Writer's Blog: Tips and Inspiration

As you’re working on your memoir, you’re probably focused on how to tell your story, right? What happened? Who was there? What did it all mean? But there are some non-literary facts that might help steer you toward success. Here are three (helpful) things about writing a memoir you might not know.

Writing a memoir? Did you know you can write more than one memoir?!

You’ve lived a big life—or a long one, or a complicated one. In any case, you don’t have to stuff all of it into a single memoir! Many memoirists write different books about different eras or aspects of their lives. For instance, Frank McCourt gave each chapter of his life its own book: his Irish childhood in Angela’s Ashes, his arrival in New York in ‘Tis, and his years in the classroom in Teacher Man. (And if you’re thinking you’ve left it too late, take heart. McCourt was sixty-six when his first book came out.)

Mary Karr has written three memoirs to date: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. Together they span Karr’s childhood, adolescence, and her very adult recovery experience. Karr has described herself as someone who “worries the bone of things over and over and over.” In her case, that “worrying” has created three beautiful books.

And then there’s Maya Angelou. Angelou wrote seven memoirs! She called them her “autobiographies.” They are:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gather Together in My Name
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
The Heart of a Woman
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
Mom & Me & Mom 

Keep this in mind the next time you’re concerned about leaving something out of your book. No facet of your life is irrevocably lost. You may just need to write another memoir to give it its place.

Writing a memoir? Did you know memoir sells like fiction?

A nonfiction book proposal is a promotional package for informational nonfiction. (“Informational nonfiction” refers to topics like self-help, business, wellness, science, history, politics, and biography.) The proposal provides agents and publishers an overview of the book, a promotion plan, and sample chapters. Writers of these types of nonfiction may garner a contract based on their proposal—well before the book exists.

Memoir is different. Most agents recommend you have a completed manuscript in hand before querying. Agents do vary in their preferences—and some may want a proposal in addition to your manuscript (or, on occasion, part of your manuscript). So it helps to familiarize yourself with book proposals and have a short one ready in case you’re asked for it.

Note: creating a book proposal can be a valuable exercise in itself. To write a proposal, you’ll need to be very clear about where your story fits in today’s market, how it compares to other memoirs, and how it might be marketed when the time comes. All of which will better prepare you for what comes after your final draft is done.

Writing a memoir? Did you know your publisher won’t protect you from a libel claim?

Many writers assume their publisher will stand behind them if someone objects to how they appear in the book. Your contract probably says otherwise. When you sign with a publishing house, you promise that your work doesn’t defame anyone or invade anyone’s privacy. You also agree to indemnify the publisher in the event of a lawsuit. (That means you cover your publisher’s legal costs if someone sues over your representation of them in your book.)

Of course, some publishers carry insurance. But literary attorney Robert Pimm points out that under the indemnity clause (the paragraph of your contract where you promise to pay the publisher’s costs and any damages if someone sues over your book), you can still be “on the hook for a million dollars” if the person suing wins.

So, how do you protect yourself in the first place? If what you wrote is true, you already have a strong defense against a libel claim. Also, most of those who file libel suits don’t end up winning, so there’s that. But privacy claims are separate from libel claims—and the truth won’t always protect you there.

When you’re writing a memoir, there’s a lot to know. In this as in so many cases, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Educate yourself. Hire a literary attorney to look over your manuscript and weigh in on how you portray people and institutions. And definitely don’t rely on your publisher to “CYA” if it needs “covering” at some point.  (For more on this, check out this post: “Should You Use Real Names When Writing a Memoir?”)

Want to know more? Here are some resources for you: 

• A Writer’s Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy by Amy Cook, in Writer’s Digest. It covers what memoir writers need to know about privacy, defamation, and the law.
• Legal and Ethical Issues in Memoir Writing, an interview with literary attorney Robert Pimm at the National Association of Memoir Writers. He discusses the warranty and indemnity clause in mainstream publishing contracts.
• 6 Signs You’re Ready to Query Literary Agents by writing coach Tiffany Hawk. She explains that a memoir submission can be a complete manuscript or a proposal with sample chapters, depending on the agent.

There are so many facets to writing a memoir—and so much to know! This article touches on just three things you might have missed the memo on. If you’d like to learn more, visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

You may have noticed that other people’s stories weave in and out of your own. Untangling what belongs to whom—and how to tell the most truthful version you can—is tricky. When you’re writing a memoir and someone else’s experience colors yours, you may find yourself asking, whose story is it, anyway?

The four examples below show some ways that others’ material can impact your story. But each asks you to decide how to integrate someone else’s experiences into your own.

When someone else’s story is more dramatic than your own

Sometimes, we hear a story we can’t forget. To digest it, we may need to write it down. But that doesn’t make it memoir. Or at least not our memoir. I once had a client—a charming, prolific writer of personal narratives—whose friend survived a mass shooting. She told him about the experience in harrowing detail. And my client, shaken by what he’d heard, went home and wrote it all down.

