What Makes Memoirs Work

Read Like A Writer Series #1

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Preamble

This is the first in a series of posts based on the workshop called Read Like a Writer I delivered a few years ago to a group of incredible people who wanted to learn how to put down their stories in a manner that invited their families to read them. They noticed that their own writing failed to ignite when compared to other works, but they didn’t understand why. The goal of the workshop was to open their eyes to what was happening on the page as they read their favorite books. I hope this series is helpful to you in your reading and writing life.

Introduction

Quick — what’s the difference between memoir and fiction?

Some argue none. But I don’t subscribe to this dim view of memoir.

Let’s try again. What is memoir? How does it operate as truthful rather than fictional story?

In this post we’re going to talk about the writer’s contract with the reader, both explicit and implicit. What is expected from the memoirist? And what is the memoirist obligated to deliver?

In the process of answering these questions we’ll discuss how plot is derived in memoir, as well as the importance of voice to narrative drive.

We end with a bibliography to guide your own reading and writing.

What Is Memoir?

A memoir is a written account that shapes a specific, lived past experience into a meaningful story. Though based on something as fallible as human memory it remains true in that nothing is fabricated. If the writer says they were arrested but no arrest report exists, then the story is fiction.

Memoir is based on verifiable facts. There are witnesses who can confirm basic information answering the questions who, what, where, when, how and sometimes why. Often these witnesses appear in the story as characters.

Contract With the Reader

A commitment to truthfulness lies at the heart of the memoirist’s contract with the reader. Most readers know that memory is incomplete, just ask a criminal defense attorney. Witnesses are notorious for getting things wrong, not because they’re willful liars but because their minds are not movie cameras. They cannot retain every detail: How tall was the perp? Sneakers or loafers? Did the pedestrian cross before the light changed? Was the motorist texting? What color was the car? Make? Was anyone at the scene wearing an argyle sweater?

Memoirists have the same problem. That’s why they do research. Reviewing photographs, letters, documents, conducting interviews and also mining their own memories for flaws, they seek confirmation and correction.

Does this mean only dialogue captured on tape can be used? Of course not. This isn’t journalism. Readers understand that dialogue and scene setting are constructed.

Actual transcribed dialogue is unreadable. All writers, including journalists, shape spoken words for clarity and meaning. In memoir the point is that the gist of the event is true, that the encounter happened and words were exchanged that caused something to happen in terms of story, driving it forward.

Names, dates and place names can be changed to protect the privacy of people involved in the story.

However, whatever adjustments the writer makes for the sake of the reader, writer and other characters ought to be stated up front so that the reader knows going in what the rules of the story world are.

Untruth in memoir is anything that is made up with the intention to deceive the reader.

Plot in Memoir

Discussions about plot can lead to raucous creative writing seminars. There are those who insist it doesn’t matter and others who insist it’s the only thing that matters. They’re both right. It all depends on how you conceive of plot.

Plot is what happens in a story. It’s a series of events, each one following from the previous one until the full dramatic purpose of the story is realized.

Notice the emphasis on “following from.” Plot in any story is not rendered via a random series of events. There must be a relationship between the previous event and the next. This relationship from one to the next drives the narrative to the final conclusion of the story.

Plot is driven by characters’ actions. The central components of every scene include conflict, action, and resolution. Each resolution drives the next component of plot until the final scene resolving the story is played out.

In her book, The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick points out that all of literature contains both a situation and a story:

“The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot that preoccupies the writer; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

Memoir is no different from other genres, except that the plot may be the series of events that led to the writer’s insight. The throughline of the story is how the narrator changed. Without change there can be no plot.

Moreover, if the memoirist isn’t able to communicate that change with a unique voice, there can be no plot or story. The writer’s voice represents the conscious human reflecting on the events and the insights that comprise both plot and story. No apparent reflecting mind, no story.

