I feel sorry for the creative nonfiction subgenre of memoir. It is so misunderstood. Even I didn’t fully understand what a proper memoir was until I decided to take a deep dive into it about four years ago. I’ve said in earlier blog posts that I blame libraries and bookstores, whether online or brick and mortar, for perpetuating this confusion. Memoir is always lumped together with biography and autobiography. Now, if you are coming at memoir simply as a reader, this distinction might seem petty. You’ll get your hands on a memoir, biography, or autobiography and learn something about someone. If your goal is to learn everything you can about a person’s life, then biography and autobiography are what you want. I’ll show you.
Here are the first two paragraphs from Nelson Mandela’s bestselling autobiography Long Walk to Freedom:
Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla. In Xhosa, Rolihlahla literally means "pulling the branch of a tree," but its colloquial meaning more accurately would be "troublemaker." I do not believe that names are destiny or that my father somehow divined my future, but in later years, friends and relatives would ascribe to my birth name the many storms I have both caused and weathered. My more familiar English or Christian name was not given to me until my first day of school. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I was born on the eighteenth of July, 1918, at Mvezo, a tiny village on the banks of the Mbashe River in the district of Umtata, the capital of the Transkei. The year of my birth marked the end of the Great War; the outbreak of an influenza epidemic that killed millions throughout the world; and the visit of a delegation of the Afriçan National Congress to the Versailles peace conference to voice the grievances of the African people of South Africa. Mvezo, however, was a place apart, a tiny precinct removed from the world of great events, where life was lived much as it had been for hundreds of years.
Mandela’s opening paragraphs are classic autobiography—a quick jump into the facts about the beginnings of his life. Here’s another to make my point. These are the first two paragraphs from Love, Lucy, Lucille Ball’s autobiography:
I'm a Leo. I was born on a Sunday, August 6, 1911. Unfortunately, everybody knows my birth date because I told the truth when I first came to Hollywood. I grew up not on the sidewalks of New York City, as some people think, but in the beautiful resort area of Lake Chautauqua, New York, near the green, wooded Allegheny wilderness. I used to say I was born in Butte, Montana--I thought it sounded more glamorous than western New York.
I was conceived in Montana when my father was working for his father as a lineman at Independent Telephone Company in Anaconda. But I was born at my grandparents' apartment on Stewart Street in Jamestown, New York, where I was delivered by my grandmother Flora Belle Hunt.
Do you see a pattern? When and where they were born. Their birth name. Grandparents and parents. That’s classic biography and autobiography—chronological life facts. You read a biography or autobiography to learn everything about a person—99.9% of the time, a famous person.
That is not the role of memoir.
Now, here are the first two paragraphs from the glorious, bestselling memoir Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, about her twenty-one-year love affair with alcohol:
I drank. I drank Fumé Blanc at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and I drank double shots of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks at a dingy Chinese restaurant across the street from my office, and I drank at home. For a long time I drank expensive red wine, and I learned to appreciate the subtle differences between a silky Merlot and a tart Cabernet Sauvignon and a soft, earthy Beaucastel from the south of France, but I never really cared about those nuances because, honestly, they were beside the point. Toward the end I kept two bottles of Cognac in my house: the bottle for show, which I kept on the counter, and the real bottle, which I kept in the back of a cupboard beside an old toaster. The level of liquid in the show bottle was fairly consistent, decreasing by an inch or so, perhaps less, each week. The liquid in the real bottle disappeared quickly, sometimes within days. I was living alone at the time, when I did this, but I did it anyway and it didn't occur to me not to: it was always important to maintain appearances.
I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often. I started to raid my parents' liquor cabinet the year my father was dying. He'd be in the back of their house in Cambridge, lying in the hospital bed in their bedroom, and I'd steal into the front hall bathroom and pull out a bottle of Old Grand-Dad that I'd hidden behind the toilet. It tasted vile--the bottle must have been fifteen years old--but my father was dying, dying very slowly and gradually from a brain tumor, so I drank it anyway and it helped.
Let me tell you, that’s a brilliant opening to a memoir. And I can’t imagine I need to spend much time explaining the stylistic differences between the start of Mandela’s and Ball’s autobiographies and the opening of Knapp’s memoir. The closest Knapp gets to offering family history is:
Alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape. . . . In some families, alcohol washes across whole generations, a liquid plague.
Her family history, mentioned briefly, is important to her memoir only to demonstrate that alcohol consumption is often a family tradition, or as she puts it, “It’s encoded in your DNA, embedded in your history. . . .” Knapp’s theme—what her memoir is about—is analyzing her early attraction to drinking (age fourteen), the adverse effects drinking had on her education, career, and relationships, and how she emerged triumphant from its grip.