He sent it to me to review. And while the piece was written beautifully, it didn’t travel beyond the report of his friend’s ordeal. That the woman’s story emerged onto the page unchanged is actually a craft problem. My client hadn’t metabolized what he’d been told. Hadn’t made it his own.

If he’d taken more time with that story, he might have discovered how hearing it affected him—and that would have been the beginning of him making the story his own. Maybe he would have realized her story changed how he moved through a crowded room. Maybe it would have cracked something open in him about luck, or about how thin the membrane is between an ordinary day and catastrophe. Maybe it would have stayed with him for a year before he understood why he couldn’t stop thinking about it. That version—her story as the thing that happened to him, not the thing he reported—would have been memoir. His own.

When someone else’s story explains yours

Often, we want to write our story but find that the influence of another person has shaped much of what we want to tell. For instance, if our mother was difficult—cold, critical, and hard to please. That is definitely part of our story—and ours to write about.

But.

How much of her story do we let in? What about her upbringing, her losses? Should we include what made her who she was? It’s a hard call. If we include too little of what caused her to be cold, our own story may lack the depth that considering her life might imbue it with. Of course, if we add too much, our memoir may suddenly start seeming like her biography—with us as the narrator!

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments threads this particular needle skillfully. In her Attachments, Gornick’s mother’s story is included in service to Gornick’s telling of her own life—not separate from it. Structurally, Gornick presents her mother’s experiences during present-day walks the two of them take together. Through their arguments and discussions, readers learn enough of the mother’s history to understand her, while Gornick stays firmly at the center of the narrative.

When other people’s experiences enlarge your own

A friend of mine is working on a sociology PhD, and has chosen to write a dissertation that’s part memoir and part research project. My friend grew up in a Rust Belt town. After years away, she is going back to interview people who still live there, to see how the place shaped them and reflect on the way it shaped her.

Most memoir writers will never run a formal research project on their own behalf. But you might find that your own story would benefit from a wider lens. In that case, you might track down old newspaper coverage of events you lived through, to see how they looked through someone else’s eyes.

Or maybe, like my friend, you visit your hometown’s society, or seek out someone else who was there at a time meaningful to the story you’re writing. Maybe you talk with a former coworker or someone who survived the same flood or the same factory closing that affected you or your family.  You might find your story widens as you let what you found sit next to your own direct memories and felt experience.

When someone remembers your story differently

Sometimes the tangle you find yourself in more emotionally fraught. That can be the case when you find yourself in a disagreement about what actually happened. Then, there’s an issue about which version—yours? your sister’s?—gets to stand as “the” story. And that is a very delicate problem.

If you are facing a situation like this, you are definitely not alone. Just as one example, Tobias Wolff wrote This Boy’s Life about his childhood with a difficult stepfather. His brother, Geoffrey Wolff, wrote his own memoir, The Duke of Deception, about their father. While the accounts differed in some ways, they dealt with the same family and neither one erased the other.

But it’s unlikely that your own sibling (or whoever sees the events differently than you) is going to just solve the issue by writing their own version of the story.

Writing a memoir that contradicts someone else’s story

So what do you do?

• You could simply write your own true account as you lived and understood it. (Remember, memoir doesn’t mean this is the only account—only that it’s your honest account.)
• You might actually spell out the disparate memories directly on the page, by adding even just a single line that acknowledges what the other person remembers differently. (As with the example of the difficult mother, above, this approach can actually deepen your story because it allows the reader to clearly see that slippery memory itself is part of what the book is about.)
• You might even turn the disagreement into a topic in your story: not here’s what happened, but why do we remember it so differently. This can add dimension that neither version alone would provide.

Notice that none of these approaches requires resolving who’s right. Memoir isn’t a courtroom, and the version you write need only be the truest account of what you experienced to be valid.

Other ways to manage another’s story when writing your memoir

Of course, these four examples don’t exhaust the possibilities. Memoir writers find new ways to manage this tension all the time. Here are a few more:

• Compression. Sometimes someone you love lived a whole separate story alongside the one you’re telling. For instance, your sister won a Senate seat the year you fled to Amsterdam for safety. One way to include her story is to show it in snippets from the edges of your own crisis. You might include a headline you saw at the airport or the texts you sent from a series of parking lots while you were trying to find shelter. What you’ll be conveying is the sadness of a distance you didn’t choose.
• Backdrop. Sometimes, another person’s energy created an ongoing condition you lived inside. Your father’s years’-long illness, the family business failing across the landscape of your teens, a sibling’s addiction. In this case, that tension—and the person whose condition created it—is written as atmosphere, the water your own story swam in.
• Filling in what you don’t remember. Some parts of your own story happened before you can remember them. If family history affected your story, someone else’s story—a grandparent’s, for instance—may need to be included as you write your memoir, even though their story isn’t visible in your own.

Each of these, like the four examples above, starts from the same place: understanding that the story is yours—and the only real question is how much of someone else’s experience belongs inside it.

