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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.

Wondering what a memoir writing coach actually does—and whether you need one? If you’ve started poking around for help with your memoir, you’ve probably run into the word “coach” somewhere along the way—as well as “editor,” “ghostwriter,” and “critique group.” It’s not always clear what separates them, or which one you actually need. If you’ve ever typed “what does a memoir coach do?” into a search bar hoping for a straight answer, this post is for you.

Ghostwriter, Editor, Critique Group, or Memoir Writing Coach—Which One Do You Need?

A ghostwriter writes your book for you, based on your material. They’ll interview you to understand the important moments of your story and the nuances that matter. But the voice on the page is theirs, built to sound like yours. A ghostwriter, while the most expensive of these options, is worthwhile if you want your story out in the world, but don’t have the time, energy, or skills to write it yourself.

Different from a ghostwriter, an editor works with what you’ve already gotten on the page. Their one-time services might include an overview (called a developmental edit), in which they track larger issues with your manuscript. Or you might hire them to do a line edit or copy edit. Both of these include tightening sentences, catching grammatical errors, and flagging inconsistencies.

A critique group offers ongoing community, accountability, and feedback. Made up of your writing peers, your critique group will support you as you work through the draft you’ll eventually give to an editor to fine tune. Taken together, the group’s opinions can give you a solid sense of how your work is progressing. Of course, if those opinions are too varied, it can be hard to know which to take onboard.

Coaching

A memoir writing coach shows up early in your memoir-writing process. They will stay the course with you, sharing resources and professional input. As a first step, your coach might help you determine the most pivotal aspect of your story: the change mechanism. Once you’re clear on that, they’ll suggest ways to structure the events related to that mechanism.

In addition to foundational input, a coach also offers accountability. They’ll provide early responses to your pages as you write—and guidance on all matters book-related. A coaching relationship is an ongoing conversation about your work: about structure, character, pacing, organization, theme, focus, motivation, and the hundred other choices that will shape your book over time.

In practice, that often looks like reading pages together, talking through what’s working and what still feels murky, and figuring out what to tackle next.

Do You Need a Coach—Or Just a Deadline?

If you know your story and know how you want to tell it, you may not need any of the above! Just someone to keep you honest about your commitment. A deadline and a friend who checks in regularly might be enough.

But if you find yourself mired midway through your draft, circling the same handful of chapters in an attempt to say something that you can’t quite put your finger on, you might benefit from a few coaching sessions. Sometimes, a (professional) outside perspective can get you back in the game.

A Memoir Coach Might Be a Good Fit If …

• You know you’re ready to tell your story. But every time you start to write it, you get stalled out before the midpoint.
• You know what happened, but aren’t sure how to say what those events mean.
• You’re willing to be honest on the page, but could use guidance about how much to reveal and about whom.
• You’d rather have company on this than write in isolation for the next two years.
• You’re done waiting for the right time to start—but aren’t sure how to start.

Remember, whether you hire a ghostwriter or editor, join a critique group, or engage a coach, you can write your memoir. And you don’t have to figure it out alone.

I work with memoir writers in all subgenres and at all stages of the process. If you’re wondering if you’re ready to write your story—or have already begun!—I can help you start (or finish) your book. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also like to take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

If your life were a movie, what genre would it be? A tearjerker? A dark comedy? A mystery where you discover what actually happened to your family? Memoir is already its own genre, of course. But most memoirs also belong to a recognizable subgenre. They tell stories about coming-of-age, comic (or tragic) romance, or addiction and recovery. Once you identify your subgenre, it becomes easier to decide what belongs in your book and what doesn’t. It also makes it easier to describe your story to others. So, what type of memoir are you writing?

Agents and editors think in terms of genre. A query letter that says “this is a redemption story” or “this is a family saga” tells them instantly what shelf your book belongs on and who its intended audience is. A reader searching for a grief memoir is looking for a different experience than someone searching for a sports memoir.

Subgenres to help you know what type of memoir you’re writing

Fall and return

Redemption stories are about a fall and a return. Something in your life breaks—marriage, career, your sense of who you are. Your story then details the work of rebuilding—your life, your relationships, your purpose. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is an example of a redemption story. After Strayed’s mother dies, Strayed spirals. She rebuilds herself, step by step, on her long trek up the Pacific Crest Trail. If this is your type of memoir, remember to include the hard parts. Setbacks matter as much to the reader as the return.

