What makes the difference between a can’t-put-it-down memoir that readers will remember forever and one that gets donated to a thrift shop? I read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls when it was first published in 2005, and now—fifteen years later—I still see things that remind me of the vivid scenes in her story.
That’s the kind of memoir you want to write, and here are some tips to help you do that.
Write About What You’ve Learned from Your Experiences
It’s not enough to just chronicle your life as if you were a newspaper reporter. Memoir demands that you write about what you’ve learned from your experiences. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls initially wrote about her childhood as a detached observer; the result, her literary agent told her, was a story that read like it was “wrapped in cellophane.” Only when she assumed the persona of herself as a little girl did it become real and powerful.
In many ways, writing a memoir is like painting. You slap some words on a blank canvas, take a few steps back, look at how they’re coming together, then refine things. That step back is retrospection. It’s observation infused with reflection. It’s thoughtfulness. It’s an attempt to figure things out. It’s the search for your truth.
Use All Your Senses
The best writers create vivid new worlds for readers to inhabit. While you’re not creating a fantasy world that might cradle the characters in a great science fiction book, you are creating a world whose intimate details are unfamiliar to your readers.
To transport readers (and yourself), write vividly. This is done through detail. Use all your senses to fully recreate a moment in time. You can teach yourself to do that, and here’s an exercise you should repeat whenever possible to see how it works. The next time you’re waiting in a restaurant, a doctor’s office, or even in traffic, notice the various sights, sounds, smells, and textures. That’s what good writers do, both in reality and in their stories.
Don’t Stress If You Can’t Remember Everything at Once
When writing a memoir, you might be describing a slice of your life from thirty, forty, or even fifty years earlier. The details might be sketchy at best.
Start by writing the memories that are within your grasp, no matter how spare and murky. Once you’ve gotten the framework of the story down, do research to enhance it. As you pay sustained attention to your memories, even ones that are deeply buried will start to resurface, often when your mind is on other things. Keep a notepad handy and jot down the things you remember as your memories kick in. As you continue writing, you’ll find that powerful details, and even powerful stories, will come out of hiding.
Include More than Just Your Story
Imagine you are writing a memoir about your three-week trek through the Himalayan Mountains. While the focus is on your trip, as well as what you learned about yourself along the way, it would be wise to include other details as well. You could describe the geography and history of the area, share interesting snippets about the people and donkeys with whom you interacted, and discuss your exploration of life-and-death questions as you progressed along your arduous journey. Your readers want to know about you, but it’s the backstory and vivid details that make for a powerful memoir.
A couple of examples will show what this means. If Hillary Clinton wrote a memoir about raising a child in the White House, she would pull in tidbits about how she handled the media, who she let visit her daughter during sleepovers, and how she navigated the politics of parenting during her time in the White House. Likewise, if Madonna was writing a memoir about reinventing herself after twenty years away from the public spotlight, she most likely would include what it felt like to return to the music scene and how she continued to travel and perform while raising her children.
Employ Elements of Fiction to Bring Your Story to Life
Think of the people in your memoir as characters—and that includes you. A great memoir pulls the reader into their lives: what they struggle with, what they are successful at, and what they wonder about. Introduce intriguing setting details and develop a captivating plot from your story, just as you would in a novel. Show your readers the locations you describe.
Don’t go overboard, though. Many of the best memoir writers focus on a few key traits of their characters, allowing the reader to get to know each one in depth. Your readers must be able to love your characters or hate them, and that won’t happen if you provide too much detail.
Put Your Readers in Your Shoes
Powerful writers show, not tell. And that’s what happens in a memoir. You must invite your readers into your perspective so they can draw their own conclusions. The best way to do that is to unfold the story before your readers’ eyes by using vivid language that helps them visualize each scene.
Perhaps you want to explain that your aunt was a “raging alcoholic.” If you say this directly, your description will likely come across as judgmental and critical. Instead, paint a picture for your audience so they come to this conclusion on their own.
Create an Emotional Journey
Don’t aim to knock your readers’ socks off. Knock off their pants, shirt, shoes, and underwear too! Leave your readers with their mouths open in awe, or laughing hysterically, or crying tears of sympathy and sadness—or all three.
