IN NO PLACE LIKE HOME: A Memoir in 39 Apartments, author Brooke Berman
—who struggled both as a playwright and as a room-renter, sub-letter, and couch-surfer—figured out how to organize her memoir quite cleverly. 39 Apartments shapes her story around the 39 spaces in which she lived during her early New-York-City years. Brilliant!
But if we haven’t occupied 39 places? What imaginative boxes could we use to divvy up and examine our lives? How about 39 cats? 12 breakups? 7 toaster ovens? 100 trips to IKEA? 17 head shots? 10,000 journal entries? 99 bottles of beer on the wall?
Find an Organizing Principle for Your Memoir
One of the biggest challenges of writing a memoir is deciding how to organize all that material you’ve accumulated simply by living your life. After all, your life doesn’t come neatly divided into chapters, complete with beginnings, middles, and satisfying endings.
And who says a memoir has to proceed chronologically, anyway?
An imaginative organizing principle can help you discover connections among experiences that might otherwise seem unrelated. Instead of beginning with your earliest memory and marching dutifully forward through the years, you might arrange your story around the houses you’ve lived in, the jobs you’ve held, the friendships you’ve made, or even the objects you’ve collected.
Each becomes a doorway into a different period of your life.
The trick is choosing an organizing principle that does more than provide a clever structure. Ideally, it should reveal something meaningful about the story you’re trying to tell.
For example, a memoir organized around a series of homes might explore belonging, independence, or the search for stability. A memoir built around relationships might reveal changing ideas about love, loyalty, or identity.
And sometimes the structure itself can help you discover what your memoir is really about.
That’s part of the fun of experimenting with unconventional approaches to memoir writing. You may begin with what seems like a quirky list and discover that you’ve stumbled upon the perfect way to tell your story!
How to Organize Your Memoir?
Make your own list! What organizing principle would best serve your memoir?
Finding an organizing principle for your memoir can transform a collection of memories into a compelling story. If you’re struggling to structure your experiences into a book, 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.
