clear, focused, and appropriate to the audience and assignment.
• The purpose is focused on the memoir.
• Shows engagement with issues of story, language, rhetoric, or thinking deeply about a personal event.
• The theme relates to a personal experience but also illustrates more universal principles.
• Transitions
• Learning Point Thesis Statement
• Topic Sentences
• Some Narrative Elements that flow with the paper
• Clear introduction, event story, and conclusion
• Dialogue is used
• Descriptions and quotes to help visualize the event
• Correct, appropriate, and varied integration of textual examples, including in-text citations
• Limited errors in spelling, grammar, word order, word usage, sentence structure, and punctuation
• Good use of academic English
• Demonstrates cohesion and flow
• Uses the rules of dialogue
• Date format

Attributions

• Memoir Content Adapted from Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). (2020).  Excelsior College. Retrieved from https://owl.excelsior.edu/ licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License .
• Narrative Writing Content Adapted from BETTER WRITING FROM THE BEGINNING . (2020).  Jenn Kepka. Retrieved from Better Writing from the Beginning licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License .

English 101: Journey Into Open Copyright © 2021 by Christine Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Because the personal memoir is more demanding than the personal essay, for both writer and reader, it doesn’t fit into introductory courses as well as the personal essay. An intermediate level course is a good place to introduce the memoir. However, if the instructor takes the time to explain and introduce the memoir form, it can be adapted for introductory courses.

Difference Between the Personal Essay and the Memoir

While the personal essay can be about almost anything, the memoir tends to discuss past events. Memoir is similar to the personal essay, except that the memoir tends to focus more on striking or life-changing events. The personal essay can be a relatively light reflection about what’s going on in your life right now.

Where the personal essay explores, free from any need to interpret, the memoir interprets, analyzes, and seeks the deeper meaning beneath the surface experience of particular events. The memoir continually asks the following questions:

• Why was this event of particular significance?
• What did it mean?
• Why is it important?

In this sense, the memoir is heavier than the personal essay, and it mines the past to shed light on the present. The memoir seeks to make sense of an individual life. The questions that are left unanswered in Wole Soyinka’s essay from the personal essay resource, Why do I Fast? are answered in the memoir.

Generating Ideas for Personal Memoirs

Moore’s memoir exercise from The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction is useful in both beginning and intermediate courses:

“Make a list of six to ten events or circumstances in your own life, or the lives of those very close to you, that still provoke your curiosity. Mine your own life for the events and circumstances that still raise questions in your mind. Once you have the list (and this list should be private - don’t share it with others - and don’t hold back because you think someone else will be looking), pick one of the questions on the list that you are willing to explore.“

The potential questions Moore asks in this exercise are meant to be answered in the memoir. While the memoir tries to make sense of experience, it also shares something in common with the personal essay - the exploration of the question, and the process of trying to arrive at an answer, is at least as important as the answer or resolution you may arrive at.

Writing the memoir is not a simple Q & A with yourself; rather, the complicated process of trying to seek the answers is what makes the memoir engaging to write, and read. Here is an example from Carlos Fuentes’ How I Started to Write :

Fuentes is constantly questioning and answering, interpreting and analyzing his experience, trying to make sense of why and how he did what he did in order to become a writer. He seeks answers and tries to make sense of his life by interpreting his own experience, the cultural and political life of his time, the meaning of language and literary influence, and by stepping over imagined nationalist borders.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Uncover Your Memoir

Part 2: outline your memoir, memoir example of a finished outline, how to outline your memoir (a complete step-by-step guide).

You might think that because you’re writing a book about your own life, you don’t have to do any outlining for it.

That’s not true.

I know it’s tempting to start writing without a plan. But if you do that, you’ll end up with a convoluted mess—if you finish at all.

Every good book—including every good memoir—starts with a good outline .

Before you start writing, it’s important to know what your book will include. Your outline will be your roadmap throughout the writing process. It will keep you on track and make sure that you’re writing a compelling story that appeals to your audience.

But before you say, “What if I don’t have a compelling story to share?” — let me stop you.

Every story matters.

Every person has overcome struggles in their life that are worth sharing.

Every person has a story to tell, and every person has a good memoir hiding inside them.

I truly believe that.

At a minimum, if you write down your life experiences, your kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids will know who you were and where they came from. That’s valuable by itself.

But if you turn those real-life turning points into a compelling story, you’ll also be able to help other people in the world. People who are facing the same struggles you did.

We’ve helped thousands of Authors publish their personal memoirs. And while there’s no such thing as a standard memoir, there is a process that will help you write the best memoir possible.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for outlining your life story.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Your Memoir Outline (with Template)

We’ve put together an entire Scribe Book School course on memoir writing. It’s a free, self-directed course that covers everything from what makes a good memoir to writing (and editing) your first draft .

But for this article, I’m going to focus on creating a memoir outline.

Outlining your memoir is actually a two-part process.

I’ll break down the two parts below. Each part contains a video overview, plus a step-by-step written breakdown that goes more in-depth.

Before you get started, download this template . I suggest you use it as you watch or read along.

Step 1. Determine what you’re hoping to get out of your memoir

Pull up your memoir template and start from the top.

Answer this very basic question: “What are you hoping to get out of writing your memoir?”

Choose the 3 things you want most.

Your answer might be something tangible. Maybe you want to find more clients for your business or earn more money .

Or your answer might be intangible . Maybe you want to help others in need.

Whatever the case, be as specific as possible. This will give you a concrete goal to work toward and an easy way to measure your progress later.

And be realistic . A lot of writers start off with unrealistic goals like, “I want to be on Oprah.”

Why? Aside from serving your ego, what will that do for you?

It’s much better to set incremental, attainable goals that will actually improve your business, help your target audience , create a lasting legacy, or serve whatever purpose you are writing for.

Step 2. What do you think your memoir will be about?

Next, take 2 minutes and answer this question: As you sit here—right at this moment—what do you believe your memoir will be about (recognizing you may change your mind)?

The reason I say “2 minutes” is because this should be your gut reaction. Don’t overthink it.

Nothing causes writer’s block quite like anxiety. Don’t give yourself a chance to get nervous. Just jump in and write what comes to mind.

Don’t stop before 2 minutes is up, either. That probably means you aren’t giving it enough thought.

“My life story” isn’t specific enough. Neither is “my entire life.”

Try to think about the key elements you’re going to include or what major events might go in your book.

What life experiences are relevant to the story you want to tell?

Step 3. Figure out what excites you

Take another 2 minutes and answer this question: What are you most excited about with regards to your memoir?

There are a number of answers to this. You could be excited about the stuff that’s going to go in the memoir. I’m excited to write the story about founding my business. I’m excited to tell people about the time I went to Aruba.

You could write down answers related to the process of writing the memoir. I’m excited to spend time working through my thoughts about this particular part of my life. I’m excited to see the memoir when it’s finished!

Or, it could be something related to your emotional experience of the memoir. I’m excited to deal with my issues in writing. I’m excited to share my truth with others.

Whatever the case may be, figure out what excites you.

Memoir writers inevitably struggle during the writing process because it’s hard to dig through your past.

Your answer to this question will give you motivation when the going gets rough.

Step 4. List your self-expectations

Take another 2 minutes to answer this question: What do you expect from yourself in the process of writing your memoir?

Your answers may be positive. I expect to set up a writing plan and stick to it. I expect to write 250 words every day. I expect to complete the first draft in six months. I expect to write some funny flashbacks about my time in high school.

As always, the more specific you can be, the better. Give yourself concrete goals to work toward.

Your answers may also be negative. We all have some bad habits, and it’s important to be honest with yourself. I expect that I will sleep in instead of getting up at 5 a.m. to write. I expect that I’ll procrastinate when I get to the hardest parts of the story because I don’t like remembering them.

If you can acknowledge those tendencies from the get-go, you’re more likely to fend them off when you’re in the thick of writing.

Awareness is the first step to making progress.

Step 5. Imagine the afterglow

Writing a book is never easy. I don’t care whether you’re a first-time Author or a professional writer. You’re going to hit a slump at some point.

The way to keep going is to keep the finishing line in mind. That’s one reason you listed your goals in step 1.

But there’s another kind of motivator that can keep you going—the way writing your memoir will make you feel .

Take 2 minutes and imagine how you would like to feel after you’ve written your memoir.

Do you imagine feeling proud of your hard work? Overjoyed? Deeply satisfied because it was a cathartic experience?

What’s your emotional goal with this book?

I need to point out something important, though.

Be careful how much pressure you put on your book.

Write down how you’d like to feel after putting all that work into your memoir. But understand that the memoir itself can’t do anything for you.

In other words, your emotional goal needs to come from inside you.

Writing a memoir isn’t going to make your dad love you or make your addiction go away.

Writing a memoir can help you process those feelings and help you motivate yourself so you can keep working through them.

Step 6. Consider how your life might change

Take 2 minutes and answer the following question: How do you think your life will change after writing your memoir?

Speaking your truth in a memoir will inevitably change your life.

Short-term, it can be painful. You might have to face some unpleasant, hard truths.

But in the long run, the change is going to be for the better.

Again, don’t immediately fast forward to visions of grandeur. Writing a memoir probably isn’t going to land you on the main stage of TED or get you on The Today Show .

It might help you develop more discipline in your day-to-day life. It might give you a sense of calm since you’ll learn how to express yourself. Or it might help you feel prepared to tackle some emotional challenges in your life.

But be honest with yourself.

Step 7. Define the limits of your memoir

Now we’re going to change it up. Only take 1 minute for the next question.

Consider this: Do you anticipate your memoir will cover your whole life, a specific period in your life, a specific relationship or theme in your life, or something else?

You’re not writing a memoir because you want to tell the world about the great sandwich you had at lunch.

You’re writing a memoir because there’s something in your life that’s worth telling. What is that something?

I believe most people who sit down to write a memoir know what they want to say. You may not have admitted it to yourself yet, but deep down, you know.

That’s why I suggest only taking a minute for this question.

It’s also why I also don’t extensively cover the types of memoirs. Sure, some memoirs cover a whole life, while others cover a single event or theme. Some move chronologically, while others don’t.

None of that really matters when it comes to planning your memoir.

You know your truth. You know what’s compelling you to write your story. Just be honest, and that truth will become clear.

This question is still important, though, because it helps you realize specifically what it is about your story that’s worth telling.

It will also help you start thinking about your narrative arc and story structure. What are the turning points in your memoir? What did you learn and how?

Don’t feel locked in by this answer. It can always change. But it’s important to get the ball rolling by considering what the most impactful elements of your life story are.

You’ll sort it out more as you write the book.

Step 8. Create a working title

If you were to title your memoir—just right now, not permanently—what would it be?

Only give yourself 1 minute for this.

I’ve written about how hard it can be to come up with the perfect title . I’ve also written about how important it is to get it right.

But your title doesn’t need to be perfect at this stage. It just needs to be something that works for you.

Ideally, it will be something that encapsulates your mission and gives you a sense of direction as you move forward.

But remember, the aim here is to start zeroing in on a direction, not to nail the bullseye.

Your working title can be boring and straightforward, like My Cancer Story .

Or, it can be enigmatic, like Candy Rain .

It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it means something to you.

Just brainstorm.

Step 9. Develop a sense of urgency

Why write your memoir now? Why not wait?

Give me the short, honest answer. This shouldn’t take more than a minute or 2.

It takes a lot of motivation to write a book, so what’s your motivation?

Why is this story so worth telling that you want to take on the extra trouble, time, and effort right now?

Did something just happen in your life to motivate you? Are you trying to process your feelings about something? Is there a pressing need for it in the community you want to serve?

What’s your purpose?

Here’s my advice: if you have a burning desire to tell a story, now’s the time. Don’t wait. Why? Because you’re going to change. As humans, we’re always growing and evolving.

There are things I’ve written that, at the time, were my absolute truth. But I can’t even imagine writing about them now.

If something about your story feels urgent to you right now, seize the opportunity.

Step 10. Dig deeper

Take 2 minutes and dig as deep as you can. Why are you really writing your memoir?

Be brutally honest.

You don’t have to show this to anyone, so there’s no answer that should make you feel embarrassed.

The more upfront you can be with yourself about your reasons, the easier it will be to write a memoir that fulfills you, your mission, and others’ needs.

But remember this: a memoir isn’t about telling people what to do. If you want to do that, consider writing a knowledge-share nonfiction book .

A memoir is about digging deep into your personal story and your own emotions.

If you want others to learn about themselves from your memoir, the best way to do it is to be honest about yourself.

Others may see themselves reflected in your story—and chances are, they will—but they aren’t the subject of the book.

Step 11. Sum it all up

Now it’s time for your big takeaway.

Working through all these questions should give you a lot more clarity about what your memoir is about and why you need to share your own experience.

So, given your answers above, what do you think your memoir is really about?

Your answer doesn’t have to be about specific content, although it may be related.

Maybe your “what’s it about” is sharing a particular experience or insight. Or maybe it’s about sharing your journey through a difficult time.

Perhaps it’s about answering a question that’s driven you professionally for decades.

Or, maybe it’s about a feeling you want to have on the other side (e.g., I am not a mistake. I am worthy.) Just remember, your personal memoir can’t heal you. But the work that you put into it can.

Step 1. List the stories, experiences, events, or time periods that might go in your memoir

Open your template and scroll down to the orange section. Where it says “memoir topic,” include your answer from Step 11 of Part 1.

Now you can get into the actual outlining.

To be clear, there are many ways to outline a memoir.

But I recommend the simplest way possible, which is to brainstorm the stories, experiences, major events, and time periods that you want to cover in your book.

For this step, make bullet points and jot down all the stories you want to cover.

They don’t have to be connected. They don’t have to be complete sentences. They just have to remind you of what you’d like to cover in the book.

Think of this as a brainstorming exercise. These stories might end up in your book, and they might not.

With a memoir, a lot of the discovery comes in the writing. This is just your basic guide for all the stuff that could or should be in the first draft.

Step 2. Put those stories in the best order for your specific memoir

Once you have all your bullet points, put them in the order you want them in the book.

Don’t feel like your book has to move chronologically. What matters is that everything is in an order that resonates with you.

When you’re done, your outline will look very basic, almost like a table of contents.

I realize this is very simple. I literally just told you to write down the memories you want in the book and put them in order.

But do not mistake simple for easy.

This process will require you to really understand what you want your memoir to be about.

Also, this outline exercise almost guarantees that your memoir will change as you begin writing.

Your outline doesn’t always have to connect the dots. In fact, your final book may not even connect the dots.

For example, take Tiffany Haddish’s The Last Black Unicorn . It sold a million copies for a reason—but there are no dots there.

The reader can read it and see dots that connect certain themes.

But the stories aren’t directly connected. Tiffany just wanted to tell her most important stories as honestly as possible.

She did. And they were great. If you go to Audible, you’ll find countless reviews that testify to the power of her stories.

Your dots don’t all have to connect for your story to resonate.

Here’s a good rule of thumb. If you don’t want to connect the dots, that’s okay. But it probably means that connecting the dots would be too painful.

Ask me how I know… Connecting the dots was a bridge too far when I was writing my “fratire” stuff. I wasn’t ready to dig that deep, emotionally.

If you need to, just tell your stories.

And if you’re an overthinker, you might want to actually try not to connect all your dots.

