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33 Memoir Examples – Inspiration From Memorable Life Stories

by P.J McNulty | Mar 4, 2024

Imagine holding a mirror to your life where every reflection tells a story, some so vivid and profound they could only be believed because they are true.

This is the essence of memoir, a genre that turns personal experiences into a universal language of emotions, lessons, and discoveries.

As writers, delving into memoirs is more than a pastime—it’s an exploration into the art of storytelling through the lens of real-life adventures, struggles, and triumphs.

We’ll explore 33 memoir examples from some of the most popular types, giving you a feel for the diversity of the genre and the writing lessons to take from these beloved books.

What is a memoir example?

A memoir example is an example of a published book that chronicles the author’s personal experiences, offering insights into their life’s pivotal moments, emotions, and lessons learned.

Unlike autobiographies, which may aim to document each phase of a person’s life, memoirs tend to focus on a specific theme, period, or series of events, painting a detailed picture of the human condition through a personal lens.

This focus enables memoirs to resonate deeply, bridging the gap between the author’s world and the reader’s.

Memoirs stand out because they prioritize storytelling over chronological history.

They invite readers into the author’s world, sharing the emotional journey rather than just the facts.

This narrative approach enriches the reader’s experience, making each memoir a unique exploration of life’s complexities.

What are the benefits of studying memoir examples?

So why should you take the time to study these memoir examples and learn the lessons they contain?

Only by studying successful memoirs can you have the right mix of knowledge and inspiration to write your own.

Some of the most compelling reasons to become a student of the memoir genre include:

• Enhanced empathy : By walking a mile in another’s shoes through their memoir, you gain insights into lives and perspectives vastly different from your own. This exercise in empathy enriches your understanding of the human experience, broadening your worldview.
• Improved writing skills : Analyzing the narrative structure, voice, and character development in memoirs sharpens your writing. Each memoir serves as a masterclass in storytelling, offering lessons in crafting compelling narratives that engage readers.
• Diverse perspectives : Memoirs open windows to varied cultural, social, and personal landscapes, encouraging you to explore themes and stories beyond your immediate experiences. This diversity fuels creativity, inspiring fresh ideas and approaches in your writing.
• Emotional connection : Learning how authors convey their most intimate experiences helps you harness the power of emotional storytelling. This connection is vital in writing that resonates with readers, making your work memorable.
• Authentic voice development : Memoirs exemplify the importance of an authentic voice in storytelling. Studying them helps you find and refine your unique voice, an essential element in distinguishing your writing in a crowded space.

Now that you have a solid grasp of the benefits that studying memoirs offers, let’s delve deep into the first of our eleven memoir types, showcasing three pertinent examples and the lessons you can learn from each.

1 – Memoir examples of early life stories

Early life memoirs explore the foundational years that shape individuals, offering a deep dive into the experiences and influences that forge character, resilience, and perspective.

These memoirs are a testament to the lasting impact of youth on personal growth and identity.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

This memoir provides a raw, unflinching look at Walls’ nomadic, poverty-stricken childhood with her dysfunctional family. It’s a story of resilience in the face of chaos and neglect.

Aspiring memoir writers can learn from Walls’ ability to recount her experiences with honesty and without self-pity.

Her narrative teaches the power of a clear, straightforward storytelling style, proving that the strength of a memoir lies in the truth of its tales, however harsh they may be.

Educated by Tara Westover

Westover’s journey from growing up in a strict, survivalist family in Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge University is a compelling exploration of self-transformation and the quest for knowledge.

Writers should note Westover’s skillful handling of complex family dynamics and her journey to education and self-awareness.

The memoir demonstrates how to weave personal growth with broader themes of education and freedom, offering a blueprint for balancing personal narratives with universal questions.

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

Wolff’s memoir of his adolescence captures his experiences with a volatile stepfather and his desperate, often misguided attempts to escape a bleak home life.

From Wolff, writers can learn the importance of reflective insight and the nuanced portrayal of characters, including oneself, in memoir writing.

His candid exploration of his younger self’s flaws and misadventures serves as a lesson in the value of vulnerability and honesty in crafting a compelling narrative.

2. Memoir examples of adventure and exploration books

Adventure and exploration memoirs plunge readers into the heart of the unknown, sharing the author’s journeys through uncharted territories, both external and internal.

These stories are not just about the places visited but the personal transformations that occur along the way.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Krakauer tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who abandoned his possessions to explore the Alaskan wilderness, ultimately leading to his tragic end. This memoir explores themes of freedom, nature, and the search for meaning.

Writers can learn from Krakauer’s meticulous research and narrative framing, illustrating how to blend biography with personal anecdote and analysis.

This memoir is a masterclass in building suspense and maintaining reader engagement through detailed, evocative descriptions of the natural world and the human spirit.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Strayed’s memoir recounts her solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, undertaken in a moment of personal crisis. It’s a story of physical endurance and emotional healing, as the journey brings her face to face with her past and her fears.

For memoir writers, Wild showcases the power of a personal journey to drive a narrative.

Strayed’s frank and poignant prose demonstrates how to balance introspection with action, making her external journey a mirror for internal change.

The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Before he became a revolutionary, Guevara embarked on a youthful motorcycle journey across South America with his friend Alberto Granado. This memoir is a blend of adventure and emerging social consciousness.

Aspiring writers can draw inspiration from Guevara’s evocative descriptions and the way he weaves social and political observations into his personal narrative.

This memoir exemplifies how travel can be a catalyst for personal and ideological transformation, teaching writers to infuse their stories with broader themes beyond their immediate experience.

3. Examples of cultural and social identity memoirs

Memoirs focusing on cultural and social identity delve into the complexities of belonging, exploring how background, society, and personal choices converge to shape one’s sense of self. These stories are vital for understanding diverse perspectives and experiences.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Didion reflects on the year following the sudden death of her husband, exploring themes of grief, love, and memory. Her precise, stoic prose captures the disorienting nature of mourning and the struggle to find meaning in loss.

Writers can learn from Didion’s controlled use of language and structure to convey deep emotion and introspection.

This memoir teaches the art of writing about pain without succumbing to sentimentality, using clarity and reflection to touch readers deeply.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Noah’s memoir of growing up in post-apartheid South Africa provides insight into the complexities of navigating identity in a place where he was literally born a crime. The book is a mix of humor, history, and personal anecdote.

Memoir writers can glean from Noah the skill of balancing light-heartedness with serious social commentary.

His ability to tell stories that are both entertaining and enlightening demonstrates how personal narratives can serve as a powerful lens on societal issues.

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Gay’s memoir is a profound exploration of body image, weight, and the intersectionality of identity and self-worth. Her candid account discusses her relationship with her body, trauma, and the societal expectations of femininity.

This memoir offers lessons in writing about deeply personal and potentially divisive topics with grace and honesty.

Gay’s forthrightness and vulnerability encourage writers to tackle their truths head-on, showing that personal specificity can resonate universally.

4. Examples of memoirs about overcoming adversity

Memoirs of overcoming adversity showcase the human spirit’s resilience in the face of challenges, be they physical, psychological, or societal.

These narratives provide hope and inspiration, demonstrating the power of perseverance and the possibility of triumph through trials.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

Beah recounts his harrowing experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, offering a poignant testament to the devastations of war and the capacity for healing. His story is a journey from loss and violence to redemption.

Writers can learn from Beah’s straightforward yet evocative storytelling style, which captures the horrors of war without sensationalism.

His memoir is a lesson in the power of narrative to foster understanding and empathy for experiences far removed from most readers’ lives.

5. Memoir examples focused on tales of career and professional life

Memoirs within the career and professional life category offer insights into the joys, struggles, and lessons learned on the path to professional achievement and personal fulfillment.

These stories inspire by showing the myriad ways one can navigate, succeed, and sometimes falter in their chosen field.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Bourdain pulls back the curtain on the culinary world with his candid, no-holds-barred look at his life as a chef. The book is a blend of personal journey and industry exposé, filled with humor, wisdom, and a love for food.

For memoir writers, Bourdain’s unfiltered voice and vivid storytelling are lessons in how to capture the essence of a profession while weaving in personal narratives.

His book demonstrates the power of passion and authenticity in connecting with readers, showing that expertise mixed with personal reflection makes for compelling reading.

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Smith’s memoir chronicles her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during their early years in New York City’s art scene. It’s a story of artistic growth, friendship, and the pursuit of creative expression.

Aspiring writers can learn from Smith’s poetic prose and her ability to capture the zeitgeist of a bygone era.

Her memoir exemplifies how personal stories can illuminate broader cultural and artistic movements, offering insights into the creative process and the bonds that fuel artistic innovation.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Knight shares the story of building Nike from a small start-up to a global brand. His memoir is a candid account of the trials, errors, and triumphs encountered in the business world.

Memoir writers can glean insights from Knight’s honest reflection on his journey, showcasing the value of resilience, vision, and innovation.

His narrative teaches the importance of storytelling in entrepreneurship, illustrating how personal and professional experiences can inspire and inform others.

6. Examples of mental health and recovery memoirs

Memoirs in this category delve into personal battles with mental health, offering unvarnished insights into the struggles and triumphs of recovery.

These stories are vital, shedding light on often-stigmatized topics and offering hope and understanding to those facing similar challenges.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

Solomon combines personal narrative with in-depth research to explore the landscape of depression. His book offers both a memoir of his own journey and a broader cultural and scientific examination of the condition.

Writers can learn from Solomon’s meticulous approach to blending personal experience with extensive research.

His work demonstrates how to discuss complex, sensitive topics with empathy and intelligence, making a compelling case for the power of personal stories to illuminate broader societal issues.

An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison

In this memoir, Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in bipolar disorder, shares her own experiences with the condition. Her unique perspective as both clinician and patient provides deep insights into the complexities of living with bipolar disorder.

Aspiring writers can draw inspiration from Jamison’s candid and poetic exploration of her mental health.

Her memoir underscores the importance of vulnerability and honesty in writing about personal struggles, showing how these qualities can foster a deeper connection with readers.

Darkness Visible by William Styron

Styron’s memoir stands as a profound account of his descent into depression and his journey toward recovery. His exploration of the condition is both deeply personal and universally resonant, offering solace and understanding to those affected by mental illness.

From Styron, writers can learn the art of conveying the indescribable aspects of mental health challenges.

His ability to articulate the ineffable experience of depression teaches the value of precise language and metaphor in exploring personal and complex subjects.

7. Family and relationships memoir examples

Memoirs about family and relationships examine the intricate web of connections that shape our lives.

These narratives explore love, loss, and the myriad ways in which our familial bonds and relationships define us.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Bechdel’s graphic memoir navigates her complex relationship with her father, intertwined with her coming-of-age story and her coming out. The novel’s visual and textual layers add depth to the exploration of family dynamics, identity, and grief.

Memoir writers can learn from Bechdel’s innovative use of the graphic novel format to tell her story.

Her work exemplifies how combining visuals with text can enhance storytelling, offering new ways to engage with readers and delve into personal narratives.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs’ memoir of his unconventional and troubled childhood offers a humorous yet poignant look at family life. His vivid storytelling and sharp wit make the book a compelling read despite its dark themes.

Aspiring memoir writers can learn from Burroughs’ ability to blend humor with hardship.

His memoir demonstrates how to use wit as a tool for coping and storytelling, showing that even the most challenging experiences can be explored in ways that resonate with humor and heart.

8. Examples of travel and living abroad memoirs

Memoirs of travel and living abroad capture the thrill of discovering new places and cultures, often reflecting on how these experiences change the author.

These narratives offer readers a passport to distant lands and the internal journeys that accompany physical travel.

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

Mayes’ memoir about renovating a villa in Italy explores themes of home, discovery, and the pleasures of food and culture. Her evocative descriptions of Tuscany and the transformation of her villa mirror the personal growth and renewal she experiences.

Writers can learn from Mayes’ rich, sensory descriptions and her ability to weave personal transformation with a sense of place.

Her memoir exemplifies how setting can be a character in itself, deeply influencing the narrative and the author’s journey.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Gilbert’s memoir chronicles her journey across Italy, India, and Indonesia, seeking self-discovery and spiritual fulfillment after a difficult divorce. Her honest and engaging narrative captures the essence of each culture and her path to finding balance and happiness.

Memoir writers can take note of Gilbert’s narrative arc, structured around the physical and emotional landscapes she navigates.

Her book shows how to frame a personal quest within the broader context of travel and exploration, making the journey relatable and inspiring.

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Weiner’s memoir is an exploration of happiness across the globe, as he travels to the world’s happiest (and unhappiest) places. His witty, insightful observations provide a unique blend of travelogue and psychological inquiry.

Aspiring writers can learn from Weiner’s use of humor and research to engage readers.

His approach demonstrates how to blend personal narrative with a thematic quest, offering a compelling way to explore big questions through the lens of travel.

9. Examples of memoirs about celebrity and public life

Memoirs from celebrities and public figures pull back the curtain on the glitz and glamour, offering a glimpse into the realities of life in the spotlight.

These narratives explore the complexities of fame, success, and the personal journeys behind public personas.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

In this deeply personal memoir, Michelle Obama chronicles her life from her childhood in Chicago to her years as First Lady of the United States. She shares her triumphs and disappointments, both public and private, with unerring honesty and warmth.

Writers can learn from Obama’s narrative how to blend personal stories with historical and social contexts, creating a rich tapestry that is both intimate and universally appealing.

Her memoir demonstrates the power of authenticity and vulnerability in connecting with a wide audience.

Open by Andre Agassi

Agassi’s memoir is a candid account of his life on and off the tennis court, revealing the struggles and conflicts that accompanied his career. It’s a story of transformation and perseverance, offering insights into the pressures of professional sports.

Memoir writers can take away Agassi’s ability to confront his past with brutal honesty and reflect on his personal and professional growth.

His narrative shows the importance of introspection and the courage to change, providing a compelling model for writing about personal evolution.

Just as I Am by Cicely Tyson

Tyson’s memoir offers a sweeping view of her life and career, breaking ground as a Black actress in Hollywood and using her platform to advocate for racial justice. Her story is a testament to resilience, talent, and the power of living one’s truth.

From Tyson, writers can learn the art of intertwining personal achievements with broader social movements.

Her memoir exemplifies how to tell a personal story that is deeply entwined with cultural and historical milestones, inspiring writers to explore the intersection of individual and collective narratives.

10. Historical and political events memoir examples

Memoirs that intersect with historical and political events provide a personal lens on the moments that shape our world.

These stories offer a unique perspective on history, told through the eyes of those who lived through significant events.

Night by Elie Wiesel

Wiesel’s memoir of his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust, is a poignant exploration of faith, humanity, and survival.

Writers can learn from Wiesel’s use of stark, simple language to convey profound truths about the human condition.

His memoir teaches the importance of bearing witness and the power of memory to honor those who were lost and to educate future generations.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Angelou’s memoir captures her childhood and adolescent years, facing racism and trauma in the American South. It’s a story of overcoming adversity and finding one’s voice against all odds.

Memoir writers can draw inspiration from Angelou’s lyrical prose and her ability to find strength and beauty in the face of hardship.

Her narrative demonstrates how personal stories can illuminate the broader struggles and triumphs of a community, encouraging writers to delve deep into their own experiences to find universal resonance.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Mandela’s autobiography chronicles his journey from his early years in a rural village to his inauguration as the first democratically elected President of South Africa. It’s a tale of resilience, leadership, and the fight for freedom.

Writers can learn from Mandela’s detailed recounting of his personal and political struggles, showing how to weave a compelling narrative that combines personal reflection with historical significance.

His memoir is a masterclass in writing about the intersection of personal life with larger political movements and ideals.

11. Examples of science and innovation memoirs

Memoirs in the realm of science and innovation offer insights into the minds of those who have pushed the boundaries of knowledge and technology.

These narratives explore the passion, curiosity, and challenges of pioneering new frontiers.

The Double Helix by James D. Watson

Watson’s account of the discovery of the DNA structure provides a behind-the-scenes look at scientific discovery, complete with the personal and professional dynamics that influenced the work. It’s a candid and sometimes controversial look at the process of scientific innovation.

Writers can learn from Watson’s engaging narrative style and his ability to make complex scientific concepts accessible and compelling.

His memoir encourages aspiring writers to find the human story within the scientific endeavor, highlighting the importance of persistence, creativity, and collaboration.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Though more an environmental science book than a traditional memoir, Carson’s work interweaves personal observation with scientific analysis, sparking the environmental movement. Her powerful advocacy for the natural world changed public perception and policy regarding pesticide use.

Writers can take from Carson’s example the power of combining personal passion with research to advocate for change.

Her work demonstrates how writing can be a tool for raising awareness and inspiring action, urging memoir writers to consider the impact their stories can have on the world.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

Feynman’s collection of anecdotes offers a glimpse into the life of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, known for his brilliant mind and playful spirit. His stories reveal the curiosity and joy that drove his scientific exploration.

From Feynman, writers can learn the importance of infusing narratives with personality and humor, making even the most complex topics engaging and relatable.

His memoir shows that at the heart of innovation lies not just intellect but a profound sense of wonder and an ability to see the world differently.

Are you ready to apply lessons from these memoir examples to your own book?

Each of the memoir examples you’ve encountered holds lessons in resilience, insight, and the art of weaving personal truths into compelling tales. Now, armed with inspiration and insight from the masters, it’s time to tell your story.

Embrace the challenge of memoir writing with honesty and courage.

Your experiences, perspectives, and voice are unique treasures waiting to be shared.

Whether it unfolds in the quiet corners of introspection or the wide landscapes of extraordinary experiences, your story deserves to be told.

Start writing today. Let the wisdom gleaned from these memoirs guide you, but let your voice lead the way.

The world is waiting for your story.

If you’ve thought about putting your life to the page, you may have wondered how to write a memoir. We start the road to writing a memoir when we realize that a story in our lives demands to be told. As Maya Angelou once wrote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

How to write a memoir? At first glance, it looks easy enough—easier, in any case, than writing fiction. After all, there is no need to make up a story or characters, and the protagonist is none other than you.

Still, memoir writing carries its own unique challenges, as well as unique possibilities that only come from telling your own true story. Let’s dive into how to write a memoir by looking closely at the craft of memoir writing, starting with a key question: exactly what is a memoir?

How to Write a Memoir: Contents

What is a Memoir?

• Memoir vs Autobiography

Memoir Examples

Short memoir examples.

• How to Write a Memoir: A Step-by-Step Guide

A memoir is a branch of creative nonfiction , a genre defined by the writer Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.” The etymology of the word “memoir,” which comes to us from the French, tells us of the human urge to put experience to paper, to remember. Indeed, a memoir is “ something written to be kept in mind .”

A memoir is defined by Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.”

For a piece of writing to be called a memoir, it has to be:

• Nonfictional
• Based on the raw material of your life and your memories
• Written from your personal perspective

At this point, memoirs are beginning to sound an awful lot like autobiographies. However, a quick comparison of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love , and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin , for example, tells us that memoirs and autobiographies could not be more distinct.

Next, let’s look at the characteristics of a memoir and what sets memoirs and autobiographies apart. Discussing memoir vs. autobiography will not only reveal crucial insights into the process of writing a memoir, but also help us to refine our answer to the question, “What is a memoir?”

Memoir vs. Autobiography

While both use personal life as writing material, there are five key differences between memoir and autobiography:

1. Structure

Since autobiographies tell the comprehensive story of one’s life, they are more or less chronological. writing a memoir, however, involves carefully curating a list of personal experiences to serve a larger idea or story, such as grief, coming-of-age, and self-discovery. As such, memoirs do not have to unfold in chronological order.

While autobiographies attempt to provide a comprehensive account, memoirs focus only on specific periods in the writer’s life. The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

Autobiographies prioritize events; memoirs prioritize the writer’s personal experience of those events. Experience includes not just the event you might have undergone, but also your feelings, thoughts, and reflections. Memoir’s insistence on experience allows the writer to go beyond the expectations of formal writing. This means that memoirists can also use fiction-writing techniques , such as scene-setting and dialogue , to capture their stories with flair.

4. Philosophy

Another key difference between the two genres stems from the autobiography’s emphasis on facts and the memoir’s reliance on memory. Due to memory’s unreliability, memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth. In addition, memoir writers often work the fallibility of memory into the narrative itself by directly questioning the accuracy of their own memories.

Memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth.

5. Audience

While readers pick up autobiographies to learn about prominent individuals, they read memoirs to experience a story built around specific themes . Memoirs, as such, tend to be more relatable, personal, and intimate. Really, what this means is that memoirs can be written by anybody!

Ready to be inspired yet? Let’s now turn to some memoir examples that have received widespread recognition and captured our imaginations!

If you’re looking to lose yourself in a book, the following memoir examples are great places to begin:

• The Year of Magical Thinking , which chronicles Joan Didion’s year of mourning her husband’s death, is certainly one of the most powerful books on grief. Written in two short months, Didion’s prose is urgent yet lucid, compelling from the first page to the last. A few years later, the writer would publish Blue Nights , another devastating account of grief, only this time she would be mourning her daughter.
• Patti Smith’s Just Kids is a classic coming-of-age memoir that follows the author’s move to New York and her romance and friendship with the artist Robert Maplethorpe. In its pages, Smith captures the energy of downtown New York in the late sixties and seventies effortlessly.
• When Breath Becomes Air begins when Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Exquisite and poignant, this memoir grapples with some of the most difficult human experiences, including fatherhood, mortality, and the search for meaning.
• A memoir of relationship abuse, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is candid and innovative in form. Machado writes about thorny and turbulent subjects with clarity, even wit. While intensely personal, In the Dream House is also one of most insightful pieces of cultural criticism.
• Twenty-five years after leaving for Canada, Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to sort out his family’s past. The result is Running in the Family , the writer’s dazzling attempt to reconstruct fragments of experiences and family legends into a portrait of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. (Importantly, Running in the Family was sold to readers as a fictional memoir; its explicit acknowledgement of fictionalization prevented it from encountering the kind of backlash that James Frey would receive for fabricating key facts in A Million Little Pieces , which he had sold as a memoir . )
• Of the many memoirs published in recent years, Tara Westover’s Educated is perhaps one of the most internationally-recognized. A story about the struggle for self-determination, Educated recounts the writer’s childhood in a survivalist family and her subsequent attempts to make a life for herself. All in all, powerful, thought-provoking, and near impossible to put down.

While book-length memoirs are engaging reads, the prospect of writing a whole book can be intimidating. Fortunately, there are plenty of short, essay-length memoir examples that are just as compelling.

While memoirists often write book-length works, you might also consider writing a memoir that’s essay-length. Here are some short memoir examples that tell complete, lived stories, in far fewer words:

• “ The Book of My Life ” offers a portrait of a professor that the writer, Aleksandar Hemon, once had as a child in communist Sarajevo. This memoir was collected into Hemon’s The Book of My Lives , a collection of essays about the writer’s personal history in wartime Yugoslavia and subsequent move to the US.
• “The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.” So begins Cheryl Strayed’s “ The Love of My Life ,” an essay that the writer eventually expanded into the best-selling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail .
• In “ What We Hunger For ,” Roxane Gay weaves personal experience and a discussion of The Hunger Games into a powerful meditation on strength, trauma, and hope. “What We Hunger For” can also be found in Gay’s essay collection, Bad Feminist .
• A humorous memoir structured around David Sedaris and his family’s memories of pets, “ The Youth in Asia ” is ultimately a story about grief, mortality and loss. This essay is excerpted from the memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day , and a recorded version can be found here .

So far, we’ve 1) answered the question “What is a memoir?” 2) discussed differences between memoirs vs. autobiographies, 3) taken a closer look at book- and essay-length memoir examples. Next, we’ll turn the question of how to write a memoir.

How to Write a Memoir: A-Step-by-Step Guide

1. how to write a memoir: generate memoir ideas.

how to start a memoir? As with anything, starting is the hardest. If you’ve yet to decide what to write about, check out the “ I Remember ” writing prompt. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s memoir I Remember , this prompt is a great way to generate a list of memories. From there, choose one memory that feels the most emotionally charged and begin writing your memoir. It’s that simple! If you’re in need of more prompts, our Facebook group is also a great resource.

2. How to Write a Memoir: Begin drafting

My most effective advice is to resist the urge to start from “the beginning.” Instead, begin with the event that you can’t stop thinking about, or with the detail that, for some reason, just sticks. The key to drafting is gaining momentum . Beginning with an emotionally charged event or detail gives us the drive we need to start writing.

3. How to Write a Memoir: Aim for a “ shitty first draft ”

Now that you have momentum, maintain it. Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write. It can also create self-doubt and writers’ block. Remember that most, if not all, writers, no matter how famous, write shitty first drafts.

Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write.

4. How to Write a Memoir: Set your draft aside

Once you have a first draft, set it aside and fight the urge to read it for at least a week. Stephen King recommends sticking first drafts in your drawer for at least six weeks. This period allows writers to develop the critical distance we need to revise and edit the draft that we’ve worked so hard to write.

5. How to Write a Memoir: Reread your draft

While reading your draft, note what works and what doesn’t, then make a revision plan. While rereading, ask yourself:

• What’s underdeveloped, and what’s superfluous.
• Does the structure work?
• What story are you telling?

6. How to Write a Memoir: Revise your memoir and repeat steps 4 & 5 until satisfied

Every piece of good writing is the product of a series of rigorous revisions. Depending on what kind of writer you are and how you define a draft,” you may need three, seven, or perhaps even ten drafts. There’s no “magic number” of drafts to aim for, so trust your intuition. Many writers say that a story is never, truly done; there only comes a point when they’re finished with it. If you find yourself stuck in the revision process, get a fresh pair of eyes to look at your writing.

7. How to Write a Memoir: Edit, edit, edit!

Once you’re satisfied with the story, begin to edit the finer things (e.g. language, metaphor , and details). Clean up your word choice and omit needless words , and check to make sure you haven’t made any of these common writing mistakes . Be sure to also know the difference between revising and editing —you’ll be doing both. Then, once your memoir is ready, send it out !

