WHAT IS MEMOIR?
Memoir is a journey story.
Creative nonfiction.
Difference between memoir and autobiography?
A memoir without a thought-provoking takeaway for the reader (a resolution, in writing terminology) is like a movie that ends with a cliff-hanger or a mystery novel that remains unsolved in the final chapter. What is the point? To think that a memoir doesn’t need a point is to miss the unique characteristic of memoir entirely.
Memoirists as Teachers
Memoirists are—or should be—teachers. I don’t mean teachers in the traditional sense of someone who stands before an assembled group in a classroom to offer instruction in a subject area, like geometry or chemistry or English composition. A memoirist teaches a lesson they have learned from the experiences of their life. A personal lesson but with a universal connection—that’s the key!
A memoir is not the recounting of stuff that happened to you. Stuff happens to everybody. A proper memoir must contain reflection; time and distance between the events told in the memoir and the time of the writing are required to allow for the author’s insightful recounting as to the meaning of those events and the transcendence they created in the author’s life. No meaning, no memoir. No transcendence, no memoir. No takeaway for the reader, no memoir.
What Lesson Will You Share?
In my opinion, there is an element of altruism to memoir writing. At least, that’s how I explain it. A focus on something other than yourself. This is the subtlety of memoir that so many writers fail to comprehend. A quote I have included in at least three other blog articles I’ve written, the words of memoir expert Marion Roach Smith, is the basis for this opinion:
Memoir is not about you. It’s about something and you are its illustration.
Think about this. Your memoir is not about you! Does this conflict with what you think a memoir is?
Are You Ready to Write a Memoir?
In another blog article I wrote titled Is It Time to Write Your Memoir? I stress the importance of allowing yourself time to process your life experiences and see them as objectively as possible; reflect (that word again) and honestly decide if you have learned anything from what you’ve been through. If you can only feel pain or anger or regret, and you can’t articulate whether you have gone through a transcendence (that word again) and come out the other side enlightened, I contend you are not ready to write a memoir.
Keeping a journal to work through feelings and analyze how and why things happened as they did and the effect it had on you is a wise first step in visualizing how you have learned, changed, and grown from your experiences. I talk more about this in another of my articles, Writing About Trauma. Until you have an a-ha moment—a moment of sudden insight, comprehension, or discovery—it will be enormously difficult to write a memoir with a clear theme, the lesson you will share with your reader.
If done properly, the writing of a memoir is a gift the author offers to their audience—the people the author most wants to read their book—because those are the people the writer most wants to help and guide through a personal storm. As the author has emerged from the turbulence of abuse, divorce, grief, or addiction, for example, they have chosen to share their journey and explore the path that brought them to a place of peace, triumph, happiness, or even just acceptance of their reality.
Are you ready to create such a gift?
One of my biggest challenges as a freelance editor and writing coach is encountering potential clients who don’t yet understand the definition of memoir.
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Believe me, I get it! When I started my editing business seven years ago, even I misunderstood what it was. I had dreams of working with elderly folks in my county in East Tennessee to help them document their lives while they still could. I confused memoir with life legacy stories, which is the most common mistake people make.
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Now, I know better, but these days, when a potential client contacts me with a memoir for which they want help, I am often presented with a manuscript consisting of autobiographical vignettes with a few personal essays about some trauma they’ve endured thrown in.
So, I must first say, “I have to tell you, what you’ve written is not memoir.” They’re skeptical. I add, “Memoir is not about you; it’s about something you’ve learned after something you’ve been through.”
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Blank stare.
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OK, how about this? “An autobiography is like a pie that represents your whole life; a memoir is a slice of that pie. A story from a life,” I say, bearing down on from, “not the story of a life.” This definition requires a keen comprehension of the role of prepositions.
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Not yet? OK, one final definition: “Memoir is not about what you did; it’s about what you did with it.” Here again, if I haven’t already thoroughly overdone the stressing of prepositions, I might emphasize the word with. You know, “. . .what you did with it.”
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By this point, my potential client either has a light bulb glowing over their head or a look of resignation that tells me that what they’ve written doesn’t match any of my definitions. So, now what?
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If, in the course of our conversation, I can find a small thread of a transformation story, we can begin to unravel a narrative that will shine a light on someone’s journey through trauma, illness, grief, self-actualization, relationships, and the like. “Who were you at the start of your narrative journey and who are you at its conclusion?” I urge. “Tell me about your personal transcendence.” And, with any luck, off we go.