Because sometimes when you over-plan, it’s a sign that, deep down, you don’t think your story is meaningful enough. You don’t think it can stand on its own without an elaborate structure behind it.

Steps 1 and 2 should take anywhere from an hour to 4 hours combined.

Do not take longer than 4 hours. In the next step, I’ll explain why.

Step 3. Are there stories that should be on that list but aren’t?

Unlike a knowledge-share nonfiction book, notice that I don’t recommend taking much time to outline your memoir. I also don’t teach you how to structure your chapters (if you want a comparison, check out this article on outlining a knowledge-share book).

That’s because a memoir works differently. You have to struggle a little putting together your outline. You have to struggle a little while writing each chapter.

Those struggles will help you figure out what’s important. They will strengthen your story.

You’re going to feel like your outline isn’t complete.

That’s okay. It probably isn’t.

Your outline isn’t going to be perfect. But perfection isn’t the point of an outline. The point is to get you writing quickly in the right direction.

In fact, if you wait until you have a perfect outline before you start your book, you’re doing it wrong.

You’ll discover much of your book as you write it . That’s just how it works.

Other stories will come to you as you write. You’ll uncover hidden connections. You’ll develop deeper insights as you get deeper into the material.

That’s all part of the process.

Your outline gives you a scaffold so you know how to move forward. But you still have to put in the struggle to make the story come to life.

Uncovering your truth is hard. If you try to make it easy, you won’t actually uncover that truth.

Like I said, your memoir outline will be very basic. It will look almost like a table of contents.

It may not make a lot of sense to an outside reader yet, but it will make sense to you.

Since I mentioned Tiffany Haddish’s The Last Black Unicorn earlier, I’ll give you her table of contents as an example.

Here’s what it looks like:

• Mascots and Bar Mitzvahs: High School Years
• Laugh Factory Comedy Camp
• Family and Foster Care
• Titus the Boyfriend
• The Pimp Gets Pimped
• Roscoe the Handicapped Angel
• How I Got (Restarted) in Comedy
• The Ex-Husband
• The Long Road to Comedy Success
• Tiffany’s True Hollywood Stories

You can tell there’s a rough chronology at work. We start with high school stories and end with Hollywood.

But within that basic narrative arc, there’s not necessarily a clear connective thread.

These are basically the moments that mattered most to Tiffany. They’re the formative experiences that made her into who she was.

And that was enough to create a riveting, vastly popular book that sold millions of copies because it spoke to her readers on a deep emotional level.

An outline is indispensable, but at the end of the day, there’s no wrong way to organize your memoir.

A memoir’s success hinges entirely on 1 thing: authenticity. Are you speaking your truth? Are you being vulnerable? Are you letting your readers see who you are?

If so, the specific dots won’t matter. It’s all about how you tell them.

The Scribe Crew

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Memoir coach and author Marion Roach

Welcome to The Memoir Project, the portal to your writing life.

How to Write A Memoir in Essays

Sorting the Stories — Memoir as Essay Collection

by Linda Styles Berkery

When I told a friend that I was taking a memoir-writing class, she replied, “Your life just isn’t that interesting.” Obviously she was thinking autobiography , not understanding memoir . I ignored her comment and continued to write about the small threads of wisdom I’ve learned.

After many edits, additions, and subtractions, I had built a wardrobe. I had a collection of fourteen personal essays—each one told through the lens of a dress. A Little Black Dress —learning compassion as illustrated by growing up in a funeral home. Memory Gown —naming mistakes as illustrated by a trip to the ER. Red Mini —seeing individuals as illustrated by teaching third grade. Ordinary dresses can bring out profound lessons.

Since all the writing pieces were in essay format, I adjusted Marion Roach Smith’s famous writing math, It’s about X as illustrated by Y to be told in a Z , and made a chart. To my Z factor, (essays) I added color and noted the dress: a turquoise paisley print, a navy maternity dress, an orange Hawaiian muumuu, a yellow sundress from 1941, a blue velvet jumper.

Each essay could stand alone, yet a book kept coming to mind. It was not enough to say I have a collection of “dress stories” of different length and various moods. I had more work to do. Although my structure would not be typical of a book length memoir (Act 1, Act 2, Act 3), even memoir as an essay collection must have an overall arc—a roof overhead, not just dress threads running through. Yes, memoir can be an essay collection, but it still needs structure and order.

I printed each story individually and laid them across my living room carpet. I knew which essay to put first and which would be last, but the other twelve? Originally I was tempted to group them. These three relate to my father’s WWII stories—put them together. Two had childhood dresses. My husband was mentioned in this group. But nothing really worked until my wonderful editor, Robyn Ringler, passed along tips she had learned from her own writing coach.

“Mix them up,” Robyn suggested. “Vary the word count. Don’t try to force the order, but pay attention to the emotions and lessons in the stories. Then, after you collect everything in the order you think might work, read the last paragraph of one story and the first paragraph of the following story and see if that works. You might need to do that process a few times.”

Robyn was right. I did arrange the essays a few times. But since these were, after all, dress stories, I got creative. If I had a photo of the dress, or a scrap of material from the dress, I stapled it to the printed page. Clearing a closet rod, I hung each essay from fourteen skirt hangers and started arranging them for a book. (Don’t try this at home.) I moved them and moved them until I could see a lovely rainbow arc for the entire collection.

When I was finally comfortable with the flow, I released my dress stories from their hangers and returned to the computer to cut and paste the individual essays into one long document. More edits. Moving paragraphs. Breaking up stories into parts. Adding just a bit more here and there. Writing an introduction and a final note to the reader. Two years after I wrote the first “dress story” for a memoir class, the book was published as Reflections: A Wardrobe of Life Lessons. Memoir, like a classic great dress, never goes out of style.

From the Introduction:

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

—Helen Hayes

At ten, I wasn’t the moody middle child wanting to be noticed, as much as the one who always seemed to notice. I was the sorter of stories, the keeper of traditions. Reaching up, or out, or down, I saw invisible threads that joined people together. I still do. Now, at seventy, I’m connecting more strands. And dresses are coaching my memory.

Three hard white suitcases live under my bed. I yank out the middle one and plop it on the blue star quilt. I’m not loading it up for a trip; it’s already full. I know what’s inside: dresses, scraps of fabric from dresses, and old photos. Clicking on the double locks feels like opening a black box of flight recordings. Messages vibrate from crinkles and creases, stains and frills. Memories rise from cotton, velvet, and silk—fibers from my journey through life.

Wisdom remains on the fold of one dress. I smooth a wrinkle and kindness appears. When I trace my pinky over white lace, I remember letting go. Hope is in there too, along with judgment, loss, compassion, forgiveness…a wardrobe of memories just waiting to be unpacked. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” I agree. But sometimes a life lesson can also be worn as a dress.

  Excerpt from a middle essay:  Navy Maternity

My first maternity outfit was a long-sleeved navy blue dress from Sears that I bought for my father’s wake and funeral. I wore it again on Father’s Day and then buried it under the lilac bush in my childhood backyard, watering the ground with my tears. The words from a homily echoed in my head. Ritualize where you are now . That’s what I was doing—dressing a wound by burying a dress…

The moment I stepped out of that dress, I felt different. Lighter. Aware. I was carrying a new life—had been all along—but now I could finally breathe. I glanced in the mirror and saw myself as a mother-to-be. I shoved the dress in the bag and tossed it in the car. The dress was easy to remove, but not the grief. Shifting my focus to new life, I decided to take one small step.

The following week, on my final day of teaching elementary school, I drove to my childhood home only two blocks away. I pulled the navy maternity dress from the white plastic bag. My mother was at work. But I didn’t need her. I knew where my father’s garden tools were kept. I grabbed a shovel and began digging in the dirt near the lilac bush—Dad’s favorite bush. It didn’t take long to scoop a hole big enough to bury a death dress…

Excerpt from the final essay: Dressing for a Reunion

At the Hyatt Regency Hotel near Dulles Airport, I’m wearing the same tri-colored dress that I wore for my 50 th  high school reunion in 2016—it’s mostly blue, with bands of black and white. I call it my past-present-future dress. The dress is making an encore appearance in 2017 at a different reunion tonight.  Can it really be called a reunion if we’ve never met?  My husband tells me to hurry. We exit the elevator and enter a full dining room. The celebration begins.

Arms reach across the table to shake my hand. A shoulder nudges close. I feel a tap on my back. Legs move toward me. Fingers clasp. Another arm extends around my waist. Then hugs, so many embraces and tears. I am aware of my middle-ness. I am a quiet middle child, in the middle of a loud story. I am in the middle of history, in the middle of generations, in the middle of Danish fishermen and American flyers. I’m standing in the middle of memory and expectation because I did what middle children do best—I made connections…

Author’s bio: Linda Styles Berkery holds an M.A. from Russell Sage College. Linda taught third grade, led retreats and worked in parish ministry. Her writings on faith/life have been published in various magazines, blogs and books. Her new book is Reflections: A Wardrobe of Life Lessons. 

HOW TO WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each installment takes on one short topic addressing how to write memoir. It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by. Love the author featured above? Did you learn something in the how-to? Then you’ve got to read the book. And you can. I am giving away one copy, and all you have to do to win is leave a comment below about something you learned from the writing lesson or the excerpt. I’ll draw winners at random (using the tool at random dot org) after entries close at midnight on May 15, 2019. Good luck!

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Related posts:

• Writing Lessons: Picking Small Topics To Write About
• Writing Lessons: Finding Time to Write
• Writing Lessons: How to Write About A Difficult Subject, by Bette Lynch Husted

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Reader interactions.

Amy Laundrie says

April 14, 2019 at 7:37 am

I found this extremely helpful. I’m a columnist for “The Wisconsin Dells Events” and am searching for a way to connect my “Slice of Life” columns into a second memoir. My first, “Laugh, Cry, Reflect: Stories From a Joyful Heart” includes pieces on nature, my pet ducklings, antidotes about my teaching career, and family stories. I appreciate the tips on how memoirists should make sure the last paragraph of one piece ties in with the first paragraph of the next and I think using dresses as a uniting metaphor was brilliant. I’m eager to read your book.

April 14, 2019 at 10:50 am

Dear Amy, I appreciate your kind words. I had a lot of fun using dresses as a thread through the essays. I would love to read your own slices of life columns. Marion has helped all of us go small. Linda

Susan Davies says

April 14, 2019 at 8:05 am

I love this concept! I have been so stuck in my writing, feeling overwhelmed. I had contemplated this approach but was so unsure….this lesson just gave me that push! Wish me luck! Thank you for your lessons! I enjoy them so much!

April 14, 2019 at 10:54 am

Susan, This is great news. I found all the writing lessons to be so helpful in my own work and I am honored that sharing my experience can help nudge you today. It is so good to give back. My editor, Robyn Ringler shared these tips from her own writing teacher so we are helping each other to gain movement. Linda

Laura McKowen says

April 14, 2019 at 8:09 am

Your content is so very helpful, Marion. About nine months ago, I read your book, and then I was on one of your calls. What I learned helped me focus, organize, and finish my manuscript for my first book, a memoir about sobriety. I sent it to my publisher last week. :) Thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 10:57 am

Marion’s content has always been so helpful to me too. Congratulations on completing your story.

David Sofi says

April 14, 2019 at 8:10 am

Excellent lesson and piece by Ms. Berkery. Especially resonating was the bit about Robyn’s advice from her writing coach. I will have that posted on my Writing Wall. I also tingled with her modification of The Algorithm (That is my personal emphasis of Marion’s lesson, it is so insightful and meaningful.)

Linda Berkery says

April 14, 2019 at 8:31 am

Marion’s writing math made each essay possible and I held it in mind throughout the entire book. Robyn RIngler’s advice pulled the entire collection together. Thank you for your comments.

Careen says

April 14, 2019 at 8:14 am

I want this book! Not only for its content, but because it illustrates the principles Marion puts forth.

April 14, 2019 at 11:34 am

Careen, I hope you continue to find help from the writing lessons and the wisdom from Marion. I surely did. Linda

Ginger Hudock says

April 14, 2019 at 8:16 am

This was wonderful post! The book would be something I could relate to because my age (61) and the metaphor of dresses. This is a great and doable way to structure a book as a series of essays. It seems much more doable for me. I am comfortable writing blog posts and magazine articles, but the thought of a long book is overwhelming sometimes.

April 14, 2019 at 11:01 am

Ginger, I am with you on the thoughts of a long book. It seemed too much for me. I was so happy to find that a series of essays was a reachable goal and Marion gave good feedback when I shared that I was attempting to do just that – she reminded me that I still needed an overall arc in order to print them together as a book. I hope you continue.

April 14, 2019 at 8:30 am

Breaking up the writing into smaller, more manageable pieces seems to tame the bigger writing project, sticking to the algorithm in each section. I loved seeing the process of finding the structure of the book, which is my biggest challenge.

April 14, 2019 at 11:40 am

Dear Beth, Smaller pieces worked so well for this collection. And yes, with each essay I made sure to follow the writing math. I kept asking myself what is this about ? Although told through the lens of a dress, it wasn’t about the dress… it was about a universal theme. Thank you for your thoughts. Linda

April 14, 2019 at 8:35 am

I can’t tell you how often I used Marion’s book and notes from her course as I was completing this book. Such good advice.

Elizabeth says

April 14, 2019 at 8:38 am

I flipped through my closet in my mind – many ideas there for essays, including the ban on trousers for women in my high school in the sixties, and the godawful bloomers for gym class. Thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 11:09 am

Oh Elizabeth, Our minds must run similar. There is a story about those gym “dresses” from my first P E class at Russell Sage College. And oh yes, a mini dress from my teaching days, when women were not allowed to wear pants, but COULD wear a mini dress three inches above the knees. Keep flipping through your closet in your mind. Clothing is so rich to draw out the memoir essays. Thank you for your post. Linda

Ruth Crates says

April 14, 2019 at 8:59 am

I continue to look for a way to write my memoirs. Essays might be a good fit for me. I love how Linda used an unlikely subject…. dresses – to relate her life experiences. If I don’t win the book, I will buy it…I loved the exerpt about burying her grief. We can all relate to that.

April 14, 2019 at 4:30 pm

Dear Ruth, I do hope that you will continue to write memoir. I found that essays were a perfect length. Mine ranged from about 800 to 1200 words in the book. Some had several parts but each one could be read alone which helped me continue. I am happy whenever someone considers the book, the proceeds are going to assist a local thrift store, called ReStyle, from Unity House in Troy. When we have some book signings we are also inviting readers to donate a gently used dress. So my unlikely thread of dresses is really being put to good use. Linda

April 14, 2019 at 4:34 pm

Isn’t it amazing how an idea can take off in so many directions! A wonderful way to help others.

April 14, 2019 at 4:40 pm

If you are in the Albany-Troy area look for several benefit book signings on the Facebook page: Reflections: A Wardrobe of Life Lessons

Cynthia C says

April 14, 2019 at 9:04 am

Incredibly helpful hearing about the writing process! I love reading how these authors make decisions about how the final product will look.