Learn How to Write a Memoir at Writers.com

Writing a memoir for the first time can be intimidating. But, keep in mind that anyone can learn how to write a memoir. Trust the value of your own experiences: it’s not about the stories you tell, but how you tell them. Most importantly, don’t give up!

Anyone can learn how to write a memoir.

If you’re looking for additional feedback, as well as additional instruction on how to write a memoir, check out our schedule of nonfiction classes . Now, get started writing your memoir!

25 Comments

Thank you for this website. It’s very engaging. I have been writing a memoir for over three years, somewhat haphazardly, based on the first half of my life and its encounters with ignorance (religious restrictions, alcohol, and inability to reach out for help). Three cities were involved: Boston as a youngster growing up and going to college, then Washington DC and Chicago North Shore as a married woman with four children. I am satisfied with some chapters and not with others. Editing exposes repetition and hopefully discards boring excess. Reaching for something better is always worth the struggle. I am 90, continue to be a recital pianist, a portrait painter, and a writer. Hubby has been dead for nine years. Together we lept a few of life’s chasms and I still miss him. But so far, my occupations keep my brain working fairly well, especially since I don’t smoke or drink (for the past 50 years).

Hi Mary Ellen,

It sounds like a fantastic life for a memoir! Thank you for sharing, and best of luck finishing your book. Let us know when it’s published!

Best, The writers.com Team

Hello Mary Ellen,

I am contacting you because your last name (Lavelle) is my middle name!

Being interested in genealogy I have learned that this was my great grandfathers wife’s name (Mary Lavelle), and that her family emigrated here about 1850 from County Mayo, Ireland. That is also where my fathers family came from.

Is your family background similar?

Hope to hear back from you.

Richard Lavelle Bourke

Hi Mary Ellen: Have you finished your memoir yet? I just came across your post and am seriously impressed that you are still writing. I discovered it again at age 77 and don’t know what I would do with myself if I couldn’t write. All the best to you!! Sharon [email protected]

I am up to my eyeballs with a research project and report for a non-profit. And some paid research for an international organization. But as today is my 90th birthday, it is time to retire and write a memoir.

So I would like to join a list to keep track of future courses related to memoir / creative non-fiction writing.

Hi Frederick,

Happy birthday! And happy retirement as well. I’ve added your name and email to our reminder list for memoir courses–when we post one on our calendar, we’ll send you an email.

We’ll be posting more memoir courses in the near future, likely for the months of January and February 2022. We hope to see you in one!

Very interesting and informative, I am writing memoirs from my long often adventurous and well travelled life, have had one very short story published. Your advice on several topics will be extremely helpful. I write under my schoolboy nickname Barnaby Rudge.

[…] How to Write a Memoir: Examples and a Step-by-Step Guide […]

I am writing my memoir from my memory when I was 5 years old and now having left my birthplace I left after graduation as a doctor I moved to UK where I have been living. In between I have spent 1 year in Canada during my training year as paediatrician. I also spent nearly 2 years with British Army in the hospital as paediatrician in Germany. I moved back to UK to work as specialist paediatrician in a very busy general hospital outside London for the next 22 years. Then I retired from NHS in 2012. I worked another 5 years in Canada until 2018. I am fully retired now

I have the whole convoluted story of my loss and horrid aftermath in my head (and heart) but have no clue WHERE, in my story to begin. In the middle of the tragedy? What led up to it? Where my life is now, post-loss, and then write back and forth? Any suggestions?

My friend Laura who referred me to this site said “Start”! I say to you “Start”!

Hi Dee, that has been a challenge for me.i dont know where to start?

What was the most painful? Embarrassing? Delicious? Unexpected? Who helped you? Who hurt you? Pick one story and let that lead you to others.

I really enjoyed this writing about memoir. I ve just finished my own about my journey out of my city then out of my country to Egypt to study, Never Say Can’t, God Can Do It. Infact memoir writing helps to live the life you are writing about again and to appreciate good people you came across during the journey. Many thanks for sharing what memoir is about.

I am a survivor of gun violence, having witnessed my adult son being shot 13 times by police in 2014. I have struggled with writing my memoir because I have a grandson who was 18-months old at the time of the tragedy and was also present, as was his biological mother and other family members. We all struggle with PTSD because of this atrocity. My grandson’s biological mother was instrumental in what happened and I am struggling to write the story in such a way as to not cast blame – thus my dilemma in writing the memoir. My grandson was later adopted by a local family in an open adoption and is still a big part of my life. I have considered just writing it and waiting until my grandson is old enough to understand all the family dynamics that were involved. Any advice on how I might handle this challenge in writing would be much appreciated.

I decided to use a ghost writer, and I’m only part way in the process and it’s worth every penny!

Hi. I am 44 years old and have had a roller coaster life .. right as a young kid seeing his father struggle to financial hassles, facing legal battles at a young age and then health issues leading to a recent kidney transplant. I have been working on writing a memoir sharing my life story and titled it “A memoir of growth and gratitude” Is it a good idea to write a memoir and share my story with the world?

Thank you… this was very helpful. I’m writing about the troubling issues of my mental health, and how my life was seriously impacted by that. I am 68 years old.

[…] Writers.com: How to Write a Memoir […]

[…] Writers.com: “How to Write a Memoir” […]

I am so grateful that I found this site! I am inspired and encouraged to start my memoir because of the site’s content and the brave people that have posted in the comments.

Finding this site is going into my gratitude journey 🙂

We’re grateful you found us too, Nichol! 🙂

Firstly, I would like to thank you for all the info pertaining to memoirs. I believe am on the right track, am at the editing stage and really have to use an extra pair of eyes. I’m more motivated now to push it out and complete it. Thanks for the tips it was very helpful, I have a little more confidence it seeing the completion.

Well, I’m super excited to begin my memoir. It’s hard trying to rely on memories alone, but I’m going to give it a shot!

Thanks to everyone who posted comments, all of which have inspired me to get on it.

Best of luck to everyone! Jody V.

I was thrilled to find this material on How to Write A Memoir. When I briefly told someone about some of my past experiences and how I came to the United States in the company of my younger brother in a program with a curious name, I was encouraged by that person and others to write my life history.

Based on the name of that curious program through which our parents sent us to the United States so we could leave the place of our birth, and be away from potentially difficult situations in our country.

As I began to write my history I took as much time as possible to describe all the different steps that were taken. At this time – I have been working on this project for 5 years and am still moving ahead. The information I received through your material has further encouraged me to move along. I am very pleased to have found this important material. Thank you!

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100 short memoir examples - narrative personal essays, scars by david owen, these precious days by ann patchett, the same river twice by david quammen, 50 more great articles about life, after life by joan didion, now we are five by david sedaris, feet in smoke by john jeremiah sullivan, when things go missing by kathryn schulz, 25 more great articles about death.

Love and Relationships

True love by haruki murakami, dating online by emily witt, no labels, no drama by jordana narin, the worst friend date i ever had by samantha irby, 50 more great articles about love and relationships, my first time, twice by ariel levy, tragedy averted. minimal gagging. by lidia yuknavitch, a girl's guide to sexual purity by carmen maria machado, deeply, truly (but not physically) in love by lauren slater, 50 more great articles about sex, peculiar benefits by roxane gay, thanksgiving in mongolia by ariel levy, long day's journey by elizabeth gilbert, trapped by aron ralston, the kingdom of the lotus by patrick symmes, 50 more great articles about travel, ultimate glory by dave gessner, skating home backward by bill vaughn, off diamond head by william finnegan, tennis, trigonometry, tornadoes by david foster wallace, 50 more great articles about sport.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

How to slowly kill yourself and others in america by kiese laymon, the price of black ambition by roxane gay, 25 more great essays about race, the comfort zone by jonathan franzen, on being an only child by geoff dyer, a raccoon of my own by lauren slater, my dad tried to kill me with an alligator by harrison scott key, difficult girl by lena dunham, seventeen by steve edwards, age appropriate by jen doll, richard by allie brosh, 50 more great articles about growing up, lost in the meritocracy by walter kirn, dumb kids' class by mark bowden, fragments from an education by christopher hitchens, 20 more great articles about education, having children, joy by zadie smith, channel b by megan stielstra, a birth story by meaghan o'connell, i was pregnant, and then i wasn't by laura turner, 10 more great articles about having children.

Patient by Rachel Riederer

The empathy exams by leslie jamison, 50 more great articles about health, mental illness, adventures in depression by allie brosh, darkness visible by william styron, insane after coronavirus by patricia lockwood, 20 more great articles about mental health, explicit violence by lidia yuknavitch, heroin/e by cheryl strayed, me & my monkey by anonymous, me and my girls by david carr, my addicted son by david sheff, how i let drinking take over my life by william leith, 10 more great articles about addiction, autobiography of a body by lucy grealy, a few words about breasts by nora ephron, a thin line between mother and daughter by jennifer egan, the broken country by molly mccully, the trash heap has spoken by carmen maria machado, saying goodbye to my chest by naomi gordon-loebl, the onset by my ngoc to, 20 more great articles about body image, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

The Unspeakable Things Between Our Bellies by Lidia Yuknavitch

Woven by lidia yuknavitch, girl by alexander chee, pause by mary ruefle, lost cat by mary gaitskill, three by david sedaris, my life as an undocumented immigrant by jose antonio vargas, been down so long it looks like debt to me by m.h. miller, lucky girl by bridget potter, goodbye to all that by joan didion, my misspent youth by meghan daum, lost and found by colson whitehead, night-shifting for the hip fleet by mark jacobson, 25 more great articles about new york, the muse of coyote ugly saloon by elizabeth gilbert, quitting the paint factory by mark slouka, the loading dock manifesto by john hyduk, 40 more great articles about work, the real heroes are dead by james b. stewart, remains of the day by mary lee hannell, 10 more great articles about 9/11.

Book-Length Memoirs

Slouching towards bethlehem by joan didion, me talk pretty one day by david sedaris, just kids by patti smith, the chronology of water by lidia yuknavitch, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius by dave eggers, the glass castle by jeannette walls, brain on fire by susannah cahalan, irritable hearts by mac mcclelland, hunger by roxane gay, a sliver of light by shane bauer, joshua fattal and sarah shourd, 100 more great nonfiction books.

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32 Memoir Examples That Offer a Thought-Provoking Read

POSTED ON Aug 29, 2023

Written by Sarah Rexford

As an aspiring author, it's likely you're an avid reader. And, if you already have dreams of sharing your story with the world, it's important to read and learn from other memoir examples that have resonated with readers.

But we don't suggest just picking up any book.

If you want to learn how to write a memoir, we recommend checking out a book that has been written by an author with whom you have a shared lived experience, who has a similar style or writing tone to your own, or who writes about a similar topic. While the intention is never to copy someone else's work, reading memoirs that might show up in the same category as yours could be immensely helpful.

While reading, take note of how vulnerable the author gets, how much they share, how they relate to the reader, what details impact you the most, and what about the delivery makes it so moving.

Our top 32 memoir examples

From famous best-sellers to the lesser-known reads on this list, the following memoir examples include common universal literary themes, very intimate glimpses into the writers' lives, hard-earned life lessons, and a variety of topics and tones to inspire your own memorable memoir.  

1. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

This is a classic memoir example – one that captures childhood, pain, and longing in all its nuanced forms.

2. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

Resilience and redemption co-star in this bestseller about Jeanette Walls’ life.

3. The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

An evangelist and survivor of Hitler’s concentration camps, the life of Corrie Ten Boom stands among the best memoir examples. 

4. The Puma Years by Laura Coleman

This story stands out among memoir examples for its personal look at the illegal pet trade industry, the impact of deforestation, and the bond between humans and animals.

5. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

You may not think documenting a life of seclusion would count as a memoir example, but Walden is considered one of the most compelling books in American literature.

6. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

This memoir shares why Steve Martin started – and stopped – his stand-up comedy. 

7. Life by Keith Richards

Written by the very one who founded The Rolling Stones , this one stands out among memoir examples. Ready to take a deep dive into Keith Richards’ life?

8. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

This semi-autobiographical, memoir-esque story shares the key points in Esther Greenwood’s neurosis. It is known as a haunting story while solidifying itself as an American classic.

9. All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg

Known for its expert prose, this memoir example tells of a life headed for the cotton mills, culminating in a career as a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter.

10. The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

One hundred years covered in one story, The Yellow House is unique among memoir examples. 

11. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Bestselling author Roxane Gay invites readers into a behind-the-curtain look at self-image, food, safety, and the dependent role each plays in correlation to the others. 

12. God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew

At first glance, Brother Andrew’s story fits in the thriller book genre – except for the fact that it’s all completely true. His dedication to smuggling Bibles to those who did not have any makes for a riveting read.

13. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke

Memoir examples that artfully address grief and how to grieve well are few and far between. Meghan tackles this topic from a personal angle with a story only she could tell.

14. Her by Christa Parravani

Imagine losing a sibling, a twin, and knowing that you yourself only have a 50% chance at survival. This memoir example covers a unique look at love and survival. 

15. South Island Tiny House by Corianne Holmes

While many of our memoir examples cover large periods of time or even an author's entire lifetime, this is a story about a pivotal, life-changing season in a person's life. Written by one of our very own Self Publishing students , Corianne shares her experience of moving to a new country and into a tiny home – divulging plenty of lessons learned.

16. Fullness by Azure Moyna 

Azure shares her story of surviving her brilliant yet sociopathic father, her struggle with bulimia, and her hunger for love.

17. My Mother's Daughter by Perdita Felicien

Opportunity, suffering, faith, perseverance and grit , Olympics, and nannying – each one of these topics shows up within the pages of this book that's based on a true story .

18. Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction By David Sheff

This memoir, written by a father about his son, is such a compelling memoir example that it was turned into a major motion picture. Addiction takes many faces, but when it appears on the face of your son, it’s that much more personal. 

19. Cowboy in a Corporate World by Ray Marxer

If you are a historical nonfiction lover or enraptured by the American West, read this memoir (by another SP student!) for a modern take about life on the ranch.  

20. Personal History by Katharine Graham

Presidents, mental illness, wealth, suicide, deep loneliness…the life of Katharine Graham will keep you turning pages.

21. Let’s Take The Long Way Home: A Memoir Of Friendship By Gail Caldwell

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Gail Caldwell invites readers into an intimate look at friendship, life’s highs and lows, and the power of women when facing it all. 

22. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

From the New York Times bestseller list , this is a memoir of a 36-year-old who goes from being a neurosurgeon to being a patient. 

23. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

This story chronicles the life of Irish immigrants, their resilience, and the details of surviving daily life. 

24. Ain't That a Miracle? by Jeremy Occhipinti

Funny and frank, while addressing some of the extremes of human emotion, this is another one of our favorite memoir examples written by one of our authors! 

25. Educated by Tara Westover 

Tara was 10ths 7 when she stepped into her first-ever classroom. Somehow, she made it to Harvard and Cambridge. This is her story.

26. Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother’s Story by David Payne

This deeply personal memoir example is one of two brothers, their rivalries and love, and the tragedy that cut through their lives far too early. 

27. Heart Berries By Terese Marie Mailhot

This memoir example shares the story of Terese’s dysfunctional past, a life-changing diagnosis, and, ultimately her journey toward overcoming it all. 

28. Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Candid but also hilarious (I mean, would we expect less?) Amy’s story belongs among the top comedic celebrity memoir examples. 

29. Pawprints On Our Hearts by Kerk Murray

Any book about a man's best friend is always worth the read. This international bestseller was a huge Amazon self-publishing success story, creating a legacy far bigger than just one book.

30.  Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell

This is a memoir example of personal ideas and the conflict when realities arrive on the war front. George Orwell recounts his time fighting the Fascists.

31. Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

Written by the sole surviving family member of a massive tsunami, Sonali writes about a very serious topic : grief and the aftermath of tragedy. 

32. What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

This one covers some major triggers: childhood abuse and trauma followed by a lifetime of mis- or undiagnosed PTSD and, finally, the healing she's always needed. Stephanie doesn't hold back in this memoir that may help others on their own journey.

What’s next? Include your story in memoir examples

You now have a versatile list of various memoir examples as well as snippets of why these stories stand out among memoirs. 

Now it’s your turn! Take some time to consider your own life story, the themes that stand out, and how they could help your readers. Then, create a memoir outline and get to writing.

Your story could change people's lives – don't wait any longer to publish it! 

While it may feel intimidating to write a book that's raw and vulnerable and your story, starting your memoir is often the most difficult part. Editing , publishing, and book marketing , including permission marketing , all come long after you've got an initial manuscript in your hands. And, if you claim your free copy of Published (just click below) or join our Author Advantage Accelerator, you'll have a dedicated coach to help you with each step of your author journey.

Related posts

The six-word memoir: an exercise on short, powerful stories, memoir vs biography: spotting the genre differences.

Memoir, Non-Fiction

How to Start a Memoir: 10 Steps for Sharing Your Story 

The New York Times

Books | the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years, the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES JUNE 26, 2019

The New York Times’s book critics select the most outstanding memoirs published since 1969.

Click the star icon to create and share your own list of favorites or books to read.

Fierce Attachments

Vivian gornick, farrar, straus & giroux, 1987.

“I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the 1940s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.”

When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. It’s a portrait of the artist as she finds a language — original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities — worthy of the women that raised her. — Parul Sehgal

I love this book — even during those moments when I want to scream at Gornick, which are the times when she becomes the hypercritical, constantly disappointed woman that her mother, through her words and example, taught the author to be. There’s a clarity to this memoir that’s so brilliant it's unsettling; Gornick finds a measure of freedom in her writing and her feminist activism, but even then, she and her mother can never let each other go. —  Jennifer Szalai

Gornick’s language is so fresh and so blunt; it’s a quintessentially American voice, and a beautiful one. The confidence of her tone in “Fierce Attachments” reminds me of the Saul Bellow who wrote, in the opening lines of “The Adventures of Augie March,” “I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” — Dwight Garner

Buy this book

The Woman Warrior

Maxine hong kingston, alfred a. knopf, 1976.

This book is more than four decades old, but I can’t think of another memoir quite like it that has been published since. True stories, ghost stories, “talk stories” — Maxine Hong Kingston whirs them all together to produce something wild and astonishing that still asserts itself with a ruthless precision.

The American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, Kingston navigates a bewildering journey between worlds, each one stifling yet perforated by inconsistencies. There’s the Chinese village of Kingston’s ancestors, where girls learn the song of the warrior woman while being told they are destined to become a wife and a slave. There’s the postwar California of her childhood, where she has to unlearn the “strong and bossy” voices of the Chinese women in her family in favor of an “American-feminine” whisper. There’s Mao’s revolution, which is supposed to upend the old feudal system that kept her female ancestors trapped in servitude (if they weren’t victims of infanticides as unwanted baby girls) but also imposes its own deadly cruelty, preventing her parents from returning home.

The narrative undulates, shifting between ghost world, real world and family lore. It can be deadpan and funny, too. The young Kingston resolves to become a lumberjack and a newspaper reporter. Both worthy ambitions, but I’m thankful she wrote this indelible memoir instead. — Jennifer Szalai

Alison Bechdel

Houghton mifflin harcourt, 2006.

Alison Bechdel’s beloved graphic novel is an elaborately layered account of life and artifice, family silence and revelation, springing from her father’s suicide. He was a distant man who devoted himself to the refurbishment of his sprawling Victorian home — and to a hidden erotic life involving young men. The title comes from the abbreviation of the family business — a funeral home — but it also refers to the dual funhouse portrait of father and daughter, of the author’s own queerness.

It’s a sexual and intellectual coming-of-age story that swims along literary lines, honoring the books that nourished Bechdel and her parents and seemed to speak for them: Kate Millet, Proust, Oscar Wilde, theory, poetry and literature. “Fun Home” joins that lineage, an original, mournful, intricate work of art. — Parul Sehgal

The Liars’ Club

Viking, 1995.

This incendiary memoir, about the author’s childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas, was published in 1995 and helped start the modern memoir boom. The book deserves its reputation. You can almost say about Mary Karr’s agile prose what she says about herself at the age of 7: “I was small-boned and skinny, but more than able to make up for that with sheer meanness.”

As a girl, Karr was a serious settler of scores, willing to bite anyone who had wronged her or to climb a tree with a BB gun to take aim at an entire family. Her mother, who “fancied herself a kind of bohemian Scarlett O’Hara,” had a wild streak. She was married seven times, and was subject to psychotic episodes. Her father was an oil refinery worker, a brawling yet taciturn man who came most fully alive when telling tall stories, often in the back room of a bait shop, with a group of men called “The Liars’ Club.”

This is one of the best books ever written about growing up in America. Karr evokes the contours of her preadolescent mind — the fears, fights and petty jealousies — with extraordinary and often comic vividness. This memoir, packed with eccentrics, is beautifully eccentric in its own right. — Dwight Garner

For generations my ancestors had been strapping skillets onto their oxen and walking west. It turned out to be impossible for me to “run away” in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

—Mary Karr, “The Liar’s Club”

Christopher Hitchens

Twelve, 2010.

This high-spirited memoir traces the life and times of this inimitable public intellectual, who is much missed, from his childhood in Portsmouth, England, where his father was a navy man, through boarding school, his studies at Oxford and his subsequent career as a writer both in England and the United States.

Christopher Hitchens was a man of the left but unpredictable (and sometimes inscrutable) politically. “Hitch-22” demonstrates how seriously he took the things that really matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty and holding public figures to high standards.

This is a vibrant book about friendships, and it will make you want to take your own more seriously. Hitchens recounts moments with friends that include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton. There is a lot of wit here, and bawdy wordplay, and accounts of long nights spent drinking and smoking. Hitchens decided to become a student of history and politics, he writes, after the Cuban missile crisis. “If politics could force its way into my life in such a vicious and chilling manner, I felt, then I had better find out a bit more about it.” He was a force to contend with from the time he was in short pants. “I was probably insufferable,” he concedes. — Dwight Garner

Read the critics discuss the process of putting together the list.

Men We Reaped

Jesmyn ward, bloomsbury, 2013.

“Men’s bodies litter my family history,” the novelist Jesmyn Ward writes in this torrential, sorrowing tribute to five young black men she knew, including her brother, who died in the span of four years, lost to suicide, drugs or accidents. These men were devoured by her hometown, DeLisle, Miss. — called Wolf Town by its first settlers — “pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism.”

Ward tells their stories with tenderness and reverence; they live again in these pages. Their fates twine with her own — her dislocation and anguish, and later, the complicated story of her own survival, and isolation, as she is recruited to elite all-white schools. She is a writer who has metabolized the Greeks and Faulkner — their themes course through her work — and the stories of the deaths of these men join larger national narratives about rural poverty and racism. But Ward never allows her subjects to become symbolic. This work of great grief and beauty renders them individual and irreplaceable. — Parul Sehgal

Random House, 1995

It’s Vidal, so you know the gossip will be abundant, and top shelf. Scores will be settled (with Anaïs Nin, Charlton Heston, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his mother), conquests enumerated (Jack Kerouac), choice quips dispensed. “At least I have a style,” Truman Capote once sniped at him. “Of course you do,” Vidal responded soothingly. “You stole it from Carson McCullers.”

It was a rangy life — one that took him into the military, politics, Hollywood, Broadway — and he depicts it with the silky urbanity you expect. What comes as a shock is the book’s directness and deep feeling — its innocence.

It’s a love story, at the end of the day. Vidal had a lifelong companion but remained passionately compelled by a beautiful classmate, his first paramour, Jimmie, who died at 19, shot and bayoneted while sleeping in a foxhole on Iwo Jima. He is the phantom that has haunted Vidal’s long, eventful life. “Palimpsest” is a book full of revelations.

“By choice and luck, my life has been spent reading other people’s books and making sentences for my own,” Vidal writes. Our great luck, too. — Parul Sehgal

Giving Up the Ghost

Hilary mantel, a john macrae book/henry holt & company, 2003.

As a poor Catholic girl growing up in the north of England, Hilary Mantel was an exuberant child of improbable ambition, deciding early on that she was destined to become a knight errant and would change into a boy when she turned 4.

Her mesmerizing memoir reads like an attempt to recover the girl she once was, before others began to dictate her story for her. At the age of 7, looking about the garden, she saw an apparition, perhaps the Devil. She thought it was her fault, for allowing her greedy gaze to wander. Her stepfather was bullying, judgmental, condescending; anything Mantel did seemed to anger him. As a young woman, she started to get headaches, vision problems, pains that coursed through her body, bleeding that no longer confined itself to that time of the month. The doctors told her she was insane.

The ghost she is giving up in the title isn’t her life but that of the child she might have had but never will. Years of misdiagnoses culminated in the removal of her reproductive organs, barnacled by scar tissue caused by endometriosis. Her body changed from very thin to very fat. Mantel, perhaps best known for her novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” writes about all of this with a fine ear and a furious intelligence, as she resurrects phantoms who “shiver between the lines.” — Jennifer Szalai

I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong.

—Hilary Mantel, “Giving Up the Ghost”

A Childhood

Harry crews, harper & row, 1978.

This taut, powerful and deeply original memoir covers just the first six years of this gifted novelist’s life, but it is a nearly Dickensian anthology of physical and mental intensities.

Harry Crews grew up in southern Georgia, not far from the Okefenokee Swamp. His father, a tenant farmer, died of a heart attack before Crews was 2. His stepfather was a violent drunk. When Crews was 5, he fell into a boiler of water that was being used to scald pigs. His own skin came off, he writes, “like a wet glove.” When he recovered from this long and painful ordeal, he contracted polio so severely that his heels drew back tightly until they touched the backs of his thighs. He was told, incorrectly, that he would never walk again. “The world that circumscribed the people I come from,” he writes, “had so little margin for error, for bad luck, that when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it.”