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This is the start of the memoir creation process, but be warned. Doing this examination properly demands introspection and self-evaluation. The most difficult part of this type of writing is self-reflection and finding objectivity about yourself.
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But, you might ask, why the heck would someone want to take the time and energy (and, ultimately, money) to document a personal journey story, especially if it involved pain of some kind? As I tell my potential clients, a memoir is a gift to your readers. The stuff you went through might not be unique, but how you faced it, how you dealt with it, and how you survived it represents a hero’s journey of sorts, one that others can learn and benefit from. As my client Tara Heaton said about her recent memoir Life Minutes, “I promised my children that we would not waste the suffering, that I would make it matter. This book is me, making good on that promise.” This is a provocative approach to writing memoir—imagining that what you write can lift, support, and console your readers.
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If this all sounds like psychotherapy, that’s not coincidental. Memoirs often come from years of keeping journals, a therapist’s best friend. Journaling is all the rage and makes for a booming commercial industry. And that’s not meant as a scornful accusation; I have written several blog articles about the many benefits of journaling for mental health, how to teach expressive journaling, and how to facilitate journaling groups. As a certified classroom teacher for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), I always recommend keeping a journal. Research has shown that journaling reduces stress and anxiety, boosts resilience and gratitude, and helps to process uncomfortable emotions. When someone gets to the point where, in their writing, they see themselves objectively and recognize the transformation that has reshaped who they are, a memoir might be in the offing.
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So, yeah. Memoir. Tricky business. Here’s the bottom line. We’ve all been through stuff in our lives. (If you haven’t, please contact me and let me touch your amulet.) The basis of a winning memoir is not to chronicle that stuff but to analyze what you did with that stuff.
Is a light bulb flashing on over your head? Then you might be ready to write. No amulet required.
Through my years of learning what memoir is and isn’t (it’s not autobiography, for one thing), understanding its intricacies, and mastering the art of its structure, I always begin by asking a potential client the same simple-sounding question:
What is your memoir about?
But the question is at once simple and complex. The correct way to answer this question is the concept that trips up most of my memoir clients. Why? Because people always answer this question by telling me their plot, not their theme.
“Huh? Plot. Theme. What’s the difference?”
Understanding the difference is essential to writing a good memoir with minimal anguish and maximum success.
Get ready. This will be on the test.
Theme is what a memoir is about.
Plot is how the theme is conveyed.
Clear as mud? It must be, because despite many books and articles being written about the distinction, it is a confusion that persists among memoir writers and, I’m sorry to say, even many memoir editors.
So here is another explanation of theme in a nutshell.
What is the theme of your memoir? It is your argument.
In writing, an argument is the claim you make that you then have to support. (In academic writing, it’s called a thesis.) An argument is a line of reasoning, backed by evidence, that proves a point.
Knowing where to begin your memoir and where to end it is easy-peasy to decide if you know what argument you will present in your memoir and include only the stories that illustrate that argument.
Any clearer? I hope you’re nodding your head vigorously.
Why does having a theme matter in a memoir? Why can’t you just write about your life and talk about whatever is weighing on you, or gnawing at you, or that you want to brag about? You absolutely can! But then it’s not a memoir.
If what you want (or need) to write about is some aspect of your life that has caused you trauma, pain, or grief, or brought you happiness, joy, a clearer sense of self, success, or true love, then, by all means, do it. Write it. But what you are writing is likely more of a therapeutic journal or a series of interconnected personal essays.
If you really want to write a memoir that people will read all the way through, there must be a point to the story you’re telling.
Your personal story must impart a universal lesson that others can relate to, and reveal something you learned that you share with readers to enlighten, soothe, or benefit them.
The Definition of Memoir
Here’s a great time to restate, for the umpteenth time, the ultimate definition of memoir, according to Memoir Maven Marion Roach Smith:
Your memoir is not about you. It’s about something and you are its illustration.
My blog post How to Choose a Memoir Theme states this clearly, and I’ve repeated it in one or two (or three) other blog posts. And yet, I feel the need to say it again, because it is the single most important aspect of writing a cohesive, enjoyable memoir.
When I begin to coach a memoir client, these are the comments I hear most often:
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I don’t know how to start. When (or how) should I start my story?
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I can’t decide which stories to include. How much of my life should I write about?
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I don’t know how to end the book. When (or how) should I finish my story?
These questions are easy to answer when you understand the purpose of a memoir and have a clearly defined theme.
When I’ve been hired to edit a memoir manuscript, these are the two questions my clients most often ask:
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Is it too long?
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Is it too short?