Writing a memoir and wondering whose story you’re actually telling? I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

When you write a memoir, you’re not writing as one person. You’re writing as two: who you were then and who you are now. In other words, you’re writing through the eyes both of the person who lived through the experience and the person looking back on it now. Both perspectives matter—and both belong on the page. The tension between those two “selves” is part of what makes memoir memoir, instead of just a record of events.

Writing a Memoir: The Two Selves at Work

Writers sometimes call these two voices the experiencing self and the narrating self. The experiencing self is you as you were in the moment. Were you confused? Hopeful? Scared? Whatever emotions you experienced, you had no way of knowing then how things would turn out. When you’re writing from the narrating self, on the other hand, you do know what happened and are telling the story with the benefit of hindsight.

Neither voice can really tell the whole story by itself. The experiencing self gives your memoir its immediacy. Those passages make your reader feel what you felt, moment by moment. The narrating self gives the events—that moment by moment—its meaning. Interestingly, the reason the events you’re writing about were important probably wasn’t evident at the time. Their meaning can only be understood—and shared—in retrospect.

A Name for These Two Voices

Memoirist Sue William Silverman gives each of these voices a name. She calls them Voice of Innocence and the Voice of Experience. The Voice of Innocence carries the raw, not-yet-understood emotions of the moment as they happened to you. The Voice of Experience is the older writer you’ve become looking back on those events and adding reflections your younger self couldn’t see at the time.

Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart offers an excellent example of the two voices telling Zauner’s story in tandem. The young Michelle we meet in the kitchen with her mother, absorbing Korean dishes and family history, is the Voice of Innocence. The adult narrator, the Voice of Experience, writing years after her mother’s death, layers grief and understanding onto those same kitchen scenes. Zauner shifts back and forth between the two voices as she weaves her moving narrative.

Remembering, Reporting, and Reflecting When Writing Your Memoir

Memoir actually asks you to do three separate things. You need to remember what happened. This includes recalling sensory details and the sequence of events. You also need to report those details clearly enough that your reader can follow along. And, finally, you need to reflect on what occurred. This is where your story stops being just a faithful record of “who, what, and where” of your experience and reveals the understanding of what it all meant.

Putting Both Voices on the Page

Like Michelle Zauner, in practice, you’ll often find that the two voices naturally weave together. You might be writing deep into a scene in the experiencing self’s voice, when your narrating self raises its hand. It has something to contribute that will make the moment you’re writing about richer with meaning than the reporting of events can deliver. This might be an association with something that happened years later or a pattern that is apparent now but was invisible at the time. You’ll naturally use phrases like looking back; I can see now; what I didn’t understand then; it would be years before I realized to signal the shift to the narrating voice or Voice of Experience.

An Illustrative Example

Here’s a quick example of the two voices at work to illuminate meaning.

The screen door slammed behind me. The porch boards were still warm from the afternoon sun. My father sat in the folding chair he always used, a glass of iced tea sweating in his hand. He was watching the field go gold at the edges. He didn’t look at me when I sat down—just kept his eyes on the field, and stayed quiet longer than he usually did. “Your grandfather used to say this land would outlast all of us,” he said finally. I picked at a splinter on the railing and watched a hawk circle over the far tree line. 

I didn’t know, that evening on the porch, that he’d already decided to sell. That the quiet, and the line about outlasting us, was as close as he could get to telling me. It would be years before I understood that his silence that night was grief, already underway, for something I didn’t yet know was being lost.

Try This

Take one scene from your manuscript. Write it twice: once, from fully inside the experiencing self, with no hindsight allowed. Then write a short passage in the narrating self’s voice, reflecting on that same scene from where you stand now. Notice what each version gives you that the other can’t.

Writing a memoir and wondering how to integrate who you were with who you are now? I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

Writing the end of your memoir is inherently awkward. Your story needs to come to a conclusion, but your life just keeps on going. Maybe you’ve finally gotten to the last chapters of your memoir (congrats!). You’ve done your research, written the painful scenes, created a sturdy narrative structure—and now you’ve hit a wall. That makes sense. Your real life is unlikely to hand you a tidy resolution. But somehow, you’ve got to figure out how to end your memoir, anyway!

Writing the end to your memoir is (usually) not quite the same as finding resolution in your life

So, yes. Your memoir does need “narrative closure”—a conclusive arc. But that doesn’t mean that you need to have gotten closure in real life.

Narrative closure can be subjective. It’s your call to make. When they read your story, narrative closure will make readers feel they’ve arrived somewhere different than where they started. Emotionally. Psychologically. You may have shown you’ve changed in some substantive way. Or that you’ve understood something better. Whatever the external circumstances, you’ve demonstrated growth through the pages of your book. Even if the issue itself hasn’t been completely resolved.

Real-life closure, on the other hand, means you’ve objectively ended or resolved the situation. For instance, your divorce is final, your treatment is behind you, or the new life you longed for is underway.

The good news? You don’t need real life to validate your inner experience. Your own sea change is likely enough to satisfy readers deeply.