Crews sought solace in the Sears, Roebuck catalog, the only book in his house besides the Bible. He began his career as a writer by making up stories about the people he saw there. These humans didn’t have scars and blemishes like everyone he knew. “On their faces were looks of happiness, even joy, looks that I never saw much of in the faces of the people around me.” — Dwight Garner

Dreams From My Father

Barack obama, times books/random house, 1995.

Barack Obama’s first book was published a year before he was elected to the Illinois senate and long before his eight years in the White House under the unrelenting gaze of the public eye. “Dreams From My Father” is a moving and frank work of self-excavation — mercifully free of the kind of virtue-signaling and cheerful moralizing that makes so many politicians’ memoirs read like notes to a stump speech.

Obama recounts an upbringing that set him apart, with a tangle of roots that didn’t give him an obvious map to who he was. His father was from Kenya; his mother from Kansas. Obama himself was born in Hawaii, lived in Indonesia for a time, and was largely raised by his mother and maternal grandparents, after his father left for Harvard when Obama was 2.

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds,” he writes, “understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” To see what held his worlds together was also to learn what kept them apart. This is a book about the uses of disenchantment; the revelations are all the more astonishing for being modest and hard-won. — Jennifer Szalai

Philip Roth

Simon & schuster, 1991.

Philip Roth’s book is a Kaddish to his father, Herman Roth, who developed a benign brain tumor at 86. Surgery was not an option, and Herman became immured in his body, which “had become a terrifying escape-proof enclosure, the holding pen in a slaughterhouse.”

“Patrimony,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is written plainly, without any flourishes — just the unbearable facts of a father’s decline, the body weakening, the vigorous mind dimming. It’s the rough stuff of devotion. Roth adopts care of his increasingly difficult father and witnesses his rapid decline, admonishing himself: “You must not forget anything.”

“He was always teaching me something,” Roth recalls of his father. He never stopped. In this book, Roth offers a moving tribute to the man but also a portrait almost breathtaking in its honesty and lack of sentimentalism, so truthful and exact that it is as much a portrait of living as dying, son as father. “He could be a pitiless realist,” Roth writes of Herman, proudly. “But I wasn’t his offspring for nothing.” — Parul Sehgal

I had seen my father’s brain, and everything and nothing was revealed. A mystery scarcely short of divine, the brain, even in the case of a retired insurance man with an eighth-grade education from Newark’s Thirteenth Avenue School.

—Philip Roth, “Patrimony”

All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw

Theodore rosengarten, alfred a. knopf, 1974.

This indelible book, an oral history from an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper, won the National Book Award in 1975, beating a lineup of instant classics that included “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men”; Studs Terkel’s “Working”; and Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Unlike these other books, “All God’s Dangers” has largely been forgotten. It’s time for that to change.

This book’s author, Theodore Rosengarten, was a Harvard graduate student who went to Alabama in 1968 while researching a defunct labor organization. Someone suggested he speak with Shaw, whose real name was Ned Cobb. What emerged from Cobb’s mouth was dense and tangled social history, a narrative that essentially takes us from slavery to Selma from the point of view of an unprosperous but eloquent and unbroken black man.

Reading it, you will learn more about wheat, guano, farm implements, bugs, cattle killing and mule handling than you would think possible. This is also a dense catalog of the ways that whites tricked and mistreated blacks in the first half of the 20th century. “Years ago I heard that Abraham Lincoln freed the colored people,” Cobb says, “but it didn’t amount to a hill of beans.” About his white neighbors, he declares, “Any way they could deprive a Negro was a celebration to ’em.” This book is not always easy reading, but it is the real deal, an essential American document. — Dwight Garner

Lives Other Than My Own

Emmanuel carrère. translated from the french by linda coverdale., metropolitan books/henry holt & company, 2011.

You begin this memoir thinking it will be about one thing, and it turns into something else altogether — a book at once more ordinary and more extraordinary than any first impressions might allow.

Emmanuel Carrère starts with the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka — he was there, vacationing with his girlfriend. But that’s just the first 50 pages. Then he turns to the story of his girlfriend’s sister, a small-town judge who’s dying of cancer, and her friendship with another judge, who also has cancer. Carrère’s girlfriend chides him for thinking that such unpromising material offers him some sort of golden storytelling opportunity: “They don’t even sleep together — and at the end, she dies,” she says to him. “Have I got that straight? That’s your story?”

She does have it straight, but there’s so much more to it. Carrère weaves in his own experiences, coming up against his own limitations, his own prejudices, his own understanding of what defines a meaningful life. His sentences are clean, never showy; he writes about himself through others in a way that feels both necessarily generous and candidly — which is to say appropriately — narcissistic.

Whenever I try to describe this memoir — and I do that often, since it’s a book I don’t just recommend but implore people to read — I feel like I’m trying to parse a magic trick. — Jennifer Szalai

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos oz. translated from the hebrew by nicholas de lange., harcourt, 2004.

This memoir was born from a long silence, written 50 years after Amos Oz’s mother killed herself with sleeping pills, when he was 12, three months before his bar mitzvah. The resulting book is both brutal and generous, filled with meandering reflections on a life’s journey in politics and literature.

The only child of European Jews who settled in the Promised Land, Oz grew up alongside the new state of Israel, initially enamored of a fierce nationalism before becoming furiously (and in one memorable scene, rather hilariously) disillusioned. As a lonely boy, Oz felt unseen by his awkward father and confounded by his brilliant and deeply unhappy mother. She taught him that people were a constant source of betrayal and disappointment. Books, though, would never let him down. Hearing about what happened to those Jews who stayed in Europe, the young Oz wanted to become a book, because no matter how many books were destroyed there was a decent chance that one copy could survive.

Oz says he essentially killed his father by moving to a kibbutz at 15 and changing his name. But his father lives on in this memoir, along with Oz’s mother — not just in his recollections of her, but in the very existence of this book. She was the one who captivated him with stories that “amazed you, sent shivers up your spine, then disappeared back into the darkness before you had time to see what was in front of your eyes.” — Jennifer Szalai

This Boy’s Life

Tobias wolff, the atlantic monthly press, 1989.

“Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide.” So begins Tobias Wolff’s powerful and impeccably written memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, a classic of the genre that has lost none of its power.

Divorced mother and son had hit the road together, fleeing a bad man, trying to change their luck and maybe get rich as uranium prospectors. The author’s wealthy and estranged father was absent. Soon his mother linked up with a man named Dwight (never trust a man named Dwight) who beat young Wolff, stole his paper route money and forced him to shuck horse chestnuts after school for hours, until his hands were “crazed with cuts and scratches” from their sharply spined husks. Wolff became wild in high school, a delinquent and a petty thief, before escaping to a prep school in Pennsylvania. His prose lights up the experience of growing up in America during this era. He describes going to confession and trying to articulate an individual sin this way: “It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.” — Dwight Garner

A Life’s Work

Rachel cusk, picador, 2002.

Rachel Cusk writes about new motherhood with an honesty and clarity that makes this memoir feel almost illicit. Sleepless nights, yes; colic, yes; but also a raw, frantic love for her firstborn daughter that she depicts and dissects with both rigor and amazement.

As many readers as there are who love “A Life’s Work” as much as I do, I know others who have been put off by its steely register, finding it too denuded, shorn of warmth and giddiness — those very things that help make motherhood such an enormous experience, and not just a grueling one. But whenever I read Cusk’s book, I am irrevocably pulled along in its thrall, constantly startled by her observations — milk running “in untasted rivulets” down her baby’s “affronted cheek”; pregnancy literature that “bristles with threats and the promise of reprisal” — and her willingness to see her experience cold.

Or, at least, to try to, because what becomes clear is that it’s impossible for Cusk to hold on to her old self. The childless writer who could compartmentalize with ease and take boundaries for granted has to learn an entirely new way of being. Embedded in Cusk’s chiseled sentences are her attempts to engage with a roiling vulnerability. None of the chipper, treacly stuff here; motherhood deserves more respect than that. — Jennifer Szalai

J.M. Coetzee

Viking, 1997.

The Nobel Prize-winning J.M. Coetzee is one of those novelists who rarely give interviews, and when he does, he’s like the Robert Mueller of the literary world — reticent, discreet and quietly insistent that his books should speak for themselves.

Coetzee, in other words, is taciturn in the extreme. Yet he has also written three revealing volumes about his life — “Boyhood,” “Youth” and “Summertime.” The first, “Boyhood,” is most explicitly and conventionally a memoir, covering his years growing up in a provincial village outside of Cape Town. The child of Afrikaner parents who had pretensions to English gentility, he was buttoned-up and sensitive, desperate to fit into the “normal” world around him but also confounded and repulsed by it. He noticed how his indolent relatives clung to their privileged position in South Africa’s brutal racial hierarchy through cruelty and a raw assertion of power. Out in the world, he lived in constant fear of violence and humiliation; at home he was cosseted by his mother and presided like a king.

The memoir is told in the third-person present tense, which lends it a peculiar immediacy. Coetzee is free to observe the boy he once was without the interpretive intrusions that come with age; he can remain true to what he felt then, rather than what he knows now. His recollections are stark and painfully intimate: “He feels like a crab pulled out of its shell, pink and wounded and obscene.” — Jennifer Szalai

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974

“The book is already a period piece,” the legendary travel writer Jan Morris opens her memoir. “It was written in the 1970s, and is decidedly of the 1970s.” It might be of its time but it is also ardent, musical, poetic and full of warm humor — a chronicle of ecstasies. Best remembered as one of the first accounts of gender transition, “Conundrum” is a study of home in all its forms — of finding home in one’s body, of Morris’s native Wales, of all the cities she possesses by dint of loving them so fiercely.

We are carried from her childhood, in the lap of a family militantly opposed to conformity, to her long career as a reporter in England and Egypt. She went everywhere, met everyone: Che Guevara (“sharp as a cat in Cuba”), Guy Burgess (“swollen with drink and self-reproach in Moscow”). It’s an enviably full life, with a long marriage, four children and Morris’s determinedly sunny disposition and ability to regard every second of her life, however difficult — especially if difficult — as a species of grand adventure.

She chafes at the notion of “identity” (“a trendy word I have long distrusted, masking as it often does befuddled ideas and lazy thinking”). It is thrilling to watch her arrive at an understanding of a sense of self and language that is her own, bespoke. “To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial,” she writes. “It was a melody that I heard within myself.” — Parul Sehgal

I did not query my condition, or seek reasons for it. I knew very well that it was an irrational conviction — I was in no way psychotic, and perhaps not much more neurotic than most of us; but there it was, I knew it to be true, and if it was impossible then the definition of possibility was inadequate.

—Jan Morris, “Conundrum”

Sonali Deraniyagala

Alfred a. knopf, 2013.

Sonali Deraniyagala was searching the internet for ways to kill herself when one click led to another and she was staring at a news article featuring pictures of her two young sons. The boys had died not long before — victims of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, which also killed Deraniyagala’s husband and her parents. She herself survived by clinging to a branch.

“Wave” is a meticulous account of derangement — of being so undone by grief that life becomes not just impossible but terrifying. She recalls stabbing herself with a butter knife. She couldn’t look at a flower or a blade of grass without feeling a sickening sense of panic. Reading this book is like staring into the abyss, only instead of staring back it might just swallow you whole.

This, believe it or not, is why you should read it — for Deraniyagala’s unflinching account of the horror that took away her family, and for her willingness to lay bare how it made her not only more vulnerable but also, at times, more cruel. Her return to life was gradual, tentative and difficult; she learned the only way out of her unbearable anguish was to remember what had happened and to keep it close. — Jennifer Szalai

Always Unreliable: Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was in June

Clive james, picador, 2004.

The Australian-born critic, poet, memoirist, novelist, travel writer and translator Clive James isn’t as well known in America as he is in England, where he’s lived most of his adult life. Over there, cabdrivers know who James is: the ebullient man who hosted many comic and erudite television programs over the years. We have no one quite like him over here: Think Johnny Carson combined with Edmund Wilson.

James is the author of five memoirs, to which many readers have a cultlike devotion. The first three — “Unreliable Memoirs,” “Falling Towards England” and “May Week Was in June” — have been collected into one volume, “Always Unreliable,” and they are especially incisive and comic. In a preface to the first book, James dealt a truth few memoirists will admit: “Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.” He’s an admitted exaggerator, but nonetheless he’s led a big life.

He was born in 1939 and grew up with an absent father, a Japanese prisoner of war. Released, his father died in a plane crash on his way home when James was 5. The author fully relives his adolescent agonies (“you can die of envy for cratered faces weeping with yellow pus”) and his rowdy troublemaking years. Later volumes take him to London and then to Cambridge University, where he edits Granta, the literary magazine, dabbles in theater (“It was my first, cruel exposure to the awkward fact that the arts attract the insane”) and gets married. He is never less than good company. — Dwight Garner

Travels With Lizbeth

Lars eighner, st. martin’s press, 1993.

Lars Eighner’s memoir contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America. Yet it’s not a dirge or a Bukowski-like scratching of the groin but an offbeat and plaintive hymn to life. It’s the sort of book that releases the emergency brake on your soul. Eighner spent three years on the streets (mostly in Austin, Tex.) and on the road in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after suffering from migraines and losing a series of jobs. The book he wrote is a literate and exceedingly humane document.

On the streets, he clung to a kind of dignity. He refused to beg or steal. He didn’t care for drugs; he barely drank. “Being suddenly intoxicated in a public place in the early afternoon,” he writes, “is not my idea of a good time.” He foraged for books and magazines as much as food, but an especially fine portion of this book is his writing about dumpster-diving. There’s the jarring impression that every grain of rice is a maggot. About botulism, he writes: “Often the first symptom is death.” There is something strangely Emersonian, capable and self-reliant, in his scavenging. “I live from the refuse of others,” he declares. “I think it a sound and honorable niche.” — Dwight Garner

Day after day I could aspire, within reason, to nothing more than survival. Although the planets wandered among the stars and the moon waxed and waned, the identical naked barrenness of existence was exposed to me, day in and day out.

—Lars Eighner, “Travels With Lizbeth”

Little, Brown & Company, 2015

The photographer Sally Mann’s memoir is weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful. She has real literary gifts, and she’s led a big Southern-bohemian life, rich with incident. Or maybe it only seems rich with incident because of an old maxim that still holds: Stories happen only to people who can tell them.

Like Mary Karr, Mann as a child was a scrappy, troublemaking tomboy, one who grew into a scrappy, troublemaking, impossible-to-ignore young woman and artist. She was raised in Virginia by sophisticated, lettered parents. When she grew too wild, they sent her away to a prep school in Vermont where, she writes, “I smoked, I drank, I skipped classes, I snuck out, I took drugs, I stole quarts of ice cream for my dorm by breaking into the kitchen storerooms, I made out with my boyfriends in the library basement, I hitchhiked into town and down I-91, and when caught, I weaseled out of all of it.”

This memoir recounts some of the Southern gothic elements of her parents’ lives. This book is heavily illustrated, and traces her growth as an artist. It recounts friendships with Southern artists and writers such as Cy Twombly and Reynolds Price. Her anecdotes have snap. About his advanced old age, in a line that is hard to forget, Twombly tells the author that he is “closing down the bodega for real.” But this story is entirely her own. — Dwight Garner

Country Girl

Edna o’brien, little, brown and company, 2013.

The enormously gifted Irish writer Edna O’Brien was near the red-hot center of the Swinging ’60s in London. She dropped acid with her psychiatrist, R.D. Laing. Among those who came to her parties were Marianne Faithfull, Sean Connery, Princess Margaret and Jane Fonda. Richard Burton and Marlon Brando tried to get her into bed. Robert Mitchum succeeded after wooing her with this pickup line: “I bet you wish I was Robert Taylor, and I bet you never tasted white peaches.”

O’Brien was born in a village in County Clare, in the west of Ireland, in 1930. This earthy and evocative book also traces her youth and her development as a writer. Her small family was religious. Her father was a farmer who drank and gambled; her mother was a former maid. She has described her village, Tuamgraney, as “enclosed, fervid and bigoted.” O’Brien didn’t attend college. She moved to Dublin, where she worked in a drugstore while studying at the Pharmaceutical College at night. She began to read literature, and she wondered: “Why could life not be lived at that same pitch? Why was it only in books that I could find the utter outlet for my emotions?” This memoir has perfect pitch. — Dwight Garner

Marjane Satrapi. Translated from the French by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris.

Pantheon, 2003.

At the age of 6, Marjane Satrapi privately declared herself the last prophet of Islam. At 14, she left Iran for a boarding school in Austria, sent away by parents terrified of their outspoken daughter’s penchant for challenging her teachers (and hypocrisy wherever she sniffed it out). At 31, she published “Persepolis,” in French (it was later translated into English by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris), a stunning graphic memoir hailed as a wholly original achievement in the form.

There’s still a startling freshness to the book. It won’t age. In inky shadows and simple, expressive lines — reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Madeline” — Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances (and scoring punk rock cassettes on the black market).

The revolution, the rise of fundamentalism, a brutal family history of torture, imprisonment and exile are conveyed from a child’s perspective and achieve a stark, shocking impact. — Parul Sehgal

Margo Jefferson

Pantheon, 2015.

The motto was simple in Margo Jefferson’s childhood home: “Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.” Her family was part of Chicago’s black elite. Her father was the head pediatrician at Provident, America’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite. They saw themselves as a “Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians.” Life was navigated according to strict standards of behavior and femininity. Jefferson writes of the punishing psychic burden of growing up feeling that she was a representative for her race and, later, of nagging, terrifying suicidal impulses.

Jefferson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for her book reviews in The New York Times. “Negroland” is an extended form of criticism that dances between a history of social class to a close reading of her mother’s expressions; the information calibrated in a brow arched “three to four millimeters.”

The prose is blunt and evasive, sensuous and ascetic, doubting and resolute — and above all beautifully skeptical of the genre, of the memoir’s conventions, clichés and limits. “How do you adapt your singular, willful self to so much history and myth? So much glory, banality, honor and betrayal?” she asks. This shape-shifting, form-shattering book carves one path forward. — Parul Sehgal

25 More Great Memoirs

Presented in Alphabetical Order by Author

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

Viv albertine, thomas dunne books/st. martin’s press, 2014.

Viv Albertine participated in the birth of punk in the mid-1970s. She was in a band with Sid Vicious before he joined the Sex Pistols. She dated Mick Jones while he was putting together his new band, the Clash. She could barely play guitar, yet she became the lead guitarist for the Slits. Her memoir is wiry and fearless. It contains story after story about men who told her she couldn’t do things that she did anyway. Her life up to the breakup of the Slits occupies only half of the book. There’s a lot of pain in the second section: loneliness, doubt, a bad marriage, cancer, depression. Throughout, this account has an honest, lo-fi grace.

Martin Amis

Talk miramax books/hyperion, 2000.

In this memoir, the acclaimed author of “London Fields,” “Money” and other novels decided, he writes, “to speak, for once, without artifice.” The entertaining, loosely structured result is movingly earnest and wickedly funny. It includes a portrait, both cleareyed and affectionate, of the author’s father, the comic novelist and poet Kingsley Amis. In addition, “Experience” offers more vivid and harrowing writing about dental problems than you might have thought one person capable of producing.

Slow Days, Fast Company

Alfred a. knopf, 1977.

The Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz writes prose that reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila. “Slow Days, Fast Company” and “Eve’s Hollywood,” the book that preceded it, are officially billed as fiction, but they are mostly undisguised dispatches from her own experiences in 1970s California. Reading her is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called “4/60 air-conditioning” — that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.

Russell Baker

Congdon & weed, 1982.

Russell Baker’s warm and disarmingly funny account of his life growing up in Depression-era America has garnered comparisons to the work of Mark Twain. The book quickly became a beloved best seller when it was published, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Baker was born into poverty in Virginia in 1925. He was 5 years old when his father, then 33, fell into a diabetic coma and died. The author’s strong, affectionate mother is a major presence in the book. Baker, a longtime humorist and columnist for The New York Times, died in January at 93.

Kafka Was the Rage

Anatole broyard, carol southern books/crown publishers, 1993.

Anatole Broyard, a longtime book critic and essayist for The New York Times, died in 1990 of prostate cancer. What he had finished of this memoir before his death mostly concerned his time living in the West Village after World War II. “A war is like an illness,” he writes, “and when it’s over you think you’ve never felt so well.” He writes about the vogue for psychoanalysis, his experience opening a used-book store and, primarily, his formative relationship with the artist Sheri Martinelli (her pseudonym in the book is Sheri Donatti). The book was truncated, but the writing in it is brilliant and often epigrammatic: “I just want love to live up to its publicity.”

Between the World and Me

Ta-nehisi coates, spiegel & grau, 2015.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, in the form of a letter to his son, is a scalding examination of his own experience as a black man in America, and of how much of American history has been systemically built on exploiting and committing violence against black bodies. Inspired by a section of James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” that was addressed to the author’s nephew, Coates’s book is a powerful testimony that will continue to have a profound impact on discussions about race in America.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan didion, alfred a. knopf, 2005.

Joan Didion, so long an exemplar of cool, of brilliant aloofness, showed us her unraveling in this memoir about the sudden death of her husband of 40 years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the frightening illness of her daughter, Quintana. It’s a troubled, meditative book, in which Didion writes of what it feels like to have “cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad.”

Barbarian Days

William finnegan, penguin press, 2015.

This account of a lifelong surfing obsession won the Pulitzer Prize in biography. William Finnegan, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, recalls his childhood in California and Hawaii, his many surfing buddies through the years and his taste for a kind of danger that approaches the sublime. In his 20s, he traveled through Asia and Africa and the South Pacific in search of waves, living in tents and cars and cheap apartments. One takes away from “Barbarian Days” a sense of a big, wind-chapped, well-lived life.

Personal History

Katharine graham, alfred a. knopf, 1997.

Katharine Graham’s brilliant but remote father, Eugene Meyer, capped his successful career as a financier and public servant by buying the struggling Washington Post in 1933 and nursing it to health. Graham took command of the paper in 1963, and steered it through the Watergate scandal and the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency, among other dramas. Her autobiography covers her life from childhood to her command of a towering journalistic institution in a deeply male-dominated industry. Her tone throughout is frank, self-critical, modest and justifiably proud.

Thinking in Pictures

Temple grandin, doubleday, 1995.

Memoirs are valued, in part, for their ability to open windows onto experiences other than our own, and few do that as dramatically as Temple Grandin’s “Thinking in Pictures.” Grandin, a professor of animal science who is autistic, describes the “library” of visual images in her memory, which she is constantly updating. (“It’s like getting a new version of software for the computer.”) As Oliver Sacks wrote in an introduction to the book, “Grandin’s voice came from a place which had never had a voice, never been granted real existence, before.”

Autobiography of a Face

Lucy grealy, houghton mifflin, 1994.

When she was 9 years old, Lucy Grealy was stricken with a rare, virulent form of bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. She had radical surgery to remove half of her jaw, and years of radiation and chemotherapy, and recovered. She then endured a sense of disfigurement and isolation from other children. She became an accomplished poet and essayist before dying at 39 in 2002. Although entitled to self-pity, Grealy was not given to it. This memoir is a moving meditation on ugliness and beauty. Grealy’s life is the subject of another powerful memoir, Ann Patchett’s “Truth & Beauty,” which recounts the friendship between the two writers.

Dancing With Cuba

Alma guillermoprieto. translated from the spanish by esther allen., pantheon, 2004.

Alma Guillermoprieto was a 20-year-old dance student in 1969, when Merce Cunningham offered to recommend her for a teaching job at the National Schools of the Arts in Havana. This memoir is her account of the six months she spent there, a frustrating and fascinating time that opened her eyes to the world beyond dance. Eventually, political turmoil, piled on top of loneliness, youthful angst and assorted romantic troubles, led the author to the edge of a nervous breakdown. This remembrance is a pleasure to read, full of humanity, sly humor, curiosity and knowledge.

Minor Characters

Joyce johnson, houghton mifflin, 1983.

Joyce Johnson was 21 and not long out of Barnard College when, in the winter of 1957, Allen Ginsberg set her up on a blind date with Jack Kerouac, who was 34 and still largely unknown. Thus began an off-and-on relationship that lasted nearly two years, during which time “On the Road” was published, leading to life-altering fame — not only for Kerouac but many of his closest friends. Johnson’s book about this time is a riveting portrait of an era, and a glowing introduction to the Beats. It’s a book about a so-called minor character who, in the process of writing her life, became a major one.

The Memory Chalet

Penguin press, 2010.

The historian Tony Judt, who was known for his incisive analysis of current events and his synthesizing of European history in books like “Postwar,” wrote this book of autobiographical fragments after he was stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and had become “effectively quadriplegic.” He would think back over his life in the middle of the night, shape those memories into stories and dictate them to an assistant the next day. “The Memory Chalet,” the resulting unlikely artifact, ranges over Judt’s boyhood in England; the lives of his lower-middle-class Jewish parents; life as a student and fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, in the 1960s and early ’70s; and his life in New York City, where he eventually settled and taught.

Kiese Laymon

Scribner, 2018.

The most recently published entry on this list of 50 books, Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy” details the author’s childhood in Mississippi in the 1980s and his relationship with his alternately loving and abusive mother, who raised him on her own. It’s full of sharp, heart-rending thoughts about growing up black in the United States, and his fraught relationship with his body — Laymon’s weight has severely fluctuated over the years, a subject he plumbs with great sensitivity. This is a gorgeous, gutting book that’s fueled by candor yet freighted with ambivalence. It’s full of devotion and betrayal, euphoria and anguish.

Priestdaddy

Patricia lockwood, riverhead books, 2017.

