Writing Dialogue for Memoir

Most of us run into the same problem sooner or later: writing dialogue for our memoir when we can’t remember exactly what we said.

We might be writing a scene in which we’re talking to our best friend at midnight. Or one about a call from our doctor delivering unexpected news. We may have replayed the moment a hundred times in our head. But when we try to remember the exact words that were spoken, we come up empty-handed.

Writing Dialogue from (Incomplete) Memory

It’s part of the memoirist’s craft: writing dialogue from incomplete memory and turning it into something truthful. Without pretending we somehow have a transcript of the conversation.

Writing Dialogue for Memoir Without Notes

It helps to set aside the idea that the dialogue in our memoir is a precise record of what was said. It’s closer to a portrait: accurate in spirit, but the brushstrokes are our own. Memoir teacher Rachael Herron talks about trying to match what she calls the “room tone” of a memory. She says we may not remember the exact words, but if we can be confident about the emotional register of the moment, that’s what should govern the scene.

From there, Herron offers a useful gut check for the dialogue itself. If we know someone well—their syntax, their diction, their particular phrasing—she says, “You get to recreate it IF you can be 80 percent” certain they would have said it that way.

Jeannette Walls leaned into that approach in her memoir The Glass Castle. In it, Walls includes dialogue from a childhood decades in her rearview mirror. She wasn’t quoting a recording. She was portraying people she knew so well that their voices had become part of how she remembered them.

A Few Ways In When Writing Dialogue for Memoir

Here are a few ways to recreate dialogue that you don’t remember word for word.

Report, don’t quote. You don’t need to quote your friend exactly. You can report the gist of what she said: “She told me, kindly, it was time to let the house go.”

Quote the line that matters most. Sometimes, a single sentence embeds itself in our memory. If, out of an entire discussion, you remember just the one sentence that turned the tide, go ahead and quote it. Don’t worry about citing the other twenty minutes of back-and-forth.

Let the physical details convey the moment. A held breath, a hand on a doorframe, the shift in someone’s gaze. These can do as much as dialogue, sometimes more, when memory won’t give you anything to quote.

When Re-creation Slips into Fabrication

Of course, there’s a line between rebuilding dialogue and creating it out of whole cloth. Recreating dialogue—in the spirit of what was said, from a person you knew intimately—is standard memoir craft. Inventing a conversation that never happened, or putting words in someone’s mouth to make your own position look better, is not.

Creative nonfiction teacher Melanie Faith draws the line this way: some compression or restructuring of a conversation is fine as long as the gist stays true, literally or emotionally. But making things up crosses into fiction.

Always ask yourself whether your approach to a particular passage of dialogue honors the truth of the moment and the people involved. Avoid stretching too far because it’s convenient.

Telling Your Reader What You’ve Done

Once you’ve accepted that recreation is legitimate, how do you let the reader know? Write them a note—an author’s note! Usually placed just after the title page or at the very end of the book, your note doesn’t need to be more than a sentence or two. You might say something like “Dialogue in this book has been recreated from memory to the best of my ability.”

That simple disclosure sets your readers’ expectations and gives you some creative license.

Quoting the Living and the Deceased

If the person you’re writing about is still alive, they can argue with your memory. Since it’s probably better to have that discussion before publication than after, if you can, call and ask them whether you’ve remembered their words correctly.

On the other hand, if the person you’re quoting—or whose dialogue you’re recreating—has passed on, it’s like you’re keeping their voice alive on the page. And that becomes more of a responsibility in some ways.

Try This

Pick one conversation you remember well, one that still feels alive to you. Write it two ways. First, paraphrase it: Report to the reader what was said and how it impacted you, without quoting any of it. Next, write the same conversation as a full scene, reconstructing the dialogue.

Which version serves the moment you want to write about better? No single approach will work in every case. But having several ways to deliver dialogue can make you more confident when facing the inevitable gaps in your own memory.