Addiction and recovery memoirs are close cousins of the redemption story. They follow the writer’s descent into addiction and the unglamorous work of getting sober. Mary Karr’s Lit and Augusten Burroughs’ Dry are both beautiful (and painful) recovery memoirs. If you’re writing this kind of book, trust your reader to understand that addiction is messy. And that recovery isn’t a straight line.

Spirituality and self-discovery

Self-discovery memoirs follow the journey you’ve taken to find a new way of understanding yourself and your life when the old way has failed. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love she leaves both her marriage and her old life and goes looking for what she feels has been missing. The tensions in this type of memoir come from the search itself. Be sure to give weight to doubt and false starts you experience along the way.

Spiritual memoirs also travel a path toward faith or meaning. Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies is this type of memoir. She writes a wry, digressive, and courageous story in which she both admits her doubts and, eventually, finds her way to faith. As with the self-discovery memoir, be sure to include confusion and contradictions as you share your spiritual journey. That honesty is more interesting to readers than arriving at a quick, clean conclusion.

Grief and survival

Grief memoirs are intense and have high internal stakes.  Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is the book many readers reach for when they look for stories about loss. In it, Didion shares the undermining experience of mourning her husband. She circles back through old memories, rather than forcing her story into tidy stages of grief. Give yourself permission to do the same.

Survival stories, on the other hand, are driven by external stakes—and a ticking clock. In Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Ralston writes about being trapped alone in a canyon. His book moves at the pace that the danger does, with heart-pounding escalations. If you’re writing about a survival situation, watch your pacing closely. You want your reader to stay with you—but too much reflection can dilute the urgency you need to propel the story forward.

Stories about family

Family memoirs show how a writer is shaped by growing up inside a particular family system. Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, for example, develops Walls’s increasing need for security as she and her family move from one unstable home to another and another. This genre is about your own perspective developing as you live inside your family. Track how you understood things at each stage to show not just what happened, but what it ultimately revealed to you.

Mystery and investigative memoirs center on a hidden truth the writer has to dig up, often about their own family. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body works this way. Marzano-Lesnevich weaves a childhood secret together with a true crime case. The dramatic effect depends on withholding. If this is the type of story you’re writing, resist explaining too much too soon.

Coming of Age

Coming-of-age memoirs are written about a younger self in the process of becoming someone they aspire to be. In Tara Westover’s Educated, a girl raised without formal schooling claws her way toward a life her family never wanted for her. The book is built around the widening gap between where she started and who she becomes. This genre lives or dies on that gap. Keep your early chapters honest about who you were before the change started.

Not every coming-of-age story is told by the person who is coming of age. Some are told by someone watching from the sidelines. David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy takes this approach. In it, Sheff follows his son’s addiction from a parent’s vantage point. Sheff is close enough to feel every relapse, but he’s never able to make his son’s choices for him. The tension in this type of memoir comes from watching someone you love change—for better or worse, resolved or not —while never fully being able to see inside their experience or control what happens to them.

Humor and heart

Comic memoirs use humor as the entry point into difficult material. Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy both manage this balance. The laughs are real, but they’re doing serious work underneath. The trick is knowing when to let the joke drop. A comic memoir needs unguarded moments where the humor steps aside and something truer shows through.

Pure romance is rarer in memoir, since few writers structure an entire book around a love story alone. For instance, in Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss, and What We Ate, issues of relationship and food are woven through the whole narrative. Melissa Febos’ Abandon Me pushes further into this territory. Its focus is an all-consuming, complicated relationship. No matter how you integrate romance into your memoir, include what was heart-wrenching—not just the parts that felt like love.

Which subgenre?

Most memoirs don’t sit neatly in just one of these genre categories. Your book may knit together threads of family saga and redemption, or grief and coming-of-age. What usually matters, is which type of story is doing the heavy lifting. One subgenre tends to sit in the driver’s seat, while the other(s) ride along, developing the fullness of the life you’re telling about. Naming that dominant thread helps you describe the book to an agent or a reader.

Try this

So what type of memoir are you writing? You might already know. Or you might need to sit with the question for a while.