Patricia Lockwood, an acclaimed poet, weaves in this memoir the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with the crisis that led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof. The book, consistently alive with feeling, is written with elastic style. And in Lockwood’s father, Greg, it has one of the great characters in nonfiction: He listens to Rush Limbaugh while watching Bill O’Reilly, consumes Arby’s Beef ’n Cheddar sandwiches the way other humans consume cashews and strides around in his underwear. Hilarious descriptions — of, to take one example, Greg’s guitar playing — alternate with profound examinations of family, art and faith.

H Is for Hawk

Helen macdonald, grove press, 2015.

When we meet Helen Macdonald in this beautiful and nearly feral book, she’s in her 30s, with “no partner, no children, no home.” When her father dies suddenly on a London street, it steals the floor from beneath her. Obsessed with birds of prey since she was a girl, Macdonald was already an experienced falconer. In her grief, seeking escape into something, she began to train one of nature’s most vicious predators, a goshawk. She unplugged her telephone. She told her friends to leave her alone. Nearly every paragraph she writes about the experience is strange in the best way, and injected with unexpected meaning.

The Color of Water

James mcbride, riverhead books, 1996.

This complex and moving story, which enjoyed a long run on best-seller lists, is about James McBride’s relationship with his mother, Ruth, the daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox Jewish rabbi. She fervently adopted Christianity and founded a black Baptist church in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn with McBride’s father. The book is suffused with issues of race, religion and identity, and simultaneously transcends those issues to be a story of family love and the sheer force of a mother’s will.

Angela’s Ashes

Frank mccourt, scribner, 1996.

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all,” Frank McCourt writes near the beginning of his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir. His parents had immigrated to New York, where McCourt was born, but soon moved back to Ireland, where they hoped relatives could help them with their four children. Having returned, they experienced crushing poverty. The book did perhaps more than any other to cement the 1990s boom in memoir writing — and reading. It features a Dickensian gallery of schoolmasters, shopkeepers and priests, in addition to McCourt’s unforgettable family.

Cockroaches

Scholastique mukasonga. translated from the french by jordan stump., archipelago books, 2016.

Thirty-seven of Scholastique Mukasonga’s family members were massacred in the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, when the Hutu majority turned on their Tutsi neighbors, killing more than 800,000 people in 100 days. “Cockroaches” is Mukasonga’s devastating account of her childhood and what she was able to learn about the slaughter of her family. (“Cockroach” was the Hutu epithet of choice for the Tutsis.) It is a compendium of unspeakable crimes and horrifically inventive sadism, delivered in an even, unwavering tone.

Keith Richards

Little, brown & company, 2010.

In “Life,” the Rolling Stones guitarist writes with uncommon candor and immediacy — with the help of the veteran journalist James Fox — about drugs and his run-ins with the police; about the difficulties of getting and staying clean; and about the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age. He spares none of his thoughts, good and bad, about Mick Jagger. He also describes the spongelike love of music that he inherited from his grandfather, and his own sense of musical history — his reverence for the blues and R&B masters he has studied his entire life.

A Life in the Twentieth Century

Arthur schlesinger jr., houghton mifflin company, 2000.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a prizewinning historian who served in John F. Kennedy’s White House, here writes about the first 33 years of his life, from his birth in 1917 — the year the United States entered World War I — to 1950 and the beginnings of the Cold War. The son of an acclaimed historian, Schlesinger was born into great privilege. He went on a yearlong trip around the world between graduating from prep school and attending Harvard. This book has incisive things to say about the large themes of world history, including isolationism and interventionism, and about many other subjects besides, including the films of the 1930s.

Edmund White

Ecco/harpercollins publishers, 2006.

“My Lives” is broken into chapters whose headings follow a clever formula: “My Shrinks,” “My Mother,” “My Father,” “My Hustlers” ... But these seemingly narrow-focus, time-hopping slices add up to a robust autobiography. Edmund White’s portraits of his parents and their lives before him are novelistic; his writing about his own sexual experiences is exceedingly candid. Reviewing the book for The Guardian, the novelist Alan Hollinghurst said that “no other writer of White’s eminence has described his sexual life with such purposeful clarity.”

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette winterson, grove press, 2012.

This memoir’s title is the question Jeanette Winterson’s adoptive mother asked after discovering her daughter was a lesbian. Winterson’s mother loomed over her life, as she looms over this book. In a quiet way she is one of the great horror mothers of English-language literature. When she was angry with her daughter, she would say, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” This memoir’s narrative includes Winterson’s search for her birth mother and the author’s self-invention, her intellectual development. The device of the trapped young person saved by books is a hoary one, but Winterson makes it seem new, and sulfurous.

Close to the Knives

David wojnarowicz, vintage, 1991.

David Wojnarowicz, who died at 37 in 1992, was a vital part of the East Village art scene of the 1980s that also produced Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Jean-Michel Basquiat and others. He was a painter, photographer, performance artist, AIDS activist and more — including writer. This work of hard-living autobiography is written in a flood of run-on sentences, and in a tone of almost hallucinatory incandescence. A typical sentence begins: “I remember when I was 8 years old I would crawl out the window of my apartment seven stories above the ground and hold on to the ledge with 10 scrawny fingers and lower myself out above the sea of cars burning up Eighth Avenue ...”

Share your picks on social media or email them to yourself as a reading list.

Designed and produced by Kevin Zweerink, Erica Ackerberg, and John Williams

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The Memoir in Essays: A Reading List

Elizabeth kadetsky on the multiple ways we can look at the self.

While the personal essay has enjoyed continued popularity, a book-length collection of linked essays, centered on an author’s self or life, is less common than a traditional memoir or novel. A truly successful essay collection can reveal the author processing experiences at many different points in time and through many different lenses. As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to the essay as a form, for its concision, for its ability to highlight an intriguing gap between author and narrator that lends an inherent tension and self-questioning. A collection of essays treating the same or related inquiries multiplies this effect.

The distance afforded by those multivalent lenses can allow an author to regard one’s younger self as a different character, a different persona. This can create an unease or uncertainty that is exciting, and also very relatable to the reader. An author’s ability to forgive that earlier version of herself is especially prevalent in the memoir-in-essays, perhaps because of the extended time period covered as a writer composes essays across years or even decades.

We are lucky enough to be in the middle of a renaissance. Several recent and upcoming memoirs-in-essays use the inquisitive essay form to tell life stories from different vantage points and make the reader question and revel in unreliable narrators and new perspectives. The more traditional memoir focuses on seeking and attaining redemption. The nonlinear structure of an essay collection reveals that there is never easy redemption, never clear resolution: bad things happen for no reason; overcoming one trial does not lessen the need to adapt in the next.

These new, enchanting and powerful collections are a welcome reminder that in our collective state of unrest and unknown futures, there is a comfort in knowing that there is an inherent uncertainty in having the answers.

Emily Arnason Casey, Made Holy: Essays (University of Georgia Press)

In beautiful, scenic prose, Emily Arnason Casey probes her middle American childhood from the stance of different venues, times of life, and primary characters—a family cabin and repository for memories both happy and sad; a little sister who grew up and wasn’t a sidekick anymore; a mother who didn’t reveal the family propensity to alcoholism until it was too late; an aunt who succumbed to the illness’s lure. In a spiral-like structure that keeps returning to a central and unanswerable question—how, and why, must this family battle the draws and effects of alcohol addiction—Arnason Casey tells a poignant story of a “normal” family that through its quirks and desires must find a path to survival. The author finds solace in nostalgia and a way forward by examining the errors of the past and by embracing, as a mother, the promise of the future generation. Her probing and compulsive need to question reminds us that alcoholism has no simple etiology, and that its cures are as individual as they are elusive.

Sonja Livingston, The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion } (University of Nebraska Press)

At a time of dwindling religiosity, Livingston finds herself wishing for greater connection to her Catholic roots while also exploring the physical space of the church in upstate New York that made memories for her as a child. Because of religious attrition, the church that she grew up in becomes the gathering space for dozens of rescued saint statues deaccessioned from other churches nearby. Livingston embarks upon a quest to find a missing Virgin Mary statue, that moves not in straight lines but elliptically, following a parallel physical and emotional journey that is an exploration into faith, Catholicism, and a desire for spiritual connection on modern terms. In examining the sustained power of a central icon of the Catholic church and an object of personal, sentimental attachment, Livingston’s linked essays highlight the irresolvable paradox of modern religiosity—that the seeker must follow an uncharted middle pathway when the old texts and their tropes, their patriarchy and their strictures, necessarily fall away.

Amy Long, Codependence (Cleveland State University Poetry Center)

In this haunting and troubling book, Long revisits scenes and anecdotes from her  boyfriend’s heroin addiction and her subsequent dependence on opioids for chronic pain. Formal experiments such as essays disguised as lists, prescription forms, and medical reports are interspersed among scene-driven recollections from different points in time: the author’s first introduction to the drug; the allure of an older addict; attempts at recovery. The grounding presence of the author’s supportive mother is offset by the narrative’s tragic other constant—the euphoria and escape offered by the drug. By eschewing a linear narrative structure, Long illustrates the difficulty of achieving recovery and puts lie to the myth that addiction is a logical disease that naturally ends with a cure. In its very form, this memoir undermines the narrative so prevalent in media treatments of this illness—that in order to trounce the beast, the individual suffering from addiction need only attend a recovery program. Having written about and witnessed my own sister’s decades’ long struggle to overcome opioid addiction, I was drawn to Long’s wisdom in portraying addiction not as a problem to be solved so much as a complexity to be observed and penetrated.

Sejal Shah, This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press)

The Indian-American author continually revisits her troubled relationship to her American identity through layered essays treating her bifurcated Indian and American past. Exploring her family’s immersion in Gujarati subculture when she was a child growing up in Rochester, New York; her experience as one of few people of color in her MFA creative writing program; and many family weddings in which she must confront her presumed future as a desi bride, Shah questions her place in both American culture and the thriving American-Gujarati subculture. By placing dates at the ends of the essays, it is suggested that her complicated and lifelong conflicts about race and cultural identity can be told chronologically. But, as she explains in her introduction, many essays had multiple end dates after having been revised and reconsidered as time moved forward. The multiple end dates elegantly upend the notion that a rational, hypothesis-thesis-synthesis structure can encompass the complexities of identity and belonging. Shah’s choice to write non-narratively about her conflicts of identity provide insight for anyone raised with a dual or multiple cultural identity—anyone who may, at different points of time, feel a greater allegiance to one culture, another, or a never straightforward amalgam of many. Who we understand ourselves to be, Shah’s book tells the reader in subtle ways, is not a fact so much as a moving target, an unending query.

Sue William Silverman, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences (University of Nebraska Press)

Silverman is the author of three previous memoirs. In How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences , she tells her life story through the lens of an obsession with death and the desire to come to terms with the inevitable but often avoided reality that in the end we are mortal. The essays begin with a chronological life story of growing up in New Jersey and encountering American culture’s death-avoidance, but then take a swerve when several brief but elusive mentions accrue into an account of a rape at a young age and a discovery that her memory of the event connects to her fixation on death. A chronological structure gives way to a thematic plot, in which Silverman seeks to confront her topic through reporting, immersion, and reflection—for instance by visiting a morgue, exploring mythological figures associated with death, and recollecting a family funeral. The sophisticated writing and structure make the whole greater than the sum of its many fascinating and worthy parts. Silverman’s essays continually reveal the irrational functioning of memory and how it connects our pasts to our worldviews. Honoring subconscious logic, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences makes the gambit that the mysteries of the self are both keys to understanding and uncertainties to be celebrated. We become who we are without being fully conscious of our choices—probing those choices won’t give us easy answers, but the discoveries along the way will be illuminating and well worth the necessary befuddlements.

__________________________________

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s memoir , The Memory Eaters, is available now from University of Massachusetts Press.

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10 Memorable Memoir Examples to Fuel Your Writing Fire

• February 17, 2024

Table of Contents:

List of memoir examples for students.

• 1- "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls:
• 2- "Educated" by Tara Westover:
• 3- "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed:
• 4- "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank:
• 5- "Night" by Elie Wiesel:
• 6- "Just as I Am" by Cicely Tyson:
• 7- "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert:
• 8- "Bossypants" by Tina Fey:
• 9- "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi:
• 10- "The Sun Does Shine" by Anthony Ray Hinton:

Importance of Memoirs

1- personal connection and empathy, 2- historical context, 3- understanding the self, 4- inspiration and motivation, 5- cultural insight, 6- therapeutic writing, conclusion:.

Memoirs hold an exceptional place because they fuse the artistry of storytelling with the raw sincerity of personal experience. With the help of memoir ghostwriters , readers can pass into someone else’s world, allowing us to see life through a different perspective, experience unfamiliar events, and understand diverse viewpoints.

The unique blend of personal insight, historical backdrop, and cultural nuances cements their value in literature and as important sociocultural documents.

Navigating through the memoir examples experience the highs and lows of the author’s life, a memoir illuminates the human condition in a way few other genres can replicate.

Below are the memoir examples:

1- “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls:

Walls paints a clear picture of her troubled youth, which was marked by poverty and parents who didn’t follow the rules. The book is a strong look at strength, family relationships, and the effects of having a hard childhood. Her honest writing lets readers into her world, making them feel pity and think about their lives.

2- “Educated” by Tara Westover:

Westover’s memoir unfolds as a journey of self-discovery and education. The narrative voice skillfully captures the tension between loyalty to family and the pursuit of knowledge. One of those memoir examples addresses the challenges of escaping a restrictive environment and reflects on the transformative power of education in shaping identity.

3- “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed:

Strayed’s autobiography is an interesting account of her journey along the Pacific Crest Trail. The book discusses loss, healing, self-empowerment, and the trip itself. Strayed’s honest and thoughtful writing style connects with readers, making “Wild” a story about looking at the world around you and inside yourself.

4- “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank:

Anne Frank’s diary is a poignant firsthand account of life in hiding during the Holocaust. Through her entries, readers witness the resilience of the human spirit amidst unimaginable circumstances. The memoir examples serve as a historical document and a timeless testament to the power of hope and courage.

5- “Night” by Elie Wiesel:

The memories of the Nazi death camps that Wiesel recounts in his book are distressing. In addition to showing how horrible the Holocaust was, the author’s motive for writing is to ask deep questions about faith and humanity. The movie “Night” is a stark warning of how horrible past events can be and how strong people are to keep going.

6- “Just as I Am” by Cicely Tyson:

Cicely Tyson’s memoir reflects on her groundbreaking career as an actress and her journey as a Black woman in the entertainment industry. The book explores themes of identity, purpose, and breaking barriers. Tyson’s strong narrative writing provides insights into the challenges she faced and the trail she blazed for future generations.

7- “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert:

In her book, Gilbert writes about her year-long trip through Italy, India, and Indonesia after a painful split. The book is about discovering yourself, being spiritual, and trying to be happy. “Eat, Pray, Love” is an easy-to-relate and positive book for people who want to grow, thanks to Gilbert’s honest and funny writing.

8- “Bossypants” by Tina Fey:

Tina Fey’s funny writing memoir Night is full of stories from her life and work in the entertainment business. “Bossypants” is funny and deep about gender roles, how the workplace works, and how hard it is to balance work and children. This book is fun and thought-provoking, thanks to Fey’s honesty and humor.

9- “When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi:

Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer, reflects on life, mortality, and the intersection of medicine and philosophy. The memoir, completed posthumously by his wife, Lucy, offers profound insights into the human experience, leaving readers with contemplative thoughts about the meaning of existence.

10- “The Sun Does Shine” by Anthony Ray Hinton:

Hinton’s memoir recounts his unjust incarceration on death row for nearly 30 years before being exonerated. The memoir examples explore themes of injustice, faith, and the resilience of the human spirit. Hinton’s story serves as a powerful testament to the flaws in the criminal justice system and the importance of hope in the face of adversity.

Memoirs offer a wealth of knowledge and insight rare in any other form of literature. They are unique windows into personal, historical, and cultural contexts, revealing real, often powerful, narratives of individual lives. Here’s a look at why memoir writing services are so important:

By reading stories, people can put themselves in another person’s shoes, which helps them understand and care about other people. Memoirs come alive by sharing personal stories about many different kinds of events. This helps us connect more deeply and see things beyond our narrow points of view.

It often captures and reflects upon significant historical events, presenting personal accounts of, for example, wars, political upheavals, or cultural shifts. Memoir examples thus serve as living testimonies and firsthand reports of history, offering an intimate understanding of the past beyond dry facts and figures.

By exploring others’ triumphs and trials, we constructively reflect on our own experiences and realize that as unique as we appear, many of our struggles and joys are universal. This powerful self-reflection opens up the possibility for personal growth.

Memoirs written by professional ghostwriters can inspire by showcasing the resilience and grit of individuals who endured hardship, overcame challenges, and subsequently flourished. They become blueprints for strength and perseverance, fueling our courage in battle.

It’s possible to read a wide range of people’s experiences through their diaries, written by people from many countries, groups, and walks of life. Reading these memoirs may help one better understand and appreciate other cultures by providing glimpses into their unique traditions and ways of life.

For book authors , writing memoirs can work as a therapeutic process. It allows them to express and navigate their experiences and emotions, providing an opportunity for healing, closure, or personal discovery.

Memoirs foster empathy, establish historical connections, provide personal and cultural insights, inspire, and fundamentally remind us of our shared human experiences.

Exploring memoirs can be a journey full of unexpected discoveries and profound insights. These ten memorable memoir examples are just the tip of the iceberg in the broad and diverse universe of memoir literature.

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Guides • Perfecting your Craft

Last updated on Apr 14, 2023

How to Write a Memoir: Turn Your Personal Story Into a Successful Book

Writing a memoir can be a meaningful way to reflect on your life's journey and share your unique perspective with people around you. But creating a powerful (and marketable) book from your life's memories — one that can be enjoyed by readers across the world — is no easy task. 

In this article, we'll explore the essential ingredients that make up an impactful and commercially viable memoir and provide you with tips to craft your own.

Here’s how to write a memoir in 6 steps: 

1. Figure out who you’re writing for

2. narrow down your memoir’s focus, 3. distill the story into a logline , 4. choose the key moments to share, 5. don’t skimp on the details and dialogue, 6. portray yourself honestly.

Before you take on the challenge of writing a memoir, make sure you have a clear goal and direction by defining the following:

• What story you’re telling (if you’re telling “the story of your life,” then you may be looking at an autobiography , not a memoir),
• What the purpose of your memoir is,
• Which audience you’re writing it for.

Some authors write a memoir as a way to pass on some wisdom, to process certain parts of their lives, or just as a legacy piece for friends and family to look back on shared memories. Others have stronger literary ambitions, hoping to get a publishing deal through a literary agent , or self-publishing it to reach a wide audience. 

Whatever your motivation, we’d recommend approaching it as though you were to publish it. You’ll end up with a book that’s more polished, impactful, and accessible 一 even if it’ll only ever reach your Aunt Jasmine.

🔍 How do you know whether your book idea is marketable? Acclaimed ghostwriter Katy Weitz suggests researching memoir examples from several subcategories to determine whether there’s a readership for a story like yours.

Know your target reader

If you’re not sure where to start it doesn’t hurt to figure out your target audience 一 the age group, gender, and interests of the people you’re writing it for. A memoir targeted at business execs is a very different proposition from one written to appeal to Irish-American baseball fans. 

If you want a little help in asking the right questions to define your audience, download our author market research checklist below. 

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Market Research Checklist

Find your ultimate target audience with our checklist.

Now that you know who you’re writing for, you need to clearly define which (yummy) slice of your life you want to share with them. 

When writing a memoir, there's always the temptation to cover broad periods of your life, from that time in first grade when Mrs. Taylor laughed at your painting, to your third divorce, and everything in between. But remember, this is not a biography. You should try to choose specific experiences or aspects of your life that form a red thread or a central theme. The narrower the focus, the better your memoir will resonate with others. 

For example, a memoir could be about the time you hiked the Appalachian Trail, became a Jiu-Jitsu master, or volunteered in a refugee camp. Naturally, anecdotes from other parts of your life may intertwine with your main narrative, but there needs to be a focused center to your book.

Not only will a narrower slice of life help you concentrate your efforts, it will also make it easier to shift the focus from your personal story to specific, relatable things you experienced , making it easier for readers to care and take something away from the book.

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A broader theme readers can relate to

Unless you’re a celebrity, you can’t expect people to just want to read your memoir 一 you have to give them a reason to carve time out of their busy schedule and sit with your book. People are drawn to stories that they can relate to or that teach them something about themselves and the world. 

So, before you get to writing, identify the broader themes behind your personal experiences and center the book around them. For example, a story about hiking the Appalachian Trail could be a story about spiritual growth. A book about learning Jiu-Jitsu may be about building confidence and overcoming fear. A memoir about working with refugees could be about cultivating empathy and overcoming structural inequality. 

These are themes that people from different ages, gender, and cultures can relate to. They will make your memoir much more universal. Figure out what readers can learn from your experiences, whether that’s something about resilience, trauma, parenting, self-discovery, or other, and center your book around that .    

💡 Listen to 3-time memoir author Paul Bradley Carr explain the importance of nailing your memoir’s focus from the get-go in this advice-packed Reedsy Live.

At this point, you’re probably fired up and stretching your fingers to start writing. But there are a few more steps to take to ensure you’re set up for success. 

Memory lane isn’t a straight path — it’s a winding road with many off-ramps and distractions. So before you start drafting, make a note of where you’re going by encapsulating your memoir in a sentence or two. Ask yourself: if I were to pitch it to a stranger on an elevator, how would I summarize it? The purpose of this exercise is to help you weave the main themes into a clear narrative arc, which is essential to turn your life into a captivating story. 

Here are some example loglines from famous memoirs for inspiration: 

Take some time with your logline and whittle your story down to its purest form. If it helps, start by writing what you think the back cover blurb will be. Then boil it down further and further, until you can finally pitch it in just a few sentences.

The logline is the North Star that will guide you as you start to collect the moments of your life to include in the book. 

Now that you have a direction and some central themes, it’s time to pick the best tales from your buffet of life experiences. It’s natural to look back at your life chronologically and select memories in a linear fashion, but really, what’s important is to pick the most meaningful moments, whether big or small, that propel your memoir forward.

For example, Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime is a collection of stories about growing up as a mixed-raced child in Apartheid South Africa. The book shares how Noah questioned his mother’s religious beliefs, spoke multiple languages to bridge cultural differences, made and sold CDs to escape poverty, and more. Each story is a different window into his world and how it shaped him, but all of them build on the book’s central themes of faith, identity, and resilience.

Look for moments of high emotion

When you’re mining your memory for stories, look for those with moments of high emotion and meaning. Whether it was a funny, sad, or embarrassing memory, the ones that shaped who you are and how you see the world tend to be the most emotionally charged.

To discern the gems from mediocre stories, consider working with a professional editor and take advantage of their editorial wisdom. 

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Now close your eyes, and dig deep into your memories to repaint your stories on the blank page as colorfully (and accurately) as possible. 

To make your memoir deeply engaging, experiment with different storytelling techniques and use sensory details, actions, and dialogue, as opposed to explicitly stating what you did or how you felt. This falls into the classic writing advice of ‘ Show, don’t tell .’

When revisiting your memories, be thorough in your research and try to collect as many details as possible: 

• Read back your journal entries (if you kept one) to see how you felt in the moment.
• Get your hands on photos or videos from that period in your life (either digital or analog.)
• Interview your family members, friends, and other people relevant to your story.
• Revisit locations and settings from the past that you plan on writing about.
• Look up anything that can be verified or fact-checked (e.g. dates, social media posts, or world news.)

Once you've collected the raw material, organize these memories in a way that makes sense for you. Being systematic in your research will pay serious dividends when you actually start working on your manuscript.

You’re allowed some creative license with dialogue

One thing that is particularly important to get right is dialogue. Obviously, you don't have to write dialogue exactly as it happened — our memories are fallible after all. However, you do need to accurately capture the essence of what was said (and how). As long as you’re faithful to what happened (or at least honest about how you experienced it) you can take some liberties with the precise wording. 

To write believable dialogue, take inspiration from your favorite writers, or take our free course below for tips. 

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😱 Inevitably, when you write about other people there’s always a risk of portraying them in a way they don’t appreciate. As general advice, tell them you’re writing this story, or prepare to lose some relationships. And if you’re really pushing some boundaries, discuss it with your lawyer! 

Next, it’s time to look inwards and flesh out a compelling and relatable protagonist: you!  

The best memoirs read like novels, which means they hinge on the protagonist’s voice and personality 一 their quirks, values, and goals, and how they rise to life’s challenges. Just as in a novel, your memoir needs a relatable protagonist that undergoes some change.

It takes a good dose of courage to portray yourself as a multidimensional character 一 one with both strengths and weaknesses, one who sometimes wins and sometimes loses. 

Do background work on yourself

To infuse a dose of humanity to your own character, you’ll have to do the background work as if you were a character in a novel. Take note of everything from your physical appearance, cultural background, psychological traits, and more. This exercise will help you bring to surface details about your personality that you’d otherwise look over, and depict a much more well-rounded protagonist. To facilitate the process, use our free character development template which will guide you with specific prompts and questions.  

Reedsy’s Character Development Template

A story is only as strong as its characters. Fill this out to develop yours.

Define your character’s arc

Additionally, it's helpful to define your own character's arc 一 how you’ve matured through the life experiences highlighted in the memoir. There are specific steps you can follow to define your personal hero's journey , but among other questions, you’ll have to answer: 

• What inciting incident set you on a journey?
• What were the obstacles you encountered?
• Which mentors helped you along the way?
• What were the lessons you needed to learn?
• How have you changed as a result?

These questions will help you strengthen your memoir’s narrative, hooking the readers in like the best novels do. 

To give an example, Cheryl Strayed's journey in Wild begins after the death of her beloved mother and other family problems, which lead her on a path of self-destruction, culminating in a divorce and addiction to heroin. Having reached the bottom, she decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail for three months in order to find herself. The path is filled with challenges 一 from her hiking inexperience, to losing her boots, to fellow hikers warning her that it's not safe to go on alone. Through resilience (and some help) she is able to overcome her physical and emotional challenges, find forgiveness and rediscover her inner strength. 

