Should you write your memoir in chronological order? Great question. Maybe—but not necessarily. Below, you’ll find five ways to structure your story, including the dramatic way Cheryl Strayed breaks the “rule” of chronology in her memoir, Wild.

Here are five structural approaches for you to consider as you draft your memoir.

1. Write your memoir in chronological order

Yes, most memoirs are written in chronological order. It’s a classic structure: Your story opens where it actually began, and moves forward from there. This works beautifully when your arc is the point—when the reader wants to see the you change, step by step.

Further, there’s inherent tension in following a person’s story as they lived it, without any foreknowledge or conveniently added hindsight. And tension is what keeps readers turning pages.

2. Open at a moment of high tension, then circle back

On the other hand, Cheryl Strayed starts Wild at the halfway point of her story. Her opening scene drops the reader into her “all is lost” moment on the Pacific Crest Trail. Then Strayed circles back through several years of back story, before returning to the head of the trail where, arguably, her story begins.

To try this method with your own memoir, identify a moment of high drama in your story. Starting there engages your reader emotionally—and likely compels them to keep reading to find out how you arrived at that powerful point. This approach also “earns” whatever backstory you need to support that moment because your reader is already so invested in your journey.

3. Braid two timelines together

Instead of including flashback on an as-needed basis as most narratives do, a braided memoir alternates between two timelines all the way through the book—a present-day chapter, followed by a past chapter, then present-day again—with both threads moving forward and developing on their own until they meet near the end.

Say you’re writing about caring for your father at the end of his life. You might start in the present with a chapter in his hospital room and follow that with a chapter from your childhood, decades ago, then alternating hospital scenes with memories the hospital scenes stir up.

Neither timeline interrupts the other—they’re running in parallel, each with its own arc. While this structure is more complex than a single timeline, it’s probably close to how memory actually works: the present constantly pulling the past to the surface.

Melissa Cistaro’s Pieces of My Mother and Susan Morris’s The Sensitive One are examples of the braided-memoir structure.

4. Let a recurring touchstone anchor every chapter

In Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses, Claire Dederer titles each chapter for a yoga pose, and her actual yoga practice develops chronologically as its own throughline in the book. But while each chapter discusses the pose named, the poses also become doorways into the unfolding story of her life. For example, in her “Child’s Pose” chapters, she revisits moments from her unconventional childhood.

If you have a practice you return to regularly—running, gardening, a weekly phone call, church, therapy—each occasion can become a chapter frame. Open a chapter there, then continue into the scene you’ve prepared for that chapter. You might even close the chapter back where you started, practice still going.

5. Anchor chapters to place instead of time

Mary Cantwell’s Manhattan, When I Was Young takes her through her twenties and thirties by way of five apartments, each one reflecting the experiences she had while she lived there.

This structure invites you to organize chapters by place. It’s a natural fit if you’ve experienced different settings—homes, schools, cities, or periods of travel—and each one came with its own cast of characters and its own version of the self you were becoming.

How do you decide whether you should write your memoir in chronological order?

Any one of these approaches might serve your memoir well. Each one makes a different promise to your reader. Chronological order promises a journey worth taking. Opening at a high-tension moment promises a big payoff. Braiding two timelines promises two stories that rely on each other to create meaning. A recurring practice promises the reader a steady place to stand while the past wavers in and out. And anchoring your story to the places you’ve been promises a varied world your reader can walk through with you (one that also does some of the emotional work for you). Which you choose depends on what you actually want the reader feeling on page one.

Are you wondering if you should write your memoir in chronological order? There may be other options that would serve your story just as well! I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.

Writing a memoir can be a deeply rewarding journey—but also a tricky one. This article offers guidance for shaping your story in a way that honors both your truth and your readers: “How to Write a Memoir.”   If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

If you’ve kept a journal for any considerable amount of time, you may have wondered whether somewhere in all those notebooks there’s a book waiting to be discovered. If that sounds like you, this blog post can help you learn a bit about how to turn your journals into a memoir.

Journaling vs. Memoir

Journaling and memoir are similar—sort of. They’re both ways of writing about your own life, but they serve different purposes. You write your  journal for yourself. It’s where you think out loud, work through a hard week, or capture a feeling before it slips away. Nobody else needs to understand what you’ve written because nobody else is going to read it. That creates a freedom no other writing offers.

On the other hand, a memoir is meant to be read by others. Writing a memoir asks you to consider the needs of those readers. These are (mostly) people who weren’t there, who don’t know your history, and who want to engage with your story, but have to be drawn in by your literary skill.

Where your journal might say “Rough day with Mom again,” in recounting that day for readers, you’ll need to show what happened: the kitchen, the tone of your mom’s voice, what you didn’t say back.

