The straight answer
Wrong question. Memoir runs on change the reader can feel happening, and drama is optional. Ask what you believed that turned out to be wrong, and whether you’ll let the reader meet who you were before without apologising for them. Name the belief and the moment it cracked and you have a book. A woman who ran a hardware shop for 31 years wrote one of the best memoirs I’ve ever been near.
A woman once told me, apologetically, that she’d only ever worked in one town, married one man, raised 3 children and run a hardware shop for 31 years. She said it the way you’d confess to a minor crime.
Her memoir is one of the best things I have ever been anywhere near.
The question people ask me is whether their life is interesting enough. It’s the wrong question, asked in good faith, by almost everybody, and it has killed more good books than any other sentence in this business.
Interesting is not the criterion
Memoir does not run on drama. If it did, the shelf would be nothing but war correspondents and people who survived light aircraft crashes, and it very obviously isn’t.
Think about the memoirs that stayed with you. A large number of them are about ordinary lives observed with unusual honesty. Somebody’s mother. A job. A year. A house. The material is frequently unremarkable and the book is unforgettable, which tells you the power was never in the events.
What memoir actually runs on is change the reader can feel happening.
Somebody was one way. Something occurred. They became another way. The reader watches the shift from inside and comes out slightly rearranged. That’s the entire machine, and it works identically whether the something was a coup or a Tuesday.
3 questions that settle it
What did you believe that turned out to be wrong?
This is the spine of nearly every good memoir. Not a lesson you learned. A belief you held with total confidence and then lost. About your family, your work, your worth, what you owed people. The size of the belief matters enormously more than the size of the event that broke it.
Name the belief and the moment it cracked and you have a book. Most people can, once somebody asks them properly instead of asking whether their life was interesting.
Who were you before, and will you let the reader meet them?
This is where memoirs live or die and it has nothing to do with how eventful your life was. A reader needs to meet the earlier version of you without your current self hovering behind them explaining and apologising. That earlier version was probably wrong about things. Unkind occasionally. Frightened more than you’d like on the record.
Writers who protect that person write flat books. Every single time. The willingness is the talent.
What does somebody get from this who has never met you?
Not a moral. Something closer to company. Recognition. A word for a thing they’ve felt and never named. Permission.
Hardware shop woman gives her reader 31 years of noticing what people are actually buying when they buy a tin of paint. It is very funny, and it turns out to be about how you can know an entire town without leaving one room. Nobody needed a plane crash.
What people mistake for the criterion
Fame. Celebrity memoir is a genre with its own economics and almost nothing to do with whether your book is any good. Some of the worst books I have ever read were by extremely famous people, and they were paid a fortune for them.
Trauma. This one bothers me most, because I watch people rummage through their own lives looking for something bad enough to qualify. Suffering is not a ticket. Plenty of extraordinary memoirs are about happy lives observed closely, and treating pain as the entry requirement is both untrue and a rotten thing to tell people.
Being finished. People wait until the story has a tidy ending. Life keeps declining to provide one. A memoir needs a shaped ending, which is a different and much more achievable thing.
Being a writer. No. You need to be honest and specific, and those are decisions rather than talents. The rest is craft, and craft is teachable to anyone who’ll sit still.
The test, since you’ll want one
Tell somebody the story out loud. Not the summary. The actual thing, with the bits you’d rather leave out left in.
Watch their face. You will know inside 2 minutes.
Then notice which part made you want to stop talking. That reluctance is a compass and it points at the book almost every time.
Your life is interesting enough. It was always the wrong question. The real one is whether you’re willing to tell the truth about it, and that’s a decision you can make this afternoon over a cup of tea.
Your Next Fave Read
- Is My Story Worth a Book? How to Know Before You Write One
- How to Write About Real People in Your Book
- Can I Write a Book If I’m Not a Writer?
Ready to get your wisdom into the world, however you write it? Book a free validation call. I’ll figure out the right approach for your specific book and your actual goals, whether that’s coaching, ghostwriting, or both of us writing it together. writewordmagic.com