Take inspiration from Wild and other memoirs, and deconstruct how your own experiences might fit into these all-important story elements. 

You now have all the ingredients: a specific memoir topic that touches on universal themes (as summarized by your logline), a selection of vivid and relevant memories, and a multidimensional character with an interesting story arc. It’s time to put it all together by outlining the structure of your memoir, which is exactly what we’ll cover in our next post.

15 responses

CourtneySymons says:

11/01/2018 – 15:26

This was exactly the article I needed today! I've just begun a new career path as a ghostwriter and am finding it difficult to find learning resources (conferences, courses, books, networks of ghostwriters, etc.). If any readers have advice on where I should be looking or who I should be talking to, I would be forever grateful! Thanks so much!

M. Thomas Maxwell says:

11/01/2018 – 15:28

I had no intention of writing a book but encouraged by my grandson I embarked on a story telling venture that led to Grandfather's Journal, www.captaintommaxwell.com. It truly is a series of life stories shared with my grandson. Published by Westbow press in 2015 I used many Reedsy tips and am very pleased with the results.I have since encouraged others to consider doing the same. It took over a year and was a pleasant experience.

Don Karp says:

11/01/2018 – 16:06

As a self-published memoir writer, I read this with appreciation. I do not agree with all that's said here. For example, "2. Do Your Research." Of course certain events--those experienced publicly by a large number of people--need to be accurate. But even the word, "memoir," says it's about memory, not accuracy. This is one of the major differences from an autobiography which does require research. I looked up the dictionary definition and got confirmation on this. Perhaps you need to re-examine this and get it right?

↪️ Reedsy replied:

11/01/2018 – 17:00

I would agree that memoirs are indeed based on memory — and in some way that's why historians are often forced to question the reliability of memoirs as a primary source. I would say, however, that modern readers to expect memoirs to be as factually-correct as possible. Editors at publishers will go to great pains to ensure that — or face a public backlash. If you say anything in a memoir that can be disproved by a basic google search will seriously compromise your relationship with a reader. The other benefit with research is that it can do a lot to jog your memories. Unreliable recollections can often be set straight once you remind yourself of certain facts. Thanks for commenting!

↪️ Don Karp replied:

11/01/2018 – 17:28

Thanks for your response. This brings up two points for me. First, what is more powerful, a memory of an experience or the actual experience? Different people interpret the same experience differently. Second, what do you propose to do with the dictionary definition of "memoir?" Since the word is based on memory and not research, perhaps you can suggest some alternate word form?

↪️ The Red Lounge For Writers replied:

05/12/2018 – 08:14

I think looking at the idea of the 'voice of innocence' and the 'voice of experience' could really help with this distinction between fact and memory. As writers of memoir, we are expected to write what we remember. We can do this using the voice of innocence, and use the voice of experience to write about the factual context.

Stu Mountjoy says:

11/01/2018 – 21:48

A group I used to attend, on a Friday, started people off with the basic exercise of writing a story about one thing that happened to you, and I did one about a race at school. I am always impressed by the first page I read of Alan Alder's bio (actor in M*A*S*H TV series) - "Hi I'm Alan Alder, and when I was six, my mother tried to kill my father." - wow.

31/01/2018 – 10:15

Alda's a great writer — "Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself" is such a fantastic name for a memoir too.

Robbie Cheadle says:

31/01/2018 – 04:48

A very useful and interesting post on writing a memoir.

31/01/2018 – 10:14

I'm glad you like it Robbie :)

The Red Lounge For Writers says:

05/12/2018 – 08:10

All great advice. Memoir is probably my favourite genre to read, and some of my favourite books are memoirs. I'm of the opinion that everyone has a story to tell; it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it really well.

James Soil says:

15/07/2019 – 13:16

Thank you very much I just finished my Memoir titled Addicted it will be out this summer after reading this article I feel much better about it I pretty much did what the article says.

Izaura Nicolette says:

04/08/2019 – 04:50

Self-published Author, Izaura Nicolette. 'Within The Mountains: A Mormon Reform School Experience.' Published January, 2019. Seeking legit Publishing House or Agent. I still have not received any royalties due to publishers being fraudulent. I want to speak publicly about my memoir. Hundreds to thousands can back me up. This is a true story. I hold too close to my heart. Hoping to heal by sharing this experience, and opening door for many others.

Magzley says:

08/08/2019 – 02:14

Can I *breathe* life into my story instead?

Cassandra Janzen says:

20/12/2019 – 04:35

Very helpful, thank you!

Comments are currently closed.

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10 Essential Essay-Length Memoirs You Can Read Online for Free

Short insights with big impacts.

• Photo Credit: Unsplash/Sincerely Media

Are you a fan of anecdotal reading, but lacking the time to dive into a 300 page memoir? Do you love the specificity of short essays? Or are you looking for a taste of an author’s work before you peek any deeper into their psyche? Then you might consider looking into some essay-length memoirs—think of them as memoir examples, rather than full-fledged books.

Whether you’re hoping to find a piece of writing that makes you feel less alone, or you want to expand your understanding of the human race, these true accounts will stick with you. Here are 10 phenomenal memoir examples you can read online right now for free.

Related: The Best Essay Collections to Add to Your TBR List

"Me Talk Pretty One Day"

by David Sedaris

• Photo Credit: Chris Karidis/Unsplash

Comedian and author David Sedaris wrote the memoir essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” about his time living in Paris to learn the French language. While matriculating as a middle-aged man has its benefits—"No one will ever again card me for a drink or demand that I weave a floor mat out of newspapers"—it doesn't spare him, or any of his peers, from the abuse of their teacher. Sedaris recounts carrying a special brand of insecurity, tackling the complexity of language and the thrill of being a humorist going toe-to-toe with a stern and scathing professeure .

For collections of Sedaris’ writing, be sure to check out Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and When You Are Engulfed in Flames .

Related: 13 Famous Memoirs Everyone Should Read Once

"Age Appropriate"

by Jen Doll

Jen Doll is a freelance journalist—whose credits include articles for The Atlantic , Esquire , and New York Magazine —and author of the young adult novel Unclaimed Baggage . In this anecdotal essay about a summer vacation spent with family, Doll explores what it means to bring your teenage self along into adulthood. Stuck between the frustration of being treated like a child by her parents, and the ever-present desire to run from the strains of adult self-sufficiency, she writes to come to terms with the different selves she houses in the context of her surroundings.

Related: 15 Best Memoirs That Will Change Your Outlook on Life

"The Price of Black Ambition"

by Roxane Gay

In “The Price of Black Ambition,” Roxane Gay interweaves a timeline of her struggles and successes with a frank discussion on the sociopolitical racism inherent in the United States. She speaks on the fact that children of color are often given an inflated sense of “ambition” at a young age, as they must work twice as hard with half as much to achieve opportunities that are more carelessly given to their white peers. And, despite the exceptional amounts of work people of color put in to move forward in life, their efforts are regularly regarded as less than—their presence in “white” circles is considered a fluke or consequence of required diversity. She refers to her ambition as a hunger that can never be satisfied in the current status quo of America.

Gay is most notable for her essay collection Bad Feminist , as well as her fiction novel An Untamed State .

Related: 8 Extraordinary Biographies About Strong Women

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"My Dad Tried to Kill Me with an Alligator"

by Harrison Scott Key

• Photo Credit: Karl Bewick/Unsplash

Harrison Scott Key is the author of two memoirs: Congratulations, Who Are You Again? and The World’s Largest Man . Key details one humorous afternoon on Mississippi’s Pearl River, where he believes his brother’s “badass” antics and his father’s gruff and wild nature almost led to his death-by-alligator. Through a consideration of the differences between him and his father, he contemplates how his near-death experience might have shaped his adult life. Remembering his father fondly, Key reconsiders his own path of fatherhood.

Related: 10 Moving Biographies and Memoirs

"Explicit Violence"

by Lidia Yuknavitch

Known for her provocative novels Dora: A Headcase , The Small Backs of Children , and The Book of Joan , Lidia Yuknavitch wrote “Explicit Violence” about the terrible abuses she suffered throughout her lifetime. She talks not just of the physical acts, but the ways in which violence changed her state of mind. Yuknavitch is honest about the ways in which she was made to feel like she deserved the violence heaped upon her—and if how she didn’t deserve it, she should become the kind of person that might deserve it. With a sharp clarity, she condemns the ways in which those who suffer abuses, particularly women, are made to feel as though to talk about it is an inconvenience on those who could never understand.

For more from the life of Lidia Yuknavitch, she has also published the full-length memoir The Chronology of Water .

"Surviving Anxiety"

by Scott Stossel

In the essay “Surviving Anxiety,” journalist and author Scott Stossel opens up about his experience with mental illness. Suffering from anxiety since infancy, Stossel paints a startling and surprising picture of the measures he has to go through to appear unaffected and “normal” due to his internal (and often irrational) worries. In an honest detailing of therapeutic, medicinal, and self-medicinal attempts to get his high-functioning anxiety under control, he expresses the frustrations and constant battle those who suffer from mental illness experience. For a deeper look into Stossel’s experience and the history of anxiety, read his full-length memoir My Age of Anxiety .

"Darkness Visible"

by William Styron

• Photo Credit: Ian Espinosa/Unsplash

William Styron, acclaimed writer of Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner , suffered deeply from bouts of depression. In his memoir essay, “Darkness Visible,” Styron is compelled to speak out about his struggle with mental illness after the suicide of Primo Levi. To combat the ignorance and taboo nature surrounding depression, Styron speaks about his own struggles with dark emotions, as well as the difficult path of healing. In the book of the same name, Styron expands upon this essay in a more complete memoir.

Related: William Styron: A Life in Books

"No Labels, No Drama, Right?"

by Jordana Narin

This enlightening and insightful essay comes from Jordana Narin, the winner of the New York Times 2015 Modern Love College Essay contest. Her memoir account exemplifies how new relationships have changed in the modern era, often careening toward an amorphous understanding between two people. She touches on an inclination to avoid not only labels, but vulnerability. Narin outlines how in a situation where the feelings are no less profound than something “real,” people are putting obstacles in their own paths by embracing an aversion to emotional honesty.

"I Was Pregnant, and Then I Wasn't"

by Laura Turner

• Photo Credit: freestocks.org/Unsplash

Laura Turner is a journalist who has written for such publications as the New York Times , The Atlantic , Glamour , and The Verge , with a book in-progress about the cultural history of anxiety. In this tear-jerking short memoir, Turner talks about her recent experience with a miscarriage. Her account encapsulates the worries of burgeoning motherhood put at sudden odds with grief and an overwhelming feeling of suddenly being alone. In an especially poignant and candid moment, Turner writes, “Your life doesn’t change, and that’s the strange part—because it was supposed to.”

Related: 7 Tragic Memoirs That Deserve Your Tears

"After Life"

by Joan Didion

Following the death of her husband in 2003, renowned essayist, journalist, and author Joan Didion penned “After Life.” In her essay, Didion describes the moments leading up to her husband’s sudden death, and continues on in aching detail about the moments following her realization that he was gone. She describes her “waves” of grief which were at the same time both strange and typical, and reaches for an explanation of how different grief can be when it’s unexpected.

More of Didion’s profound writings include Slouching Toward Bethlehem , The White Album , and After Henry .

Fiction & Memoirs From 6 Influential Writers

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18 Essay-Length Short Memoirs to Read Online on Your Lunch Break

Emily Polson

Emily Polson is a freelance writer and publishing assistant at Simon & Schuster. Originally from central Iowa, she studied English and creative writing at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, before moving to a small Basque village to teach English to trilingual teenagers. Now living in Brooklyn, she can often be found meandering through Prospect Park listening to a good audiobook. Twitter: @emilycpolson | https://emilycpolson.wordpress.com/

View All posts by Emily Polson

I love memoirs and essays, so the genre of essay-length short memoirs is one of my favorites. I love delving into the details of other people’s lives. The length allows me to read broadly on a whim with minimal commitment. In roughly 5–30 minutes, I can consume a complete morsel of literature, which always leaves me happier than the same amount of time spent doom-scrolling through my various social news feeds.

What are short memoirs? 

What exactly are short memoirs? I define them as essay-length works that weave together life experiences around a central theme. You see examples of short memoirs all the time on sites like Buzzfeed and The New York Times . Others are stand-alone pieces published in essay collections.

Memoir essays were my gateway into reading full-length memoirs. It was not until I took a college class on creative nonfiction that I realized memoirs were not just autobiographies of people with exciting lives. Anyone with any amount of life experience can write a memoir—no dramatic childhood or odd-defying life accomplishments required. A short memoir might be an account of a single, life-changing event, or it may be reflection on a period of growth or transition.

Of course, when a young adult tells people she likes writing creative nonfiction—not journalism or technical writing—she hears a lot of, “You’re too young to write a memoir!” and “What could someone your age possibly have to write about?!” As Flannery O’Connor put it, however, “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot. The writer’s business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.”

Memoir essay examples

As the lit magazine Creative Nonfiction puts it, personal essays are just “True stories, well told.” And everyone has life stories worth telling.

Here are a few of my favorite memoir examples that are essay length.

SHORT MEMOIRS ABOUT GROWING UP

Scaachi koul, “there’s no recipe for growing up”.

In this delightful essay, Koul talks about trying to learn the secrets of her mother’s Kashmiri cooking after growing up a first-generation American. The story is full of vivid descriptions and anecdotal details that capture something so specific it transcends to the realm of universal. It’s smart, it’s funny, and it’ll break your heart a little as Koul describes “trying to find my mom at the bottom of a 20-quart pot.”

ASHLEY C. FORD, “THE YEAR I GREW WILDLY WHILE MEN LOOKED ON”

This memoir essay is for all the girls who went through puberty early in a world that sexualizes children’s bodies. Ford weaves together her experiences of feeling at odds with her body, of being seen as a “distraction” to adult men, of being Black and fatherless and hungry for love. She writes, “It was evident that who I was inside, who I wanted to be, didn’t match the intentions of my body. Outside, there was no little girl to be loved innocently. My body was a barrier.”

Kaveh Akbar, “How I Found Poetry in Childhood Prayer”

Akbar writes intense, searing poetry, but this personal essay contextualizes one of his sweetest poems, “Learning to Pray,” which is cradled in the middle of it. He describes how he fell in love with the movement, the language, and the ceremony of his Muslim family’s nightly prayers. Even though he didn’t (and doesn’t) speak Arabic, Akbar points to the musicality of these phonetically-learned hymns as “the bedrock upon which I’ve built my understanding of poetry as a craft and as a meditative practice.” Reading this essay made me want to reread his debut poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf , all over again.

JIA TOLENTINO, “LOSING RELIGION AND FINDING ECSTASY IN HOUSTON”

New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino grew up attending a Houston megachurch she referred to as “the Repentagon.” In this personal essay, she describes vivid childhood memories of her time there, discussing how some of the very things she learned from the church contributed to her growing ambivalence toward it and its often hypocritical congregants. “Christianity formed my deepest instincts,” she writes, “and I have been walking away from it for half my life.” As the essay title suggests, this walking away coincided with her early experiences taking MDMA, which offered an uncanny similarity to her experience of religious devotion.

funny short memoirs

Patricia lockwood, “insane after coronavirus”.

Author Patricia Lockwood caught COVID-19 in early March 2020. In addition to her physical symptoms, she chronicled the bizarre delusions she experienced while society also collectively operated under the delusion that this whole thing would blow over quickly. Lockwood has a preternatural ability to inject humor into any situation, even the dire ones, by highlighting choice absurdities. This is a rare piece of pandemic writing that will make you laugh instead of cry–unless it makes you cry from laughing.

Harrison Scott Key,  “My Dad Tried to Kill Me with an Alligator”

This personal essay is a tongue-in-cheek story about the author’s run-in with an alligator on the Pearl River in Mississippi. Looking back on the event as an adult, Key considers his father’s tendencies in light of his own, now that he himself is a dad. He explores this relationship further in his book-length memoir, The World’s Largest Man , but this humorous essay stands on its own. (I also had the pleasure of hearing him read this aloud during my school’s homecoming weekend, as Key is an alumnus of my alma mater.)

David Sedaris, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”

Sedaris’s humor is in a league of its own, and he’s at his best in the title essay from Me Talk Pretty One Day . In it, he manages to capture the linguistic hilarities that ensue when you combine a sarcastic, middle-aged French student with a snarky French teacher.

SAMANTHA IRBY, “THE WORST FRIEND DATE I EVER HAD”

Samantha Irby is one of my favorite humorists writing today, and this short memoir essay about the difficulty of making friends as an adult is a great introduction to her. Be prepared for secondhand cringe when you reach the infamous moment she asks a waiter, “Are you familiar with my work?” After reading this essay, you’ll want to be, so check out Wow, No Thank You . next.

Bill Bryson, “Coming Home”

Bryson has the sly, subtle humor that only comes from Americans who have spent considerable time living among dry-humored Brits. In “Coming Home,” he talks about the strange sensation of returning to America after spending his first twenty years of adulthood in England. This personal essay is the first in a book-length work called I’m a Stranger Here Myself , in which Bryson revisits American things that feel like novelties to outsiders and the odd former expat like himself.

Thought-provoking Short memoirs

Tommy orange, “how native american is native american enough”.

Many people claim some percentage of Indigenous ancestry, but how much is enough to “count”? Novelist Tommy Orange–author of There There –deconstructs this concept, discussing his relationship to his Native father, his Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, and his son, who will not be considered “Native enough” to join him as an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. “ How come math isn’t taught with stakes?” he asks in this short memoir full of lingering questions that will challenge the way you think about heritage. 

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, “I Had a Stroke at 33”

Lee’s story is interesting not just because she had a stroke at such a young age, but because of how she recounts an experience that was characterized by forgetting. She says that after her stroke, “For a month, every moment of the day was like the moment upon wakening before you figure out where you are, what time it is.” With this personal essay, she draws readers into that fragmented headspace, then weaves something coherent and beautiful from it.

Kyoko Mori, “A Difficult Balance: Am I a Writer or a Teacher?”

In this refreshing essay, Mori discusses balancing “the double calling” of being a writer and a teacher. She admits that teaching felt antithetical to her sense of self when she started out in a classroom of apathetic college freshmen. When she found her way into teaching an MFA program, however, she discovered that fostering a sanctuary for others’ words and ideas felt closer to a “calling.” While in some ways this makes the balance of shifting personas easier, she says it creates a different kind of dread: “Teaching, if it becomes more than a job, might swallow me whole and leave nothing for my life as a writer.” This memoir essay is honest, well-structured, and layered with plenty of anecdotal details to draw in the reader.

Alex Tizon, “My Family’s Slave”

In this heartbreaking essay, Tizon pays tribute to the memory of Lola, the domestic slave who raised him and his siblings. His family brought her with them when they emigrated to America from the Philippines. He talks about the circumstances that led to Lola’s enslavement, the injustice she endured throughout her life, and his own horror at realizing the truth about her role in his family as he grew up. While the story is sad enough to make you cry, there are small moments of hope and redemption. Alex discusses what he tried to do for Lola as an adult and how, upon her death, he traveled to her family’s village to return her ashes.

Classic short memoirs

James baldwin, “notes of a native son”.

This memoir essay comes from Baldwin’s collection of the same name. In it, he focuses on his relationship with his father, who died when Baldwin was 19. He also wrestles with growing up black in a time of segregation, touching on the historical treatment of black soldiers and the Harlem Riot of 1943. His vivid descriptions and honest narration draw you into his transition between frustration, hatred, confusion, despair, and resilience.

JOAN DIDION,  “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT”

Didion is one of the foremost literary memoirists of the twentieth century, combining journalistic precision with self-aware introspection. In “Goodbye to All That,” Didion recounts moving to New York as a naïve 20-year-old and leaving as a disillusioned 28-year-old. She captures the mystical awe with which outsiders view the Big Apple, reflecting on her youthful perspective that life was still limitless, “that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”  This essay concludes her masterful collection,   Slouching Towards Bethlehem .

Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried”

This is the title essay from O’Brien’s collection, The Things They Carried . It’s technically labeled a work of fiction, but because the themes and anecdotes are pulled from O’Brien’s own experience in the Vietnam War, it blurs the lines between fact and fiction enough to be included here. (I’m admittedly predisposed to this classification because a college writing professor of mine included it on our creative nonfiction syllabus.) The essay paints an intimate portrait of a group of soldiers by listing the things they each carry with them, both physical and metaphorical. It contains one of my favorite lines in all of literature: “They all carried ghosts.”

Multi-Media Short Memoirs

Allie brosh, “richard”.

In this blog post/webcomic, Allie Brosh tells the hilarious story about the time as a child that she, 1) realized neighbors exist, and 2) repeatedly snuck into her neighbor’s house, took his things, and ultimately kidnapped his cat. Her signature comic style drives home the humor in a way that will split your sides. The essay is an excerpt from Brosh’s second book, Solutions and Other Problems , but the web version includes bonus photos and backstory. For even more Allie classics, check out “Adventures in Depression” and “Depression Part Two.”

George Watsky, “Ask Me What I’m Doing Tonight”

Watsky is a rapper and spoken word poet who built his following on YouTube. Before he made it big, however, he spent five years performing for groups of college students across the Midwest. “Ask Me What I’m Doing Tonight!” traces that soul-crushing monotony while telling a compelling story about trying to connect with people despite such transience. It’s the most interesting essay about boredom you’ll ever read, or in this case watch—he filmed a short film version of the essay for his YouTube channel. Like his music, Watsky’s personal essays are vulnerable, honest, and crude, and the whole collection, How to Ruin Everything , is worth reading.

If you’re looking for even more short memoirs, keep an eye on these pages from Literary Hub , Buzzfeed , and Creative Nonfiction . You can also delve into these 25 nonfiction essays you can read online and these 100 must-read essay collections . Also be sure to check out the “Our Reading Lives” tag right here on Book Riot, where you’ll find short memoirs like “Searching for Little Free Libraries as a Way to Say Goodbye” and “How I Overcame My Fear of Reading Contemporary Poets.”

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Write a Great Memoir: How to Start (and Actually Finish) Your First Draft

by Joe Bunting | 1 comment

Free Book Planning Course!  Sign up for our 3-part book planning course and make your book writing easy . It expires soon, though, so don’t wait.  Sign up here before the deadline!

When I first started writing my memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , about a real-life adventure I experienced with my wife and ten-month-old son, I thought it was going to be easy.

After all, by that point in my career, I had already written four books, two of which became bestsellers. I’ve got this, I thought. Simple.

It wasn’t. By the time Crowdsourcing Paris was published and became a #1 New Release on Amazon, it was more than five years later. During that time, I made just about every mistake, but I also learned a process that will reliably help anyone to start and finish writing a great memoir.

My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , as a #1 New Release on Amazon!

In this guide, I want to talk about how you can start writing your memoir, how you can actually finish it, and how you can make sure it’s good .

If you read this article from start to finish, it will save you hundreds of hours and result in a much better finished memoir.

Hot tip : Throughout this guide, I will be referencing my memoir Crowdsourcing Paris as an example. To get the most out of this guide and the memoir writing process in general, get a copy of the book to use as an example. Order your copy here »

But Wait! What Is a Memoir? (Memoir Definition)

How do you know if you're writing a memoir? Here's a quick memoir definition:

A memoir is a book length account or autobiography about a real life situation or event. It usually includes a pivotal experience in your life journey.

A key point to make is that memoir is a  true story . You don't have to get every piece of dialogue perfect, but you do have to try to tell the personal story or experience as best as you remember.

If you're looking to fictionalize your real life account you're writing a novel, not a memoir (and specifically a roman à clef novel ).

For more on the difference between a novel and a memoir, check out this coaching video:

How to Get Started With Your Memoir: 10 Steps Before You Start Writing

This guide is broken into sections: what to do before you start writing and how to write your first draft.

When most people decide to write a memoir, they just start writing. They write about the first life experience they can think of.

That’s sort of what I did too. I just started writing about my trip to Paris, beginning with how I first decided to go as a way to become a “real writer.” It turned out to be the biggest mistake I made.

If you want to finish your memoir, and even more, write a good memoir, just starting with the first memory you can think of will make things much harder for you.

Instead, get started with a memoir plan.

What’s a memoir plan? There are ten elements. Let’s break it down.

Get the memoir plan in a downloadable worksheet. Click to download your memoir plan »

1. Write Your Memoir Premise in One Sentence

The first part of a memoir plan is your premise. A premise is a one-sentence summary of your book idea.

You might be wondering, how can I summarize my entire life in a single sentence?

The answer is, you can’t. Memoir isn’t a full autobiography. It’s not meant to be a historical account of your entire life story. Instead, it should share one specific situation and what you learned from that situation.

Every memoir premise should contain three things:

• A Character. For your memoir, that character will always be you . For the purposes of your premise, though, it’s a good idea to practice thinking of yourself as the main character of your story. So describe yourself in third person and use one descriptive adjective, e.g. a cautious writer.
• A Situation. Memoirs are about a specific event, situation, or experience. For example, Marion Roach Smith’s bestselling memoir was about the discovery that her mother had Alzheimer’s, which at the time was a fairly unknown illness. My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , begins on the first day of my trip to Paris and ends on the day I left. You can’t write about everything, at least in this book. But you can write about one thing well, and save all the other ideas for the next book.
• A Lesson. What life lesson did you learn from this situation? How did your life change inexorably after going through this situation? Again, here you can’t write about everything you’ve ever learned. Choose ONE life lesson or emotional truth and focus on it.

Want to see how a premise actually looks? Here’s an example from my memoir Crowdsourcing Paris :

When a Cautious Writer is forced by his audience to do uncomfortable adventures in Paris he learns the best stories come when you get out of your comfort zone.