Once you’re circling an answer, pull a book that matches your possible subgenre off the shelf and read its opening chapter. Notice what the writer puts in front of the reader first and what gets left for later. Those choices aren’t accidental. They’re the author reaching out to guide your expectations for the story you’re about to read.

When you’ve clarified the genre focus of your memoir, jot it down somewhere you’ll see it. The top of your outline or on a sticky note on your monitor. When you’re deep in a chapter and unsure whether a scene belongs, that one phrase can act as a filter: Does this moment serve the redemption arc, or the mystery, or the slow accumulation of family history? If it doesn’t, it may belong in a different chapter, or not in the book at all.

Genre isn’t a box to fit your life into. It’s a map other writers have already walked, one you can borrow from as you find your own way through.

What type of memoir are you writing? I work with memoir writers in all subgenres and at all stages of the process. If you’re wondering if you’re ready to write your story—or have already begun!—I can help you start (or finish) your book. 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.

You’ve had a truly impactful experience. Or you’ve lived an exceptional life. And you’re thinking maybe you should write a memoir (or everyone tells you that you should!). But … but … but…. Could it be too soon to write your memoir? And how can you tell?

Journaling as a beginning to write your memoir

When something painful or otherwise life-changing happens, your first instinct might be to write it down in your journal. Getting the events and your feelings onto the page can be a steadying alternative to carrying the experience around unprocessed inside. When you journal, you also create a record you can return to when you’re ready to review what’s happened and how it affected you.

Also, if you’re considering writing a memoir about what you’ve been through, your journal entries are great at preserving the moments you’ve lived through before memory smooths it over.

Perspective over time

We humans are growing, developing beings. What we first record in our journals is usually quite raw. We haven’t had time yet to reflect on our experience. Reflection is a different task altogether. We learn from the perspective time affords us. Time allows us to make meaning of our experiences. And the layers of meaning that underlie the events we’ve undergone are the foundational strata of any memoir we want to write.

I’ve worked with writers who felt compelled to start their memoir while they were still deep inside the experience they wanted to write about. The divorce hadn’t been finalized. Their loved one was buried only a month ago. The estrangement with their sister was ongoing—the writer still hoping this might be the year they could speak again.

In some way, the situation or relationship remained unresolved. As of yet, these writers hadn’t gotten the perspective—and perhaps closure—that time could eventually provide. And their writing showed it. Not because they lacked talent. But because you can’t see the full extent of the mountain range while you’re still climbing. All you can see from partway up is rock and fog and the next few feet of trail.

You need to get some distance, gain some elevation, before the entirety of the prospect becomes visible.

Not calendar time

It’s not really about months or even years elapsing. It’s about whether the experience you want to write about has finished its work. Are you able to recognize and name the change that you’ve undergone because of that experience? A woman writing about her divorce while she’s still negotiating custody arrangements will tell a different story than she’ll be able to tell in three years. After the dust has settled and she can see what the marriage actually meant, not just what it cost her this week, her writing will be wiser.

Knowing where you are with your story—is it finished or still-forming?—is an important judgment call. Start too early, and while you’ll definitely still be processing your experience, you’re unlikely to be able to get to the vein of gold underlying the events and the emotional landscape you had to traverse because of them.

I understand that the urge to write feels like proof it’s time to start drafting your memoir. But that isn’t always the case. It may just be time to journal faithfully and trust that the process will take you to the top of that mountain where you can finally see the whole story—one that you can deliver to the readers you’re hoping to reach with it.

Hemingway knew it was too soon to write his Paris memoir

Hemingway was sitting in a Paris café one cold, rainy day, writing. But not about Paris. He famously wrote that it was “too early for that.” Because he realized he wouldn’t be able to write about Paris while he lived there. He didn’t have the distance. The perspective.

Sure, he was living in Paris, walking its streets, eating in its cafés. He was drinking with the writers and painters who filled his world there: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald. By any ordinary measure, he knew the city intimately. But that wasn’t enough for him to write about his experience there. He didn’t yet have the long view on himself—the writer he was still becoming, the marriage he was still living through, the ambitions and rivalries and daily disciplines that were still shaping him.

He understood that he couldn’t describe what that chapter of his life meant while he was still living it.