April 14, 2019 at 4:36 pm

Cynthia, I always loved reading the writing lessons from Marion’s posts. I was fascinated with the whole process of structure. Linda

Cassandra Hamilton says

April 14, 2019 at 9:41 am

Great post. I appreciate Linda Styles Berkery sharing her process. By breaking her subject into essays she was able to work ideas in smaller sections. I like how when she focused on the larger piece, the book, she turned to a visceral and visual method: hanging up her essays, each represented by a dress, to sort and rearrange until she felt they were right. I would think the photos of the dresses also evoked in her thoughts and feelings and helped her to pack her writing with vivid descriptions. I’m inspired with her process and how she cleverly teased us with snippets of her new work. Thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 4:44 pm

Dear Cassandra, Thanks for your comments. You are right about the visual part. It really helped me to organize the flow of the essays and the overall arc of the book. (And at one point when I realized that I didn’t have a green dress – it brought up a life lesson from an old memoir of a green gym dress!) Linda

Cheryl Hilderbrand says

April 14, 2019 at 10:08 am

Since the excerpts offered here resonated so strongly, I can’t wait to read the rest of the book. Is it just women our age who grew up with dresses who are so emotionally connected to fabric, and tucks, and gathers? A quilt made from childhood dresses keeps me warm, but I worry that I should put it away so that it’s scrapbook, memory-spurring nature can be preserved. The advice from Ms. Berkery’s editor was something I needed to hear . Thank you Marion, Linda, and Robyn.

April 14, 2019 at 4:49 pm

Dear Cheryl, I do think that dresses meant a lot more to us than they do to the next generation. My own adult daughters rarely wear dresses, but they still have emotional and memories attached to clothing. My husband saved his race t-shirts and had them made into a quilt! He no longer runs, only walks due to an injury, but that quilt hangs over his couch reminding him of all those races. Robyn Ringler’s insights (my editor for the book) were so valuable in getting this collection to print. I am glad to pass her advice along. Linda

Jen Chambers says

April 14, 2019 at 10:17 am

I find this very helpful- it solidifies a concept that I’ve been working on for some time of using essays as memoir in my own work. Using a literal thread to hold the narrative together made a great metaphor here. I am intrigued by the structural ideas and hope to get the book!

April 14, 2019 at 5:18 pm

Dear Jen, Thank you for your comments. I hope you continue to use essays as memoir. It really helped me to keep going.. I could focus on one essay at a time. Indeed I kept them in separate folders on my computer until I recognized how to make “dress stories” into a literary closet collection. Best regards,’ Linda

Debbie Morris says

April 14, 2019 at 10:28 am

I’ve had an idea brewing for years now, and this style has opened up a completely new way to join them yet keep them separate. I thoroughly enjoy the teachings here as well as that wonderfully inspiring sampling of essays. I feel energized, thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 6:03 pm

Dear Debbie, Thanks for the comments. I hope this idea keeps brewing and maybe finds a similar outlet. Linda

Barbara Womack says

April 14, 2019 at 10:38 am

I love this concept and have been inspired to use a similar approach in my own (somewhat stalled) writing.

I can’t wait to read this book!

April 14, 2019 at 6:06 pm

Dear Barbara, I am glad to hear about your writing. I wish you well on the journey and am happy that you found this approach to be helpful. Linda

Ann Hutton says

April 14, 2019 at 10:44 am

Excellent! I’m sharing this with a memoir writing group I facilitate. Meanwhile, I call out a “Yes!” to visually laying out your pages to really SEE what you’ve got and how it might fit together. Once I taped 260 pages to three walls in an empty office in order to look at the structure of a memoir manuscript. That’s when I realized that I did indeed have a beginning, middle, and ending! And looking for repetitions or other glaring mistakes was easier this way, rather than trying to read through pages on a computer screen.

Many thanks!

LInda Berkery says

April 14, 2019 at 6:11 pm

Dear Ann, Wow that must have been some wall sight! Yes, I think we sometimes need a visual way to keep us moving forward. Glad that worked for you and thank you for the comments. Best to your writing group. If you send me a personal message on Facebook page for the book. I will send you my “chart” with all the essays. My editor used that page for a talk she was giving on memoir writing. Linda

Merrie Skaggs says

April 14, 2019 at 10:49 am

Linda’s wardrobe structure is brilliant. I learned that I might be able to include an essay I wrote about my dad in my memoir. Also, Linda’s words spoke to me on several levels, or with various threads as she might say. I am still in the unraveling stage of my memoir writing and relish the connections since I am a Marion disciple, have seen my 70th birthday, and taught third grade. I learned much from your charming writing and the lessons you shared. Thank you, Linda, and thank you to our guru Marion. I’m not going to wait to win your book; I plan to buy it, read it, and learn from it now. “. . .bury a death dress. . .” My heart strings are still vibrating.

Linda Styles Berkery says

April 14, 2019 at 11:13 am

Dear Merrie, I am so happy to meet another over 70 writer of memoir. My father’s journey through his WWII experience rescued in the North Sea by Danish fishermen and as a POW is another thread through the collection. The proceeds from this book are also being used to help ReStyle, the thrift store run by Unity House in Troy, NY – my hometown. So buying the book supports a great cause. Thank you. Linda

Carol Gyzander says

April 14, 2019 at 11:00 am

I love the connecting device of the dresses! The first essay excerpt was interesting, but then I found myself curious about how it would be used in the next…and the next…

April 14, 2019 at 4:53 pm

Carol, I am so glad that you found yourself curious about the dresses used and the lessons they told. Sometimes I found myself pondering how a certain dress or saved piece of fabric could bring out so many memoires. What was going on? – You start writing and then you find more and more life experiences coloring the page. Linda

Jan Duffy says

April 14, 2019 at 11:15 am

Thank you Marion for another excellent post. The idea of basing a series of personal essays on a collection of dresses is so good. As I was reading the excerpts I felt as though I was Linda’s alter ego, experiencing every emotion that she did. Good work, I hope I can be as successful in my writing endeavors.

marion says

April 14, 2019 at 2:31 pm

Dear Jan, You are most welcome. Isn’t this a lovely, helpful post? Linda did an excellent job with this and with the book. I am delighted to see you here. Please come back soon. Best, Marion

Thank you Jan and Marion for your kind remarks. Several readers have commented that they felt they were standing right with me as they read. So we touched universal topics – close to our hearts. Linda

Karen Elizabeth Lee says

April 14, 2019 at 11:42 am

Thank you for writing this piece. I have been struggling with structure for my memoir for almost a year! writing short pieces as that is how it seems to be unfolding but then questioning myself – “Is this the right or acceptable format?” “Can I do it this way?” Your insight gives me the courage to follow this path – the essay path – to see where it will lead me! thank you.

April 14, 2019 at 4:57 pm

Dear Karen, I never started out to write a book or a collection. I just began with one essay of a brown plaid dress – a short piece for a writing assignment. I casually remarked, “I could probably write a lot more essays through the lens of a dress…” and I received such encouragement to continue. See where the short pieces lead you. Perhaps you have a collection rather than a traditional memoir book. Blessings for your good work. I am happy that this piece could encourage you. Linda

Cheryl A Kesling says

April 14, 2019 at 2:19 pm

Thank you, Linda, for sharing your story. I’m a 72-year-old struggling writer working on a memoir since 2014. It seems life keeps flying in front of me to the point of building a wall too high to see over. I’ve journaled, keeping track of unimaginable tragic moments and survival. I’ve written words on paper for a critique group but never seems to hit the mark, or at least to my satisfaction. Maybe I’m too hard on myself. Your memoir essay structure is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time but I know that each essay needs a reason or a lesson learned, and that is been my problem. Knowing what lessons I’ve learned is hard to put on paper when one holds back emotions. I’m sure reading your book would be helpful. Maybe making a chart as you did from Marion’s math and color coding for different periods ( as told in a Z- the essay) and using one metaphorical object to push the essays along is the answer for me as well. Thank you again.

April 14, 2019 at 5:06 pm

Dear Cheryl, Thank you for your heartfelt comments. Some essays (lessons) needed space and time before I could write about them. We all tend to be hard on ourselves. Keep writing. and Keep journaling. I found that going back to journals and circling some key memoires allowed me to move toward an essay. But journal writing is different than writing for print and I had to allow some pieces to stay in a journal and not try to force them to be an essay. But making the chart using X, Y, and Z was the most important formula I learned from Marion.

Etty Indriati says

April 14, 2019 at 3:11 pm

I love the excerpt of Linda’s book as it reflects the “what it is about” in Marion’s online course The Memoir Project that I took; and Linda cleverly wrote her book into chapters of personal essays. It makes me want to read the whole book! It is also inspires me to not giving up writing a memoir.

April 14, 2019 at 5:09 pm

Dear Etty, Marion’s outline is a wonderful way to start. I hope you can read the whole book and please don’t give up writing memoir in whatever form it takes. I think reflecting through writing is a blessing. Thank you for the comments. Linda

iliana says

April 14, 2019 at 7:23 pm

Linda, thanks so much for sharing aspects of your writing process! Cut and paste, and I really mean printing the pages, cutting where needed and rearranging, gluing them on another blank page, was my graduate advisor’s way of writing and editing articles, reports and proposals. That’s how I wrote my thesis too, hands on, feeling it. Looking at a dress as a metaphor, so clever! Looking forward to reading your book :)

April 14, 2019 at 7:36 pm

Seems like I did something like that old fashioned cut and paste on my TYPED thesis back in the day. Thanks for your kind remarks. Linda

KRISTA L RUSKIN says

April 14, 2019 at 7:28 pm

OMG. I’ve been struggling with not having lived “an important life” and yet wanting to write a memoir for my kids. My father died when I was 31. I often wished I had received more lessons from him and had them for my kids. In recording my own, 20 years later, on the upside of my life lessons, I’m hoping they see the possibilities for their lives even in The dark days. The idea of writing bits and and pieces of varying length and letting them tell me how to structure the book is liberating. Thank you!

April 15, 2019 at 9:00 pm

Dear Krista, I am happy that you can see your life as memoir worthy as it surely is. My father died when I was 26 and yet his influence is strongly felt in this collection. I wish you all the best for your writing. Linda

Lisa Sonora says

April 15, 2019 at 8:43 am

So many take aways here!

I haven’t read all of the comments, but skimmed, so hope to offer something not shared yet.

First, that you ignored your friends comment about writing about your life.

Then… using Marion’s algorithm for each of the essays (described in the second paragraph) —brilliant!

I too, am a student of Marion, and have been so STUCK on trying to figure out the algorithm for my memoir.

Your piece gave me the idea to look closer at the individual pieces within the book and trying to name what those are really about.

I just love the image of you hanging up your essays like dressed in the wardrobe, and laughed out loud at “don’t try this at home”. Because, yeah, I would try that at home — it make sense to give the writing some physical form that relates to the subject to help see it differently.

Congrats on the publication of your book, Lynda — I cannot wait to read it!

April 15, 2019 at 9:07 pm

Dear Lisa, Thank you for such great comments. Yes, hanging up those dress stories was crazy but a fun way to really see them in place. And it was wonderfully refreshing too. We often need to trust our own instincts sometimes more than the voices of dear but sometimes bossy friends! Best to you for your own writing. Linda

Cathy Baker says

April 15, 2019 at 8:47 am

I love everything about this post as I’m working on a book with mini-memoirs on our building my future writing studio, Tiny House on the Hill. After reading this post, I might consider having fewer chapters with a higher word count. I always learn so much from you, Marion, as well as those you coach. Thank you!

April 15, 2019 at 9:09 pm

I love the idea of mini-memoirs! Great! Thanks for your comments. I have also learned so much from Marion and her writing posts. Linda

Tammy Roth says

April 15, 2019 at 11:51 am

I’m always looking for clever ideas of arranging memoir topics and this is just brilliant. Thank you for sharing the process.

April 15, 2019 at 9:14 pm

Dear Tammy, Arranging those memoir essays was made easier using Robyn’s advice along with Marion’s wisdom. I was honored to share the process with so many interesting writers. Thank you for your comments. Linda

April 16, 2019 at 8:35 pm

Oh my! This came at the most perfect time. I am trying to write a memoir and it keeps running through my mind that I should try doing it in essays. I lost my son to suicide, so it’s about grief, hope, and faith. I loved what Robyn shared with you about connecting the last paragraph of one to the beginning of the next. The excerpts are wonderful. I can’t wait to read the book. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

April 16, 2019 at 9:01 pm

Dear Faith, I am glad that Robyn ‘s idea might help you find your way through a collection of essays. She suggested the last paragraph and the first one should flow for the reader but they can still stand alone as individual essays. I wish you blessings in your writing. Linda

Naomi Johnson says

April 16, 2019 at 10:51 pm

I LOVED the wonderful advice from her editor, while she was still working out the overarching structure: “pay attention to the emotions and lessons in the stories . . .. Then . . . read the last paragraph of one story and the first paragraph of the following story and see if that works.”

Lovely, indeed!

April 17, 2019 at 7:00 pm

Thank you for your comments. Robyn Ringler and Marion offer such valuable suggestions. And I am grateful. Linda

Melanie says

April 17, 2019 at 2:49 pm

I’m in the process of structuring my next book now. I was right there, with descriptions of white suitcases containing “…fabrics from my journey through life.” I could hear the crinkle of crinoline, and I was reminded of one of my absolute favorite couplets by Joni Mitchell: “Everything comes and goes, marked by lovers and styles of clothes…” As I enjoyed all the other places the piece had taken me, I asked myself, “Do I have milestones (like these dresses) that mark the milestones of my life?” And I realized, I DO! I am a songwriter, so of COURSE, every milestone has a song! Thanks, Marion & Linda for such beautiful and inspiring work.

April 17, 2019 at 5:23 pm

You are most welcome, Melanie. Please come back soon. Best, Marion

April 17, 2019 at 7:06 pm

Thank you for your comments and the great quote! Love it. And nice for me too as my maiden name was Styles. I am glad that you found yourself asking questions about your own milestones.

Teresa Reimer says

April 20, 2019 at 9:12 pm

What a wonderful idea to hang each story and it’s inspiration on a clothes hanger. Organization and expanding on the theme! Can’t get much better than that.

April 22, 2019 at 6:15 pm

Teresa Thanks for your comments. Yes it was definitely different but fun! Linda

Donna P says

April 29, 2019 at 11:36 am

Dear Linda,

Your ideas, along with Marion’s brilliant advice, strike a real chord with me. I, too, have been struggling with the concept of essays within a memoir. Due to health issues, I have not given my book as much attention lately. I’m going to paste this article to my forehead to keep it top of mind! Truly inspirational at a time when I really needed it. Thanks to you and to Marion. I will definitely buy the book.

April 29, 2019 at 12:34 pm

Dear Donna, Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Marion’s advice really helped me stay focused on each individual essay. And I am so happy to know that sharing my experience making a collection of essays could help you move your own writing along. Best to you for your writing. Linda

Gail Gaspar says

Essays in the form of a wardrobe of dresses, yes. I am wondering if my memoir will take the form of essays unified by a theme (I adore metaphors) and you have illustrated how it can done. As a coach, I am happy you listened to your inner voice and not to the friend who remarked, “Your life just isn’t that interesting.” I appreciate how you show, don’t tell, about what each dress represents. The image of your dress stories hanging in your closet is an excellent reminder of how creative and expansive the writing process can be – when we allow it.

Laurie says

May 1, 2019 at 3:10 pm

Marion – This is my first visit to your blog and site. So much info! Thank you! I too am working on a memoir that right now is a collection of stories. This truly resonated with me as I am stuck as to how to pull them together into a book. Linda – your insights and suggestions couldn’t have been more on target. I have already printed them out and moved them about – but I think I need to write a few more – and then piece them together – reading the last para / first para – and adding bits as you suggested. I LOVED reading the excerpt of the book – what a wonderful way to tie the stories together by the dresses. As a writer – I loved that creative idea to tie it all together – and as a reader – each except you shared – I could apply to my own life and my own past closet of dresses! Well done! I would be tickled to win the book and read more!