Writing about what you’re still processing

Sometimes, writing while we’re in the midst of things can help us process what’s swirling around us. When you’re shaping your experience into a story, though, this approach can feel complicated. If you’re working through trauma or an unresolved relationship you might be concerned that you won’t be able to write the ending. Or at least not now.

In such a case, reframing your task as a memoirist can help. Remind yourself that you’re not writing toward an objectively concluded outcome. You may not be able to do that. But what you can do is write toward some level of subjective understanding that you can share with your readers. Relieve yourself of the expectation that your ending has to say: Here’s how it turned out. Instead, congratulate yourself on being able to say: Here’s what I understand now, at this point in my life, looking back at this part of it.

That’s more than legitimate. It’s honest and likely to land with readers—who are also living complicated lives.

How one author wrote an inconclusive end to his memoir

David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy is a good example of this. In it, Sheff writes about his son’s addiction. The memoir doesn’t end with his son’s recovery or with the healing of their relationship. Why? Because neither of those things had happened by the time he finished his book. Instead, Sheff brings his readers with him, to the understanding that he couldn’t fix his son. That he had to change the way he loved him. That’s the ending. It tells the truth as Sheff lived it. And it doesn’t pretend to have answers he didn’t have.

If you’re sitting with something unresolved, ask yourself what you understand today that you didn’t understand prior to the experience unfolding. That shift in understanding may be exactly the ending your book needs. Even if the situation itself is still unfolding.

When Your Memoir Has a Built-In Ending

Some memoirs are written about something that has an obvious end point—a particular time in your life, a specific undertaking, or a relationship that completed its story. Any experience that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. When that’s the type of story you’re telling, your ending will be straightforward—even if it wasn’t easy to live.

Patti Smith’s Just Kids is one beautiful/painful instance of this type of memoir. In it, Smith explores her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and the story ends with his death. Smith’s own life didn’t end there—she has kept living and making art into the present day.

Patti Smith has written three more memoirs since Just Kids: M Train (2015), Year of the Monkey (2019), and Bread of Angels (2025). She’s had a big life and has a lot of story to share. Still, she allowed herself to let Just Kids come to an end with the conclusion of that particular chapter in her life—rather than trying to carry that narrative thread forward into everything that came after.

If your material has that kind of clarity about where it ends, you’re not obligated to follow the story past that point just because your life kept going. That’s what a next book is for.

Finding Your Own Ending

Maybe your story has a natural ending. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, here’s a way to test it. Write one sentence that fills in this blank: By the end of this experience, I understood … Not necessarily I resolved … or I fixed … Just, I understood. Whatever you fill in that blank with is probably the ending you’ve been wondering about—whether your life outside the pages has wrapped up tidily or not.

If you have questions about how to end your memoir, to start it, or how to keep going in the murky middle, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

Folks aren’t always sure of the difference between a memoir and a novel. After all, they’re both stories about people. And they share a lot of the same ways of telling a story. For instance, both a memoir and a novel have characters, action, dialogue, and description. But they are based on two very different premises. A memoir is nonfiction. It’s a true story, told by the person who lived it. A novel is fiction, a made-up story. Its characters and events are (usually) entirely invented. So, should you write a memoir, or a novel?

The answer may not be as clear-cut as you might imagine!

What Is a Memoir?

Memoir belongs to a category called narrative nonfiction. General nonfiction (or non-narrative nonfiction), like how-to books or self-help books, present information. By contrast, narrative nonfiction is built like a story, with scenes, tension, and character development. So, a memoir isn’t just true. It’s true, it’s book length, and it’s got an engaging narrative arc.

For instance, Paula McLain’s Like Family is a true account of McLain and her sisters growing up in foster homes. In it, she uses her real name and real memories to convey what happened to her and her siblings during those years. But it reads like a story, not like an exposé of the foster system.

What Is a Novel?

A novel is a book-length, made-up story. Its characters and events are invented (for the most part; historical fiction blurs that line a bit). It doesn’t have to come from your life at all. It can, but nothing requires it. In fact, most novels are completely fabricated. Paula McLain also wrote A Ticket to Ride. This entirely invented coming-of-age story about a teenage girl and her cousin has no basis in McLain’s own history.

Memoir or a Novel? Three Paths for Writing About Your Life

If you want to write about your own life, you actually have three options, not two.

1. Write a memoir.
You tell your true story, using your own name, bound to what actually happened. This means being accountable to your memory, to the facts you can verify, and often to the people who were there with you. McLain’s Like Family is this path — nothing invented, nothing softened for the story’s sake.

2. Write a novel based on your life.
You can use your own experience as raw material, then let yourself invent freely. Paula McLain did this with her novel When the Stars Go Dark. Stars is a novel about a missing-persons detective, Anna Hart. While Hart is entirely McLain’s invention, McLain has said she poured her own foster-care history and trauma into Anna. It’s fiction, shelved and read as fiction, but it emerged from something true.