Not a travel guide

And sure enough, when Hemingway finally did write about Paris, it wasn’t a guidebook. It wasn’t about cafés and monuments—nor even primarily about the famous writers he hung out with. What he actually wrote about, decades later, was his own story: the discipline and hunger of learning to write; his first, fiercely poor, fiercely happy marriage; and the tangled friendships and literary rivalries of his expat circle. And, importantly, the recognition of how that entire chapter of innocence eventually ended.

He needed not only to have lived Paris; he also needed to have left it and gained enough distance to see what, ultimately, it had given him.

A Moveable Feast

His Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, points to that understanding. Hemingway’s Paris wasn’t really a place at all. It was an experience, a state of being that became a permanent part of him. He carried that Paris with him for the rest of his life.

It was so wise of him to declare, then, at that café table, that he couldn’t write about Paris while he was engaged with making a life there. In that moment, he was simply living his twenties: poor, married, ambitious, surrounded by people whose talent and egos he was still learning to navigate.

It was only decades later that he could look back and recognize what that Paris actually meant to him. It was not a city he’d lived in, but a version of himself he’d lived out. He couldn’t title his memoir A Moveable Feast until his Paris life had, in fact, stopped moving and started settling into memory.

When Hemingway was ready

In fact, Hemingway didn’t write about Paris until thirty years later, in Ketchum, Idaho, and Havana, Cuba, near the very end of his life. Thousands of miles and half a lifetime separated him from the Left Bank of his twenties. A Moveable Feast was published after his death. In the end, it took decades for him to truly see the shape of what those Paris years had meant.

So, is it too soon to write your memoir?

While we’re in the midst of an experience—a teetering marriage, a hard diagnosis, a grievous loss—we’re still being shaped by it. What we don’t have yet is a vantage point that will let us say what it means. That vantage point exists on the other side of the experience—once we’ve had time to digest and reflect.

We certainly don’t need to wait thirty years. But we likely do need some version of what Hemingway gave himself: enough distance for our experience to stop being the thing we’re in and become a thing we are able to look back at.

Unfortunately, few experiences ever fully resolve in a neat, tidy way. Our grief may not end but become muted. And some relationships stay complicated forever. But if we can give ourselves the time and space we need to look at the questions raised by the events and consider them from a few different angles, we’re likely to get to the heart of the memoir we want to write. Not just tell about the cafés and monuments.

Questions to help you know if it’s too soon to write your memoir

This isn’t a test! But these questions may help you know where you are in your memoir-writing process:

1. Can I describe what this experience meant to me, not just what happened?
2. Do I feel curiosity about this time in my life now, or only pain?
3. Can I imagine a reader reading my story and understanding the growth I’ve experienced by living it?
4. Am I writing to process the experience, or to share what I’ve already processed?
5. If I read this draft in a year, do I think I’d feel I’ve explored the nuances of the events and the meaning they held?

Consider these questions a mirror. A way of checking  whether you’re still inside your story or whether you’ve stepped back far enough to tell it. If most of your answers point toward not yet, give yourself more time. When you’re ready, you’ll know.

The process is … a process

And if you decide it is too soon to write your memoir? Keep journaling! Draft scenes while they’re fresh—and a little raw. Say how you feel—and track how that changes.  The process has real value, both for you and for the memoir in your future. What you write today, while you’re still deeply inside your experience, can be some of the truest material you’ll ever have access to. A future version of you, shaping the memoir from your journals will be grateful you captured these moments while they were fresh.

Is it too soon to write your memoir? I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. If you’re wondering if you’re ready to write your story—or have already begun!—I can help you start (or finish) your book. 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.

You may be someone who, for better or worse, has lived through something dramatic—a sudden loss, a hard diagnosis, a family secret that finally came to light. If that’s you, a memoir may already feel like the obvious next step. But maybe your life looks “ordinary” from the outside. No big scandals, no life-threatening crises, nothing you’d really call a “story”? But you’re still feeling a nudge to write about your experiences? No worries! If that’s you, this post will help you see that your life is interesting enough to write a memoir.

The Comparison Trap

People often put off writing their memoir because of doubt. They may be measuring the dramatic value of their own life against that of someone else. Usually they’re comparing themselves to already-famous memoirists—particularly those whose stories arrived pre-shaped by trauma or fame. But that’s unfair. Sure, trauma and fame, while difficult to live through, are interesting to read about. And those experiences certainly offer a writer a core to their story those with more unremarkable lives have to go looking for.