May 1, 2019 at 5:47 pm

Dear Laurie, Thank you for your thoughtful remarks. Finding Marion’s blog and site is certainly a real gift. I was fortunate to take a class when she was teaching in Troy before everything went online. But look how many more people can be reached. I am delighted that you could relate to the dress stories and find memories arriving from your own closet. I loved making the book a collection/ wardrobe of stories. All the best to you with your own memoir. Linda

May 2, 2019 at 11:52 am

What a lovely way to seamlessly piece together a book! I’m in awe of your process and inspired by the concept! I’ve always struggled to let go of certain garments because of the memories associated with them. Now I understand why: Not only does each one offer a memory, but you’ve proven each one tells a story. I can’t wait to visit your story-closet and read more!

May 2, 2019 at 8:59 pm

Dear Susan, Thank you for your kind remarks. I hope you do visit my “story-closet” as well as peek at some life lessons from your own wardrobe. Linda

Maggie Yoest says

May 3, 2019 at 10:57 am

I am new to memoir writing and have been encouraged by Susan and Marion. Hopefully, as I stay with this, some of the fear will dissipate and the courage to share myself and my view will grow. Thank you both!

May 3, 2019 at 4:00 pm

Maggie, I hope you continue with memoir. Marion is a wonderful guide. Linda

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So You Think You Can Write a Memoir?

Lilly Dancyger ’12JRN on the art of writing about yourself — and making other people care about your story. 

Lilly Dancyger ’12JRN edits personal essays and memoirs for two online publications and a literary press, and she teaches classes on memoir writing. She is the editor of  Burn It Down , a new anthology of essays on women’s anger, and is working on her own memoir, Negative Space.

Tell us a little about your writing classes.

I teach classes for writers from different backgrounds and at all levels. One of my favorites is a class for writers with a book project already underway. We dig into how to shape personal experience into narrative, and the ways in which a story can start to take on its own life. 

So what makes a great memoir?

It’s all about that alchemy of transforming the raw material of experience into something special. It’s important to have a good story to tell, but there has to be more to it than merely recounting the events of your life. A big part of my job is telling people that the worst or most powerful thing that ever happened to them sounds boring. I don’t say it to be mean! But I often find myself explaining that just having an experience — no matter how shocking or unusual — is not enough. A great memoir articulates something about being human and it will resonate with readers regardless of whether their lives look anything like the writer’s.  

You don’t have to be famous to write a memoir, right? 

No! Memoir used to be almost exclusively written by famous, influential people as a way to cement their legacies. That’s not true anymore, though celebrity memoirs still hold strong on the bestseller lists — Michelle Obama’s Becoming has sold more than ten million copies so far. But if you’re not a celebrity, you have to rely on artistry to drum up the interest that’s inherent in stories of famous people’s exploits. The non-celebrity literary memoir is as much about exceptional storytelling and craft as it is about having an interesting life. 

Can you name recent memoirs that exemplify the best of the genre? 

There are so many to choose from. Tara Westover’s  Educated , about being raised by survivalists and not setting foot in a classroom until the age of seventeen; Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries , about growing up on a reservation; Stephanie Land’s Maid , about her time working as a house cleaner and struggling to provide for her daughter; and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy , about a Black boy growing up in the South and grappling with weight, trauma, and societal failings, are a few that come to mind. 

Why do these stories resonate with readers?

Because the writers use their personal experiences to elucidate something universal. Westover describes a childhood most readers can’t relate to directly. She’s kept out of school for her entire childhood, burying guns and canned peaches to prepare for the apocalypse. But while the circumstances she describes — in vivid, gripping detail — may be foreign, the feelings at the core of the story are universal: her desire to believe the best of her parents; her ambition to escape her circumstances; her loyalty to family that she often puts ahead of her own well-being. In Maid , Land’s struggle to make the smallest amount of progress toward a more stable life is more common than many realize. It resonated with readers who saw their experience, or their mothers’ experience, reflected in literature for the first time. 

Trauma seems to be a recurring feature in literary memoirs. 

Yes — the hardest stories are often the most gripping, because the stakes are higher. We want to know how memoir writers — including all of the ones I listed above — made it out OK. Writing about traumatic experiences can also be deeply healing for a writer, but there’s more to it than that. As an editor I see a lot of personal essays that seem entirely motivated by the writer’s need to document and share their pain. The writer revels in the catharsis of writing but hasn’t taken the necessary next steps of processing that experience and turning it into something universal. When writers come to me with their raw personal experiences, I understand the weight of the trust they’re putting in me, and I push them hard to shape those experiences into essays that transcend the events they’re based on. I remind them that “what happened” is a lump of clay for them to sculpt, and it’s up to them to shape it into something beautiful. As an editor and a writer, I’m always pushing for the bigger story buried under the surface of personal experience.

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18 Essay-Length Short Memoirs to Read Online on Your Lunch Break

Emily Polson

Emily Polson is a freelance writer and publishing assistant at Simon & Schuster. Originally from central Iowa, she studied English and creative writing at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, before moving to a small Basque village to teach English to trilingual teenagers. Now living in Brooklyn, she can often be found meandering through Prospect Park listening to a good audiobook. Twitter: @emilycpolson | https://emilycpolson.wordpress.com/

View All posts by Emily Polson

I love memoirs and essays, so the genre of essay-length short memoirs is one of my favorites. I love delving into the details of other people’s lives. The length allows me to read broadly on a whim with minimal commitment. In roughly 5–30 minutes, I can consume a complete morsel of literature, which always leaves me happier than the same amount of time spent doom-scrolling through my various social news feeds.

What are short memoirs? 

What exactly are short memoirs? I define them as essay-length works that weave together life experiences around a central theme. You see examples of short memoirs all the time on sites like Buzzfeed and The New York Times . Others are stand-alone pieces published in essay collections.

Memoir essays were my gateway into reading full-length memoirs. It was not until I took a college class on creative nonfiction that I realized memoirs were not just autobiographies of people with exciting lives. Anyone with any amount of life experience can write a memoir—no dramatic childhood or odd-defying life accomplishments required. A short memoir might be an account of a single, life-changing event, or it may be reflection on a period of growth or transition.

Of course, when a young adult tells people she likes writing creative nonfiction—not journalism or technical writing—she hears a lot of, “You’re too young to write a memoir!” and “What could someone your age possibly have to write about?!” As Flannery O’Connor put it, however, “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot. The writer’s business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.”

Memoir essay examples

As the lit magazine Creative Nonfiction puts it, personal essays are just “True stories, well told.” And everyone has life stories worth telling.

Here are a few of my favorite memoir examples that are essay length.

SHORT MEMOIRS ABOUT GROWING UP

Scaachi koul, “there’s no recipe for growing up”.

In this delightful essay, Koul talks about trying to learn the secrets of her mother’s Kashmiri cooking after growing up a first-generation American. The story is full of vivid descriptions and anecdotal details that capture something so specific it transcends to the realm of universal. It’s smart, it’s funny, and it’ll break your heart a little as Koul describes “trying to find my mom at the bottom of a 20-quart pot.”

ASHLEY C. FORD, “THE YEAR I GREW WILDLY WHILE MEN LOOKED ON”

This memoir essay is for all the girls who went through puberty early in a world that sexualizes children’s bodies. Ford weaves together her experiences of feeling at odds with her body, of being seen as a “distraction” to adult men, of being Black and fatherless and hungry for love. She writes, “It was evident that who I was inside, who I wanted to be, didn’t match the intentions of my body. Outside, there was no little girl to be loved innocently. My body was a barrier.”

Kaveh Akbar, “How I Found Poetry in Childhood Prayer”

Akbar writes intense, searing poetry, but this personal essay contextualizes one of his sweetest poems, “Learning to Pray,” which is cradled in the middle of it. He describes how he fell in love with the movement, the language, and the ceremony of his Muslim family’s nightly prayers. Even though he didn’t (and doesn’t) speak Arabic, Akbar points to the musicality of these phonetically-learned hymns as “the bedrock upon which I’ve built my understanding of poetry as a craft and as a meditative practice.” Reading this essay made me want to reread his debut poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf , all over again.

JIA TOLENTINO, “LOSING RELIGION AND FINDING ECSTASY IN HOUSTON”

New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino grew up attending a Houston megachurch she referred to as “the Repentagon.” In this personal essay, she describes vivid childhood memories of her time there, discussing how some of the very things she learned from the church contributed to her growing ambivalence toward it and its often hypocritical congregants. “Christianity formed my deepest instincts,” she writes, “and I have been walking away from it for half my life.” As the essay title suggests, this walking away coincided with her early experiences taking MDMA, which offered an uncanny similarity to her experience of religious devotion.

funny short memoirs

Patricia lockwood, “insane after coronavirus”.

Author Patricia Lockwood caught COVID-19 in early March 2020. In addition to her physical symptoms, she chronicled the bizarre delusions she experienced while society also collectively operated under the delusion that this whole thing would blow over quickly. Lockwood has a preternatural ability to inject humor into any situation, even the dire ones, by highlighting choice absurdities. This is a rare piece of pandemic writing that will make you laugh instead of cry–unless it makes you cry from laughing.

Harrison Scott Key,  “My Dad Tried to Kill Me with an Alligator”

This personal essay is a tongue-in-cheek story about the author’s run-in with an alligator on the Pearl River in Mississippi. Looking back on the event as an adult, Key considers his father’s tendencies in light of his own, now that he himself is a dad. He explores this relationship further in his book-length memoir, The World’s Largest Man , but this humorous essay stands on its own. (I also had the pleasure of hearing him read this aloud during my school’s homecoming weekend, as Key is an alumnus of my alma mater.)

David Sedaris, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”

Sedaris’s humor is in a league of its own, and he’s at his best in the title essay from Me Talk Pretty One Day . In it, he manages to capture the linguistic hilarities that ensue when you combine a sarcastic, middle-aged French student with a snarky French teacher.

SAMANTHA IRBY, “THE WORST FRIEND DATE I EVER HAD”

Samantha Irby is one of my favorite humorists writing today, and this short memoir essay about the difficulty of making friends as an adult is a great introduction to her. Be prepared for secondhand cringe when you reach the infamous moment she asks a waiter, “Are you familiar with my work?” After reading this essay, you’ll want to be, so check out Wow, No Thank You . next.

Bill Bryson, “Coming Home”

Bryson has the sly, subtle humor that only comes from Americans who have spent considerable time living among dry-humored Brits. In “Coming Home,” he talks about the strange sensation of returning to America after spending his first twenty years of adulthood in England. This personal essay is the first in a book-length work called I’m a Stranger Here Myself , in which Bryson revisits American things that feel like novelties to outsiders and the odd former expat like himself.

Thought-provoking Short memoirs

Tommy orange, “how native american is native american enough”.

Many people claim some percentage of Indigenous ancestry, but how much is enough to “count”? Novelist Tommy Orange–author of There There –deconstructs this concept, discussing his relationship to his Native father, his Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, and his son, who will not be considered “Native enough” to join him as an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. “ How come math isn’t taught with stakes?” he asks in this short memoir full of lingering questions that will challenge the way you think about heritage. 

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, “I Had a Stroke at 33”

Lee’s story is interesting not just because she had a stroke at such a young age, but because of how she recounts an experience that was characterized by forgetting. She says that after her stroke, “For a month, every moment of the day was like the moment upon wakening before you figure out where you are, what time it is.” With this personal essay, she draws readers into that fragmented headspace, then weaves something coherent and beautiful from it.

Kyoko Mori, “A Difficult Balance: Am I a Writer or a Teacher?”

In this refreshing essay, Mori discusses balancing “the double calling” of being a writer and a teacher. She admits that teaching felt antithetical to her sense of self when she started out in a classroom of apathetic college freshmen. When she found her way into teaching an MFA program, however, she discovered that fostering a sanctuary for others’ words and ideas felt closer to a “calling.” While in some ways this makes the balance of shifting personas easier, she says it creates a different kind of dread: “Teaching, if it becomes more than a job, might swallow me whole and leave nothing for my life as a writer.” This memoir essay is honest, well-structured, and layered with plenty of anecdotal details to draw in the reader.

Alex Tizon, “My Family’s Slave”

In this heartbreaking essay, Tizon pays tribute to the memory of Lola, the domestic slave who raised him and his siblings. His family brought her with them when they emigrated to America from the Philippines. He talks about the circumstances that led to Lola’s enslavement, the injustice she endured throughout her life, and his own horror at realizing the truth about her role in his family as he grew up. While the story is sad enough to make you cry, there are small moments of hope and redemption. Alex discusses what he tried to do for Lola as an adult and how, upon her death, he traveled to her family’s village to return her ashes.

Classic short memoirs

James baldwin, “notes of a native son”.

This memoir essay comes from Baldwin’s collection of the same name. In it, he focuses on his relationship with his father, who died when Baldwin was 19. He also wrestles with growing up black in a time of segregation, touching on the historical treatment of black soldiers and the Harlem Riot of 1943. His vivid descriptions and honest narration draw you into his transition between frustration, hatred, confusion, despair, and resilience.

JOAN DIDION,  “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT”

Didion is one of the foremost literary memoirists of the twentieth century, combining journalistic precision with self-aware introspection. In “Goodbye to All That,” Didion recounts moving to New York as a naïve 20-year-old and leaving as a disillusioned 28-year-old. She captures the mystical awe with which outsiders view the Big Apple, reflecting on her youthful perspective that life was still limitless, “that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”  This essay concludes her masterful collection,   Slouching Towards Bethlehem .

Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried”

This is the title essay from O’Brien’s collection, The Things They Carried . It’s technically labeled a work of fiction, but because the themes and anecdotes are pulled from O’Brien’s own experience in the Vietnam War, it blurs the lines between fact and fiction enough to be included here. (I’m admittedly predisposed to this classification because a college writing professor of mine included it on our creative nonfiction syllabus.) The essay paints an intimate portrait of a group of soldiers by listing the things they each carry with them, both physical and metaphorical. It contains one of my favorite lines in all of literature: “They all carried ghosts.”

Multi-Media Short Memoirs

Allie brosh, “richard”.

In this blog post/webcomic, Allie Brosh tells the hilarious story about the time as a child that she, 1) realized neighbors exist, and 2) repeatedly snuck into her neighbor’s house, took his things, and ultimately kidnapped his cat. Her signature comic style drives home the humor in a way that will split your sides. The essay is an excerpt from Brosh’s second book, Solutions and Other Problems , but the web version includes bonus photos and backstory. For even more Allie classics, check out “Adventures in Depression” and “Depression Part Two.”

George Watsky, “Ask Me What I’m Doing Tonight”

Watsky is a rapper and spoken word poet who built his following on YouTube. Before he made it big, however, he spent five years performing for groups of college students across the Midwest. “Ask Me What I’m Doing Tonight!” traces that soul-crushing monotony while telling a compelling story about trying to connect with people despite such transience. It’s the most interesting essay about boredom you’ll ever read, or in this case watch—he filmed a short film version of the essay for his YouTube channel. Like his music, Watsky’s personal essays are vulnerable, honest, and crude, and the whole collection, How to Ruin Everything , is worth reading.