Evoke emotions within your readers. They need to experience your story, almost as if it was their own. Take them on an emotional journey that will provoke them to read the next chapter, wonder about you well after they finish the last page (like I still do about Jeannette Walls), and tell their friends and colleagues about your book. The best way to evoke these feelings in your readers is to connect your emotions with the pivotal events that happen throughout the story.
That moment when you realized your husband had an affair? Don’t just say you were sad, angry or devastated. Show your readers how you felt. You might say something like:
I learned of my husband’s affair when the February bank statements arrived and I realized that in one month’s time, he had purchased a ring and two massages at a high-end spa. Those gifts weren’t mine. He was using our money to woo another lady and build a new life. I curled up in a ball and wept for three hours—I had been demoted to the other woman.
Artis Henderson, who wrote Un-remarried Widow, shared this about how to write sensory detail in a memoir:
“I begin with as wide a screen as I can. Often when I write, I launch into a scene with a global statement: It was _____. I almost always start with a detail about the weather. It was hot. It was sunny. It was breezy. I understand that from a style perspective this is all wrong. I can imagine my critique group members cringing. Passive voice, they’d say. Too general. I know, I know. But I like to take Anne Lamott’s advice and give myself permission to write crappy first drafts. We have to start somewhere. And when it comes to sensory details, we might as well start as generally as we can. Anyway, that first sentence—the embarrassing “It was hot”—will almost never make it into the final draft. It simply stands as a reminder that a scene calls not only for action and dialogue but also for vivid sensory set design. Once I have this most basic sensual detail on the page—It was hot—I keep writing. I move through the senses, describing everything I remember about the moment I am trying to capture. A horn honked. It smelled like rain. The good stuff—the best stuff—never comes in the first few sentences. But if I keep going, keep writing through the senses, eventually I hit on something.
“From this outermost ring of sensation, I move a step closer to bring the focus of my writing to the immediate stage. I zoom in on the area where the action takes place—a room, a field, a car. I try to remember what was happening on a sensory level in that moment. Could I smell something cooking on the stove? Did I hear a dog barking outside? Maybe I felt a draft from the air conditioner? Discovering these details takes time and a willingness to be still and listen. If we sit with our memories, I think we are often surprised at what we uncover. . . . On the next pass I have time to slow down and consider the moment I’m writing about. I pause to let the memory percolate, and then I place myself in the scene. I ask, How did the fabric feel? How did the oven smell? How did the radio sound?
“Finally, on the last and most intimate sensory level, I use my body as a reference point. I try to recreate what was happening inside my own frame during the moment I am describing. Were my shoulders tense? Did my fingertips smell like oranges? Was my breathing jagged? These personal sensory details are the key to delivering the most powerful, immediate experience to the reader—and isn’t that why we’re here?”
Tell the Truth
One of the best ways to write a powerful memoir is to be honest and genuine. This is often tricky, because you don’t want to hurt or upset the people (your family and friends!) you’ve written into your book. But it’s important that you tell the truth—even if it makes your journey as an author more difficult.
Beth Kephart, author of Telling the Truth When Writing Memoir, gives this great caution: “It’s true, of course, that truth is elusive, that memory is hardly reliable, that my version is not your version, and that elisions are, by their very nature, a form of white lie. What concerns me—what alarms me—is the active distortion of truth for the sake of a somehow ‘better’ story.
“It begins, I find, with the knowing disruption of a single, minor detail. The car he drove. The horse’s color. The size of the caterpillar. No harm in that, the writer thinks. But all of a sudden there’s a hole in the dike. There’s a little of gush of fiction flowing, and pretty soon anything goes. Give yourself permission to lie on purpose with one little thing, and you’ve yourself permission to lie writing forward. Vigilance is constraining, it’s a wagging finger, it’s an old school marm. It’s so much easier to lie; like comfort food, it can feel good at the time. But truth—your best rendering of it, your most honest try—is, in the end, what you must stand behind. Don’t lie on the little things. Don’t start the precipitous slide.”
When M. Shannon Hernandez wrote her memoir, Breaking the Silence: My Final Forty Days as a Public School Teacher, she knew she had a major dilemma: “If I opted to tell the whole truth, I would pretty much ensure I would never get a job with New York City Public Schools again.
“But I also knew teachers, parents and administrators needed to hear why great teachers are leaving education in droves and why the current educational system is not doing what’s right for our nation’s kids. I wrote my book with brutal honesty, and it has paid off with my readers—and is bringing national attention to what is happening behind closed school doors.”
