What Kind of Memoir Should You Write? |
A first-time memoir writer who hasn’t read many memoirs has an extra hoop to jump through when figuring out how to structure her own. When I determined to write a memoir after having published several nonfiction books and a novel, I realized that memoir isn’t one of the genres I most often read. I got busy reading some right away.
What I discovered is that there are many different ways to structure a memoir. Consider the following forms, with examples, that I found enlightening:
If you’ve already written some essays, or perhaps gotten some published over the years, consider adapting or collecting them into a cohesive volume.
Examples: Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives – a memoir in essays by Mary Laura Philpott (Atria Books, 2022). “It hit me,” she writes, “as we left our son again at the beginning of August, that I was standing at the beginning of a string of endings, proud and bereft at once.” This is from an essay in the middle of the book about the mixed feelings a parent experiences when her child is growing up. She goes on from there to call her grief “self-indulgent” in comparison with the less ordinary losses of many others, and I understand what she means. I’ve written about the same exact thing, and yet none of our words are the same. I stand by mine and yet I love hers.
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (Vintage, 1992). This slim book (82 pages) began as a lecture, which was then expanded........