If you’re looking for even more short memoirs, keep an eye on these pages from Literary Hub , Buzzfeed , and Creative Nonfiction . You can also delve into these 25 nonfiction essays you can read online and these 100 must-read essay collections . Also be sure to check out the “Our Reading Lives” tag right here on Book Riot, where you’ll find short memoirs like “Searching for Little Free Libraries as a Way to Say Goodbye” and “How I Overcame My Fear of Reading Contemporary Poets.”

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On Murder Memoirs

I spent years preparing to write about my cousin’s murder. the story i ended up with was not what i had imagined..

This piece is from the book  First Love: Essays on Friendship  by Lilly Dancyger. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted with permission of The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

When I was deciding whether to attend the trial of the man who raped and murdered my cousin Sabina, I felt like I should go so that the jury would see me there. I knew how easy it would be for her to become an abstraction to them:  the victim, the deceased, the body . To us—to me and my aunt and my mother and the rest of our family and her friends—she was still Sabina, still a real girl who we would never see or hug or dance with again. If we were all there, sitting on the bench behind the prosecutor, I thought, maybe the jury would be able to see that there was a real person missing. And maybe they would want to punish the man who had taken her from us.

I also thought I should go to the trial because I might want to write about it someday. I had already learned, at 23, that the page is the safest place for me to try to make sense of things that feel senseless. Telling myself I would write about what happened to Sabina someday meant I didn’t have to fully face the horror of it just yet. I could put it on a shelf, where it would wait until I was ready to arrange it into something from which I could extract some kind of meaning. And whenever that day came, I figured, the trial would be an important part of the story I would tell.

But despite these two compelling reasons that I felt I should get on a bus to Philadelphia and sit in that bright, formal room to hear the worst of human cruelty discussed in a discordantly procedural and orderly way, my body refused. Two years after her murder, my whole self was still clamped shut, bracing against the truth of what had happened to Sabina—to my first and favorite childhood playmate. The idea of sitting through detailed explanations of her final moments—seeing photos of her body in the dirt, hearing detectives and medical examiners describe the brutality enacted on her—was too much. I couldn’t even look at the mug shot of her killer or read a single news article about what he had done, let alone be in the same room as him; hear his voice, see his body move through a room or shift in a seat, so very alive, while she was not. And so I didn’t go. If I wanted to write about Sabina’s murder someday, I would have to do without the firsthand courtroom scenes.

In the meantime, I kept working on the book I had started the year before Sabina was killed, a book about my father. I approached that story like a journalist—the job I was in graduate school to prepare for while the trial was happening—interviewing people who knew my father, trying to push beyond the limits of my own memories to put together something that felt more like a capital-T True story. Thinking like a reporter while writing about my father’s heroin addiction, his art, his complicated and ill-fated relationship with my mother, and his death when I was 12 years old had provided something of a buffer between me and the ugliest parts of the story I was digging out of the earth like bones. I imagined that when I was ready to write about Sabina—someday—I might approach the story of what happened to her in a similar way: I would read transcripts of the trial I hadn’t been able to bring myself to attend; I would interview the friends Sabina had been with in the hours before she was killed, drinking champagne on a Philadelphia rooftop. I would re-create that final evening until it felt almost like I had been there, standing next to her while she laughed for the very last time. Someday, when I was ready, I would finally look directly at the truth of the way that night ended. And somehow, though I wasn’t quite sure how yet, this would help me grieve.

First Love: Essays on Friendship

By Lilly Dancyger

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When David Kushner’s memoir  Alligator Candy  came out in 2016—six years after Sabina’s murder, four years after the trial I didn’t attend—it sounded like a potential model for the story I still wasn’t ready to write. In  Alligator Candy,  Kushner, a reporter, revisits the disappearance and murder of his brother Jon when the two were kids in 1970s Florida, attempting to make sense of his life’s defining tragedy using the tools of his trade. I thought it might help me start thinking about how to approach Sabina’s story, while I waited for the emotional fortitude to shore itself up in me.

I got 94 pages in—to a scene where Kushner goes to the library to read the news reports about his brother’s death for the first time—when I started to feel seasick, like the room was heaving up and down around me. This scene described something I still had not been able to do: allow the vague looming darkness to settle into the familiar shape of a news story. I squeezed my eyes shut and closed the book, noting matter-of-factly that I wasn’t ready to even read murder stories yet, let alone write one.

I continued to buy what I thought of as “murder memoirs” when they came out, which they did with increasing frequency over the next few years—a trend later identified as “true-crime memoir,” which felt at the time like a pointed reminder of what I couldn’t yet face. I bought Carolyn Murnick’s  The Hot One,  Sarah Perry’s  After the Eclipse,  Rose Andersen’s  The Heart and Other Monsters,  and  Natasha Trethewey’s  Memorial Drive   when they came out between 2017 and 2020, and placed them on my bookshelf next to  Alligator Candy,  unopened. I added older titles to my growing collection, too: Maggie Nelson’s  The Red Parts,  Melanie Thernstrom’s  The Dead Girl,  and Justin St. Germain’s  Son of a Gun . I didn’t read those either.

I couldn’t handle them yet, but I knew that eventually I would need to see how other writers had managed to write a “crime story” about something so personal and painful when, as far as I could tell from my previous associations with the genre—mostly the shows like  Forensic Files  and  Cold Case  that my mother devoured when I was a child—a good crime story required a certain degree of callousness, an ability to view cruelty with curiosity, even eagerness.

Portraying a real person on the page is always a subtle violence—reducing their multidimensional humanity, the unknowability of their inherent contradictions and mutable nature, into something flat and digestible. Even the best-rendered character on the page is only a fraction as complex as a real person. Doing this to a person who has been murdered— whose very literal humanity has already been stolen from them—feels like a larger injustice than doing it to someone who’s still living and can flout your depiction with their continued humanness. Murder already threatens to eclipse a person—it is so shocking that those of us who mourn someone who was murdered have to work to make sure the terror of their death doesn’t take up more space in our memories than the living person they once were. Writing about a murder inevitably solidifies the murder as the defining detail of a victim’s life.

So, I wondered, could I write about Sabina without reducing her to another dead girl in a story about male violence? Could I draw readers’ eyes away from the brutality and toward Sabina singing and dancing down the street on a fall day with yellow and orange leaves wet and slick under her feet? Toward the scoliosis that made it look like she was always cocking her hip, about to say something sassy—and the fact that she usually was?

Sabina came to visit me in New York when she was 20 and I was 21, and I brought her to one of my favorite dive bars. She scanned the chalkboard of bottle beers, the rows of liquor, and the taps, before asking, “Do you have any champagne?”

The bartender let out a little laugh of surprise, and said they might have some somewhere. I smiled at her and shook my head—who orders champagne at a dive bar? It felt so perfectly her—undeniably and unapologetically sparklier than everyone else. Making a special occasion out of a regular afternoon.

She gave me a shy smile, explaining, “It’s the only thing I really like to drink.”

“Of course it is!” I responded, laughing and throwing my arm around her. “Only the best for Bina.”

By then the bartender had fished an unopened, frosty bottle from way in the back of the fridge, laughing, “I think this is from New Year’s.”

“Fuck it,” I said, “I’ll take one too.”

He poured us two wineglasses of champagne, setting mine next to my whiskey soda, and we clinked our glasses and said a cheers to each other and to the day.

Could I make moments like that as vivid in a story about her as the violence they all lead back to?

When Truman Capote first pitched a story about the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family—Herb and Bonnie, and their teenage children Nancy and Kenyon—to his editor at the New Yorker ,  he described a story about the impact the crime had on the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. It was going to be about the victims, he said. Despite this stated aim, the resulting book,  In Cold Blood ,  devotes more than twice as many pages to the depiction of the murderer, Perry Smith (and, to a lesser extent, his partner, Dick Hickock), as it does to anyone else. The Clutters are relatively thin characters, each reduced to an archetype: the hardworking father, the nervous mother, the popular daughter, the rambunctious son. The all-American family, a stock cast that could easily be swapped out for another. Meanwhile, Perry is given emotional depth, complexity, development.

Capote was not the first person to write about crime—not even the first person to write about it in an immersive, narrative style. But, as true-crime expert Justin St. Germain puts it in his book  Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood,  “Capote spiked a vein, and out came a stream of imitators, a whole bloody genre, one of the most popular forms of American nonfiction: true crime.” And the genre he spawned has replicated his project’s central contradiction over and over again: No matter how sincere the intention to center the victim, the killer is a black hole, pulling focus to himself. Murderers are enthralling in their aberration, and made even more alluring and terrifying by the glimpses of recognizable humanity that confirm they could be almost anyone. If we as a society are captivated by murder stories (which we undeniably are), it’s no surprise that our fascination tends to focus on the most active and defining participant—the one who actually does the deed.

Many  true-crime books (and shows, and podcasts)  are also devoted to the second most active character in a story of murder: the investigator. True crime as we know it today is the land of sleuths, both professional and amateur—from the older shows my mom used to watch on A&E to their modern heirs like  Making a Murder   and  The Jinx ,  from books like  I’ll Be Gone in the Dark   and  We Keep the Dead Close  to podcasts like  Serial   and  In the Dark . Fans of the genre, having internalized the methods and perspectives of professional investigators, have begun taking on the role themselves, sometimes solving crimes that have stumped law enforcement (or that law enforcement couldn’t be bothered to investigate with the vigor that police-valorizing true crime has advertised).

In sleuth-focused true crime, the detective or prosecutor becomes a stand-in for the reader or viewer as we try to understand how such a thing could have happened. They, more than the murderer, are our best chance at ever getting an answer to the maddening question of “why,” because they’re asking it, too. Their doggedness and cleverness and ultimate defeat of the killer are also the security blanket of true crime—assuring us that we are safe, that the monster will always meet his match in the end.

If  In Cold Blood  spawned the true-crime genre as a whole, then  Helter Skelter,  the 1974 account of the Manson murders written by the prosecutor who handled the case, Vincent Bugliosi (with Curt Gentry), set it on the investigation-focused path it’s largely stayed on since.  Helter Skelter  opens on the morning of Aug. 9, 1969, when the bodies of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent are discovered in the house on Cielo Drive that Tate shared with her husband, Roman Polanski—the audience enters the story at the moment it becomes an investigation. From there, the book follows a detailed timeline of police arriving at the scene; when each new clue was discovered, missed, misinterpreted, and finally put into context; and how the mystery was eventually solved and the killers brought to justice. Even the brief attempts to humanize the victims early in the narrative are couched in the perspective of the investigation, overshadowed by the crime. Brief passages about Tate, Folger, Frykowski, Sebring, and Parent—about them as living people with families and interests and plans for the future—are folded into the details of their autopsy reports, each one ending with the manner of death, presented in clinical terms. There’s a self-awareness to this technique, an acknowledgment that once we’ve encountered them first as bloody corpses, it’s impossible ever to see these people as fully alive; as anything other than murder victims.

The victim, by comparison to the fascinating murderer and dynamic investigator, tends to be the least interesting character in a murder story. She is passive; the main action of the story is something  done to her,  not something she does. And after her death, which is when the majority of the action in true-crime stories takes place, she is offstage—only the looming specter of a snuffed-out smile—while the active characters play out the rest of the story. She is less a character, more an implicit threat: She could be you, or your daughter, or your cousin.

It is important to note, too, that the victim is representative not of just any woman, but almost always specifically a pretty young white woman. A Nancy Clutter or a Sharon Tate. The idea of the young white woman as a symbol of innocence and goodness under constant threat from vague and ever-present danger has been part of America’s social fabric since frontier times and warnings of “Indian scalpers.” White women’s innocence has been an excuse for boundless brutality against Black men since slavery. It remains the easiest commodity to whip white audiences into a protective frenzy over. It is the bread and butter of true crime.

Sabina was mixed-race (white and Filipino), with brown skin, but she still got the Dead White Girl treatment from the Philadelphia media. Cynically, or realistically, I assume the public was so interested in her story at least in part because she had her white Irish American mother’s last name; because it was her mother (my aunt) shown crying on the evening news. But also because the specific circumstance of her murder—a random attack by a stranger on a city street after dark—is one of America’s favorite fears. Most female murder victims are killed by men they know. But a stranger killing is easier to imagine as imminent—lends itself better to dramatic music and goosebumps that might be the chill of the evening air or might be danger itself. In short: It’s more titillating.

St. Germain posits that the shift in  In Cold Blood ’s focus happened because while Capote never met the Clutters, having arrived in Holcomb after their deaths, he interviewed Smith at length over the course of several years. And over the course of those interviews, Capote became fascinated with Smith, came to identify with him, maybe even fell in love with him. In one form or another, I think, the same thing happens to almost everyone who sets out to write true crime. These stories are always written after the fact, when the victim is already gone, making it impossible for a writer to portray her as anything other than a memory, a stand-in for the reader or the reader’s daughter, a symbol of goodness. The killer or the investigator, however, is still there—still active in the story. Still a mystery to unravel, a source to interview. It’s no wonder then that the murder victim is rarely successfully centered in true-crime stories: Ultimately, no matter how fervently authors or producers proclaim otherwise, the story isn’t really about her at all. Not, at least, when told from the perspective of someone who never knew her as anything other than a murder victim.

As I considered the inevitability of this trap, I became convinced that the murder memoirs on my shelves held the promise of the only exception—these were murder stories told by people who knew the victims as people first. Maybe, I thought, only someone who knew the victim could ever write a true-crime story that didn’t get sucked into the black hole of the killer, or fall back on the easy framework of the investigation. Maybe, when I was ready, these books would show me how to pull off the impossible: a murder story that doesn’t further abuse the victim by reducing them to the violence of their death.

In a  2017 essay in Slate ,  culture columnist Laura Miller identified true-crime memoir as a trend and highlighted a pitfall that’s adjacent to, but slightly different from, the old problem with true crime in general: Rather than sidelining the murder victim in favor of a murderer or an investigator, Miller argues that true-crime memoirists center  themselves  too much. I bristled when I first read this accusation four years after it was published—still doing cautious background research for a story I wasn’t quite ready to write. It sounded to me like another version of the tired complaint that memoirists are self-absorbed navel gazers. At the same time, though, I felt a flash of a new apprehension: Would writing about my grief over her death make Sabina’s murder all about me?

I have seen the way people cling to tragedies that are not really theirs: remembering a friendship as much closer than it was with a person who has died, soaking up sympathy like a thirsty houseplant. The cousin relationship is not as clear-cut as sisters or even best friends, and ever since Sabina’s death I’ve struggled to articulate that we weren’t the kind of cousins who barely knew each other and happened to end up in the same place during holidays; that I loved her deep in the pit of my being, and so her death cut that deep too. That I felt as strongly for her when she was alive as I do now that she’s gone. So how to write about her death without the appearance of tragedy-seeking? How to write about my grief for her without claiming it as primary, without overshadowing the grief of her mother, my aunt? I talked to my Aunt Rachel about this concern and she waved it off, assuring me that my own grief is mine to express. But still.

Miller’s essay complicated the ethical hierarchy I’d created in my mind—now I was confronted with the possibility that a memoir about murder could be just as exploitative as any other true-crime story. And I realized that my hierarchies and suspicions and all of the plans and fears about what kind of story I might or might not write would remain theoretical as long as the murder memoirs I’d been collecting for years sat unread on my shelf. That I could ask these questions in the hypothetical forever, but would never figure out whether it was possible to tell a non-exploitative murder story until I took the leap and started reading and writing.