3. Fictionalize your memoir.
This is the middle ground. You can stay close to the true story, but where a gap in your memory calls for it, you can reshape scenes and even combine people—as long as you tell readers you’ve done it! Augusten Burroughs took this approach in Dry, which is shelved as memoir. Dry opens with Burroughs’s author’s note, which explains that he’d changed names, combined some characters, and compressed or recreated scenes, to convey the narrative effect he wanted.

So, Should You Write a Memoir or a Novel?

I wrote an entire post about the levels of invention available to memoir writers. You can read it here: “When to Fictionalize Your Memoir.” Basically, if you feel confident about the factual aspects of your story, writing a straight memoir might be a good choice for you. On the other hand, if you want to invent characters and/or situations while tracking significant parts of your experience closely, a novel based on your life gives you the freedom to do exactly that. If you want to tell your story to the best of your memory, though, but your memory has significant gaps, fictionalizing your memoir might be a perfect middle road.

None of these paths is more legitimate than the others. The only real question is which one lets you tell the story you actually need to tell.

If you have questions about whether you should write a memoir or a novel—or any other aspects of the writing process—I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

If you’re have questions about how much research a memoir needs—or any other aspects of the memoir-writing process—I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

As a memoir writer, you might think that all the material you need is just waiting in your memory. Sure, novelists dig through archives and interview experts. But memoir writers? How much research does a memoir really need? It’s a fair question—with at least some clear-cut answers.

For most of us, memory isn’t a direct record of events. It’s more of a reconstruction. And we subtly rebuild our memories a little differently each time we revisit them. Research can close the gap between what we “remember” and what actually happened. Or at least get us closer to fact.

What Kind of Research Does Your Memoir Need?

Start with the basics: dates and timelines. If your story spans a decade, make sure you have the order of events right. Weirdly, our minds love to compress and reorder situations.

As for setting, get the details of the town, the house, the school as they were then. If you’re describing a building that’s since been torn down or a street that’s been renamed, a quick search or glance at an old map can save you from an anachronism that a sharp-eyed reader will catch.

Of course, you want to make sure you have the facts about other people in your memoir right, too. Interview those you can to see how their memories align or differ from yours. For instance, when did your father leave his job at the factory? How did the move to the city affect your siblings? What was the actual story beneath the gossip that hounded a teacher out of their position?

When Memories Conflict

Sometimes your research will turn up a version of events that doesn’t match your memory. A sibling remembers the fight happening at Thanksgiving; you remember it at Christmas. A discovered note contradicts the story you’ve told yourself for twenty years.

You don’t have to resolve every discrepancy in favor of “accuracy.” Your memoir is your account of events. It’s inherent in the notion of memoir that your story will be filtered through your own perspective.

But, if you can’t verify something, or if your memory does conflict with someone else’s, say so on the page: as I remember it; my brother tells it differently. That kind of honesty builds trust with your reader.

Others’ memories may be no more reliable than our own. But, still, they can provide a valuable source to cross-reference as we aim closer to the truth.

Research Letters, Photos, and Journals for Your Memoir

If you have access to letters, photographs, or journals from the period you’re writing about, that’s great! Artifacts like those provide a rich vein to mine. A journal entry might reveal that you weren’t nearly as certain, or as angry, or as calm as you remember being. A photograph might remind you of someone else who was present at a particularly impactful moment.

In addition to helping you verify facts, objects like these can remind you of details and “color” you may have otherwise forgotten.

Research historical or cultural context—the popular music of the time, the news of the day, even the price of eggs, as well. These details can help you truly anchor a scene in an actual moment, giving your reader a sharper experience of being there.

The Over-Research Trap

On the other hand (because there’s always an other hand): research can become a very good way to avoid writing.

It’s easy to tell yourself you need one more archive search, one more phone call to a relative, one more afternoon with old photo albums before you can dive into your first draft. While some research is important, it can be a stall—a comfortable, productive-feeling way to stay in preparation mode instead of facing the page head-on.

Rule of thumb: Your research should serve the writing, not replace it. If you notice you’re a month into “just checking a few facts” and haven’t opened your manuscript, that’s worth noting. Researching on a need-to-know basis might be the solution. Look up what you need for one scene, then write the scene.

We can’t rewrite time we spend not writing.

You Know … Moderation in All Things 

At some point, you have to close the archive and open the manuscript. Research can go on indefinitely—there’s always one more letter to find, one more relative to call. But your story isn’t in the research. It’s inside you, in what you lived, how those events changed you. And, importantly, in what you do with all of that once you sit down to write. Do the digging your story actually needs, then trust yourself to write it.

If you’re have questions about how much research a memoir needs—or any other aspects of the memoir-writing process—I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

I’ve fielded many questions about memoir writing over the years. In this post, I’ve assembled the most common questions I hear from memoir writers. Read on to get answers and additional resources to explore.

Getting Started

Is my life interesting enough to write a memoir? Almost certainly, yes! But maybe not for the reason you think. You don’t need to have lived a particularly eventful life to write a compelling memoir. Readers very often look to memoirs to find a truthful exploration of the types of events they themselves may have lived through.