One thing to note: a premise is not a book description. My book description, which you can see here , is totally different from the premise. It’s more suspenseful and also less detailed in some ways. That’s because the purpose of a premise isn’t to sell books.

What is the premise of your memoir? Share it in the comments below!

2. Set a Deadline to Finish Your First Draft

Or if you’ve already finished a draft, set a deadline to finish your next draft.

This is crucial to do now , before you do anything else. Why? Because there are parts of the memoir plan that you can spend months, even years on. But while planning is helpful, it can easily become a distraction if you don’t get to the writing part of the process.

That’s why you want to put a time limit on your planning by setting a deadline.

How long should the deadline be?

Stephen King says you should write a first draft in no longer than a season. So ninety days.

In my 100 Day Book program, we’ve helped hundreds of memoir writers finish their book in just 100 days. To me, that’s a good amount of time to finish a first draft.

However, I wouldn’t take any longer than 100 days. Writing a book requires a level of focus that’s difficult to achieve over a long period of time. If you set your deadline for longer than 100 days, you might never finish.

Also set weekly milestones.

In addition to your final deadline, I recommend breaking up the writing process into weekly milestones.

If you’re going to write a 65,000-word memoir over 100 days, let’s say, then divide 65,000 by the number of weeks (about 14) to get your weekly word count goal: about 4,600 words per week.

That will give you a sense of how much progress you’re making each week, so you won’t be in a huge rush to finish right at the end of your deadline. After all, no one can pull an all-nighter and finish a book! Create a writing habit that will enable you to actually finish your book.

Keep track of your word count deadlines.

By the way, this is one reason I love Scrivener , my favorite book writing software , because it allows you to set a target deadline and word count. Then Scrivener automatically calculates how much you need to write every day to reach your deadline.

It’s a great way to keep track of your deadline and how much more you have to write. Check out my review of Scrivener to learn more.

3. Create Consequences to Make Quitting Hard

I’ve learned from experience that a deadline alone isn’t enough. You also have to give your deadline teeth .

Writing a book is hard. To make sure that you show up to the page and do the work you need to finish, you need to make it harder to not write.

How? By creating consequences.

I learned this from a friend of mine, writer and book marketing expert Tim Grahl .

“If you really want to finish your book,” he told me, “write a check for $1,000 to a charity you hate. Then give that check to a friend with instructions to send it if you don’t hit your deadline.”

“I don’t need to do that,” I told him. “I’m a pro. I have discipline.” But a month later, after I still hadn’t made any progress on my memoir, I finally decided to take his advice.

This was during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. So I wrote a $1,000 check to the presidential candidate that I most disliked (who shall remain nameless!), and gave it to a friend with instructions to send the check if I didn’t hit my final deadline.

I also created smaller consequences for the weekly deadlines, which I highly recommend. Here’s how it works:

Consequence #1 : Small consequence, preferably related to a guilty pleasure that might keep you from writing. For example, giving up a game on your phone or watching TV until you finish your book.

Consequence #2 : Giving up a guilty pleasure. For example, giving up ice cream, soda, or alcohol until you finish your book.

Consequence #3 : Send the $1,000 check to the charity you hate.

Each of these would happen if I missed three weekly deadlines. If I missed the final deadline, then just the $1,000 check would get sent.

After I put in each of these consequences, I was the most focused and productive I’ve ever been in my life. I finished my book in just nine weeks and never missed a deadline.

If you actually want to finish your memoir, give this process a try. I think you’ll be surprised by how well it works for you.

4. Decide What Kind of Story You’re Telling

Now that you’ve set your deadline, start thinking about what kind of book you’re writing. What is your story really about?

“Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through,” says Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project .

I think there are seven types of stories that most memoirs are about.

• Coming of Age. A story about a young person finding their place in the world. A great example is 7 Story Mountain  by Thomas Merton.
• Education. An education story , according to Kim Kessler and Story Grid, is about a naive character who, through the course of the story, comes to a bigger understanding of the world that gives meaning to their existing life. My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , is a great example of an education memoir.
• Love. A love story is about a romantic relationship, either the story of a breakup or of two characters coming together. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is a great example of a love story memoir, as it tells the story of her divorce and then re-discovering herself and love as she travels the world.
• Adventure/Action. All adventure stories are about life and death situations. Also, most travel memoirs are adventure stories. Wild by Cheryl Strayed is a great example, and Crowdsourcing Paris is also an adventure story. (You can apply the principles from our How to Write Adventure guide here , too!)
• Performance. Performance memoirs are about a big competition or a competitive pursuit. Julie and Julia , Julie Powell’s memoir about cooking her way through Julia Child’s recipes, is a good example of a performance memoir. Outlaw Platoon , about the longest-serving Ranger platoon in Afghanistan, is another great performance story.
• Thriller. Memoirs about abuse or even an illness could fall into the crime, horror, or thriller arena. (Our full guide on How to Write a Thriller is here .)
• Society. What is wrong with society? And how can you rebel against the status quo? Society stories are very common as memoirs. I would also argue that most humor memoirs are society stories, since they talk about one person’s funny, transgressive view on society. Anything by David Sedaris, for example, is a society memoir.

For more on all of these genres, check out Story Grid’s article How to Use Story Grid to Write a Memoir .

Three Stories

Note that I included my memoir in two categories. That’s because most books, including memoirs, are actually a combination of three stories. You have:

• An external story. For example, Crowdsourcing Paris is an adventure story.
• An internal story . As I said, Crowdsourcing Paris is an education story.
• A subplot . Usually the subplot is another external story, in my case, a love story.

What three stories are you telling in your memoir?

5. Visualize Your Intention

One of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve coached hundreds of writers to finish their books is that if you visualize the following you are much more likely to follow through and accomplish your writing goals:

• Where you're going to write
• When you're going to write
• How much you're going to write

Here I want you to actively visualize yourself at your favorite writing spot accomplishing the word count goal that you set in step two.

For example, when I was writing Crowdsourcing Paris , I would imagine myself sitting at this one café that was eight doors down from my office. I liked it because it had a little bit of a French feel. Then I would imagine myself there from eight in the morning until about ten.

Finally, I would actively visualize myself watching the word count tracker go from 999 to 1,000 words, which was my goal every day. Just that process of imagining my intention was so helpful.

What is your intention? Where, when, and how much will you write? Imagine yourself actually sitting there in the place you’re going to write your memoir.

6. Who Will Be On Your Team?

No one can write a book alone. I learned this the hard way, and the result was that it took me five years to finish my memoir.

For every other book that I had written, I had other people holding me accountable. Without my team, I know that I would never have written those books. But when I tried to write my memoir, I thought, I can do this on my own. I don’t need accountability, encouragement, and support. I’ve got this.

To figure out who you need to help you finish your memoir, create three different lists of people:

• Other writers. These are people who you can process, with who know the process of writing a book. Some will be a little bit ahead of you, so that when you get stuck, they can encourage you and say, “I’ve been there. You’re going to get through it. Keep working.”
• Readers. Or if you don’t have readers, friends and family. These will be the people who give you feedback on your finished book before it’s published, e.g. beta readers.
• Professional editors. But you also need professional feedback. I recommend listing two different editors here, a content editor to give feedback on the book as a whole (for example, I recommend a Write Practice Certified Coach), and a proofreader or line editor to help polish the final draft. (Having professional editing software is smart too. We like ProWritingAid. Check out our ProWritingAid review .)

Just remember: it takes a team to finish a book. Don’t try to do it on your own.

And if you don’t have relationships with other writers who can be on your team, check out The Write Practice Pro. This is the community I post my writing in to get feedback. Many of my best writing friends came directly from this community. You can learn more about The Write Practice Pro here .

7. What Other Books Will Inspire You?

“Books are made from books,” said Cormac McCarthy. Great writers learn how to write great books by reading other great books, and so should you.

I recommend finding three to five other memoirs that can inspire you during the writing process.

I recommend two criteria for the books you choose:

• Commercially successful. If you want your book to be commercially successful, choose other books that have done well in the marketplace.
• Similar story type. Try to find books that are the same story type that you learned in step four.

For my memoir, I had four main sources of inspiration.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain; A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway; and Midnight in Paris , the film by Woody Allen.

I referred back to these sources all the time. For example, when I was stuck on the climactic scene in the memoir, I watched one scene in A Midnight in Paris twenty times until I could quote the dialogue. I still didn’t come up with the solution until the next day, but understanding how other writers solved the problems I was facing helped me figure out my own solutions for my story.

8. Who Is Your Reader Avatar?

Who is your book going to be for? Or who is the one person you’ll think of when you write your book? When the writing gets hard and you want to quit, who will be most disappointed if you never finish your book?

I learned this idea from J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote his novel The Hobbit for his three boys as a bedtime story. Every day he would work on his pages, and every night he would go home and read them to his sons. And this gave him an amazing way to get feedback. He knew whether they laughed at one part or got bored at another.

This helped him make his story better, but I also imagine it gave him a tremendous amount of motivation.

This Can Be You, Sort Of

I don’t think your reader avatar should be you. When it comes to your own writing, you are the least objective person.

There’s one caveat: you can be your own reader avatar IF you’re writing to a version of yourself at a different time. For example, I have friends who have imagined they were writing to a younger version of themselves.

Who will you write your memoir for?

9. Publishing and Marketing

How will you publish your book? Will you go the traditional route or will you self-publish? Who is your target market (check your reader avatar for help)? What will you do to promote and market your book? Do you have an author website ?

It might be strange to start planning for the publishing and marketing of your book before you ever start writing it, but what I’ve discovered is that when you think through the entire writing process, from the initial idea all the way through the publishing and marketing process, you are much more likely to finish your book.

In fact, in my 100 Day Book program, I found that people who finished this planning process were 52 percent more likely to finish their book.

Spend some time thinking about your publishing and marketing plans. Just thinking about it will help you when you start writing.

Start Building Your Audience Before You Need It

In the current publishing climate, most memoir agents and publishers want you to have some kind of relationship with an audience before they will consider your book.

Start building an audience before you need it. The first step to building an audience, and the first step to publishing in general, is building an author website. If you don’t have a website yet, you can find our full author website guide here .

(Building a website doesn’t have to be intimidating or time-consuming if you have the right guide.)

10. Outline Your Memoir

The final step of the planning process is your memoir outline . This could be the subject of a whole article itself. Here, I’ve learned so much from Story Grid, but if you don’t have time to read the book and listen to over 100 podcast episodes, here’s a quick and dirty process for you.

But First, for the Pantsers

There are two types of writers: the plotters and the pansters . Plotters like to outline. Pantsers think outlining crushes their creative freedom and hate it.

If you identify with the pantsers, that’s okay. Don’t worry too much about this step. I would still recommend writing something in this section of your memoir plan, even if you only know a few moments that will happen in the book, even recording a series of events might help as you plan.

And for you plotters, outline to your heart’s content, as long as you’ve already set your deadline!

Outlining Tips

When you’re ready to start outlining, here are a few tips:

• Begin by writing down all the big moments in your life that line up with your premise. Your premise is the foundation of your story. Anything outside of that premise should be cut.
• S eparate your life events into three acts. One of the most common story structures in writing is the three-act story structure. Act 1 should contain about 25 percent of your story, Act 2 about 50 percent of your story, and Act 3 about 25 percent.
• Act 1 should begin as late into the story as possible. In Crowdsourcing Paris , like most travel memoirs, I began the story the day I arrived in Paris.
• Use flashbacks, but carefully. Since I began Crowdsourcing Paris so late into the action, I used flashbacks to provide some details about what happened to lead up to the trip. Flashbacks can be overused, though, so only include full scenes and don’t info dump with flashbacks.
• Start big. The first scene in your book should be a good representation of what your book is about. So if you’re writing an adventure story (see Step 4), then you should have a life or death moment as the first scene. If you’re writing a love story, you should have a moment of love or love lost.
• End Act 1 with a decision. It is you, and specifically your decisions , that drive the action of your memoir. So what important decision did you make that will drive us into Act 2?
• Start Act 2 with your subplot. In Step 4, I said most books are made up of three stories. Your subplot is an important part of your book, and in most great stories, your subplot begins in Act 2.
• Act 2 begins with a period of “fun and games.” Save the Cat , one of my favorite books for writers, says that after the tension you built with the big decision in Act 1, the first few scenes in Act 2 should be fun and feel good, with things going relatively well for the protagonist.
• Center your second act on the “all is lost” moment. Great stories are about a character who comes to the end of him or herself. The all is lost moment is my favorite to write, because it’s where the character (in this case you ) has the most opportunity to grow. What is YOUR “all is lost” moment?
• Act 3 contains your final climactic moment. For Crowdsourcing Paris , this was the moment when I thought I was going to die. In a love story memoir, it might be when you finally work things out and commit to your partner.
• Act 3 is also where you show the big lesson of the memoir. Emphasis on show. Back in Step 1, you identified the lesson of your memoir. Act 3 is when you finally demonstrate what you’ve learned throughout the memoir in one major event.
• A tip for the final scene: end your memoir with the subplot. This gives a sense of completion to your story and works as a great final moment.

Use the tips above to create a rough outline of your memoir. Keep in mind, when you start writing, things might completely change. That’s okay! The point with your plan isn’t to be perfect. It’s to think through your story from beginning to end so that you’ll be prepared when you get to that point in the writing process.

Want to make this process as easy as possible? Get the memoir plan in a downloadable worksheet. Click to download your memoir plan »

That’s the end of the planning stage of this guide. Now let’s talk about how to write your first draft.

How to Write the First Draft of Your Memoir

If you’ve followed the steps above to create a memoir plan, you’ve done the important work. Writing a memoir, like writing any book, is hard. But it will actually be harder to not be successful if you’ve followed all the steps in the memoir plan.

But once you’ve created the “perfect” plan, it’s time to do the dirty work of writing a first draft.

In part two of our guide, you’ll learn how to write and finish a first draft.

1. Forget Perfection and Write Badly.

First drafts are messy. In fact, Anne Lamott calls them “shitty first drafts” because they are almost always terrible.

Even though I know that, though, any time I’m working on a new writing project, I still get it into my head that my first draft should be a masterpiece.

It usually takes me staring at a blank screen for a few hours before I admit defeat and just start writing.

If you’re reading this, don’t do that! Instead, start by writing badly.

Besides, when you’ve done the hard planning work, what you write will probably be a lot better than you think.

2. Willpower Doesn’t Work. Neither Does Inspiration. Instead, Use the “3 Minute Timer Trick.”

My biggest mistake when I began Crowdsourcing Paris was to think I had the willpower I needed as a professional writer and author of four books to finish the book on my own. Even worse, I thought I would be so inspired that the book would basically write itself.

I didn’t. It took not making much progress on my book for more than a year to realize I needed help.

The best thing you can do to help you focus on the writing process for your second draft is what we talked about in Step 4: Creating a Consequence.

But if you still need help, try my “3 Minute Timer Trick.” Here’s how it works:

• Set a timer for three minutes. Why three minutes? Because for me, I’m so distractible I can’t focus for more than three minutes. I think anyone can focus for three minutes though, even me.
• Write as fast as you can. Don’t think, just write!
• When the timer ends, write down your total word count in a separate document (see image below). Then subtract from the previous word count to calculate how many words you wrote during that session.
• Also write down any distractions during those three minutes. Did the phone ring? Did you have a tough urge to scroll through Facebook or play a game on your phone? Write it down.
• Then, repeat the process by starting the timer again. Can you beat your word count?

This process is surprisingly helpful, especially when you don’t feel like writing. After all, you might not have it in you to write for an hour, but anyone can write for three minutes.

And the amazing thing is that once you’ve started, you might find it much easier to keep going.

Other Tools for Writers

By the way, if you’re looking for the tools I use and other pro writers I know use, check out our Best Tools for Creative Writers guide here .

3. Make Your Weekly Deadlines.

You can’t finish your book in an all-nighter. That being said, you can finish a chapter of your book in an all-nighter.

That’s why it’s so important to have the weekly deadlines we talked about in Part 1, Step 2 of this guide.

By breaking up the writing process into a series of weekly deadlines, you give yourself an achievable framework to finish your book. And with the consequences you set in Step 3 of your memoir plan, you give your deadlines the teeth they need to hold you accountable.

And as I mentioned above, Scrivener is especially helpful for keeping track of deadlines (among other things). If you haven’t yet, check out my review of Scrivener here .

4. Keep Your Team Updated.

Having a hard time? It’s normal. Talk to your team about it.

It seems like when you’re writing a book, everything in the universe conspires against you. You get into a car accident, you get sick, you get into a massive fight with your spouse or family member, you get assigned a new project at your day job.

Writing a book would be hard enough on its own, but when you have the rest of your life to deal with, it can become almost impossible.

Without your team, which we talked about in Step 6 of your book plan, it would be.

For me, I would never have been able to finish one book, let alone the twelve that I’ve now finished, without the support, encouragement, and accountability of the other writers whom I call friends, the readers who believe in me, and most of all, my wife.

Remember: No book is finished alone. When things get hard, talk about it with your team.

And if you need a team, consider joining mine. The Write Practice Pro is a supportive encouraging community of writers and editors. It’s where I get feedback on my writing, and you can get it here too. Learn more about the community here.

5. Finally, Trust the Process.

When I walk writers through the first draft writing process, inevitably, around day sixty, they start to lose faith.

• They think their book is the all-time worst book ever written.
• They get a new idea they want to work on instead.
• They decide the dream to write a book and become a writer was foolish.
• They want to quit.

A few do quit at this point.

But the ones who keep going discover that in just a few weeks they’ve figured out most of the problems in their book, they’re on their last pages, and they’re almost finished.

It happens every time, even to me.

If you take nothing else from this post, please hear this: keep going. Never quit. If you follow this process from start to finish, you’re going to make it, and it’s going to be awesome.

I’m so excited for you.

How to Finish Your Memoir

More than half of this guide is about the planning process. That’s because if you start well, you’ll finish well.

If you create the right plan, then all that’s left is doing the hard, messy work of writing.

Without the right plan, it’s SO easy to get lost along the way.

That’s why I hope you’ll download my Memoir Plan Worksheet. Getting lost in the writing process is inevitable. This plan will become your map when it happens. Click to download the Memoir Plan Worksheet.

More than anything, though, I hope you’ll never quit. It took me five years to write Crowdsourcing Paris , but during that time I matured and grew so much as a writer and a person, all because I didn’t quit.

Even if it takes you five years, the life lessons you’ll learn as you write your book will be worth it.

And if you’re interested in a real-life adventure story set in Paris, I’d be honored if you’d read Crowdsourcing Paris . I think you’ll love it.

Good luck and happy writing.

More Writing Resources:

• How to Write a Memoir Outline: 7 Essential Steps For Your Memoir Outline
• 7 Steps to a Powerful Memoir
• The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith
• Crowdsourcing Paris by J.H. Bunting

Are you going to commit to writing a memoir (and never quitting, no matter what)? Let me know in the comments .

Summarize your memoir idea in the form of a one-sentence premise. Make sure it contains all three elements:

• A character
• A situation

Take fifteen minutes to craft your premise. When you’re finished, share your memoir premise in the Pro Practice Workshop for feedback. And if you share, please be sure to give feedback to three other writers. Not a member? Join us .

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

Work with Joe Bunting?

WSJ Bestselling author, founder of The Write Practice, and book coach with 14+ years experience. Joe Bunting specializes in working with Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, How To, Literary Fiction, Memoir, Mystery, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, and Self Help books. Sound like a good fit for you?

One of my book chapters has been accepted for publication, but I lack confidence in the accuracy of what I have written. I have completed the chapter, but I would appreciate your assistance in improving its quality.

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What Is a Memoir? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Memoir definition.

A  memoir  (MIM-wahr) is a literary form in which the author relates and reflects on experiences from their own life. Memoirs and  autobiographies  share many similarities, as both are types of self-written  biographies . But while an autobiography provides a comprehensive account of someone’s life, a memoir is a series of formative or notable memories or events that impacted the author in some way. Memoirs also focus on the author’s thoughts and feelings about those events, what they learned, and how they integrated the experiences into their life.

The term  memoir  comes from the early 15th century Anglo-French word  memorie , meaning “written record” or “something written to be kept in mind.”

The History of the Memoir Genre

The literary genre of memoir has been around since ancient times. One of the first prominent memoirs was  Commentaries on the Gallic Wars  by Julius Caesar, in which Caesar recounted his exploits fighting in the Gallic Wars. During the Middle Ages, historians Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville and diplomat Philippe de Commines wrote notable memoirs. French princess Margaret of Valois was the first woman to write a modern memoir during this period.

Memoirs have been (and continue to be) a popular genre. Henry David Thoreau released  Walden  in 1854, recording his experiences living simply in the New England woods.  Out of Africa  (1937) recounts Isak Dinesen’s time attempting to start a coffee plantation in Kenya.  A Moveable Feast  (1964) is Ernest Hemingway’s account of his years as an American expatriate in Paris in the 1920s.  Travels with Charley: In Search of America  is a travel memoir by John Steinbeck, chronicling an epic road trip with his poodle. All of these have become classics of the genre.

The Elements of Memoirs

Nearly all memoirs contain six main elements that serve to communicate the story of the author’s life clearly and realistically to the reader.

An Emotional Journey

The memoirist goes through some type of emotional evolution over the course of their story, which helps readers identify with the author’s struggle. Cheryl Strayed’s  Wild  is about Strayed grieving the end of her marriage and the death of her mother, reflected in her challenging backpacking trip along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Obstacles are the things standing in the way of the author getting what they want or need. Overcoming obstacles builds tension within a story and keeps the reader turning the page.  Prozac Nation  by Elizabeth Wurtzel charts her struggle to conquer depression as a young woman in 1990s America. The obstacle of mental illness is further complicated by other, more mundane obstacles in Wurtzel’s life, like going to college, working her first professional job, and maintaining interpersonal relationships. Ultimately, Wurtzel doesn’t so much defeat her depression as she does manage it through medication and other supports.

• Point of View

Memoirs are always told in first person  point of view , using  I / me / my  language. This makes the story personal and the experiences subjective. In fact, objectivity is difficult to achieve in memoirs since the  narrative  is filtered through the author/subject’s  perspective . Author Steve Almond once said, “Memoirs are radically subjective versions of objective events.”

A memoir is tied together by a common topic, premise, or lesson. This theme is not the author’s life as a whole; if it is, then the book is an autobiography. A memoirist doesn’t set out to capture all the critical moments of a life—only those that have special significance. For instance, Anne Lamott’s  Bird by Bird  is a book of writing instructions connected by the larger theme of lessons Lamott has learned about life and faith.

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of any memoir or autobiography, truth is essential to telling a relatable story. Even in cases where an author had an epic, larger-than-life, or downright strange experience, the emotional truth of the described events must resonate with readers to some extent. Readers trust that a memoirist will tell the truth, and if the memoirist violates that trust, it can be scandalous at best and career-destroying at worst.

For example, after the publication of James Frey’s memoir  A Million Little Pieces , evidence emerged that Frey invented key parts of the story. The revelation rocked the literary world; his lack of honesty undermined what readers believe is an authorial responsibility to accurately tell a story, as well as the publisher’s duty to truthfully market their books.

Every memoirist writes their book in their own unique  voice . Voice is the style in which a writer writes: the way they convey their thoughts, their word choices and patterns, and their storytelling approach. A reader finishes a memoir with a distinct idea of the author’s voice in their head. For example, Carrie Fisher’s  Shockaholic  chronicles the actor’s affection for electroconvulsive therapy, which she feels saved her life multiple times over. Fisher blends her wisecracking sense of humor with a serious dedication to raising mental health awareness and helping others, resulting in a voice uniquely her own.

Memoir Styles

Memoirists can tell their stories in a number of ways. Framing devices are popular structures for memoirs, opening and closing with more recent events and, in between, going back in time to earlier events.

Many authors construct their memoirs as a series of anecdotes or short snapshots about their lives. This has been a popular approach in recent years with several notable essay collections receiving widespread attention and landing on bestseller lists. For instance, actors Anna Kendrick and Mindy Kaling released personal essay collections largely centered around their Hollywood experiences.

Famous people, however, are not the only ones who write successful memoirs. Ordinary folks often have just as, if not, more interesting stories to tell.  A Three Dog Life  by Abigail Thomas explores the author’s life after her husband suffers a traumatic brain injury;  Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously  charts Julie Powell’s attempts to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s  Mastering the Art of French Cooking ; and  Running with Scissors  is about a very bizarre period in the childhood of writer Augusten Burroughs, in which his mother’s mentally unstable psychiatrist becomes Burroughs’s guardian.

Other common memoir subjects include addiction, mental illness, difficult childhoods, spiritual or religious quests, travelogues, and political careers.

The Function of Memoirs

A memoir gives an author an opportunity to share what they have learned from specific life experiences. Instead of recording every major life event, a memoir focuses on certain details around a central theme. This approach helps the author find clarity and meaning in their lives.

Memoirs also help readers gain insights, both into the lives of others and their own. Memoirs invite readers into someone else’s mind, and in doing so provide answers, a sense of humor, common ground, and/or interesting or unique stories that speak to life’s challenges or absurdities.

Notable Memoirists

• Sarah M. Bloom,  The Yellow House
• Charles M. Blow,  Fire Shut Up in My Bones
• Augusten Burroughs,  Running with Scissors ,  A Wolf at the Table
• Joan Didion,  The Year of Magical Thinking ,  Blue Nights
• Isak Dinesen,  Out of Africa ,  Shadows on the Grass
• Carrie Fisher,  Wishful Drinking ,  Shockaholic
• James Frey,  A Million Little Pieces
• Joy Harjo,  Crazy Brave
• Saeed Jones,  How We Fight for Our Lives
• Mary Karr,  The Liar’s Club ,  Cherry
• Frank McCourt,  Angela’s Ashes
• Patti Smith,  Just Kids ,  M Train

Examples of Memoirs

1. Elie Wiesel,  Night

Night  tells the story of Wiesel’s time in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during World War II. The memoir opens with Wiesel and his family fleeing their small Transylvanian hometown before Nazis capture them. When they arrive at Auschwitz, the Nazis separate Wiesel and his father from his mother and sister. Grappling with his faith and fighting for survival, Wiesel must also care for his ailing father.