Eleven years after Sabina was killed, five years after my first attempt to read a murder memoir, I read Rose Andersen’s  The Heart and Other Monsters,  about the death of her younger sister Sarah, which appears at first to be an accidental overdose but turns out to be—maybe—murder. Miller’s qualms about true-crime memoir struck a nerve for me, undeniably. But I swung back toward defiance while reading  The Heart and Other Monsters . Yes, Andersen centers herself in the story, I thought; and why shouldn’t she? The book is about what it was like to live with, and lose, her vibrant, troubled baby sister. It feels right that she be the one to write a record of her sister—her life and her death. And Sarah Andersen is so much more multidimensional on the page than any murder victim in a traditional true-crime story. It is a story about  her,  not the man Rose suspects of killing her, not the cops that caught her case.

The book was hard to read. There were moments that called up unwanted mental images of Sabina’s bruised body, and of her smiling face; poignant and painful articulations of the way that every happy memory of a person who was murdered becomes tainted, the shadow of the way they died at the edge of every image. I cried a few times, but I didn’t get that seasick feeling and have to stop this time. So I picked up the next murder memoir on my shelf, and then the next, and then the next.

In  Memorial Drive,  Natasha Trethewey’s memoir about her mother, who was shot by her abusive ex-husband, Trethewey tells the reader right at the start that it took her almost 30 years to return to the house where her mother was killed. It took her that long to be able to face what happened. I felt a little bit of relief, then. Eleven years had felt like a long time to still barely be able to read stories about murder, let alone try to write the story of Sabina’s. It was 10 years after my father’s death that I started writing about him; that felt like the inevitable amount of time. Like a deadline. But maybe it would take longer this time, and maybe that was okay.

The question of who killed Sarah Perry’s mother looms large in her memoir,  After the Eclipse , and isn’t answered until nearly 250 pages in. As I read, identifying with Perry as she tried to make sense of this unfathomable and traumatic loss, I’m a little ashamed to admit, I also became invested in the mystery. I didn’t want to be a voyeur, to be like everyone else, collecting clues and making my own guesses as to who might’ve done it. But also, Sarah Perry is a skilled writer who wove a compelling narrative. I understood, logically, that she knew what she was doing by not revealing the killer’s identity until the point in the story when she learned it herself, 12 years after her mother’s death. She wanted the reader to feel the infuriating empty space, the endless possibilities of danger. She wanted the reader to want to know. But even as I moved through the story in exactly the way I believe the author wanted me to, I also felt complicit. Maybe she wanted that, too.

While reading Maggie Nelson’s  The Red Parts,  about her aunt’s murder and the trial, 36 years later, of the killer, I recognized glimmers of the type of scenes I might have written if I had forced myself to sit through the trial of Sabina’s killer. Nelson describes the “little methods” she develops to be able to look at the autopsy photos: “Each time an image appears I look at it quickly, opening and closing my eyes like a shutter. Then I look a little longer, in increments, until my eyes can stay open.” And the way her mother hunches over in her seat, “her chest hollowed out, her whole body becoming more and more of a husk.”

As I read these memoirs and half a dozen more, I was awed by the authors’ ability to charge ahead into such dark and terrible woods. As I suspected they would be, they were able to avoid the classic true-crime trap of sidelining the victims in favor of the more active characters because, unlike Capote and Bugliosi and every other writer or producer who has told a crime story centered on either the killer or the cops, they didn’t enter the story after the victim was offstage. They were able to bring their loved ones to life on the page through their own memories, and to keep the focus on them, because their investment in the story was genuinely tied to the person they’d lost, not the intrigue or shock value of the crime.

But they also included the details that audiences have come to expect from crime stories. They read police and autopsy reports, painstakingly recreating and describing their loved ones’ terrified last moments; putting into words all of the unspeakable imaginings anyone close to a murder victim lives with, about what they must have thought, and felt, at the end. They walked into police stations and held in their hands articles of clothing stained with the blood of people they loved. They transformed the killers who had marred their lives forever into characters, with backstories and traumas of their own. In my awe, it was very clear to me that I was still not ready to do any of these things.

I still didn’t feel physically capable of looking closely enough at the details of Sabina’s murder to tell this kind of story about it—at least to tell it effectively, with the kind of brazenness of these writers, who don’t let their readers slip into the comforting lull of the traditional true-crime sleuth story. They prevent their loved ones from becoming passive dead girls in entertaining stories about killers and cops by keeping the horror, the too-real reality, brimming on the surface. They force themselves to look, and in turn they don’t let their readers look away. I didn’t have the fortitude to tell a story like that. And, I finally realized, I didn’t want to.

I started to wonder whether there was a different kind of story I could tell instead.

If I’d written the kind of book I initially thought I would write someday, I would have set out at some point to learn about Sabina’s killer. I would go digging into his childhood, looking for what put such violence into him. I would wonder if a grain of hurt had settled deep in his heart, collecting layer upon layer of anger like a hideous pearl until it became too big to contain. I would pose the question of whether he hated women specifically, or was just a coward who liked his odds against a 20-year-old girl better than against another man when the rage in him demanded a target.

But I don’t want to know these things. I don’t care about his childhood or what was going through his mind that June night when he first spotted Sabina and started following her, or during what came next. I don’t ever need to know so much as what his voice sounds like. Don’t need to let him become human for me; a character more defined than a fairy-tale wolf, a personification of evil. Nothing that could have happened in his life would make what he did make any sense, and the idea of searching for a reason feels too close to inviting sympathy for him—in myself or in a reader.

It is possible to write a true-crime memoir without offering undue grace to the killer. In fact, most of the ones I read stand firm in their refusal to do so.  The Heart and Other Monsters  is divided into five parts, and the man who may have killed Andersen’s sister is not given a name until part IV, referred to until then only as “the Man.” He is part of Sarah Andersen’s story, not the other way around. And Perry writes about her decision not to interview her mother’s killer for  After the Eclipse:  “To be in conversation with someone, you must cooperate with them, however briefly, and I have no wish to cooperate with him.” (I felt such immense relief reading that line—I had been bracing for such an interview since she brought up the possibility earlier in the story, and wanting desperately for her to spare herself.) But even these authors’ demonstrations of how to keep the murderer out of the center of a murder story felt like more attention than I was willing to give. I don’t even want to know enough about Sabina’s killer to hate him with more precision than I already do. All I need to know about him is that he will be in prison until he dies.

It’s been 13 years now since Sabina’s death, and I still can’t bring myself to wade all the way into the horror of what happened to her. What’s changed, though, is that I’ve stopped waiting to be able to, stopped anticipating that someday I will have to. I feel instead a self-protective impulse, a stubborn unwillingness to shine a bright light on the most horrible parts of this story.

In all of these murder memoirs I read, there was a sense that the writer felt it was their duty to look directly at the ugly truth. Several state this outright; in others it’s present as an undercurrent, in the way the writers keep pushing forward despite nightmares, nausea, and visceral urges to flee. I felt this sense of duty when I was investigating my father’s life, reading his journals and letters, sitting through tearful conversations with my mother and stilted ones with people who had betrayed and been betrayed by my father during the course of his heroin addiction. I had to keep going because I had convinced myself that if I looked at every detail, including the most painful ones, they would arrange themselves into a constellation of him. Maybe that’s part of why I’m not driven to handle this story in the same way—I’ve already written an investigative memoir, wringing every detail I could out of letters, journals, and interviews, trying to conjure my father back to life. I’ve already reached the end of that road and found myself still alone, my father still dead. So I can’t convince myself it would work if I tried again.

“I have spent years conjuring her body,” Andersen writes of her sister, “have envisioned myself next to her as she died again and again.” I understand this impulse. I have three dried seedpods from a tree in the lot where Sabina died, and sometimes I look at them and hope that in the last moments of her life, she was looking up at this tree, not at the face of a monster. That as she was fading into unconsciousness, she could no longer feel the pain in her body, or the fear—that maybe she felt even just a second of peace. I have looked at these seedpods and tried to transport myself into this final moment through them, to crouch in the dirt beside her and smooth her hair out of her face, wipe the tears from her cheeks, and whisper in her ear,  It’s OK, you’re OK, I’m so sorry. I love you . But for whatever reason, the seedpods are enough for me to do this. I don’t need the autopsy report, the trial transcripts, the sound of a killer’s voice.

I spent years preparing myself to write a crime story, waiting for the desire to know more about Sabina’s murder to bubble up in me. I expected it, but it hasn’t arrived. When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all. It was a love story.

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A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing

If it is true, as Saint Augustine says, that the dead aren’t absent but merely invisible, then somewhere round about, as I write about her and you read about her, Hilary Mantel is present. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she is present not only if Augustine’s statement is true but if I believe it, or if you do. Mantel believed it: she quotes it twice in her 2017 BBC Reith Lectures on the art of historical fiction, which are included among the essays and reviews that make up A Memoir of My Former Self . Elsewhere she says, apropos Princess Diana, “For some people, being dead is only a relative condition.” And I want to believe it too. I imagine her raised eyebrow, her incredulous laugh, as she looks over my shoulder at the computer screen.

I met her only twice: the first time when she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of London and I was asked to give the oration in her honor. The pomposity of the proceedings was beyond parody, and as we bowed and scraped, wearing our silly hats and gowns (royalty was present, in the form of Princess Anne, chancellor of the university), Mantel managed simultaneously to project genuine warmth and gratitude, and enormous skepticism. Not long afterward I went with a friend to the opening run of the adaptation of Wolf Hall in the West End, and as we sidled into our seats, there she was, sitting with her husband, Gerald McEwen, directly behind us. We whooped and giggled like teenagers meeting by accident in an unfamiliar setting (What? You here?) as she raised an eyebrow at her own royal entertainment. Mantel died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of seventy in September 2022, a week before a planned move to Kinsale in Ireland—not far from my own patch. I would have liked to have got to know her better, but maybe, as Augustine suggests, I still can.

Born in 1952 in the small town of Glossop in the north of England, Mantel described herself as “an uneasy mix of Derbyshire and Irish.” Her great-grandparents were millworkers in County Waterford in Ireland before they became millworkers in the Peak District; she was raised a Catholic by her mother and two fathers. (They all lived in the same house when she was small: stepfather in the main bedroom, father in the spare room.) A convent education; a degree in law, though she never practiced. (It’s no accident that so many of her central characters start out as lawyers but find the profession wanting.)

She described her concerns as a writer as “with memory, personal and collective: with the restless dead asserting their claims.” She finished her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985), in a flat in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she and her husband were living in the early 1980s because of Gerald’s work as a geologist: “Each room had many doors, double doors made of dark wood, so it was like a coffin showroom. We took some of them off, but the impression of death persisted.” She wanted the restless dead, not the coffined variety.

“If we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art,” she insisted, and she kept on conjuring animated specters across twelve novels; numerous short stories; a devastating 2003 memoir of childhood perplexity and illness, Giving Up the Ghost (“What’s to be done with the lost, the dead,” she says of her childhood phantoms, “but write them into being?”); and a large archive of journalism, essays, public lectures, and parapolitical interventions—more than seventy of which are now brought together for the first time in this collection.

By the time of her death Mantel had become a household name in Britain, in a celebratory sense for her twice-Booker-Prize-winning series of novels about England under the Tudors (adapted for the stage and for a BBC miniseries), and in a tabloid-outrage sense for her admission in 2014 that she had fantasized about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher and then written a story about it (there were calls for a police inquiry) and for her astringent takedowns of the ailing British monarchy’s attempts to manufacture and maintain itself through the bodies of its women.

The essays collected here offer personal reflections and trenchant opinions on fiction, film, politics, and the art of writing, published over a span of thirty years. Some of the earliest include a series of mordant film reviews published in The Spectator in the late 1980s. She sits in the cinema, rolling her eyes. (By 1990 Mickey Rourke’s career “has a gruesome fascination, like the site of an especially gory road accident”; the final scene in Fatal Attraction finds Dan and Beth “safe in each other’s arms, and the golden lighting gone up a notch; we are left with a family snapshot, basted in marmalade.”) There are autobiographical sketches: a portrait of her stepfather, Jack Mantel; several accounts of the misery of living in the Gulf region in the early years of her marriage; and a series of moving, enraged essays written in the early 2000s, recounting her years of suffering from misdiagnosed endometriosis, and blasting the misogyny of the medical establishment. Twenty-five years’ worth of reviews for The New York Review are scaled down to ten pieces, including a brilliant analysis of the myth of Jane Austen as “everybody’s dear Jane”—dutiful, self-effacing, stay-at-home—and several essays that take so-called middlebrow women writers (Rebecca West, Sybille Bedford) seriously and pinpoint the precise ways in which they ask the reader to think differently.

The book’s editor, Nicholas Pearson, sensibly reprints all five of Mantel’s Reith Lectures—what we might think of as the crowning achievement of her public persona, if only the phrase weren’t so royalist. Named after Baron John Reith, the champion of postwar British public service broadcasting, the tradition began in 1948 with a series of lectures by Bertrand Russell on “Authority and the Individual.” That was the subject of Mantel’s Reith Lectures too (although she titled them “Resurrection: The Art and Craft”), and arguably of all her writing. What motivated her was the attempt to imagine or to understand (the two verbs are almost interchangeable in her lexicon) the relationship between people and the structures of power that support and constrain them. The remarkable thing is that she managed to persuade that most philistine of bodies, the British public, that the way to do this was through fiction—and not just any fiction, but historical fiction, that lowly genre, nearly as bad as sci-fi.

Not since Sir Walter Scott has historical fiction enjoyed such a reputation in English letters. At the height of Wolf Hall fever Mantel was giving interviews comparing Thomas Cromwell with Boris Johnson’s once-favored courtier Dominic Cummings (though Cromwell was undoubtedly “much better dressed”). But the transformation of the genre’s fortunes didn’t come easily. She wrote her first novel, about the French Revolution, in the 1970s and couldn’t get a publisher interested until the early 1990s (it was the fifth of her novels to come out) because “historical fiction wasn’t respectable or respected. It meant historical romance.” Mantel’s description of herself as subject to “marauding” ideas, “fettered” in the service of a violent past, is about as far from romance as it is possible to get. “You have to keep shocking your psyche,” she writes, “or nothing happens in your writing—nothing charged, nothing enduring. It’s imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page.”

To make those imaginary encounters feel real she spent years verifying the details of the lives of her lawyers-turned-revolutionaries—Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins—understanding the politics of the factions and the counterfactions, researching the fortunes of the relatives left behind in the country, assembling backstories for the wives, the lovers, and the countless enemies. Accuracy was important to her. She checked her facts and wove in actual speeches, verbatim newspaper reports. If a historical character missed the storming of the Bastille, as Danton did, his fictional counterpart couldn’t make up for the omission, however much a novelist might wish to place him in the middle of the action.

One of the most beguiling aspects of A Place of Greater Safety (1992) is the amount of time we spend indoors, with the wives and the cooks and the part-time revolutionaries who would have liked to get out more. Mantel’s chief concern, she explained, was with “the interior drama of my characters’ lives. From history, I know what they do, but I can’t with any certainty know what they think and feel.” But she was determined not to falsify the other kind of interior in her quest for feeling: “I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing-room wallpaper.”