This could include divorce, a difficult medical diagnosis, a tough childhood, or a grievous loss. If you can name what you learned or how you changed because of your experiences, you have enough to start writing.
Read more: Is Your Life Interesting Enough to Write a Memoir?

I’ve journaled for years. Is that enough to start a book? Journaling is great. Reviewing years of journal entries can garner you wonderful raw material to develop into your memoir. But transcribing even the most meticulously kept of journals is unlikely to net you a completed manuscript.

In a journal, you’re recording what happened as you lived it, in the moment, usually without having time to reflect on what it meant. When you write a memoir, you may be dealing with exactly what you’ve journaled for years. But in that memoir version, you’ll be looking back on those events to find the ways in which you changed because of them.
Read more: How to Turn Your Journals Into a Memoir

Am I Ready to Write My Memoir?

How do I know when I’m ready to write about something painful? Can you write about it? In full sentences? Complete scenes?  That may be the best test. If putting your experience into words spirals you back into pain too deep to write your way out of, give it more time.

While writing about the painful times in our lives can definitely help us on the road to healing. But it’s not therapy on its own. If you’re not ready to share your experience, try writing about it for yourself, first. Take your time. Natalie Goldberg talks about how we may need to return again and again to aspects of our lives before we have explored them enough to share them publicly.

For now, ask yourself if you can look steadily enough at your experience to shape it into a narrative. Can you find the personal arc you underwent from living through the pain? If so, you’re ready.
Read more: Is Writing a Memoir Therapeutic? 

Truth, Privacy, and Other People

Do I have to use real names? No. You can change names, combine minor characters (called composite characters), or refer to people by their role (“my sister,” “the doctor”) instead of by name. What you can’t do is change what happened. The events need to stay true. The names you use as you describe the events can be changed.
Read more: Should You Use Real Names When Writing a Memoir

What if my family doesn’t want me to write this? This is a hard one. Your story includes other people. Even if your family (or former employer, coach, or friend group) doesn’t want you to “air your dirty laundry” (because they’re worried about how it’s going to make them look), ultimately, it’s not up to them.

What can you do? Write with honesty rather than to settle a score. Be clear in your memoir that these are your memories, not a definitive record. Change identifying details. Or, finally, you might wait until a family member or other person has passed.

Am I allowed to write about events I don’t remember perfectly? Yes. Memory is not a courtroom transcript. Most memoir writers include an author’s note acknowledging that the dialogue and some details are reconstructed to the best of their memory. Readers understand this. They’re looking to you for emotional honesty, not forensic accuracy.

Memoir Writing Questions About Craft Basics

Does a memoir have to be told in order? Not at all. Chronological order is one option, but plenty of memoirs open at a moment of high tension and circle back, or braid two timelines together, or organize around a recurring object or place rather than a strict timeline. The right structure is whichever one serves the narrative you’re telling — not a rule you have to follow.
Read more: Should You Write Your Memoir in Chronological Order?

How much of my life should I include? This is one of the most common memoir writing questions. And the answer is: probably less than you think. An autobiography covers your whole life, roughly in order, and aims to be complete. In your memoir, you are either focusing on one aspect of your life: a theme, a period, a relationship. (Your grandmother’s legacy, for example, or the year you spent on an archeology dig.)

Autobiography asks “what happened.” Memoir asks “what did it mean.” If something isn’t directly relevant to your memoir topic, theme, or time period, but still feels like information the reader requires, share it on a need-to-know basis.
Read more: The Difference Between Memoir and Autobiography

Questions About Publishing Your Memoir

Do I need an agent to publish a memoir? For a traditional publishing deal with a major press, yes. Most major publishers only consider manuscripts submitted by literary agents. But traditional publishing isn’t the only path. Small presses don’t require an agent. And neither does self-publishing. Each of these options comes with its own tradeoffs in control, cost, and reach.

What if I never want to publish it? Should I still write it? Yes. Writing a memoir and publishing it are two separate decisions. Some writers complete a manuscript and then, for a variety of reasons, decide not to publish. So, why bother? The process of clarifying and making meaning of your story by putting it into language may be deeply worthwhile, whether or not another person ever reads it.
Read more: Why You Shouldn’t Write a Memoir

How long does it usually take to write a memoir? Longer than you’d like, and that’s normal. Most memoir writers spend several years on a full draft, often more if the material is emotionally difficult. It’s a process, and a potentially deep one.

Do You Have More Memoir Writing Questions?

Of course, these questions are just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to keep exploring from there, here are a few resources to consider:

• Memoir Writing for Dummies—a solid, comprehensive craft book if you want the fundamentals laid out in full.
• The National Association of Memoir Writers (NAMW)—a community of memoir writers offering ongoing support, not just a one-time answer.
• The Memoir Nation podcast, hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner—episode-based, so you can go straight to whichever topic you’d like to learn more about.