Be forewarned: the process may be painful. “Writing memoir is like preparing yourself to go to confession,” says Frank McCourt, who didn’t publish Angela’s Ashes—a book focusing on his life as a first-generation immigrant in Brooklyn—until he was sixty-six. You have to examine your conscience, and that entails honesty. You can’t write an effective memoir if you’re worried about family and friends looking over your shoulder. Even if the truth hurts, if it is truthful, then there’s no other way to present it. At the very least, readers will recognize the courage in that and respect you for it.
Jeannette Walls said, “A smart therapist once told me that what I had done in this book was exactly what he tries to get patients to do, and that is confront the truth. For many years I was running from it, but the truth has a way of catching up with you, and this was my way of coming to terms with it. The things that haunt you, the things that have power over you—once you confront them, they lose their power. So many people ask me, ‘How can you forgive your parents for treating you that way?’ Well, actually, the person I had to forgive was myself. By sitting down and telling what really happened, I was able to understand it for the first time.”
You need to feel free to write about the uncomfortable truths, and unless your motive for writing is revenge, you may find that these moments of discomfort are mostly your own. Your memoir should explore the concept of truth as seen through your eyes. Don’t be bitter or irritable. The motivation for writing a memoir shouldn’t be to exact revenge or whine or seek forgiveness; it should simply be to share your experience. Don’t exaggerate or bend the truth in your memoir. Your story, the unique one that you hold and cherish, is enough. There is no need to fabricate or embellish.
Remember this important thing about your responsibility to tell the truth: It’s your story. You’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. Some of your relatives will wish you hadn’t said some of the things you said, especially if you reveal various family traits that are less than lovable. But most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons.
Switch Points of View When Writing about Family
Writing about family can be especially tricky. Sheila K. Collins, author of Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and the Rituals that Heal, wrote about the wrenching death of her daughter. As she wrote, she fretted over the potential reaction of her son-in-law—her deceased daughter’s husband. She had always had communication challenges with him, and she was writing her version of scenes for which she and her son-in-law were both present. As she wrote, she found her flow was frequently slowed or interrupted by thoughts like, What would Bill think about this?
Here’s how she resolved her dilemma. She chose a scene from her memoir and wrote it “as I imagined my son-in-law would write it, from his perspective. I had genuine trouble attempting to write what I imagined his version would be. . . . Attempting to write the events of that night greatly increased my empathy for Bill and my understanding of some of what later transpired in our real lives. My final account of that night included something of his perspective in an improved version of the memoir.
“My efforts to expand my understandings beyond my own perspective resulted in a clearer, more layered account, and some healing of old wounds, for which I am especially grateful. Before my manuscript was published, I invited my son-in-law to read it, and he was able to point out some errors and a particular tone or attitude in one section that was annoying to him. Since both of these things interfered with the story I was trying to tell, I eliminated them, with much gratitude to him for his help.
“Being able to clarify my own perspective, while understanding more clearly the perspective of others, is another way that writing my memoir has enriched my life. I always knew that what my daughter would most want from me is for me to be able to get along with the man who is raising her three children without her.”
Handle Privacy Issues
What about the privacy of the people you write about? Should you leave out things that might offend or hurt your relatives? What will your sister think? Your mother? Your husband?
Don’t worry about that problem in advance. Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it—now. Don’t look over your shoulder to see what relatives are perched there. Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue.
If you are writing your memoir only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you’re considering a broader audience—mailing it to friends or publishing it as a book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. It also gives them a chance to ask you to take certain passages out, which you may or may not agree to do.
This article combines excerpts from two great online pieces: “How to Write a Memoir: 7 Creative Ways to Tell a Powerful Story” by Brooke Walker, published in The Write Life on September 22, 2019; and “6 Tips for Writing a Life-Changing Memoir” by M. Shannon Hernandez, published in HuffPost on December 6, 2017.
(Photos: red snowsuit, kathryn-jenkins.com; girl at window, HuffPost; smelling flowers, greenmylife.in; sherpa, look4ward.co.uk; shocked woman, Daily Record; rain, cyprustourism.news; two kids, kathryn-jenkins.com; woman at broken window, wallhere.com; hospital curtain, The Conversation)