memoir
[noun] a record of events written by
a person having intimate knowledge of them
and based on personal observation
Lots of really astonishing memoirs have been written.
You’ve probably read some of them. The Glass Castle. The Diary of Anne Frank. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
And maybe you’ve thought, Wow, I wish I could write a riveting memoir. And then you’ve snapped out of it. Because let’s face it: you didn’t grow up homeless, bouncing from one hovel to another with an alcoholic father who toted along his blueprints for an imaginary glass castle. You didn’t stop at a traffic light on a crowded New York City street only to see your mother diving through the Dumpster on the curb. You weren’t hidden away in an attic from Swatiska-bearing soldiers. You weren’t sexually assaulted as a young Black girl in a time when young Black girls had no voice. To read more, click the button below.What Do You Have to Write About?
Take me, for example. Mine might be the years of watching my daddy waste away from cancer, and the sticky-hot July afternoon 
when I was called in from the alfalfa field where I was playing to be told he had escaped the tethers of mortality to leave behind my ten-year-old version of reality. Or mine might be my tenuous friendship with a serial killer and my experience of driving him to church. Or the dissolution of a marriage I thought would last forever. Or my attempt to adopt a once-healthy little boy in Peru who government officials let die of starvation in an orphanage. Or the fact that every witch costume my mother made for me ended up looking like a Ku Klux Klan get-up my grandfather wore on his after-dark raids (and how I felt when I discovered that had gone on). It could be any of those. Or all of those.
All of them? Yes. Because you can only write one autobiography, but you can write dozens of memoirs.
Here’s the secret: You don’t need to have had a hardscrabble youth in order to write a memoir. You don’t need eccentric parents. Believe it or not, you don’t need anything dramatic. And, by the way, you don’t even need to publish it.
Why even bother, then?
Why You Should Do It
Writing about your life is about coming to a fresh understanding of it at an age when you probably think you know yourself pretty well. Until you set an experience down on paper, until you ponder the perfect words to describe it, you can't fully appreciate or understand it. Threading related experiences together, you see a pattern in the quilt of your existence. It's about creating a legacy that doesn't have dollar signs in front of it but has far greater residual value for family and friends.
As Jeannette Walls—author of The Glass Castle—put it, “Memoir is about handing over your life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it. It’s honestly sharing what you think, feel, and have gone through. If you can do that effectively, then somebody gets the wisdom and benefit of your experience without having to live it.”
Making It Happen
I can give you tips on how to start (including some great exercises to help you get started), how to choose your first line, how to work your way through the process, mistakes to avoid, and the best things you can do now. That’s not all. If you’d like help getting it ready for prime time—whether that means a big-five publisher or your next family reunion—I can edit it for you. And if you’ve got some great ideas rattling around in your head but you’re not confident in your writing skills, I can ghostwrite it for you. The bottom line? You’ve got lots of options!
I can’t wait to see what you create (and help you in the process) . . . I’ll be watching for it on the bookstore shelves!