Memoir writing questions arise—and can be answered—in the process of writing your story. If you’re writing your memoir and have questions, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

Some of the most powerful memoirs ever written aren’t about a marriage, a childhood, or a career. They’re about a dog. Or a horse. Or a cat who showed up on a porch one winter and never left. If you’ve been wanting to write a memoir about your pet, you’re in good company.

There are wonderful memoirs available that focus on the writer’s relationship with an animal companion. Here are just a few:

• H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, is a memoir about grief and how a goshawk helped Macdonald heal.
• Alex & Me, by Irene Pepperberg, is the story of Pepperberg’s decades-long partnership with an African grey parrot who could talk.
• Wesley the Owl, by Stacey O’Brien, follows O’Brien’s relationship with a barn owl she raised and lived with for nineteen years.
• Enslaved by Ducks, by Bob Tarte, tells of a household slowly overtaken by rescued birds and other animals.

Writing a Memoir About Your Pet Can Be a Depth Charge

When we write a pet memoir, we aren’t really writing about the animal—or not entirely. Like any other compelling memoir, a pet memoir is about the relationship. In this case, the one you had with your animal. The joys and sorrows they brought. What they taught you. How you changed because of them.

A dog’s long illness can help us understand more about our own mortality. Earning a rescue horse’s trust can awaken our ability to trust more deeply. These are the types of understandings—internal arcs—we bring to writing a memoir about our pets.

It can be tempting to want to write just the positive, the obvious: “She was the best cat in the world” or “He loved me unconditionally.” While these things are undoubtedly true, mining the deeper truths will gain you the gold that lives beneath the surface of your good dog’s life. And that is what makes the story you and your pet lived worth reading for those who didn’t know them.

Avoid Sentimentality When Writing a Memoir About Your Pet

Pet memoir can be hard to write well. Why? Because it can so easily slide into sentimentality, asking for an emotional response the story hasn’t fully earned. Your readers are likely to be animal lovers. That means they show up to your story primed to sympathize. But if the writing leans too heavily on that built-in goodwill, instead of specific, honest storytelling, the emotions can start to feel manipulative. Then the book will feel thin even to readers who love animals.

Try as often as you can to offer your reader specificity, rather than declarations. In other words, “show, don’t tell.” So, instead of telling your reader that the bond you had with your pet was “special,” show exactly what that looked like.

Write scenes of having conversations with your pup in the car. Or of times when your cat (horse, rabbit, goat …) insisted on “helping” with a project that would have been finished in half the time without their “support.”

And then, of course, there are the tough moments. The day she didn’t come to the door. The new wobble when he walked. The vet visit you didn’t see coming. Concrete, particular experiences—positive or otherwise—carry emotional weight in ways that abstractions like “smart,” “funny,” or “loyal” just can’t.

Capturing Your Pet’s Personality on the Pages of Your Memoir

Personality is where a pet memoir gets to be funny, warm, and alive—not just meaningful. To get their personality on the page, make lists of the odd, specific stuff they’d do. The food she’d refuse to eat unless it came from your hand. The spot on the couch he defended like it was his job. The pitch of the bark that meant “someone’s at the door” versus the one that meant “I’m bored and it’s your fault.”

Anne Kaier, author of the memoir Home With Henry, suggests going through old photos to notice your pet’s typical poses. This will help you remember their small, repeated gestures, which make a character feel specific rather than generic.

These are the same tools a novelist uses to build a human character—habits, contradictions, comic timing. They work just as well to help us share our four-legged (or winged) ones with our readers. John Grogan relies on exactly this kind of detail in Marley & Me to make us fall in love with his dog Marley.

Deciding How Big the Story Is

Not every pet story needs to be a full-length book. Some are best as a single chapter inside a larger memoir. Your relationship with your red hen may have been one relationship among many that shaped your childhood. But some animals in our lives definitely need a book of their own. Those are the ones whose story runs alongside our own transformative experiences. For instance, how helping an abused dog heal helped us survive the first year after losing a partner

Real Examples Worth Studying

Mark Doty’s Dog Years uses two dogs as a way into a memoir about grief and the AIDS crisis. The animals matter, but the book is doing larger work through them. Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door stays close to one dog’s life, using it to explore questions about freedom and companionship.

In both books, the dogs are not the subject—or not entirely. Instead, these two authors use their dogs’ presence to approach something broader. Whether it’s grief, or freedom, or what it means to belong to another creature, the dogs in these stories carry readers to the deeper meaning the writers are aiming for.

Try This

Think back over the animals who have shared your life. What would it mean to write about one of them? Not just remember them, but honor what they gave you by putting it into words someone else could read?

Then try this: write a page describing your pet as a full character—the way they moved, what they wanted, the quirks that only you know about. When you’re done, write a second page, this page as if your pet were describing you—your habits, your moods, your quirks.

Sometimes the truest thing you can write about a relationship comes out sideways, through someone else’s eyes—even when that someone else has four legs.