Journaling records that something happened. Memoir has to make a stranger feel it.

How to turn your journals into a memoir

We keep our journals in a different way than we shape our memoirs. Our journals unfold in real time, day by day. When we’re writing on Monday, we don’t know what will happen on Tuesday until we live it.

Memoirist Patricia Hampl has written about this, the difference between dumping raw, undigested material into our journals and the memoir writer’s job of finding the pattern in the events that have concluded.

In a memoir, we’re looking back and choosing a throughline, finding the story that took shape over time. When we write about those moments in our journal, we don’t yet know what larger story each experience is part of.

So how do you actually get from a shelf of notebooks to a manuscript? Author Louisa Deasey wrote two memoirs from years of keeping a daily journal. Once you have a sense of the story you’re telling, Deasey suggests going back through your journal entries for moments—specific days, scenes, conversations—that still have heat when you read them back. Develop those moments into full scenes, she says, and they become the bones of your memoir.

Mine your journals for gold

As Deasey shows, your journals are gold! They’re your raw material, an emotional record you’ve kept perhaps for decades. They’re also proof that you can stay the course of a long writing project—because you’ve already been showing up on the page for years.

What will help is to think about which story (among the many you’ve lived) you want to tell—what you’re writing about. And also who you’re writing for—the particular reader you want to engage. Then mine your journals for scenes, and shape what may feel like a sprawl into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Try this: turn one journal entry into a scene. Pull out an old journal entry. Then rewrite it in three rounds:

1. Ground it. Add the physical details you may have skipped when recording the situation: capture the room, the weather, what you were wearing, what time of day it was.
2. What happened? Who was there? If anyone else was there, what did they say or do? If no one else was part of that moment, what happened? And how did you react?
3. Step back and ask how it fits the story you’re creating. When you made your journal entry, you just needed to get down the truth. But to turn that truth into a scene, you’ll want to understand how that moment works in your larger story. Is it revealing something? Shifting something? Costing you something? What does that moment change?

Here’s what this might look like in practice. Say your journal entry reads:

Rough day with Mom again.

After Round 1, grounded in the physical world:

Rough day with Mom again. That stuffy kitchen, radio turned up too loud so we wouldn’t have to talk.

After Round 3, once you’ve asked how the moment fits the story you’re writing:

You realize this isn’t just a hard afternoon. It’s the pattern the whole book is circling: the volume of the radio as a stand-in for everything neither of you would say.

That’s the shift. A journal entry records what happened. A scene gives the readers an immediate experience of what happened—and tells them why it matters.

Foundations

If you’ve been journaling for years, congratulations. You have much of the material you need. Of course, there’s more to memoir writing than creating scenes. But this technique will be a foundational one. Now, if you’re ready, go forth and turn those journals into a memoir!

You can turn your journals into a memoir!

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Digging through your old personal writing is exciting. I can help you understand how to turn your journals into a memoir. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

If you’ve been putting off writing your memoir because you worry your memory is not accurate, you’re not alone. This is such a valid concern! And it stops a lot of writers before they even get going. But really, you don’t need an exact chronological record of your life to start writing. So, how much do you need to remember to write your memoir?

Memory won’t necessarily hand you the whole story

We may wish our memories would play back our life like a movie, scene by scene. But it doesn’t usually work like that. Instead, when we give ourselves time and space to think about our past, what we receive comes in fragments. The sound of a screen door slamming, the summer smell of cut grass, the way your father’s voice cracked on one word. These flashes illuminate paths into parts of your story—they’re the raw material you develop.

If you expect your mind to offer you complete scenes, with meaning intact, you’re likely to come up empty-handed. But if you follow one sensory detail with your pen, chances are good it will lead you back into a complete and important moment.

Memories that keep coming back are trying to tell you something

Most of us experience moments that resurface again and again—replaying themselves at odd times for no clear reason. It’s tempting to dismiss these as random, or to feel like we should be “over” them by now. But memories that keep returning may be circling something that still matters, even if we  can’t say why.

Trust what comes around repeatedly. It may have something valuable to offer you about your story. And don’t feel you have to understand your recurring memories before writing about them. Start writing from whatever you remember. That’s how you find out what these moments have been trying to tell you all along.

What it feels like to misremember

Sometimes, we have the feeling that a memory we’ve carried for years might not be accurate. Your sister insists you weren’t in the kitchen when that life-changing phone call came. A friend remembers you crying about a significant slight, while you swear you laughed it off. The marriage-ending fight may not have happened in the theater lobby, as you remember.

Whether you’re doubting how you’ve recalled an important moment or a minor one, the uncertainty alone can be disorienting. It’s a little like reaching for a stair that isn’t there. And it can shake your confidence in everything else you think you know.