Eventually, the Nazis send them to other camps before the two ultimately arrive at Buchenwald. Wiesel’s father dies just before the Allies liberate the camp, and though Wiesel survives, the experience haunts him forever.  Night  is not only about his experiences but what those experiences taught him about humanity and forgiveness.

2. Joan Didion,  The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking  is Didion’s record of the first year of her life after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. One evening, Dunne suddenly collapses, and Didion’s life is forever changed. She devotes the next year to analyzing his death, trying to make sense of it, while navigating the turbulent waters of her own grief. She relies on the power of words, medical and psychological research, and her own “magical thinking”—the false belief that her thoughts or actions will change the course of events—to get her through.

3. Roxane Gay,  Hunger

Hunger  is Gay’s memoir of her relationship with her body and food. This relationship is rooted in an early sexual trauma, and she subsequently turns to food as a means of protecting her vulnerable body from the world. She thinks that by overeating, she will make her body unappealing to men and thereby prevent another violation. Gay struggles with eating and her weight for many years afterward, and there is no easy resolution. She ultimately begins to embrace her own worth and understands that her value is not in any way connected to her size.

Further Resources on Memoir

In  The New Yorker , Stephanie Burt discusses  “Literary Style and the Lessons of the Memoir.”

A University of California, Berkeley, website delves into the  history of memoirs  and profiles a few notable contributions to the genre.

Pat McNees compiles several anecdotes about  voice in memoir .

Goodreads has a list of  popular memoirs .

Reader’s Digest put together a list of  17 Memoirs Everyone Should Read .

Related Terms

• Autobiography
• Frame Story

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Memoir coach and author Marion Roach

Welcome to The Memoir Project, the portal to your writing life.

How to Write A Memoir in Essays

Sorting the Stories — Memoir as Essay Collection

by Linda Styles Berkery

When I told a friend that I was taking a memoir-writing class, she replied, “Your life just isn’t that interesting.” Obviously she was thinking autobiography , not understanding memoir . I ignored her comment and continued to write about the small threads of wisdom I’ve learned.

After many edits, additions, and subtractions, I had built a wardrobe. I had a collection of fourteen personal essays—each one told through the lens of a dress. A Little Black Dress —learning compassion as illustrated by growing up in a funeral home. Memory Gown —naming mistakes as illustrated by a trip to the ER. Red Mini —seeing individuals as illustrated by teaching third grade. Ordinary dresses can bring out profound lessons.

Since all the writing pieces were in essay format, I adjusted Marion Roach Smith’s famous writing math, It’s about X as illustrated by Y to be told in a Z , and made a chart. To my Z factor, (essays) I added color and noted the dress: a turquoise paisley print, a navy maternity dress, an orange Hawaiian muumuu, a yellow sundress from 1941, a blue velvet jumper.

Each essay could stand alone, yet a book kept coming to mind. It was not enough to say I have a collection of “dress stories” of different length and various moods. I had more work to do. Although my structure would not be typical of a book length memoir (Act 1, Act 2, Act 3), even memoir as an essay collection must have an overall arc—a roof overhead, not just dress threads running through. Yes, memoir can be an essay collection, but it still needs structure and order.

I printed each story individually and laid them across my living room carpet. I knew which essay to put first and which would be last, but the other twelve? Originally I was tempted to group them. These three relate to my father’s WWII stories—put them together. Two had childhood dresses. My husband was mentioned in this group. But nothing really worked until my wonderful editor, Robyn Ringler, passed along tips she had learned from her own writing coach.

“Mix them up,” Robyn suggested. “Vary the word count. Don’t try to force the order, but pay attention to the emotions and lessons in the stories. Then, after you collect everything in the order you think might work, read the last paragraph of one story and the first paragraph of the following story and see if that works. You might need to do that process a few times.”

Robyn was right. I did arrange the essays a few times. But since these were, after all, dress stories, I got creative. If I had a photo of the dress, or a scrap of material from the dress, I stapled it to the printed page. Clearing a closet rod, I hung each essay from fourteen skirt hangers and started arranging them for a book. (Don’t try this at home.) I moved them and moved them until I could see a lovely rainbow arc for the entire collection.

When I was finally comfortable with the flow, I released my dress stories from their hangers and returned to the computer to cut and paste the individual essays into one long document. More edits. Moving paragraphs. Breaking up stories into parts. Adding just a bit more here and there. Writing an introduction and a final note to the reader. Two years after I wrote the first “dress story” for a memoir class, the book was published as Reflections: A Wardrobe of Life Lessons. Memoir, like a classic great dress, never goes out of style.

From the Introduction:

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

—Helen Hayes

At ten, I wasn’t the moody middle child wanting to be noticed, as much as the one who always seemed to notice. I was the sorter of stories, the keeper of traditions. Reaching up, or out, or down, I saw invisible threads that joined people together. I still do. Now, at seventy, I’m connecting more strands. And dresses are coaching my memory.

Three hard white suitcases live under my bed. I yank out the middle one and plop it on the blue star quilt. I’m not loading it up for a trip; it’s already full. I know what’s inside: dresses, scraps of fabric from dresses, and old photos. Clicking on the double locks feels like opening a black box of flight recordings. Messages vibrate from crinkles and creases, stains and frills. Memories rise from cotton, velvet, and silk—fibers from my journey through life.

Wisdom remains on the fold of one dress. I smooth a wrinkle and kindness appears. When I trace my pinky over white lace, I remember letting go. Hope is in there too, along with judgment, loss, compassion, forgiveness…a wardrobe of memories just waiting to be unpacked. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” I agree. But sometimes a life lesson can also be worn as a dress.

  Excerpt from a middle essay:  Navy Maternity

My first maternity outfit was a long-sleeved navy blue dress from Sears that I bought for my father’s wake and funeral. I wore it again on Father’s Day and then buried it under the lilac bush in my childhood backyard, watering the ground with my tears. The words from a homily echoed in my head. Ritualize where you are now . That’s what I was doing—dressing a wound by burying a dress…

The moment I stepped out of that dress, I felt different. Lighter. Aware. I was carrying a new life—had been all along—but now I could finally breathe. I glanced in the mirror and saw myself as a mother-to-be. I shoved the dress in the bag and tossed it in the car. The dress was easy to remove, but not the grief. Shifting my focus to new life, I decided to take one small step.

The following week, on my final day of teaching elementary school, I drove to my childhood home only two blocks away. I pulled the navy maternity dress from the white plastic bag. My mother was at work. But I didn’t need her. I knew where my father’s garden tools were kept. I grabbed a shovel and began digging in the dirt near the lilac bush—Dad’s favorite bush. It didn’t take long to scoop a hole big enough to bury a death dress…

Excerpt from the final essay: Dressing for a Reunion

At the Hyatt Regency Hotel near Dulles Airport, I’m wearing the same tri-colored dress that I wore for my 50 th  high school reunion in 2016—it’s mostly blue, with bands of black and white. I call it my past-present-future dress. The dress is making an encore appearance in 2017 at a different reunion tonight.  Can it really be called a reunion if we’ve never met?  My husband tells me to hurry. We exit the elevator and enter a full dining room. The celebration begins.

Arms reach across the table to shake my hand. A shoulder nudges close. I feel a tap on my back. Legs move toward me. Fingers clasp. Another arm extends around my waist. Then hugs, so many embraces and tears. I am aware of my middle-ness. I am a quiet middle child, in the middle of a loud story. I am in the middle of history, in the middle of generations, in the middle of Danish fishermen and American flyers. I’m standing in the middle of memory and expectation because I did what middle children do best—I made connections…

Author’s bio: Linda Styles Berkery holds an M.A. from Russell Sage College. Linda taught third grade, led retreats and worked in parish ministry. Her writings on faith/life have been published in various magazines, blogs and books. Her new book is Reflections: A Wardrobe of Life Lessons. 

HOW TO WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each installment takes on one short topic addressing how to write memoir. It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by. Love the author featured above? Did you learn something in the how-to? Then you’ve got to read the book. And you can. I am giving away one copy, and all you have to do to win is leave a comment below about something you learned from the writing lesson or the excerpt. I’ll draw winners at random (using the tool at random dot org) after entries close at midnight on May 15, 2019. Good luck!

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Related posts:

• Writing Lessons: Picking Small Topics To Write About
• Writing Lessons: Finding Time to Write
• Writing Lessons: How to Write About A Difficult Subject, by Bette Lynch Husted

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Reader interactions.

Amy Laundrie says

April 14, 2019 at 7:37 am

I found this extremely helpful. I’m a columnist for “The Wisconsin Dells Events” and am searching for a way to connect my “Slice of Life” columns into a second memoir. My first, “Laugh, Cry, Reflect: Stories From a Joyful Heart” includes pieces on nature, my pet ducklings, antidotes about my teaching career, and family stories. I appreciate the tips on how memoirists should make sure the last paragraph of one piece ties in with the first paragraph of the next and I think using dresses as a uniting metaphor was brilliant. I’m eager to read your book.

April 14, 2019 at 10:50 am

Dear Amy, I appreciate your kind words. I had a lot of fun using dresses as a thread through the essays. I would love to read your own slices of life columns. Marion has helped all of us go small. Linda

Susan Davies says

April 14, 2019 at 8:05 am

I love this concept! I have been so stuck in my writing, feeling overwhelmed. I had contemplated this approach but was so unsure….this lesson just gave me that push! Wish me luck! Thank you for your lessons! I enjoy them so much!

April 14, 2019 at 10:54 am

Susan, This is great news. I found all the writing lessons to be so helpful in my own work and I am honored that sharing my experience can help nudge you today. It is so good to give back. My editor, Robyn Ringler shared these tips from her own writing teacher so we are helping each other to gain movement. Linda

Laura McKowen says

April 14, 2019 at 8:09 am

Your content is so very helpful, Marion. About nine months ago, I read your book, and then I was on one of your calls. What I learned helped me focus, organize, and finish my manuscript for my first book, a memoir about sobriety. I sent it to my publisher last week. :) Thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 10:57 am

Marion’s content has always been so helpful to me too. Congratulations on completing your story.

David Sofi says

April 14, 2019 at 8:10 am

Excellent lesson and piece by Ms. Berkery. Especially resonating was the bit about Robyn’s advice from her writing coach. I will have that posted on my Writing Wall. I also tingled with her modification of The Algorithm (That is my personal emphasis of Marion’s lesson, it is so insightful and meaningful.)

Linda Berkery says

April 14, 2019 at 8:31 am

Marion’s writing math made each essay possible and I held it in mind throughout the entire book. Robyn RIngler’s advice pulled the entire collection together. Thank you for your comments.

Careen says

April 14, 2019 at 8:14 am

I want this book! Not only for its content, but because it illustrates the principles Marion puts forth.

April 14, 2019 at 11:34 am

Careen, I hope you continue to find help from the writing lessons and the wisdom from Marion. I surely did. Linda

Ginger Hudock says

April 14, 2019 at 8:16 am

This was wonderful post! The book would be something I could relate to because my age (61) and the metaphor of dresses. This is a great and doable way to structure a book as a series of essays. It seems much more doable for me. I am comfortable writing blog posts and magazine articles, but the thought of a long book is overwhelming sometimes.

April 14, 2019 at 11:01 am

Ginger, I am with you on the thoughts of a long book. It seemed too much for me. I was so happy to find that a series of essays was a reachable goal and Marion gave good feedback when I shared that I was attempting to do just that – she reminded me that I still needed an overall arc in order to print them together as a book. I hope you continue.

April 14, 2019 at 8:30 am

Breaking up the writing into smaller, more manageable pieces seems to tame the bigger writing project, sticking to the algorithm in each section. I loved seeing the process of finding the structure of the book, which is my biggest challenge.

April 14, 2019 at 11:40 am

Dear Beth, Smaller pieces worked so well for this collection. And yes, with each essay I made sure to follow the writing math. I kept asking myself what is this about ? Although told through the lens of a dress, it wasn’t about the dress… it was about a universal theme. Thank you for your thoughts. Linda

April 14, 2019 at 8:35 am

I can’t tell you how often I used Marion’s book and notes from her course as I was completing this book. Such good advice.

Elizabeth says

April 14, 2019 at 8:38 am

I flipped through my closet in my mind – many ideas there for essays, including the ban on trousers for women in my high school in the sixties, and the godawful bloomers for gym class. Thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 11:09 am

Oh Elizabeth, Our minds must run similar. There is a story about those gym “dresses” from my first P E class at Russell Sage College. And oh yes, a mini dress from my teaching days, when women were not allowed to wear pants, but COULD wear a mini dress three inches above the knees. Keep flipping through your closet in your mind. Clothing is so rich to draw out the memoir essays. Thank you for your post. Linda

Ruth Crates says

April 14, 2019 at 8:59 am

I continue to look for a way to write my memoirs. Essays might be a good fit for me. I love how Linda used an unlikely subject…. dresses – to relate her life experiences. If I don’t win the book, I will buy it…I loved the exerpt about burying her grief. We can all relate to that.

April 14, 2019 at 4:30 pm

Dear Ruth, I do hope that you will continue to write memoir. I found that essays were a perfect length. Mine ranged from about 800 to 1200 words in the book. Some had several parts but each one could be read alone which helped me continue. I am happy whenever someone considers the book, the proceeds are going to assist a local thrift store, called ReStyle, from Unity House in Troy. When we have some book signings we are also inviting readers to donate a gently used dress. So my unlikely thread of dresses is really being put to good use. Linda

April 14, 2019 at 4:34 pm

Isn’t it amazing how an idea can take off in so many directions! A wonderful way to help others.

April 14, 2019 at 4:40 pm

If you are in the Albany-Troy area look for several benefit book signings on the Facebook page: Reflections: A Wardrobe of Life Lessons

Cynthia C says

April 14, 2019 at 9:04 am

Incredibly helpful hearing about the writing process! I love reading how these authors make decisions about how the final product will look.

April 14, 2019 at 4:36 pm

Cynthia, I always loved reading the writing lessons from Marion’s posts. I was fascinated with the whole process of structure. Linda

Cassandra Hamilton says

April 14, 2019 at 9:41 am

Great post. I appreciate Linda Styles Berkery sharing her process. By breaking her subject into essays she was able to work ideas in smaller sections. I like how when she focused on the larger piece, the book, she turned to a visceral and visual method: hanging up her essays, each represented by a dress, to sort and rearrange until she felt they were right. I would think the photos of the dresses also evoked in her thoughts and feelings and helped her to pack her writing with vivid descriptions. I’m inspired with her process and how she cleverly teased us with snippets of her new work. Thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 4:44 pm

Dear Cassandra, Thanks for your comments. You are right about the visual part. It really helped me to organize the flow of the essays and the overall arc of the book. (And at one point when I realized that I didn’t have a green dress – it brought up a life lesson from an old memoir of a green gym dress!) Linda

Cheryl Hilderbrand says

April 14, 2019 at 10:08 am

Since the excerpts offered here resonated so strongly, I can’t wait to read the rest of the book. Is it just women our age who grew up with dresses who are so emotionally connected to fabric, and tucks, and gathers? A quilt made from childhood dresses keeps me warm, but I worry that I should put it away so that it’s scrapbook, memory-spurring nature can be preserved. The advice from Ms. Berkery’s editor was something I needed to hear . Thank you Marion, Linda, and Robyn.

April 14, 2019 at 4:49 pm

Dear Cheryl, I do think that dresses meant a lot more to us than they do to the next generation. My own adult daughters rarely wear dresses, but they still have emotional and memories attached to clothing. My husband saved his race t-shirts and had them made into a quilt! He no longer runs, only walks due to an injury, but that quilt hangs over his couch reminding him of all those races. Robyn Ringler’s insights (my editor for the book) were so valuable in getting this collection to print. I am glad to pass her advice along. Linda

Jen Chambers says

April 14, 2019 at 10:17 am

I find this very helpful- it solidifies a concept that I’ve been working on for some time of using essays as memoir in my own work. Using a literal thread to hold the narrative together made a great metaphor here. I am intrigued by the structural ideas and hope to get the book!

April 14, 2019 at 5:18 pm

Dear Jen, Thank you for your comments. I hope you continue to use essays as memoir. It really helped me to keep going.. I could focus on one essay at a time. Indeed I kept them in separate folders on my computer until I recognized how to make “dress stories” into a literary closet collection. Best regards,’ Linda

Debbie Morris says

April 14, 2019 at 10:28 am

I’ve had an idea brewing for years now, and this style has opened up a completely new way to join them yet keep them separate. I thoroughly enjoy the teachings here as well as that wonderfully inspiring sampling of essays. I feel energized, thank you!

April 14, 2019 at 6:03 pm

Dear Debbie, Thanks for the comments. I hope this idea keeps brewing and maybe finds a similar outlet. Linda

Barbara Womack says

April 14, 2019 at 10:38 am

I love this concept and have been inspired to use a similar approach in my own (somewhat stalled) writing.

I can’t wait to read this book!

April 14, 2019 at 6:06 pm

Dear Barbara, I am glad to hear about your writing. I wish you well on the journey and am happy that you found this approach to be helpful. Linda

Ann Hutton says

April 14, 2019 at 10:44 am

Excellent! I’m sharing this with a memoir writing group I facilitate. Meanwhile, I call out a “Yes!” to visually laying out your pages to really SEE what you’ve got and how it might fit together. Once I taped 260 pages to three walls in an empty office in order to look at the structure of a memoir manuscript. That’s when I realized that I did indeed have a beginning, middle, and ending! And looking for repetitions or other glaring mistakes was easier this way, rather than trying to read through pages on a computer screen.

Many thanks!

LInda Berkery says

April 14, 2019 at 6:11 pm

Dear Ann, Wow that must have been some wall sight! Yes, I think we sometimes need a visual way to keep us moving forward. Glad that worked for you and thank you for the comments. Best to your writing group. If you send me a personal message on Facebook page for the book. I will send you my “chart” with all the essays. My editor used that page for a talk she was giving on memoir writing. Linda

Merrie Skaggs says

April 14, 2019 at 10:49 am

Linda’s wardrobe structure is brilliant. I learned that I might be able to include an essay I wrote about my dad in my memoir. Also, Linda’s words spoke to me on several levels, or with various threads as she might say. I am still in the unraveling stage of my memoir writing and relish the connections since I am a Marion disciple, have seen my 70th birthday, and taught third grade. I learned much from your charming writing and the lessons you shared. Thank you, Linda, and thank you to our guru Marion. I’m not going to wait to win your book; I plan to buy it, read it, and learn from it now. “. . .bury a death dress. . .” My heart strings are still vibrating.

Linda Styles Berkery says

April 14, 2019 at 11:13 am

Dear Merrie, I am so happy to meet another over 70 writer of memoir. My father’s journey through his WWII experience rescued in the North Sea by Danish fishermen and as a POW is another thread through the collection. The proceeds from this book are also being used to help ReStyle, the thrift store run by Unity House in Troy, NY – my hometown. So buying the book supports a great cause. Thank you. Linda

Carol Gyzander says

April 14, 2019 at 11:00 am

I love the connecting device of the dresses! The first essay excerpt was interesting, but then I found myself curious about how it would be used in the next…and the next…

April 14, 2019 at 4:53 pm

Carol, I am so glad that you found yourself curious about the dresses used and the lessons they told. Sometimes I found myself pondering how a certain dress or saved piece of fabric could bring out so many memoires. What was going on? – You start writing and then you find more and more life experiences coloring the page. Linda

Jan Duffy says

April 14, 2019 at 11:15 am

Thank you Marion for another excellent post. The idea of basing a series of personal essays on a collection of dresses is so good. As I was reading the excerpts I felt as though I was Linda’s alter ego, experiencing every emotion that she did. Good work, I hope I can be as successful in my writing endeavors.

marion says

April 14, 2019 at 2:31 pm

Dear Jan, You are most welcome. Isn’t this a lovely, helpful post? Linda did an excellent job with this and with the book. I am delighted to see you here. Please come back soon. Best, Marion

Thank you Jan and Marion for your kind remarks. Several readers have commented that they felt they were standing right with me as they read. So we touched universal topics – close to our hearts. Linda

Karen Elizabeth Lee says

April 14, 2019 at 11:42 am

Thank you for writing this piece. I have been struggling with structure for my memoir for almost a year! writing short pieces as that is how it seems to be unfolding but then questioning myself – “Is this the right or acceptable format?” “Can I do it this way?” Your insight gives me the courage to follow this path – the essay path – to see where it will lead me! thank you.

April 14, 2019 at 4:57 pm

Dear Karen, I never started out to write a book or a collection. I just began with one essay of a brown plaid dress – a short piece for a writing assignment. I casually remarked, “I could probably write a lot more essays through the lens of a dress…” and I received such encouragement to continue. See where the short pieces lead you. Perhaps you have a collection rather than a traditional memoir book. Blessings for your good work. I am happy that this piece could encourage you. Linda

Cheryl A Kesling says

April 14, 2019 at 2:19 pm

Thank you, Linda, for sharing your story. I’m a 72-year-old struggling writer working on a memoir since 2014. It seems life keeps flying in front of me to the point of building a wall too high to see over. I’ve journaled, keeping track of unimaginable tragic moments and survival. I’ve written words on paper for a critique group but never seems to hit the mark, or at least to my satisfaction. Maybe I’m too hard on myself. Your memoir essay structure is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time but I know that each essay needs a reason or a lesson learned, and that is been my problem. Knowing what lessons I’ve learned is hard to put on paper when one holds back emotions. I’m sure reading your book would be helpful. Maybe making a chart as you did from Marion’s math and color coding for different periods ( as told in a Z- the essay) and using one metaphorical object to push the essays along is the answer for me as well. Thank you again.

April 14, 2019 at 5:06 pm

Dear Cheryl, Thank you for your heartfelt comments. Some essays (lessons) needed space and time before I could write about them. We all tend to be hard on ourselves. Keep writing. and Keep journaling. I found that going back to journals and circling some key memoires allowed me to move toward an essay. But journal writing is different than writing for print and I had to allow some pieces to stay in a journal and not try to force them to be an essay. But making the chart using X, Y, and Z was the most important formula I learned from Marion.

Etty Indriati says

April 14, 2019 at 3:11 pm

I love the excerpt of Linda’s book as it reflects the “what it is about” in Marion’s online course The Memoir Project that I took; and Linda cleverly wrote her book into chapters of personal essays. It makes me want to read the whole book! It is also inspires me to not giving up writing a memoir.

April 14, 2019 at 5:09 pm

Dear Etty, Marion’s outline is a wonderful way to start. I hope you can read the whole book and please don’t give up writing memoir in whatever form it takes. I think reflecting through writing is a blessing. Thank you for the comments. Linda

iliana says

April 14, 2019 at 7:23 pm

Linda, thanks so much for sharing aspects of your writing process! Cut and paste, and I really mean printing the pages, cutting where needed and rearranging, gluing them on another blank page, was my graduate advisor’s way of writing and editing articles, reports and proposals. That’s how I wrote my thesis too, hands on, feeling it. Looking at a dress as a metaphor, so clever! Looking forward to reading your book :)

April 14, 2019 at 7:36 pm

Seems like I did something like that old fashioned cut and paste on my TYPED thesis back in the day. Thanks for your kind remarks. Linda

KRISTA L RUSKIN says

April 14, 2019 at 7:28 pm

OMG. I’ve been struggling with not having lived “an important life” and yet wanting to write a memoir for my kids. My father died when I was 31. I often wished I had received more lessons from him and had them for my kids. In recording my own, 20 years later, on the upside of my life lessons, I’m hoping they see the possibilities for their lives even in The dark days. The idea of writing bits and and pieces of varying length and letting them tell me how to structure the book is liberating. Thank you!

April 15, 2019 at 9:00 pm

Dear Krista, I am happy that you can see your life as memoir worthy as it surely is. My father died when I was 26 and yet his influence is strongly felt in this collection. I wish you all the best for your writing. Linda

Lisa Sonora says

April 15, 2019 at 8:43 am

So many take aways here!

I haven’t read all of the comments, but skimmed, so hope to offer something not shared yet.

First, that you ignored your friends comment about writing about your life.

Then… using Marion’s algorithm for each of the essays (described in the second paragraph) —brilliant!

I too, am a student of Marion, and have been so STUCK on trying to figure out the algorithm for my memoir.

Your piece gave me the idea to look closer at the individual pieces within the book and trying to name what those are really about.

I just love the image of you hanging up your essays like dressed in the wardrobe, and laughed out loud at “don’t try this at home”. Because, yeah, I would try that at home — it make sense to give the writing some physical form that relates to the subject to help see it differently.

Congrats on the publication of your book, Lynda — I cannot wait to read it!

April 15, 2019 at 9:07 pm

Dear Lisa, Thank you for such great comments. Yes, hanging up those dress stories was crazy but a fun way to really see them in place. And it was wonderfully refreshing too. We often need to trust our own instincts sometimes more than the voices of dear but sometimes bossy friends! Best to you for your own writing. Linda

Cathy Baker says

April 15, 2019 at 8:47 am

I love everything about this post as I’m working on a book with mini-memoirs on our building my future writing studio, Tiny House on the Hill. After reading this post, I might consider having fewer chapters with a higher word count. I always learn so much from you, Marion, as well as those you coach. Thank you!

April 15, 2019 at 9:09 pm

I love the idea of mini-memoirs! Great! Thanks for your comments. I have also learned so much from Marion and her writing posts. Linda

Tammy Roth says

April 15, 2019 at 11:51 am

I’m always looking for clever ideas of arranging memoir topics and this is just brilliant. Thank you for sharing the process.