Voice

In The Art of Memoir Mary Karr includes a chapter titled “A Voice Conjures the Human Who Utters It.” In it she says:

“Because memoir is such a simple form, its events can come across—in the worst books—as thinly rendered and haphazard. But if the voice has a high enough voltage, it will carry the reader through all manner of assholery and tangent because it almost magically conjures in her imagination a fully realized human. We kind of think the voice is the narrator. It certainly helps if the stories are riveting, but a great voice renders the dullest event remarkable.”

Consider Joan Didion’s voice in The Year of Magical Thinking. She writes about a terrible experience of grief, the loss of her husband, and yet she begins by maintaining some distance from the event itself by presenting the facts—who, what, where, when, and why she’s sharing this story: “because it will happen to you.”

Simultaneously, as a reader I fall into a feeling of deep intimacy as she describes the scene on that fateful night her husband passed. An ordinary evening familiar to most of us it includes setting the fire, establishing the comfort of home on a cool night, making something to eat, fixing her husband a drink, talking. And then, the worst happens. He dies from a sudden heart attack. Right there in their comfortable home. Their safe place. Are we hooked? You bet your ass.

Every memoirist has to find her own voice and establish it on page one. Yes, the emotional register will change throughout the story, but each register change is consistent with the voice, the persona with whom the reader has connected.

Why Memoirs Fail

Voice is a big reason memoirs fail. Voice conjures the person telling the story and creates a sense of reliability and relatability. Unreliable narrators work in fiction but not memoir. Memoir demands a trustworthy narrator. A reader’s doubts about the narrator’s authority must be laid to rest quickly.

Another common failure is an unbalanced emotional tone. Bitterness cannot carry a reader for long, but neither can too much overt positivity or bravado. After a while the reader smells a rat.

This is connected to the throughline of any memoir—how the narrator changes.

No change in tone suggests the narrator is the same at the end as she was in the beginning. Therefore nothing happened.

Matters of craft are too big a subject for this essay, but I will say that poor pacing, terrible or absent transitions, failure to dramatize exposition with scenes, and flat, static descriptions can compound the problem.

Why Memoirs Succeed

When memoirs succeed, it’s because the writer has assured the reader that what they are reading is a true representation of the writer’s experience. The writer’s truth—her insight and meaning—follows naturally from that experience.

From the experiences that drove the dramatic purpose of the story follows the writer’s truth: what she has come to say about the meaning of the experience and how it changed her. In other words, there was a good reason for the reader to take up the journey of reading.

Reliability, authenticity and solid writing are the main reasons memoirs succeed. When these things merge together a reader will find herself nodding, agreeing that life is like that, even when the topic is vastly different from anything she herself has experienced.

I have never surfed, held political office, or had a friend commit suicide, but I have read memoirs on these subjects and all of them have been life-affirming in one way or another. I could relate to the human being behind the words. The best memoirs, like the best fiction or other types of narrative nonfiction, stimulate empathy and knowingness.

Subjective curiosity more than objective facts creates a sense of authenticity and honesty in narration in memoir. Memoirists tell the story to seek answers to questions rather than express answers they already have.

Conclusion

We’ve defined memoir and described 4 core elements:

• contract with the reader

• plot

• story

• voice.

There’s more, but that’s enough information to apply to reading like a writer for now.

If I’ve left you with one thing to ponder it’s voice, the most important component of any memoir.

Exercise and Reading Lists

The reading list that follows is by no means complete. It’s an invitation to explore the subject of memoir as a literary genre from the perspective of both reader and writer.

But before I get to the list, I’ve attached a PDF of an essay by Sei Shōnagon, a Japanese noble woman who lived in the 10th Century. It’s called “Hateful Things,” in which she briefly reviews all of things—societal, individual, and objects—that she dislikes. Normally, such a list would become tiresome to readers. However, she is funny. The humor comes through a level of self-awareness that readers pick up from the subtext and tone of the piece.

I often ask students to write their own version of “Hateful Things.” Once students get into the subject and write freely, it’s amazing what they discover about themselves and their voices on the page.

Below the paywall you’ll find a PDF of the essay and a complete reading list.

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