But memory is a human function—and that, by definition, makes it subjective. How much, then, do you need to remember to write your memoir with confidence? Fortunately for us humans, a memoir isn’t a deposition. Getting a detail wrong doesn’t disqualify the emotional truth underneath it. The theater lobby or the car on the drive home matters less than what the dispute cost you.

Still, it’s worth telling the reader honestly when you’re not certain of a detail. Your simple admission that “I remember being in the kitchen, although my sister swears I was raking leaves in the yard” weaves itself into the story without risking reader trust.

Remembering too well

What happens when you remember something with startling, unwelcome clarity? For example, the exact, cutting words your teacher said about you in front of the whole class—and the haughty look on her face as she humiliated you. There are moments that have been burned so precisely into our minds that it would be self-betrayal to pretend we aren’t sure they happened as we remember.

These moments can feel less like a gift of memory and more like a burden. Especially when the other person is still alive, may read your story, or is someone you love despite what they did. For sure, writing it down risks being corrected, contradicted, or confronted by someone who remembers it differently—or who would simply rather you didn’t remember it at all.

This is one of the real costs of memoir: sometimes the truest passages are the ones most likely to cause you trouble, and you have to decide, with open eyes, whether to write them anyway.

Holding steady

We might be tempted to respond to both kinds of memory, the uncertain and the too-certain, with a quick fix. Maybe, we think, I can present an uncertain memory as something safely vague, without letting my reader know that that moment, although important, remains fuzzy in my mind. On the other hand, maybe we want to soften a too-clear memory so it’s unlikely to trigger a reaction from the person I’m showing in a negative light.

But some of the richest memoir writing happens when we writer resist both impulses. We can hold both not-knowing and knowing-too-well, without forcing either into false resolution. Readers actually don’t need us to have it all figured out. What they do need is for us to be honest about what remembering actually feels like. It can be messy, uneven, sometimes even scary. And, in the midst of all that, we have the right to claim our version of our own story.

Memory isn’t a filing cabinet

Once we’ve made peace with memory’s unevenness—its gaps, its unreliable edges, its occasional pointed clarity—we may wonder, how do we find more of what’s actually there?

Almost no one’s memory works like an archive. We can’t rely on being able to access dates and details at the push of a button. Memory has its own agenda. It keeps what matters emotionally and lets the rest fade. That’s not a flaw in our recall. It’s actually useful information, because the scenes that have stuck with us usually carry the most meaning. If you remember the kind of ice cream sundae you shared with your grandmother, but not what you talked about at the table on particular day, the hot fudge may be the story.

Trust what surfaces and follow where it leads.

You’re allowed to write around the memory gaps

A memoir doesn’t require you to provide wall-to-wall detail. So, how much do you need to remember to write your memoir? Many memoirists write in fragments, scenes that jump across time, leaving spaces empty rather than inventing what belongs there.

Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse
In this memoir about the aftermath of her mother’s murder, Perry shares aspects of the story she can’t fully remember. Instead of narrating straight through hours she can’t clearly recall, she calls memory “a hospital-white mist, an inconsistent curtain that rolls over the hours.” She makes the “fog” part of the texture of the writing.

Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Flynn’s memoir has a raw, fragmentary style that mirrors the disjointed nature of memory. He stitches together parts of his childhood, his father’s life, and his own adulthood, rather than moving in a straight line. In a 2005 Project MUSE review, the reviewer says it has a “dreamy, fragmented feel” that propels readers “from one episode to the next the way a poet uses line breaks.”

Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club
Instead of letting fragmentation carry her whole book, Karr names a specific gap directly: “I don’t remember who we got farmed out to or for how long,” then continues. It’s a small, exposed moment, and it works precisely because she doesn’t try to cover for it.

You, too, can be direct: “I don’t remember what she said next, only how the temperature in the room fell after she said it.” That honesty can make a scene feel more powerful, not less. Readers don’t need a forensic account. They need your truth, told as clearly as you can tell it.

Other people’s memories can help, but …

If you want to fill in some of the places where your own memory isn’t holding steady, talking with family or old friends can help. But (and this is a big but!), remember that they’re human, too. Which means that their recall is maybe no better than yours. And it’s pretty obvious that different people remember the same event a little differently. Their observations and memory are shaped by their perspective: where they were standing, literally and figuratively, in relation to the events unfolding.

Psychologists who study memory explain this by saying that memory is reconstructive, not recorded. Each time we recall an event, our brains rebuild it rather than replaying a fixed copy. That rebuild is shaped by whatever we were feeling or attending to in the moment. That’s why two people can witness the same car accident and walk away with two different memories. Not because one person is wrong, but because they weren’t actually encoding identical experiences to begin with.