April 15, 2019 at 9:14 pm

Dear Tammy, Arranging those memoir essays was made easier using Robyn’s advice along with Marion’s wisdom. I was honored to share the process with so many interesting writers. Thank you for your comments. Linda

April 16, 2019 at 8:35 pm

Oh my! This came at the most perfect time. I am trying to write a memoir and it keeps running through my mind that I should try doing it in essays. I lost my son to suicide, so it’s about grief, hope, and faith. I loved what Robyn shared with you about connecting the last paragraph of one to the beginning of the next. The excerpts are wonderful. I can’t wait to read the book. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

April 16, 2019 at 9:01 pm

Dear Faith, I am glad that Robyn ‘s idea might help you find your way through a collection of essays. She suggested the last paragraph and the first one should flow for the reader but they can still stand alone as individual essays. I wish you blessings in your writing. Linda

Naomi Johnson says

April 16, 2019 at 10:51 pm

I LOVED the wonderful advice from her editor, while she was still working out the overarching structure: “pay attention to the emotions and lessons in the stories . . .. Then . . . read the last paragraph of one story and the first paragraph of the following story and see if that works.”

Lovely, indeed!

April 17, 2019 at 7:00 pm

Thank you for your comments. Robyn Ringler and Marion offer such valuable suggestions. And I am grateful. Linda

Melanie says

April 17, 2019 at 2:49 pm

I’m in the process of structuring my next book now. I was right there, with descriptions of white suitcases containing “…fabrics from my journey through life.” I could hear the crinkle of crinoline, and I was reminded of one of my absolute favorite couplets by Joni Mitchell: “Everything comes and goes, marked by lovers and styles of clothes…” As I enjoyed all the other places the piece had taken me, I asked myself, “Do I have milestones (like these dresses) that mark the milestones of my life?” And I realized, I DO! I am a songwriter, so of COURSE, every milestone has a song! Thanks, Marion & Linda for such beautiful and inspiring work.

April 17, 2019 at 5:23 pm

You are most welcome, Melanie. Please come back soon. Best, Marion

April 17, 2019 at 7:06 pm

Thank you for your comments and the great quote! Love it. And nice for me too as my maiden name was Styles. I am glad that you found yourself asking questions about your own milestones.

Teresa Reimer says

April 20, 2019 at 9:12 pm

What a wonderful idea to hang each story and it’s inspiration on a clothes hanger. Organization and expanding on the theme! Can’t get much better than that.

April 22, 2019 at 6:15 pm

Teresa Thanks for your comments. Yes it was definitely different but fun! Linda

Donna P says

April 29, 2019 at 11:36 am

Dear Linda,

Your ideas, along with Marion’s brilliant advice, strike a real chord with me. I, too, have been struggling with the concept of essays within a memoir. Due to health issues, I have not given my book as much attention lately. I’m going to paste this article to my forehead to keep it top of mind! Truly inspirational at a time when I really needed it. Thanks to you and to Marion. I will definitely buy the book.

April 29, 2019 at 12:34 pm

Dear Donna, Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Marion’s advice really helped me stay focused on each individual essay. And I am so happy to know that sharing my experience making a collection of essays could help you move your own writing along. Best to you for your writing. Linda

Gail Gaspar says

Essays in the form of a wardrobe of dresses, yes. I am wondering if my memoir will take the form of essays unified by a theme (I adore metaphors) and you have illustrated how it can done. As a coach, I am happy you listened to your inner voice and not to the friend who remarked, “Your life just isn’t that interesting.” I appreciate how you show, don’t tell, about what each dress represents. The image of your dress stories hanging in your closet is an excellent reminder of how creative and expansive the writing process can be – when we allow it.

Laurie says

May 1, 2019 at 3:10 pm

Marion – This is my first visit to your blog and site. So much info! Thank you! I too am working on a memoir that right now is a collection of stories. This truly resonated with me as I am stuck as to how to pull them together into a book. Linda – your insights and suggestions couldn’t have been more on target. I have already printed them out and moved them about – but I think I need to write a few more – and then piece them together – reading the last para / first para – and adding bits as you suggested. I LOVED reading the excerpt of the book – what a wonderful way to tie the stories together by the dresses. As a writer – I loved that creative idea to tie it all together – and as a reader – each except you shared – I could apply to my own life and my own past closet of dresses! Well done! I would be tickled to win the book and read more!

May 1, 2019 at 5:47 pm

Dear Laurie, Thank you for your thoughtful remarks. Finding Marion’s blog and site is certainly a real gift. I was fortunate to take a class when she was teaching in Troy before everything went online. But look how many more people can be reached. I am delighted that you could relate to the dress stories and find memories arriving from your own closet. I loved making the book a collection/ wardrobe of stories. All the best to you with your own memoir. Linda

May 2, 2019 at 11:52 am

What a lovely way to seamlessly piece together a book! I’m in awe of your process and inspired by the concept! I’ve always struggled to let go of certain garments because of the memories associated with them. Now I understand why: Not only does each one offer a memory, but you’ve proven each one tells a story. I can’t wait to visit your story-closet and read more!

May 2, 2019 at 8:59 pm

Dear Susan, Thank you for your kind remarks. I hope you do visit my “story-closet” as well as peek at some life lessons from your own wardrobe. Linda

Maggie Yoest says

May 3, 2019 at 10:57 am

I am new to memoir writing and have been encouraged by Susan and Marion. Hopefully, as I stay with this, some of the fear will dissipate and the courage to share myself and my view will grow. Thank you both!

May 3, 2019 at 4:00 pm

Maggie, I hope you continue with memoir. Marion is a wonderful guide. Linda

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How To Write a Memoir: Examples and a Step-by-Step Guide 

• December 4, 2023

Introduction

A memoir provides the author an opportunity to share one’s life experiences. This genre focuses on a central theme, rather than recording every life event. Memoirs help the readers gain insights.

The elements of a memoir, which help to communicate the narrative of the author’s life are:

• An emotional journey: The author goes through some type of emotional evolution over time. It helps the readers identify the struggle. Cheryl Strayed’s book “Wild” talks about how she survived the trauma of losing her mother.
• Obstacles: Overcoming an obstacle builds tension in the memoir which hooks the audience with the story. “Prozac Nation” by Elizabeth Wurtzel is an example of the same.
• Point of view: Memoirs are always narrated in the first person like I/we/ my language. This makes it subjective and personal.
• Theme: A memoir is knitted together by a common topic, lesson or premise. The theme is not the author’s life as a whole. It is a set of experiences that are critical moments of life.
• Truth: The most highlighted element in a memoir is the truth. The readers trust the memoirist that they would write the truth and if the latter violates that, it could be scandalous both on the personal and professional front.
• Voice: Voice is the specific style of the author. The way they express their thoughts, their word choices, and their storytelling approach comes under this. Upon completing a memoir, readers should have a distinct idea of the author’s voice.

This article will be the push you need to learn how to write a memoir.

• What is a memoir?

What is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?

Examples of memoirs: for inspiration, a step-by-step guide to memoir writing, what is a memoir.

A memoir is an offshoot of creative nonfiction and it is a genre itself. To be a memoir, a piece of writing must be: nonfictional, based on a true life incident and written from one’s perspective. A memoir should approach a story, keeping in mind the human element. Evoking emotions and leading with a laugh should be the goal of a good memoir.

The first step in how to write a memoir is to behave as if you are sharing a secret with the reader that hasn’t been narrated before. Although it is nonfiction, it primarily focuses on facts like when-who-where-how of their life’s timeline. The author chooses a pivotal life event and tries to recreate it through storytelling. The word ‘memoir’ comes from the French word ‘mémoire’ or memory.

Based on the following grounds, an autobiography and a memoir can be distinguished:

• Structure: Autobiographies are mostly comprehensive because they narrate one’s life as a whole. They are chronological as well. On the other hand, a memoir curates a list of personal experiences to serve a bigger picture and is not necessarily chronological.
• Scope: Autobiographies don’t put stress on a life event or incident, while a memoir highlights specific times in the author’s life. It can be understood through an example of a CV and one single resume. The former is more like an autobiography and the latter represents a memoir.
• Style: An autobiography focuses on events, while a memoir prioritizes the author’s personal experience of those events. A memoir can go beyond the expectations of formal writing. This means that a memoirist can use fiction writing techniques as well to perfectly capture their stories.
• Philosophy: An autobiography emphasizes facts while a memoir is dependent on memories. Due to the unreliable nature of memories, a memoirist puts stress on emotional truth rather than facts.
• Audience: Readers prefer autobiographies to learn about the author’s journey. Since memoirs are more personal and intimate, the readers pick up this genre to experience a story built around specific themes.

The next section will serve as inspiration on how to write a memoir by focusing on how the famous ones were written.

The following books are great places to know how to start a memoir and to understand how to write a memoir:

• The Year of Magical Thinking: It deals with Joan Didion’s year of mourning over her husband’s demise. The book is certainly the best when it comes to grief. The writing is lucid, starting from the first page to the last.
• Just Kids: Patti Smith’s memoir is a classic coming-of-age bildungsroman. The book covers her move to New York and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. She has beautifully captured the energy of downtown New York in the late sixties and seventies.
• When Breath Becomes Air: Written by Paul Kalanthi, a young surgeon who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The book is poignant and teaches us to cope with some of the most difficult human experiences. It highlights fatherhood and mortality.
• In the Dream House: Carmen Maria Machado’s book revolves around relationship abuse, and it is extremely candid and innovative.
• Running in the Family: Michael Ondaatje returns to Sri Lanka after spending twenty-five years in the United States to sort out his family’s past. It should be taken into account that the book was sold to readers as a ‘fictional memoir’.

Reading these famous memoirs might serve as memoir writing tips that work better than guides.

• Generate memoir writing ideas: Choosing one memory that feels the most emotionally thrilling should be the aim. Starting is the hardest, but once you get a theme and start brainstorming, you have given a form to your memoir.
• Begin drafting: Beginning with the event that one cannot stop thinking about, is the key. The motto of drafting is gaining momentum. Starting with an emotionally charged incident provides that drive we require for that burst of creative energy.
• Engage the reader from the first word: A classic example would be Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’. It makes us glued to her story. Giving details and creating suspense should be the priority.
• Building trust with the reader: As we know, a memoir is a deeply intimate non-fiction book that one is going to share with the world. Hence, the author needs to build that trust with the readers.
• Opening with a dramatic moment: Sharing an exciting glimpse of what one is going to expect is a great way to start a memoir and keep the audience engaged. The pivotal moment in the story should be coming at first, coupled with vivid and sensory details.
• Keeping it relevant: Memoirs have a narrow scope, which is centred around a period of one’s life. Going with the flow should be the aim of a good memoir. One should avoid including unnecessary details and engaging in hyperbole.
• Be honest: Staying true to one’s narrative while respecting their right to privacy. You might include family members of yours, but it is important to hide or change their names. Only an author decides what needs to be edited and should deliver an honest story.
• Bringing out the emotions: A memoir should also approach a story which should connect with the reader on an emotional level. Using language which is lucid and simple is the key. Also, readers should be able to resonate with the writing.
• Writing the opening last: If you are experiencing writer’s block, remember that a memoir doesn’t have to be chronological. Therefore, it might be better to save the opening for last. Start by writing the part of the story that inspires you the most. In the course of writing, you’ll eventually discover the perfect opening and know exactly how to write a good memoir.

All in all, memoirs are specially written to share one’s personal experiences on a deeper and emotional level. It is different from an autobiography on many grounds, as we have discussed earlier. Lee Gutkin remarked once that memoirs are said to be true stories, which are well told and executed. So, what are you waiting for? You know how to write a memoir. Time to turn your dreams into reality!

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16 memorable memoirs told in essays, stories, and snapshots

• BY Anne Bogel
• IN Audiobook , Book Lists , Books & Reading
• 40 Comments | Comment

When I’m not sure what to read next, I often turn to memoir. My own reading habits skew towards fiction, and a good memoir allows me to read nonfiction that is still driven by story, in much the same way a good novel is.

In recent years, I’ve noticed the rise of memoir-in-essays, as well as memoirs that play with the format in interesting ways. ( You know I’m a total nerd when it comes to format and structure, right ? ) A bonus: memoirs told in essays, stories, and snapshots are a great option for anyone dealing with a short attention span, something I admit to struggling with these days.

With books like these, you can read one essay or short chapter at a time or gobble them down in one sitting. The memoirs featured here run the gamut of emotions, from funny and light to poignant and serious. I hope you’ll find a few attractive options for your every reading mood.

We’ve included one graphic memoir; if you’re interested in more along those lines, be sure to check out WSIRN producer Brenna Frederick’s recommendations in  Patreon Bonus Episode #79: Comics and graphic novels for the curious . As if that’s not enough, team member Shannan Malone shared the memoirs that changed her life in this Patreon bonus episode .

A special note for audiobook fans: I love  listening  to memoirs, especially when the author reads their own story. Many of these are fantastic in that format.

Some links (including all Amazon links) are affiliate links.  More details here .

16 well-crafted memoirs to read in small bites or one sitting

Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say

I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine

Here for It: Or How to Save Your Soul in America

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir)

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

84, Charing Cross Road

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A true (as told to me) story

Stories I Only Tell My Friends

We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

I Am, I Am, I Am

My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

Do you have any uniquely structured memoirs to add to this list? Tell us in the comments!

P.S. Enjoy these 20 travel memoirs to take you around the world and 20 tasty and tantalizing food memoirs to inspire your culinary pursuits.

P.P.S. Find an exclusive list of my favorite autobiography, biography, and memoirs in My Reading Life: A Book Journal , available in bookstores near you!

40 comments

This is how I structured my books. I think writing so many sermons trained my brain to think in discrete chapters. Sermons are, after all, kind of a cousin of essays.

I love so many of the books you listed here and will add others to my to-read list.

I am currently reading an Australian memoir, Sandra Hogan’s With My Little Eye, and my book club’s choice for November is Cicely Tyson’s memoir, Just As I Am.

My all time favorite book is a memoir. It is in epistolary format, letters to males in the authors life. Some she has meet, some have impacted her even though she never laid eyes on them or knew their names. I have read this book seven times, and can easily see myself reading it seven more. Beautifully written, almost like poetry Mary-Louise Parker’s Dear Mr. You is an amazing book.

That sounds good! I am placing it at the top of my TBR list.

I love all things Jenny Lawson and Let’s Pretend this Never Happened is a great introduction to her. I really love her second memoir, Furiously Happy, in which she delves a little deeper into her struggles with autoimmune disease and mental health.

I loved Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s memoirs, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal, both of which are structured in unusual and captivating ways using text, art, and variations on formatting that give the reader a clear sense of how creative, quirky, and lovely Amy was.

Yes! Amy Krouse Rosenthal is my favorite author. Her memoir is definitely uniquely structured. I bought the blank encyclopedia of me. I’ve always wanted to journal but the blank pages overwhelmed me. Amy’s format gave me courage! I am so glad you thought to add it to the list. I miss her, don’t you?

I came to comment the same thing! Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal is the most unique thing I’ve ever read: she’s clever and warm and so genuinely unique. I just read it for a second time.

I love the Rick Bragg book! Any of his books read on audio by him is fantastic! I read 84, Charing Cross Road a long time ago and I still remember the feeling I had as the main characters forge a friendship an ocean away through pen and ink and anticipation awaiting correspondence.

Our book club read Belonging (by Nora Krug, https://nora-krug.com/belonging-heimat ), which is a graphic memoir. I loved the way she intertwined a variety of illustration types with the story.

Born a Crime–an absolute MUST on audio! And Tell Me More…oh, my. One bit of advice: don’t do what I did! I listened on a flight. Muffled sobs…tiny airplane napkins (sad excuse for a hanky).

To this list, I would add Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. I also love May Sarton’s journals.

This is my favorite genre!!! All of Kelly Corrigan’s books are perfection. Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens For A Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, and her just published No Cure for Being Human are both stunning! Nora McInerny’s It’s OK to Laugh(Crying is Cool Too) is also great. On the lighter side, Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking never fails to make me laugh, and Leslie Jordan’s How Y’all Doin’? On audiobook in his distinctive voice is a delight:)

I loved Born a Crime. I listened to it on audio as read by the author. Fantastic! Thanks for the Rick Bragg recommendation. I recently finished his All Over but the Shoutin’. Excellent. That book had me smitten from chapter 1, page 1.

Persepolis and mouse

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

I guess Unbroken probably isn’t a memoir. Sorry.

I nominate John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, which doesn’t sound like a memoir but very much is. The audio version, which he narrates, is especially wonderful.

I love Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas. The vignette structure appeals to me and she makes me laugh! I haven’t yet read her follow-up memoir, Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad, but I’d expect another stellar read.

This was such a great list. A lot to add to my TBR list. Thanks for the brief, but descriptive reviews.

I recommend El Deafo told in graphic form. I loved it

El Deafo is fantastic! I also loved Ordinary Hazards by Nikki Grimes–a memoir in verse that is beautiful, breathtaking, and bittersweet (warning: some sexual abuse). Dear Exile by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery is a dual memoir told through letters (sort of like 84 Charing Cross). One of the women is in Africa, serving in the Peace Corps for a year, and the other is in New York City. Fascinating and one I’ve read several times.

I’ve just started “London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency” by Kate McDougall. Very charming so far!

I read Rick Bragg’s this past year and loved it.

The Bright Hour. Achingly honest telling of Nina Riggs end of life – she lives each day lovingly and doesn’t lose her passion or humor.

Highly recommend I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O’Farrell. Every chapter is her wonderful, extraordinary, rich prose. She has lived an amazingly different life and the talent to write so well about it.

If you liked Rob Lowe’s book, you will like Mathew McConaughney’s book, Greenlights. He narrates and is a great story teller. He too had an interesting childhood & outlook on life.

I just want to comment that lately, when I try to click on the link in the email, to go to Modernmrsdarcy.com for one of these blog articles—- on both my android tablet and my iPad I get “Security Risk” and it won’t go there. On my computer it’s fine. Is it just me, or has anybody else had this issue?

I have had the same security issue on my tablet. Doesn’t do this unless I click on the link in a email to take me to the blog.

Thanks for letting me know. We’re investigating why this warning occasionally pops up.

I really did enjoy I Miss You When I Blink, and I’m not one for a book of essays! But what about these excellent ones? My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr Lunch in Paris and Picnic in Provence, by Elizabeth Bard The Olive Farm, by Carol Drinkwater My Life in France, by Julia Child Animals in Translation, by Temple Grandin and Here if You Need Me, by Kate Braestrup

I’ve read or purchased many of these based on your recommendations from the podcast. Every one I’ve read, I’ve loved. Thanks for sharing these!

The style you’re talking about is creative non-fiction, defined as “true stories, well told.” For anyone interested in writing their own memoir in this style, I highly recommend “Fifty-Two Snapshots: A Memoir Starter Kit” by Sonja Livingston. Her book, “Ghostbread,” is a stellar example of this style and is about her childhood in upstate New York.

Just ordered fifty two snapshots. Thank you.

Ree Drummond’s Frontier Follies made me laugh so hard that I cried! It was a book that was hard to put down. She is smart, witty, and tells about a life unlike most. Highly recommend!

I just finished I’m Just Happy to Be Here by Janelle Hanchett and loved it! Its addiction memoir meets truth-telling mommy blogger.

Does Crying in H Mart count? I listened on audio, so it was hard to tell if is was written in essays, or just narrative.

And I read the egalley, and the formatting isn’t always the best on those. I’m inclined to count it, and regardless, I thought it was incredible.

Brown Girl Dreaming is Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir told in verse. It’s lovely.

Found this older list while looking for memoirs. Very helpful! I recommend The Beastie Boy Book, which is a memoir of the surviving Beastie Boys, written in essays, playlists, recipes, etc. I read it more for the 1980s NYC stories than because I am a big Beastie Boys fan, and I was surprised by how much I loved the whole thing! It’s really fun book.

i would highly recommend Grace Notes by Brian Doyle. It made me cry and laugh.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

The Personal Memoir

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Because the personal memoir is more demanding than the personal essay, for both writer and reader, it doesn’t fit into introductory courses as well as the personal essay. An intermediate level course is a good place to introduce the memoir. However, if the instructor takes the time to explain and introduce the memoir form, it can be adapted for introductory courses.

Difference Between the Personal Essay and the Memoir

While the personal essay can be about almost anything, the memoir tends to discuss past events. Memoir is similar to the personal essay, except that the memoir tends to focus more on striking or life-changing events. The personal essay can be a relatively light reflection about what’s going on in your life right now.

Where the personal essay explores, free from any need to interpret, the memoir interprets, analyzes, and seeks the deeper meaning beneath the surface experience of particular events. The memoir continually asks the following questions:

• Why was this event of particular significance?
• What did it mean?
• Why is it important?

In this sense, the memoir is heavier than the personal essay, and it mines the past to shed light on the present. The memoir seeks to make sense of an individual life. The questions that are left unanswered in Wole Soyinka’s essay from the personal essay resource, Why do I Fast? are answered in the memoir.

Generating Ideas for Personal Memoirs

Moore’s memoir exercise from The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction is useful in both beginning and intermediate courses:

“Make a list of six to ten events or circumstances in your own life, or the lives of those very close to you, that still provoke your curiosity. Mine your own life for the events and circumstances that still raise questions in your mind. Once you have the list (and this list should be private - don’t share it with others - and don’t hold back because you think someone else will be looking), pick one of the questions on the list that you are willing to explore.“

The potential questions Moore asks in this exercise are meant to be answered in the memoir. While the memoir tries to make sense of experience, it also shares something in common with the personal essay - the exploration of the question, and the process of trying to arrive at an answer, is at least as important as the answer or resolution you may arrive at.

Writing the memoir is not a simple Q & A with yourself; rather, the complicated process of trying to seek the answers is what makes the memoir engaging to write, and read. Here is an example from Carlos Fuentes’ How I Started to Write :

Fuentes is constantly questioning and answering, interpreting and analyzing his experience, trying to make sense of why and how he did what he did in order to become a writer. He seeks answers and tries to make sense of his life by interpreting his own experience, the cultural and political life of his time, the meaning of language and literary influence, and by stepping over imagined nationalist borders.

Memoir Essay

Writing out our memories of the past and present , while putting it into paper and pen, for the world to see sounds like a dream come true for those who are into this. To a smaller few, it may sound more like an open diary.   Though it may sound sad to hear, a memoir is actually a fun way of writing something you wish to be remembered. Sounds like a good idea? Do you wish to want to know how and what to write in a memoir? Easy! Check them out below and download any of our  5+ Memoir Essay examples that fit you.

5+ Memoir Essay Examples

1. memoir essay template.

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2. Visual Memoir Project Essay

3. Narrative Memoir Essay

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4. Example of Memoir Essay

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5. Essay on the Memoir Literary Genre

6. Mexicana-Chicana Memoir Essay

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What is a Memoir?

A memoir is taken from the French word mémoire which means memory or something to reminiscent. A memoir is a nonfiction narrative that talks about the situations in your life that you want to hold on too. A memoir is different from an essay since the person reading the memoir is taken back to a journey of the author’s life while an essay is a writer’s thoughts and ideas.

What is a Memoir Essay?

A memoir essay is a type of writing where you put both your thoughts and ideas as well as your desired memories together. It is also known as an essay length adaptation of a memoir . The word count ranges from 1,000/2,000 words to 8,000 or 10,000 words. Nothing more, nothing less. Your memoir essay is different from your autobiography. You are not going to write your whole life story, but some snips of your life story.

How to create a Memoir?

Although there are some ways in creating such a beautiful memoir, sticking to the facts is better than making things that do not belong or you have not experienced a part of it to make it sound better. The result is, it is no longer considered a memoir but an essay since you are only sharing your thoughts and not the actual facts. However, there are easy steps you can read to know and understand how to write the perfect memoir.

Think Of What Theme You Are Going For.

Brainstorming what theme you are going for is essential when writing your memoir. Your theme could range from happy or sad. The theme is important in your memoir.

Identify and Write Down Your Memories.

Brainstorm. The second thing you can do is to brainstorm for memories you wish to write down. From your earliest memories to your most recent ones, especially those that gave you the biggest impact on your life.

Your memoir must be truthful.

This is a big deal when it comes to writing your memoir, since this is about you and your special memories. Adding somebody else’s experience to make your memoir sound better is wrong and should be avoided at all costs.

Connect each memory to your current ones, and don’t be afraid to get vulnerable.

Interconnecting your previous memories to your current ones is okay. Some memories often interlink. Also, when writing, do not be afraid to get vulnerable. Readers often relate more if the author gets on to their level of vulnerability.

Write a memoir you want others to remember you for.

When writing, we often want to think about the rules, the formats, how we want our readers to view it. But remember, this is your memoir. Write the facts, write about your memories but do so while having fun. Let your readers be a part of your story. Draw them in. Let them dive in and see how you are viewed in their eyes.

Put life in your memoir.

Readers would love to hear you laugh, to see you smile, to sympathize with you when you are sad through your words. They want to be in your shoes through words. To view your experiences through your eyes.

What is the difference between a memoir and a memoir essay?

A memoir in layman’s terms is like a big open diary you let people read. You write the memories that affected you most from the beginning to present. A memoir essay however is an essay adaptation of a memoir. There is very little difference between the two.

How many paragraphs does it take to write a memoir essay?

It only takes about 2 to 4 paragraphs to write your memoir essay or half a page long.

Writing a memoir essay may take a while and some trial and errors, but as long as you stick to the simple rules on how to write a memoir essay, you are all set. Just remember to look at the rules and to have fun while sticking to the facts as well.

Memoir Essay Generator

Text prompt

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Write about a pivotal moment in your life for your Memoir Essay.

Discuss the impact of a significant relationship in your life in your Memoir Essay.