Writing a memoir about your pet can be a wonderful tribute and make a powerful story. If you’re ready to write a memoir about your pet, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

If you’re considering writing your memoir, you may be worried how other people—family members, the public, folks from your past—will react. That’s a reasonable worry! On the other hand, someone in your life may be encouraging you to just “go for it.” “Write your truth,” they might say. “Don’t hold back. The world needs your story.” Of course, they’re not the one taking the risk. As many memoir writers will tell you, your concerns are well-founded. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write your memoir. It just means you should be aware of the liabilities you could face if you publish your memoir.

Publishing a memoir is a mixed bag. While publishing your story lets you take charge of your own narrative, it can carry legal risk. When you write about real people, you expose yourself to possible claims of defamation or invasion of privacy, even when everything you’ve written is true. You also put yourself at emotional risk because, once your story is public, so is your reputation. And then there are the relational risks. Those closest to you may feel exposed or even betrayed by their treatment in your memoir, whether or not that was your intention.

But these aren’t reasons you shouldn’t write a memoir. They’re reasons for you to consider, once your memoir is written, whether you should publish it.

How Writing and Publishing Are Different

It can be helpful to separate the decision to write your memoir from the decision to publish it. And you don’t have to make those decisions at the same time. You can complete your manuscript, sit with it, and eventually decide it was never meant for anyone else’s eyes. That’s not failure. That’s one legitimate ending to the process.

Almost everything that’s risky about memoir—the potential legal exposure, the public judgment, the strain on relationships—only comes into effect once your book is published. Almost none of it gets stirred up by the writing of your story.

The Benefits of Writing a Memoir—Published or Not

• Understanding: When you put your experience into writing, you may uncover a deeper understanding of what actually happened and what it ultimately meant.
• Ownership: You regain authority over your own story when you take the time to write it out fully.
• Process without exposure: The writing process itself will invite you to be completely honest about how the events and outcome unfolded. And that honest writing carries none of the risk that comes with publication.
• A record for yourself: As the archeologist of your own past, your memories become true artifacts of your life when you have them in writing.
• Completion: We don’t always get the closure we long for. But telling your own version of your story, even if it’s only for your eyes, can bring you a sense of completion, whether anyone else ever provides that elusive “closure” you may wish for.

The Risks of Publishing a Memoir

• Legal risk: Claims of defamation or invasion of privacy are possible, even when everything you’ve written is true.
• Loss of privacy: Details of your life become permanently public and searchable.
• Loss of control over your own narrative: Once you publish your story, you aren’t able to manage how it’s read, quoted, or discussed.
• Damage to relationships: People who recognize themselves in your book may respond in ways you can’t predict. They may become hurt or angry—while some may just quietly pull away.
• Risk to family members: The people in your story—whether or not they agreed to be included—can be exposed in ways that they didn’t anticipate.
• Public judgment: Readers, reviewers, and strangers online get to form and share opinions about who you are.

If you’re weighing how to handle the real people in your story—names, composites, how recognizable is too recognizable—I’ve written more on that here.

What Tara Westover Learned About Publishing a Memoir

Tara Westover, author of Educated, reached out to nearly everyone named in her book before it published. She wanted to make sure they were at peace with how they were portrayed. (With the exception of those family members from whom she was already estranged.) Despite her best efforts, though, her parents publicly disputed her account. In fact, Westover’s mother later published a competing version of the family story.

That’s not to say Westover (or you) shouldn’t have published her memoir. It’s just one example of how combustible a published memoir can be. Even a writer who tried to tread carefully couldn’t fully control the responses she received.

Like Kimberly Dawn Rempel, You Can Write Your Memoir and Keep It Private

Not everyone who writes a memoir ends up publishing it. Writer Kimberly Dawn Rempel spent years wrestling with a memoir she ultimately chose to keep private. She felt so much of her story was tangled up with the lives of people who hadn’t chosen to be written about that she decided against publishing it—even under a pseudonym. Still, she said that finishing the book was, for her, one of the most important things she’d ever done for herself.

After You Write Your Memoir (But Before You Publish)

Memoirist Cate Macabe wrote an article titled “Writing the Memoir: Consider the Consequences.” In it, she frames the decision around three questions. Editor and publisher Brooke Warner, in How Not to Get Sued for Your Memoir, adds a fourth. Consider these questions for yourself.

• Are you ready to open the door on your own secrets, and let others truly know you?
• Is telling this story worth what it might cost your relationships with the people in it?
• Have you thought through the legal risk—defamation, invasion of privacy—not just the emotional one?
• What do you stand to lose by publishing, and are you ready to face that?

Sometimes, we write a memoir because we want to be seen, understood, validated. We want to be acknowledged for what we’ve survived. Yes. Yes. But unfortunately, publication doesn’t guarantee either acknowledgment or validation. What we may get instead are the slings and arrows of criticism. Misreading of our intent. Silence from people we hoped would understand us.

So, no, publishing our book can’t promise us acceptance or closure or peace. But writing it? That very well might.

Should you write your memoir? That could be a powerful choice. The decision to publish can come later. If you’re ready to write your story, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.