I want to say something to the person who has been thinking about writing a memoir for three years and hasn’t started. I also want to say something to the person who started one and stopped on page forty because the whole thing felt like a lie. Both of you are in the right place. Stay for a minute.
I ran an independent bookshop in Durham for twenty-two years. In that time, I sold more memoirs than I can count, and I watched the genre change from something rare and literary into something everyone felt they either should write or should be asked to write. I’ve read brilliant memoirs and terrible ones. I’ve read memoirs that made me call my mother. I’ve read memoirs that made me put the book down and stare at the wall because the writer had gotten so close to something true that I needed a minute before I could keep going.
I’ve also read memoirs that were three hundred pages of someone explaining why everything that went wrong in their life was someone else’s fault, and those I did not finish.
So here is what fifty years of reading has taught me about how to write a memoir. I’m not a writing instructor. I’m the man who stood behind the counter and watched which memoirs people came back to talk about, and which ones they returned quietly and asked for something else.
A Memoir Is Not a Diary
This is where most people go wrong, and I say this with genuine affection, because the mistake comes from a good impulse. You sit down to write your story and you start at the beginning. Born in 1952 in Cedar Rapids. Parents named Helen and Frank. You describe the house. You describe the neighborhood. You describe the dog. By page twenty you’re in third grade and nothing has happened that would make a stranger keep reading.
That’s a diary. A diary records what happened. A memoir makes meaning out of what happened, and meaning requires selection. You can’t include everything. The question isn’t “What happened to me?” The question is “What happened to me that changed me, and why does it matter to someone who wasn’t there?”
Mary Karr understood this. “The Liar’s Club,” published in 1995, covers Karr’s childhood in an East Texas oil town with an alcoholic father and a mother whose secrets unravel across the book. Karr doesn’t start with her birth certificate. She starts with a scene of being examined by a doctor while her father stands in the doorway, and the reader is immediately inside a situation that feels dangerous and confusing and real. The reason that opening works is because Karr chose it. She could have started anywhere. She started where the meaning was.
Tobias Wolff does the same thing in “This Boy’s Life,” published in 1989. The book opens with Wolff and his mother driving west, their car overheating on a mountain road while behind them a truck goes off a cliff. That image, the truck falling, the boy watching, tells you everything about the book before you’ve finished the first page. It’s a memoir about a childhood that kept going off cliffs, and Wolff found the one image that held the whole story.
If you’re sitting down to write your memoir, don’t start with your birthday. Start with the moment that made you need to write this at all.
Finding the Shape
Every good memoir has a shape, and the shape is never “everything that happened to me in order.” It’s closer to a novel than most people realize. There’s a question at the center, spoken or not, and the book exists to answer it.
In Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” published in 2005, the question is: What happens to a mind when grief arrives? The book covers one year after the death of Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne. She doesn’t tell you about their entire marriage. She tells you about the year the marriage ended, and inside that year, she finds the universal thing. I’ve sold that book to more people than any other memoir in twenty years. Widows, widowers, people who lost a parent, people who lost a friend. They all come back and say the same thing: “I didn’t know someone else felt that way.”
That’s what shape does. It turns your particular experience into something another person can enter.
Jesmyn Ward’s “Men We Reaped,” published in 2013, has one of the most striking shapes I’ve encountered. Ward tells two stories simultaneously. Moving forward, she chronicles five years in which five young Black men she loved died. Moving backward, she tells the story of her own life in a Mississippi town where those deaths were not accidents but consequences. The two timelines meet in the middle. The structure itself is the argument. You couldn’t tell that story chronologically and have it hit the same way.
You don’t need to be that inventive. But you do need to decide what your book is about, which is different from deciding what happened to you. Your book is about one thing, or maybe two things, and everything else is scenery.
The Problem of Memory
Here is something most how-to-write-a-memoir guides won’t tell you: your memory is wrong. Not about all of it, but about enough of it to matter. The conversation you remember word for word from 1978 did not happen that way. The house you grew up in was smaller than you think. The fight your parents had on Thanksgiving, the one that changed everything, may have happened on Christmas, or on a Tuesday in March.
This isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a condition to be acknowledged.
Mary Karr talks about this openly. She called her mother while writing “The Liar’s Club” to verify memories, and her mother’s version of events was, in many cases, completely different. Karr didn’t pretend her version was the objective truth. She wrote what she remembered and let the reader understand that memory is partial, shaped, and sometimes self-serving.
Tobias Wolff called his book “This Boy’s Life: A Memoir” with that subtitle doing real work. A memoir. Not the memoir. Not the definitive account. A memoir, one person’s reckoning with what they believe happened to them.
If you’re stuck because you can’t remember whether the wallpaper was blue or green, stop worrying about the wallpaper. Memoir isn’t journalism. You’re not filing a police report. You’re telling the truth about how something felt, and the emotional truth is the one that matters. Get that right and nobody will care about the wallpaper.
What to Leave Out
This is the hardest part, and it’s where I’ve watched the most first drafts collapse.