There’s also another effect worth considering: the more a story gets retold (at family gatherings, for example) the more it can drift from what actually happened, until even “incorrect” details feel like settled fact.

None of this means our memories are untrustworthy. It means memory was never designed to work like a recording in the first place. Which, of course, complicates the question of how much we need to remember to write a memoir. And it’s also why, while it can be really useful to refer to others’ memories for context, your memoir is your version.

And at the end of the day, that’s the version only you can truthfully write.

Let research jog your memory

In Memoir Writing for Dummies, Ryan G. Van Cleave devotes a chapter to gathering material  that can help you recall some aspects of the past:

• Look through photo albums, home movies, and videos.
• Review newspapers and magazines published at key moments in your life—knowing what the world was concerned with can help you contextualize your own story.
• Flip through school yearbooks: remembrance pages, class songs, and event calendars can unlock memories of a mostly forgotten year.
• Check vital records: report cards, licenses, bills, transcripts, even estate papers.

If you want the fuller list and Van Cleave’s approach to using it, Memoir Writing for Dummies is a genuinely comprehensive resource worth having on your shelf.

Try this

To help you remember more to write your memoir, try this: Pick one year from the period you’re writing about. Find one artifact from it—a photo, a report card, a newspaper headline—and write for ten minutes about what it brings back, even if it’s not the “important” memory you thought you’d write about.

You may be surprised what shows up on the page once you give your memory something to hold onto.

You can write your memoir!

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Knowing how much you need to remember to write you memoir is part of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

There are plenty of memoirs out there competing for readers’ time and attention. Perhaps you worry that your story isn’t compelling enough to earn its place among them. But you don’t need a particularly dramatic life to write a memoir people want to read. Instead, dig deep, tell your truth about what you lived through as honestly as you can. Write a memoir people want to read because, beyond anything else, it tells them more about what it means to be human than they knew before they opened your book.

What Memoir Readers Want to Read

What really moves memoir readers, whether they’d put it this way or not, is a writer willing to tell them the truth of what something cost.  Someone who can convey how it felt before they knew how it would turn out.

You might be asking, “Why would anyone want to read my story?” You might say, “It’s really not interesting enough. Nothing truly tragic happened to me.” But maybe you have other fears riding beneath those thoughts. Maybe you sense that if you excavate enough of the truth of your story, you’ll see something clearly—perhaps too clearly. That you might not like what you discover. Or that someone you love will read what you wrote and feel betrayed by it.

This is the memoirist’s dilemma: Fears like these can mean you’re getting close to the parts of the story that matter most. And those are exactly the parts that move readers the most.

When you’re willing to go to those places, open those long-closed doors, you’re offering your reader a kind of generosity. You’re sharing a version of your life that includes parts you were unsure about, parts that took a long time to understand, parts you may still not fully understand.

And somehow that’s the version people trust. Not because it’s impressive, but because it’s true.

Which Memoirs Have Moved You?

It might help to think about which memoirs have meant the most to you. Which have changed you in some way? Stayed with you? Left you understanding something more about being human—about your own life—than you realized before.

That’s what honesty creates. It doesn’t only tell your story. It hands your reader something they can turn back toward their own life and see a little more clearly by.

These three memoirs carry the weight of truth beautifully.

• Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. Unsparing about his relationship with his mother, his body, and addiction, Laymon never smooths anything into a lesson before he’s actually earned it.
• Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. A mother-daughter memoir that stays inside the discomfort of their bond rather than resolving it neatly. Gornick creates a close, uncomfortable honesty rather than distance.
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Written about an abusive relationship, formally unusual, but every structural choice serves the same goal: getting at what the experience actually did to her, not just what happened.

Your Truth Is Why People Will Read Your Memoir

Some of the best memoir writing happens while you’re still figuring out what a thing meant. Your reader can feel when you’re finding your way through the meaning of your story, not just reporting its events. Writing like that will make your book feel alive—not just “finished.”

So if you’ve been holding back because you don’t think your life is dramatic enough, or resolved enough, or interesting enough, consider this: What makes a memoir worth reading isn’t drama. It’s about a writer trusting their reader with something real.

You already have that. It’s just a matter of putting it on the page.

Try this: Let a moment come to mind. Not necessarily the most impactful moment, just one you’ve been circling but may not have written yet. Ask yourself two questions: What did this cost me? And what did it teach me? That may be enough to open a door that’s been closed for a while.

And if you read this piece because someone else’s memoir has moved you, told you something about being human you hadn’t known how to say yourself, and you want to do the same? You already understand, better than any craft advice could teach you, exactly how to write a memoir people want to read.

You can write a memoir people want to read!

 I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.