But, obviously, most of our lives don’t come with that built-in center—and they don’t need to. Remember, whatever the level of drama a memoirist brings to the writing of their book, by the time we pick it up on Amazon, that story has been through years of drafting and professional editing to make it a compelling read.

The benchmark for a worthwhile memoir, in a reader’s eyes, isn’t really the intensity of experiences it covers. To a large degree it’s how well the story—ordinary or extraordinary—is told. Your life, at this stage, is still raw material. It hasn’t failed a comparison test; it just hasn’t been shaped yet.

Interesting vs. Universal

It also helps to separate two things you might lump together: being interesting and being universal. Again, a memoir doesn’t need to deliver drama. The telling of a more straightforward life just needs to share a truth that other people can recognize in themselves. Readers aren’t necessarily drawn to a memoir because the story is unusual. They are equally as likely to be drawn to a book in which the author has put language to feelings the reader may have had but never quite named.

That feeling may be quite ordinary, something we’ve all experienced. The ache of not being chosen, the dull realization that a marriage has gone quiet, the guilt of feeling relief after a loss. These emotions are not produced only by an extraordinary life. Those of us living ordinary lives feel these things as deeply. But no matter the details of the  life we’re writing about, we will capture our readers’ hearts if we share the truths that lie beneath the events we’ve lived.

Then, readers will finish our memoir thinking not “what a rare life.” They’ll finish it thinking “I’ve felt that too, and I didn’t know anyone else had.” That recognition is “interesting”—and it’s available to any life, examined closely enough.

Showing Your Life Is Interesting Enough to Write a Memoir

An ordinary moment, told with honesty and sensory detail, can land hard. Compare  “my mother was sick for a long time” to a description of the weight of the spoon in your hand as you fed her on the last morning she could still eat. The first is an objective observation. The second is a scene: personal, subjective. It’s a moment that invites your reader into the room and experience what you experienced.

This is an example of the writing advice “show, don’t tell.” Telling (“my mother was sick”) is an observation. No matter how sad or complicated the situation you’re naming, telling asks readers to take your word for it. Showing (the weight of the spoon, the angle of light, the words your mother said) lets them arrive at sad or hard or complicated on their own. A reader trusts a feeling they arrived at themselves far more than one they were asked to take your word for.

What Readers Actually Want

Readers pick up a memoir to feel less alone. To learn more about what it means to be human. That means the goal isn’t to present your most impressive moments, polished to a high shine. It’s to offer your most honest understanding of those moments—or the arc of the portion of your life you’re sharing. A polished, yet emotionally guarded account of even the most extraordinary events will move readers less than an open, truthful account of the course of more ordinary events. Readers can feel honesty from the first page. And no amount of drama can substitute for that.

Test: Is Your Life Interesting Enough to Write a Memoir?

One useful way to check whether you have enough for a memoir is this. Can you say what your story is really about? Do you know what underlies the events themselves? The growth you experienced through the experiences you had? So, not “my divorce” but what the divorce revealed about how you’d disappeared inside the relationship. Not “my mother’s illness” but what caring for her taught you about duty. If you can find that underneath layer, you have enough to write your memoir. Regardless of how quiet the surface of the story looks.

Small Life, Big Feeling

Some of the most beloved memoirs explore the interior of the lives they cover. H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is a deep but quiet telling of the relationship between the author and a goshawk she trains after her father’s death. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke, which explores her mother’s illness and death, takes place almost entirely inside one house. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal is written as an A-to-Z of small daily moments—without plot.

Even if you happen to be famous, you can focus on the smaller aspects that make up an important portion of your life. Patti Smith is about as well known as a memoirist gets, but her book M Train is mostly her drinking black coffee in the same cafe, watching detective shows, and missing her late husband.

Rest assured though, you don’t need fame! Self-published South Island Tiny House by Corianne Holmes covers a single season in Holmes’s life during which she moves into a new country and a tiny home.

None of these books needed a big life—or loud moments. They just needed a close look at small moments that carried quiet impact on their authors’ lives.