You leave out everything that doesn’t serve the story. I know that sounds obvious. It isn’t. When it’s your life, everything feels essential. The trip to Yellowstone in 1983. Your first job at the hardware store. The summer you spent at your grandmother’s house. All of it feels like it matters because it happened to you, and it did matter, to you, but a memoir isn’t therapy and it isn’t a scrapbook.
Vivian Gornick’s “Fierce Attachments,” published in 1987, is a masterclass in leaving things out. It’s about Gornick’s relationship with her mother, set mostly during walks they take together through Manhattan. Decades of a complicated, suffocating, necessary relationship compressed into fewer than two hundred pages. Gornick includes only what illuminates the central question: how do you become yourself when the person who made you won’t let go? Everything else, the jobs, the marriages, the other relationships, appears only as it touches that question.
I tell people who come to my Tuesday book group at the library and say they want to write a memoir: write everything first, if you need to. Get it all down. Then go back and ask yourself, for every scene, every anecdote, every character: does this belong to the book I’m writing, or does it belong to a different book, or does it belong only to me? The things that belong only to you are precious, but they don’t go in the manuscript.
The Ethics of Writing About Real People
This is the part nobody wants to talk about, and it’s the part that stops more memoirs than writer’s block ever has.
Your mother is in your memoir. Your ex-husband is in your memoir. Your children, your siblings, your best friend from college who did that thing you’ve never told anyone about. They’re all in there because they were in your life, and you can’t write about your life without writing about them.
Kiese Laymon wrestled with this visibly in “Heavy,” published in 2018. The book is addressed to his mother. It’s about their relationship, about his body, about Mississippi, about race and food and secrecy and love. Laymon writes with extraordinary honesty about things his mother did that hurt him, and he does it while clearly loving her, and the tension between those two truths is what makes the book devastating. He revised the book after his mother read an early draft. The revision didn’t soften the truth. It deepened it.
There’s no formula for this. I can tell you what I’ve observed from reading hundreds of memoirs. The ones that work are honest without being vengeful. They describe what happened without pretending to know why the other person did it. They leave room for the possibility that the writer is wrong about someone, or that the writer’s own behavior was part of the problem.
The memoirs that don’t work are the ones where everyone else is a villain and the writer is the only person in the room with a soul. If your memoir has no moment where you’re the one who got it wrong, I don’t trust it. Neither will your reader.
Why It Matters
I want to push back on the idea that memoirs are self-indulgent. I’ve heard this from well-read people who should know better. “Who wants to read about someone’s childhood?” As if Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” were a home movie. As if Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” were a diary entry.
Memoir, when it’s done well, is the most democratic form of literature. You don’t need to have climbed Everest or survived a shipwreck. You need to have lived a life and thought carefully about what it means. Harry Crews wrote “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place” in 1978 about growing up in rural Georgia, poor, the son of a tenant farmer, and that book is as literary and as important as anything published that decade. Nobody asked Crews to write it. No publisher came knocking. He wrote it because the story existed and he was the only one who could tell it.
That’s the thing I want to say to the person who has been putting this off. The publishing industry isn’t going to come looking for your memoir. That doesn’t mean your memoir doesn’t matter. It means you have to believe it matters before anyone else will. And if you’ve lived sixty or seventy years and paid attention, you have a story that nobody else can tell. Not because your life was extraordinary. Because your life was yours, and you were there, and you noticed things, and the noticing is the whole art.
Where to Start
Go to your public library. I’m serious. Walk in and ask. Most public libraries run memoir-writing workshops, or they can point you to one. The Durham County Library, where I’ve been showing up every week for forty years, runs a life-writing group that meets monthly, and I’ve watched people walk in with nothing but a feeling that they should write something and walk out six months later with forty pages that made the room go quiet.
Read three memoirs before you write a word of your own. Not how-to books. Actual memoirs. I’d start with “The Liar’s Club” by Mary Karr, because it will teach you more about structure and voice in three hundred pages than any writing manual. Then “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion, because it will show you what happens when a great writer refuses to look away from the hardest thing. Then pick one that’s close to your own experience, whatever that is. If you grew up poor in the South, read Harry Crews. If you’re writing about a parent, read Vivian Gornick. If you’re writing about race and the body, read Kiese Laymon.
Then sit down and write the scene you can’t stop thinking about. Not the first scene. The one that wakes you up at two in the morning. The one you’ve told at dinner parties but never gotten quite right. Start there. That scene is the seed of your book. Everything else grows around it.
And if you get stuck on page forty, which you probably will, don’t quit. Go back to the memoirs you read and look at how they handled the middle. Look at how Karr moves from childhood to adolescence without losing momentum. Look at how Didion keeps circling back to the same night, finding something new each time. The solution to being stuck is almost always in another book. That, if nothing else, is something fifty years of reading has taught me.
I wrote recently about three novels that refuse to lie about the second half of life. Memoir does the same work, but with higher stakes, because the life on the page is yours and you can’t hide behind a character. The difficulty is the point. The book nobody else can write is the one that matters most.