This balance between fact and fiction was the driving force behind all her writing, and it sustained her because it offered not only a shape for her novelistic inquiry, a question for the novels to answer—How do people manage their hopes and desires and the forward momentum of their lives within the limits imposed on them?—but also a purpose, one bordering on moral justification. Her books were canvases or tapestries (she was fond of both analogies) on which she displayed characters rebelling against order, hierarchy, and sentiment: the revolutionaries against the ancien régime, badly behaved teenagers against the biddable, pragmatic Thomas Cromwell against dogmatic Thomas More, skepticism against faith.

There are moments in these essays when she comes close to promoting skepticism as a moral virtue, and she thinks reading novels helps cultivate it. In a 2008 essay, “Real Books in Imaginary Houses,” she draws up her battle lines in favor of the doubting, the irreverent, and even the fickle, against conservatism, against nostalgia. “Show me a man—it’s usually a man—who ‘doesn’t see the point of fiction,’ and I’ll show you a pompous, inflexible, self-absorbed bore.” And then there are the sentimentalists:

There are people who declare, “I love reading,” which is a lame-brain statement like “I love children.” When anyone refers—as papers and magazines do at holiday time—to the pleasure of “escaping” into a good book, you can be sure the writer has no idea what books are for. They are not there to allow you to escape, but to give you information about the human condition, which is a thing you cannot escape. You find out the use of books when you are very young. History, biography, and novels in particular lend you experience that is not yet your own. They are an advance paid on life. They hand you different scripts to try. They rehearse you. If you want entertainment, roll dice; then you can maintain your happy-go-lucky innocence. Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

The title essay in this volume, “A Memoir of My Former Self,” was first published in The Guardian in 2010, five years after her mysterious, witchy novel Beyond Black . The first of her books to be long-listed for the Booker, Beyond Black is about a psychic who works the soulless function rooms of the English suburbs and is subject to the claims of the malicious, unquiet spirits she conjures—it’s a surreal take on the familiar fictional situation of a character haunted by her traumatic past. Mantel encountered her “former self” during her research for that book, when she paid a medium (she found him so irritating that in the essay she calls him Twerp), selling his wares at a stall in a hired hall, to experience “past-life regression”:

What is hard to convey about the next hour is how my attention was riven, split. One part of me was in the roaring room, despising Twerp, annoyed with myself for producing a past life that was, in light of my background, predictable: born in the north to a family of millworkers, I had produced a child of the early industrial revolution, a miserable illegitimate infant called Sara, of an age to clutch her mother’s skirts. Go on to when she’s twelve, Twerp suggested; irritated by the interruption, my fantasy obeyed him…. I told Twerp that my mother was dead and I was running away. On a hill above the town, I looked down on the sooty world I had known, turned my back on it and commenced a new chapter in my penny novelette.

I very much wanted to know how Sara got out of her plight—friendless, uneducated, destitute. But Twerp wanted her to be twenty-one now and so she was: “Are you courting, Sara?” Now it wasn’t just me who was cross with Twerp; Sara was nettled too.

This battle between Twerp and Mantel is over how to write a historical novel. Twerp wants his characters’ lives to fit the established pattern of sentimental fiction, punctuated by the traditional highs and lows—he’s constructing the kind of plot where the reader knows where she is going and it doesn’t take long to get there. Mantel is interested in the gaps in the historical record—she wants to pause and consider (and get her reader to consider) all the bits we can’t know of past lives. She wants to open up new perspectives on the past, and she is unapologetic about the fact that it will require some work on our part if we are to understand them properly.

She had no time for fiction or film that doesn’t ask something (often quite a lot) of its audience. We don’t tend to think of her as a didactic writer, but she had lessons to teach, and some of those lessons were quite specific. One of her tasks in Bring Up the Bodies (2012), for example, was “to persuade my readers that the broken stones of the abbeys can lie, that their pathos is unearned, and that dissolving the monasteries was a reasonable thing to do.” But the broader moral lying behind her portrayal of Cromwell’s campaign was that people should (like Cromwell) think for themselves: it is dangerous to sacrifice “our need for freedom” to the confirmations of plot and the safety of traditional authority, in society or in books.

But as she implies, this split is also inside Mantel. Like all writers, she needs the established pattern in order to get anywhere at all with filling out the pages of her fiction. Plot, the more predictable the better, closes down possibilities, and that is a boon for a writer, who is otherwise subject to the chaos of reality. You want the teeming spirits, the badly behaved and random details—but to make a story you also need what Mantel calls the “preordained.” In a 2009 essay, “Persons from Porlock,” she claims that “fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing”:

You dread setting off down any one narrative path, because you know your choice will make most of the others impossible. Select one, write it, and it begins to seem in some sense preordained, natural, correct; the other options fade from memory.

The writer is the lonely, godlike creator of the narrative situation, and the burden of that role can be “anguished” and “wretched.” How handy, then, if the outlines of the story are not only preordained but have in fact already happened. In historical fiction numerous choices (characters, setting, plot) have already been made, and by an entity far more reliable than Twerp, leaving the novelist free to get down to the business of exploring the gaps between what characters do and what they think and feel.

Historical fiction’s predetermined plot appears to set it in opposition to the kind of stuff a novelist makes up. But the distance between Mantel’s historical fictions and her contemporary novels is merely a matter of degree. “The most meaningful things in their lives have happened already,” she says approvingly of the characters in John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002); she commends Sybille Bedford for her conviction that “the forces that shape our behaviour…lie further back than we know.” These aren’t, I think, merely commonsense statements about how individuals are shaped by the history from which they have come. Rather, Mantel is interested in plots that can’t unfold any way other than the way they unfold, in the relentlessness of consequences set in train by the past.

Take one of my favorite novels, An Experiment in Love (1995). It is many things: an account of a character very like Mantel (she’s called Carmel) growing up as a Catholic in a poor family, in a mill town in the north of England, who moves to London to study law; a book about “appetite” that features the bodies of some young women growing thinner as they starve themselves and others much, much fatter as they try to disguise unplanned pregnancies; a dissection of class politics in postwar Britain, explored through a group of women who end up living together in a dorm in their first year at university. But it is also an experiment in narrative preordainment and the struggle for freedom from the engine of plot.

When Julia, Carmel’s friend from convent school, turns up at the dorm, excited for a new London adventure, she wonders whether their situation most resembles a novel by Edna O’Brien or one by Muriel Spark. If the setup were limited to Carmel and Julia this would be O’Brien territory—a crisp, knowing, realist bildungsroman exploring the inevitably dashed hopes and desires of convent girls in the big city. But there is a third girl, Karina. Karina’s parents are from an unidentified Eastern European country, she has an unpronounceable surname, and her family history is telescoped by Carmel’s mother into the muttered phrase “cattle-waggons.” Shadowy, vaguely threatening, Karina belongs in a novel by Spark. Carmel’s fated relationship with her begins in primary school, when the two girls are five years old and Carmel kicks Karina’s baby doll out of her toy stroller.

There is no hope of brushing this aside as the casual action of an innocent child, because novels teach you that actions have consequences. The plot (which I won’t spoil) moves inexorably toward a catastrophic denouement, though it takes nearly fifteen years to get there. On the way, Mantel plants several clues to her experiment with Sparkian predestination. The London Hall of Residence where the girls live recalls the May of Teck Club in Spark’s 1963 novel The Girls of Slender Means ; Carmel grows ever more slender due to her lack of means; and there is a fur coat that serves the same purpose in the plot as Spark’s Schiaparelli dress. Carmel thinks she is stepping out into the world as a free agent, but the most meaningful thing in her life has happened already—not only in the plot of this novel but in a novel before that. All Carmel has power over, under Mantel’s pen, is how she thinks about it.

One way of understanding Mantel’s interest in the preordained is that she was experimenting with how to think about the narrowing of possibilities in her own life, and particularly her infertility—a consequence of her misdiagnosed endometriosis. Her own unborn children, she wrote in Giving Up the Ghost , were “stretching out their ghost fingers to grab the pen.” “I wasn’t certain, and I’m still not certain, whether I wanted children,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “What I wanted was the choice.”

Novels may be an advance paid on life, they may rehearse you, but for scripts you are mostly not going to be offered, parts you won’t get to play. “When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led,” and though fiction can accomplish a sort of secular resurrection of those other lives, it can’t change the main plot. Imprisoned in a body that is determined to thwart you, and subject to a medical establishment that refuses to listen, what is there to do but think differently? All that is left is skepticism—the raised eyebrow that can do little to alleviate pain, except help you distance yourself from it.

“For most of my career I wrote about odd and marginal people,” Mantel explains in her fourth Reith Lecture:

They were psychic. Or religious. Or institutionalised. Or social workers. Or French. My readers were a small and select band, until I decided to march onto the middle ground of English history and plant a flag.

Given Mantel’s open distrust of hierarchical structures of power, and of English royalism in particular, we might expect that her move from the periphery to the center of English political life would have the effect of destabilizing the middle ground. But championing meritocracy, questioning deference, and advocating for the common man and woman are not, or haven’t been in Britain for some time, revolutionary doctrines; nor is skepticism a particularly radical quality. It shouldn’t be a surprise that middle England took her to their hearts.

Mantel warned against deriving lessons from the past, mostly, I think, because the lessons drawn in British politics have been principally for conservative, nostalgic ends—from Margaret Thatcher’s praise (via Edmund Burke) of Britain’s Glorious Revolution as superior to France’s bloody one, to the myth of blitz spirit or that of the benign, chummy, colonial empire (think of Boris Johnson quoting Kipling’s “Mandalay” on a state visit to Myanmar). “The past is not a rehearsal,” Mantel insisted, warning against drawing didactic contrasts between great Britain past and declining Britain now: history is not “a branch of morality.” But historical fiction may be. In Mantel’s hands it teaches us that life is not for changing, only for considering differently.

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Editors’ Note

Welcome to Issue 2 of Deerfield, which contains projects created by students in Boston University Writing Program courses during 2023 and selected by an Editorial Committee of faculty and students.

Many of the contributions to this issue explore the relationship between language, justice, and storytelling. To what extent might language intentionally or unintentionally obscure how we remember the past, understand the present, or anticipate the future? What does it mean to use language ethically, and how can language be solicited as a vehicle for liberation and truth?

Ethan Cappelleri questions the value of purportedly “objective” journalism, suggesting a provocative distinction between objectivity and truth. Stella Lavallee explores the concept of environmental and economic injustice by considering its effects on her hometown of Chelsea, Massachusetts, while Trinity Olander argues that large businesses and factory farms use lobbying and media manipulation to turn the public eye away from their unethical practices.

This tension between the objective and subjective continues in Mrinalee Reddy’s piece, but on a more personal and intimate scale: that of self-portraiture and serialized photography. The link between the personal and the political arises again as Karishma Sivakumar encourages us to think more critically about the metaphors that often shape how we understand the world, putting Susan Sontag’s observation about the “war metaphors” used to describe those living with cancer in conversation with Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.

Examining media coverage of the 2011 tsunami in Japan, Roshan Sivaraman questions why we have a tendency to imagine the destruction from such events as unavoidable, suggesting that such a framing too quickly relinquishes society from the burden of anticipating and preventing such tragedies in the future. And for those who might imagine big data and the computer age as a solution to limitations of subjectivity, Emma Stone exposes how artificial intelligence, too, often is trained on biased datasets, lacks transparency, and may be employed in ways that cause more harm than good. All of these essays demonstrate the urgent need to retain that which makes us human, and Brielle Telfair looks toward our own Boston MFA to think about the way art can nurture and heal the human within.

The last few years have witnessed a rapid expansion in alternative genres, digital and multimodal forms, and creative writing work in Writing Program classes. We are delighted to devote an entire section of this issue to a small sampling of this new diversity in genre and form. Zaiyue Gui’s “The Sunbonnet” is a short story set in China in the midst of World War 2, while Layla Thu Nguyen’s “ When the Lotus Speaks,” is a collection of intensely beautiful poems about intimacy, connection, language, and tenderness, inspired by Vietnamese language and cultural history. Rae Ruane and Jiayi Zhang each contribute graphic memoirs that reveal the great irony of memoir as a form: in writing about the uniqueness of one’s own experiences, their personal testimonies attend to universal themes of vulnerability, strength, growing up, and living with full recognition of the frailty and resilience of the human body.

Because communication is not always something that happens in writing alone, our issue concludes with Tiffany Liu’s video essay and Alyssa Bauman and Kamya Parekh’s podcast episode, both of which return to the theme of language, truth, and justice. Liu explores China’s struggle-to-success approach in climate change, while Bauman and Parekh engage in a smart (and often humorous) critical discussion of “The Little Mermaid” retellings, a fishy tale (tail?) to launch us into summer.

The warm, verdant promise of summer is so well captured in our cover image by Iris Ren. The figure relaxes in the arms of the arboreal landscape, a book over their face. Are they reading, or are they asleep? Perhaps a little of both, not a bad combination at all.

Chris McVey & Jessica Bozek

When Poetry Could Define a Life

The close passing of the poetry critics Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler is a moment to recognize the end of an era.

From the 1970s through the 2000s, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler were regularly mentioned together as America’s leading interpreters of poetry. When a 2000 article in Poets & Writers referred jokingly to a “Vendler-Perloff standoff,” Perloff objected to the habitual comparison. “Helen Vendler and I have extraordinarily different views on contemporary poetry and different critical methodologies, but we are assumed to be affiliated because we are both women critics of a certain age in a male-dominated field,” she wrote in 1999.

Now fate has paired them again: Perloff’s death in late March, at age 92, was followed last week by Vendler’s at age 90. Both remained active to the very end: Perloff wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , published this year, and the current issue of the journal Liberties includes an essay by Vendler on war and PTSD in poetry. But for many poets and readers of poetry, the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.

Age and gender may have played a role in their frequent pairing, as Perloff suspected, but it was their different outlooks as critics that made them such perfect foils. They stood for opposite ways of thinking about the art of poetry—how to write it, how to read it, what kind of meaning and pleasure to expect from it.

Vendler was a traditionalist, championing poets who communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language. As a scholar, she focused on clarifying the mechanics of that artistry. Her magnum opus, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets , is a feat of “close reading,” examining the 154 poems word by word to wring every drop of meaning from them. In analyzing “Sonnet 23,” for instance, she highlights the 11 appearances of the letter l in the last six lines, arguing that these “liquid repeated” letters are “signs of passion.”

For Vendler, poetic form was not just a display of virtuosity, but a way of making language more meaningful. As she wrote in the introduction to her anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry (named for the popular introductory class she taught for many years at Harvard), the lyric poem is “the most intimate of genres,” whose purpose is to let us “into the innermost chamber of another person’s mind.” To achieve that kind of intimacy, the best poets use all the resources of language—not just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.

Perloff, by contrast, championed poetry that defied the very notion of communication. She was drawn to the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as “eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.” She found this kind of spiky intelligence in John Ashbery, John Cage, and the late-20th-century school known as Language poetry, which drew attention to the artificiality of language by using it in strange and nonsensical ways. One of her favorite poets was Charles Bernstein, whose poem “A Test of Poetry” begins:

What do you mean by rashes of ash ? Is industry systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are we tossed in tune when we write poems?

For Perloff, the difficulty of this kind of poem had a political edge. At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention. “Poetic discourse,” she wrote, “defines itself as that which can violate the system.”