The “Who Cares” Voice

Almost everyone who sits down to write a memoir hears some version of the same voice: who cares about this? It’s a first cousin to the question “is your life interesting enough to write a memoir?” Truthfully? You don’t know yet. You need to write your story to find your way to the answer. That “who cares” voice is loudest before there’s anything written to prove it wrong.

How do you prove it wrong? Write. Then share with a reader—even one reader—who can tell you about a specific moment that moved them.

Proving Your Life Is Interesting Enough to Write a Memoir

Still asking, “Is my life interesting enough?” Try this.

Set a timer for ten minutes and write five ordinary moments you still remember clearly. Not milestones, just moments. A moment in a cafe. A kitchen table. A car ride. A phone call you took standing in a doorway. Write without editing yourself. And don’t explain why they matter yet. Just list them.

Then pick one moment from your list and write for another ten minutes about what was actually happening underneath the obvious. What you wanted, what you were afraid of, what you couldn’t name at the time. If writing that made you feel something, or made you remember more than you expected to, you’ve found your way in.

Do this a few more times, on a few more mornings, with a few more moments. You’re not looking for your one big story yet. You’re looking for the pull: the moment that, once you start writing it, compels you to keep writing.

That’s your material. And that pull tells you your life is interesting enough.

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. If you’re wondering if your life is interesting enough to write a memoir, I can help you find the pivot points that will help you tell your story and engage readers. 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.

Have you been looking for a memoir class or workshop? I’m happy to tell you there are great options available to you! Some folks thrive in weekly workshops with deadlines and feedback. Others bloom in writing groups focused less on critique and more on being heard. And some just want a single weekend to help fuel their tank. Below you’ll find memoir writing classes, programs, and communities worth considering, whatever kind of support works best for you.

Memoir Writing Classes

Gotham Writers Workshop
Gotham has been teaching creative writing since 1993. Their ten-week Memoir Writing I course is a solid starting point. In it, you’ll receive excellent instruction, engaging exercises, and real workshopping experience. Classes are offered in-person and online.

UCLA Extension Writers’ Program
If you’d benefit from a more comprehensive approach, UCLA offers a full memoir sequence. During their three-part program, you’ll be guided from the basics through a substantial portion of your manuscript. Classes are conducted online.

Interlochen Online
Interlochen, a well known Michigan arts school, offers Writing Your Memoir online. Classes include weekly instruction, inspiring reading, and feedback on your own short memoir pieces. This is a particularly useful approach when you’re still developing your voice or finding the shape of your story.

Community and Memoir Writing Workshops

Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA)
I trained in the AWA method myself. AWA workshops are built on the belief that every writer has a voice worth hearing. The workshops emphasize the creation of new work, with less focus on critique. This makes them a deeply encouraging space for new memoir writers.

Story Circle Network
Since 1997, Story Circle Network has supported women writing memoir and personal essay. They offer a wide range of instruction. You’ll find ninety-minute webinars and multi-week courses listed on their site. They also provide small writing circles where members can trade work and receive encouragement rather than critique.

The Memoir Writing Club
Led by memoir coach Irene Graham, this program pairs a workbook of right-brain and left-brain exercises with live meetings and instructor feedback. There’s also an in-person retreat option for writers who want to go deeper. It’s especially good for writers who respond to visual and associative memory prompts rather than straight outlining.

Low-Commitment Options

Gotham’s Memoir Writing Intensive
If a ten-week course feels like too much too soon, Gotham also offers a Memoir Writing Intensive—one day in NYC or two days on Zoom. It’s a mix of lectures and exercises open to writers at any level. It’s a good way to test whether memoir writing classes are the right fit for you.

HippoCamp Online
Produced by Hippocampus Magazine, the online conference “HippoCamp” is built specifically for creative nonfiction and memoir writers. You can attend craft sessions and author-platform discussions without travel or a multi-day commitment.

The Loft Literary Center
The Loft is a well-regarded nonprofit literary center based in Minneapolis, though nearly everything they offer is available online. Their memoir and personal essay classes range from single-session workshops to multi-week courses, so you can dip a toe in or commit to something longer.

Your Local Library or Community College
Many libraries and community colleges offer free or low-cost memoir and life-writing classes, often taught by writers in your area. They can be a great way to get workshopping experience without a big commitment.

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’ve taken ten memoir writing classes or are just getting started, if you feel you could use more support, 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 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.