For Vendlerites, Perloff’s approach to poetry could seem excessively theoretical and intellectual; for Perloffians, Vendler’s taste could seem too conventional. (Perloff wrote that when her “poet friends … really want to put me down, they say that I’m not so different from Helen Vendler!”) Vendler’s scholarly books explored canonical poets such as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell; Perloff’s focused on edgier figures such as Gertrude Stein and the French Oulipo group, which experimented with artificial constraints on writing, such as avoiding the letter e . When it came to living poets, Vendler’s favorites tended to win literary prizes—Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and, in the case of her friend and colleague Seamus Heaney, the Nobel. Perloff’s seldom did, finding admiration inside the academy instead.

These differences in taste can be seen as a reflection of the critics’ very different backgrounds. Vendler was born in Boston and attended Catholic schools and a Catholic college before earning a doctorate from Harvard. She went on to teach for 20 years at Boston University and then returned to Harvard as a star faculty member. She spoke about the open sexism she initially encountered in the Ivy League, but she was a product of that milieu and eventually triumphed in it.

Perloff was born to a Jewish family in Vienna and came to New York in 1938 as a 6-year-old refugee from Nazism. (In her memoir, The Vienna Paradox , she wrote that she exchanged her original name, Gabrielle, for Marjorie because she thought it sounded more American.) She earned her Ph.D. from Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., and spent most of her academic career in California, at the opposite corner of the country from the Ivy League and its traditions. Perloff’s understanding of high art as a tool for disrupting mass culture unites her with thinkers of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno—German Jewish émigrés of an older generation, many of whom also ended up in California.

In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being “relevant.” Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.

Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself. In her 2004 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vendler argued that art, not history or theory, should be the center of a humanistic education, because “artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history.” Perloff made a similar argument in her 1999 essay “ In Defense of Poetry ,” where she criticized the dominance of cultural studies in academia and called for “making the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choice” in studying the humanities.

There are no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today. Given the trend lines for the humanities, it seems unlikely that we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon. But that is all the more reason for them to be remembered—together, for all their differences—as examples of how literary criticism, when practiced as a true vocation, can be one of the most exciting expressions of the life of the mind.

Kathleen Hanna is a troubadour unafraid to speak out

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On the Shelf

Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk

By Kathleen Hanna Ecco: 336 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

It was never about fame. While artist and activist Kathleen Hanna stood out as a leading figure in the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement, she actively worked against the role. Rather, Hanna’s focus was on community, forged through collective effort. What catapulted her to this position and fixed her in the spotlight was the visibility of her band Bikini Kill. With mainstream media coverage came a distortion of the movement’s mission. Quickly the movement became co-opted by an anodyne rallying cry for “girl power.”

Yet in the decades that have passed, what’s endured is a genuine punk spirit, fed by Hanna’s ongoing force as a gutsy, proud feminist who helped other artists and fans fight back against abuse and discrimination. She never gave up on being determined, yet playful and brash at the same time. Now is the time to set the record straight.

Hanna’s first book will be released May 14. “Rebel Girl,” a memoir subtitled “My Life as a Feminist Punk,” is a far cry from the handcrafted zines that Hanna archived at New York University in 2010. Yet it possesses the same vibrancy as those fliers, notebooks and ephemera. The book opens with her childhood and coming of age as an art student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., then moves on and off the road as a musician and lead singer in the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, among others. With this book, she creates space for her own story as well as the larger context of her time and the need for art as a creative agent of empathy and change. Hanna is a troubadour unafraid to speak out.

Talking over the phone in February before a tour with Bikini Kill, Hanna mused, “I just always thought I had a pretty uneventful life.” But the more Hanna sifted through her memories while writing her exuberant memoir, the more she gained the perspective that hadn’t been clear to her before now. “Wait,” she said, “this is actually really eventful.”

With its episodic style of vivid, swift chapters and Hanna’s kinetic voice, “Rebel Girl” is a bold portrait. For the sake of late 20th century history alone, it’s a crucial book about feminist politics and art. But it’s also a tender examination of a woman who survived abuse and sexual assault. You’ll find the origin stories of her bands; chronicles of her friendship with the late Kurt Cobain; the tour where she fell in love with her husband, Adam Horowitz, better known as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys; recording with Joan Jett; and getting punched by Courtney Love at Lollapalooza — just the boldface highlights.

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But more important, Hanna talks about her complicated family history, the art gallery she began with friends during college, the challenges of a rapidly growing social movement, the gritty truth about life on the road as a musician and the enduring friendships that saw her through the challenges she faced as a woman in punk.

Scenes among friends, including Bikini Kill bandmate Tobi Vail, Le Tigre’s Johanna Fateman and musician, artist and the founder of Mr. Lady Records, Tammy Rae Carland, highlight the power of friendship in an industry that thrives on competition.

Faced with the solitary nature of writing, Hanna drew from her experience as a musician, recognizing that she does better “in collaborative situations.” She quickly recognized that the “aloneness” of writing meant “you don’t have anybody to decompress with” as you would “after a crappy show.” Yet she carried on, and after her years of writing, Hanna found herself flush with material. The book was originally more than 600 pages long. A friend of Hanna’s , writer Ada Calhoun, flew to California from New York to help her pare the book down by 300 pages.

In the end, Hanna felt that the memoir “was really a way for me to make a narrative out of my life to get distance from some of the harder things” so she could say to herself, “‘OK, that was really painful at the time, but now it’s a funny story.’ And maybe that’s not the healthiest thing but it really works for me to turn something into a funny story or even just a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.”

While this may sound simple, Hanna sees it as a blessing that isn’t granted to everyone. “I felt kind of lucky. I had a lot of stories that came full circle, and I wanted to write them all down.”

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While a memoir seems a natural next accomplishment for someone with a nearly 35-year career in arts and activism, it wasn’t necessarily fated that she would write a book.

More than a decade ago, the documentary “ The Punk Singer ” chronicled her life and work. This book takes a deeper, longer look from Hanna’s singular perspective. It’s a gift to readers that Hanna bided her time before speaking for herself. Interestingly, one can look at one episode in her life as a reason to consider the medium as much as the message.

Now 55, living in Pasadena with Horowitz and their 10-year-old son, Julius, with her mother nearby, along with three decades of art and music under her belt, Hanna can say that she is solidly a writer. Her memoir marks a new chapter in her life. She reflects, “I really wanted to write a book because I’m in this transitional period in my life.”

While she has no desire to quit music, by capturing her history in a memoir, she puts to rest an enormous period of her life in order to make space for something new.

Asked what she wants to do next, Hanna says, “Honestly, I would really like to be a comedy writer.” While this initially sounds like a pivot, it makes complete sense. Hanna is a tremendously warm and funny person. Both in conversation and in her music and writing. Not only is she deeply aware of the ways that others engage with her work but she also notes that “one of the things that is really different about writing a book than being in a band is the lack of collaboration.” Hanna said she “would like to write comedy for other people, for TV, theater or film. I’d love to be in a writers room.”

Comedy is another reason Hanna has taken to life in California after more than 20 years living in New York. She and her family relocated shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Actually, when I moved to New York originally” — in the early aughts — Hanna thought to herself, “‘I’m leaving punk. And I’m going into the comedy scene.’ And it didn’t quite work out.”

The scene is different and more accessible in Los Angeles.

“The shows are really small. You can just go right up and talk to people. There’s a lot more people here whom I knew from San Francisco and from past experiences in the punk scene, who are now into comedy.” Hanna even hosted a comedy show with comedian Kate Berlant at her home.

Her life seems no less busy than it was 30 years ago, but Hanna’s confidence gives her the ability to transition from concert tours to book events without any challenge to her identity. With age comes perspective and wisdom. She sees her work as part of a larger project. This applies to the material she cut from the book. Hanna is sanguine and remarked, “I’m lucky because I’m older. And so I know that if I don’t use this material for this, I can use it for something else.” She can see herself weaving material into a short story, an essay or article, or even an Instagram or TikTok post. “It’s not like the material’s lost.”

LeBlanc is a writer whose work has been published in Vanity Fair, the Believer and the New York Times Book Review, among others.

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An underappreciated era in Black literature gets its due

Harvard scholar jesse mccarthy shines new light on revelatory books published in the middle of the 20th century..

L ately, in English departments the idea of grouping works of literature by when they were written has started to feel outdated, or at least old-fashioned. This might sound odd since the field is organized around such literary periods, with historical labels like “Victorian” or “Modernist” defining its conferences, course titles, journals, and job listings. But some professors now see such categories as blunt and tired. One even wrote a book called “ Why Literary Periods Mattered ,” past tense.

Which makes it rather surprising that a young star professor in Harvard’s English department has written a new book defending literary periodization — and proposing a new period of his own.

In “The Blue Period,” Jesse McCarthy zooms in on Black authors who lived and wrote between 1945 and 1965. During these decades, roughly the first half of the Cold War, most of the world sided with either America or the Soviet Union. But many Black Americans felt torn. “What is so distinctive, compelling, and politically potent about black writing from this era,” McCarthy writes, “is its dissent from both of the hegemonic Cold War ideological blocks.” Instead of turning toward Washington or Moscow, Black authors turned inward. Alongside Black painters and Black musicians, they produced ambiguous and emotional art that McCarthy calls “blue.”

It’s an exciting new window into well-known writers like Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks, and it offers a chance to rediscover forgotten figures like Vincent O. Carter. It’s also a reminder that in our own period — one marked by distraction and information and a reflexive obsession with the present — the quaint act of thinking historically, of thinking periodically, remains valuable, even radical.

Thanks to some wonderful authors and some diligent academics, modern Black literature now feels rich with periodization. There’s Toni Morrison, who looms as a period unto herself. There are current writers like Jesmyn Ward and Colson Whitehead, who extend and revise Morrison’s historical approach. Moving backward, there’s the Black Arts Movement, with writers like Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and the Harlem Renaissance, with writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

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But what about the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement? McCarthy found himself pondering those missing decades one day when he was a graduate student at Princeton, browsing the library shelves.

It started when McCarthy pulled down a copy of Vincent O. Carter’s obscure and experimental memoir “The Bern Book,” a striking volume with its cover illustration of a single piercing eye. “I was immediately intrigued,” McCarthy says.

Part of this intrigue was the unknown author and the brilliant prose, and part of it was that McCarthy didn’t know how to contextualize this fascinating book. “We didn’t really have a sense of who Carter was, how to read his books, why they mattered, how they fit into the field,” McCarthy says. What he needed as a reader, and what Carter needed as an author, was an interpretive framework: a literary period.

“The Blue Period” sketches this framework, often through the words of the authors themselves. In 1948, soon after he’d emigrated to Paris, Richard Wright published an essay on the front page of a French newspaper. “My body was born in America,” Wright wrote. “My heart was born in Russia; and today I stand contritely ashamed between my two parent countries.”

Many Black intellectuals shared Wright’s alienation. On one side, there was the version of communism that had once energized them — but also Stalin and his brutal assault on freedom. On the other side, there was America and its avowed liberalism — but also the reality lived by so many Black people of Jim Crow and its brutal assault on freedom.

To Wright, both sides deserved blame: “The present nationalism, in America and in Russia, forces a man to abandon his human heritage.” But Wright also believed Black people could carve out a refuge from the dominant national politics, an interior space to discuss their feelings and fears and desires. “Our weapons are not their weapons,” Wright wrote. “For us there still exists room for liberty, and that room is your spirit and mine.”

The weapon many writers chose was a “blue” style, an adjective McCarthy borrows from Miles Davis and several of his 1950s albums, including “Kind of Blue.” “Davis would turn his back to the audience when he performed,” McCarthy says. Then he would play music that was intense, meditative, and inwardly focused — music that was reserved but still fiery.

“When I think of Black life in the 1950s,” McCarthy says, “it has this kind of sound.”

Once McCarthy understood the political dynamic and the aesthetic response to it, he began to see examples everywhere. Take Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Critics have often read the novel as Ellison’s turn from communism toward liberalism. But McCarthy believes this reading is too simple. “Ellison sees Black people being instrumentalized by both sides,” he says. “Invisible Man” doesn’t end with the main character choosing a team. It ends with him retreating to his books and jazz records — with him turning his back to the audience and adopting a blue style.

One benefit of a literary period is that it can cast major figures in a fresh light. Another is that it can elevate minor figures. Vincent O. Carter is a good example. Although he wrote “The Bern Book” near the start of the blue period, in the ’50s, he couldn’t find a publisher until 1973. “By then it was the height of the Black Arts Movement,” McCarthy says, referring to the decade-long period of overtly political Black writing. “No one wanted this kind of book from a Black writer.” “The Bern Book” describes leaving America and ultimately settling in rural Switzerland. “Carter meditates on what Blackness means,” McCarthy says, “especially in the heart of Europe.” For his next book, “Such Sweet Thunder,” a novel centered on a Black working-class neighborhood that will be erased by an Eisenhower interstate, Carter couldn’t find any publisher at all. It appeared in 2003, two decades after his death.

By restoring both Carter titles to the 1950s, when they were largely written, McCarthy can argue for their importance and illuminate their themes.

Perhaps the best benefit of a literary period, though, is the way it connects authors major and minor. “The Bern Book” makes a fascinating counterpoint to “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin’s classic essay on his own time living in Switzerland. Why did Baldwin leave? Why did Carter stay, ultimately for 30 years? How did each author try to carve out space for Black interiority and emotion? Reading Carter and Baldwin alongside each other as works of the same literary period, and realizing that the authors were pursuing similar goals at similar times, enriches our understanding of them both.

In 1959, Baldwin wrote another important essay, which echoed Wright’s frustrations with the Cold War. “The world has shrunk to the size of several ignorant armies,” Baldwin wrote. The problem was he didn’t know which army was right: “I share, for example, the ideals of the West — freedom, justice, brotherhood — but I cannot say that I have often seen these honored.”

McCarthy hopes literary connections like these, so persuasively laid out in “The Blue Period,” will give scholars and students new approaches to Black writers of the 1950s and 1960s. At Harvard, he wants to teach a class that will focus on a number of blue texts. “If you’re teaching a whole class instead of a survey,” he says, “then in addition to Baldwin and Ellison you can assign, say, ‘Brown Girl, Brownstones’” — a 1959 novel by Paule Marshall about a family of immigrants with a fierce emotional life. Bookworms can do the same thing at home, pairing Marshall with Gwendolyn Brooks or Carter with Baldwin.

In addition to making a case for the blue period, McCarthy wants to advocate for a certain style of reading and thinking. “My students are extremely bright,” he says. “In many ways they know more than I did when I was in college, and if they don’t know something, they can look it up.” But sometimes he wonders if this information has become not just a crutch but an obstacle. “They don’t always know where all of this information fits in an actual trajectory,” he says. “They struggle to think historically.”

Thinking historically matters for any subject, but it especially matters for someone trying to understand the Black experience in America. As McCarthy writes in his book, “mores and political attitudes, fashion and taste, idiom and vocabulary — most notoriously the very words black people use to describe themselves — what it means to and how it feels to be black in the modern world have swung wildly.”

The swings and breaks of the past often provide its most revealing moments — but also the ones that are easiest to misinterpret or simply to forget. This is where thinking periodically can help.

Craig Fehrman is a journalist and historian. He is at work on a revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition for Simon & Schuster.