Memoir as a Kind of Novel
As a memoir writing coach, potential clients are often surprised when I say that a memoir should be written like a novel, not like an autobiography. And some don’t like it and don’t want to hear it. But, at the very least, a memoir must have a point; if it doesn’t, well then, it’s not really a memoir.
At this point, I’m nearly overcome with the urge to repeat everything I wrote in my February 2022 post Memoir is a Journey Story and my March 2022 post Three-act Structure for Memoir Ensures the Best Read. What’s different about this post is, I always say memoir is not autobiography but I’ve never offered excerpts as examples. Now I have and I could do this all day long. I’ll prove it; here's the second paragraph from the autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi:
Ota Gandhi [his grandfather] married a second time, having lost his first wife. He had four sons by his first wife and two by his second wife. I do not think that in my childhood I ever felt or knew that these sons of Ota Gandhi were not all of the same mother. The fifth of these six brothers was Karamchand Gandhi, alias Kaba Gandhi, and the sixth was Tulsidas Gandhi. Both these brothers were Prime Ministers in Porbandar, one after the other. Kaba Gandhi was my father. He was a member of the Rajasthanik Court. It is now extinct, but in those days it was a very influential body for settling disputes between the chiefs and their fellow clansmen. He was for some time Prime Minister in Rajkot and then in Vankaner. He was a pensioner of the Rajkot State when he died.
Gandhi was a brilliant freedom fighter and moral activist, but a few pages of this and I’m in dreamland. It is classic autobiography, though.
To close this out, I will repeat the point I most want you to remember:
A memoir is not the recounting of stuff that happened to you. Stuff happens to everybody. A proper memoir must contain reflection. . . . No meaning, no memoir. No transcendence, no memoir. No takeaway for the reader, no memoir.
Let me know if I can help you craft your memoir.
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
Memoir groups on social media debate regularly about how to structure a memoir. As a memoir writing coach, I take what I assume is a conventional approach to memoir structure, one in which the stories are divided into three acts, like a play. I coach novice memoirists in this approach because I think it gives the writer the greatest chance of producing a coherent and engaging memoir.
This three-act structure is not for pantsers—those who write when and how the urge hits, who don’t follow a roadmap on their journey, but just start off and go wherever the storytelling wind takes them. No, developing and following a three-act structure for a memoir forces you, within reason, to follow an outline that moves you in a predictable way—from the introduction of your circumstance to its resolution. To do this, the writer must be a planner.
So, what is the three-act structure for memoir and is it for you?
The Classic Three-act Structure
The three-act structure is the basis of narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, and plays. It is not specific to memoir writing, it is just where I apply it in my coaching since I don’t work with fiction. My Google search for the phrase three-act structure came back with more than five billion results. Five billion. So, if you want to read more about this method, you won’t have any trouble finding information! And that’s good, because I’m not going to spend time describing it here.
My search results also came back with scores upon scores of images that illustrate this structure. They were all informative and showed the same information as this one:
Here’s another, with slight adjustments to the climax of Act Two and what’s included in Act Three:
But, as you can see, they are effectively the same structure.
I’m not going to explain which stories go into which act; as a writing coach, I will be happy to guide you through that process for your memoir. What I am going to do is explain why I believe that following this structure is the best (though not necessarily the easiest) way to produce a memoir that accomplishes everything a memoir is supposed to accomplish:
Presents a clear theme (the author’s argument)
Shows what is at stake for the author (the problem to be fixed in this memoir)
Describes what challenges are encountered
Shows how the author fails to overcome those challenges
Identifies the disaster (biggest challenge, final straw), the point at which the author knows the situation cannot go on and must change
Offers the resolution to the problems faced throughout the memoir
Concludes when the author has become the person they want to be
To follow the three-act structure, you will have to really work as a writer. It is for those you dare take on the challenge of becoming an author.
The #1 Mistake in Memoir Writing
If you read my other blog articles on memoir, you will see that I can’t say enough about what the purpose of memoir is. And I can’t say it any more clearly than I did in Memoir is a Journey Story. If you haven’t read that one, stop and do so now. I’ll wait. . . .
So what is the #1 mistake that first-time memoir writers make? I’ve talked about the four most common memoir writing mistakes in this article. But since writing that, I have found that the most common mistake is not having a clear point or reason for the memoir—a clear, concise answer to the question, “Why are you writing this?” Related to that, I ask, “What lesson have you learned that you are going to share with the reader?” As I’ve said before:
No meaning, no memoir. No transcendence, no memoir. No takeaway for the reader, no memoir.
Frankly, I’ve lost potential memoir coaching clients over this. But that’s OK. Let me be clear about how deeply I want to help someone write a truly good memoir! Maybe even a great one. If I’m coaching you, we agreed that you, the writer, are serious about producing a memoir that has an interesting point, a clearly defined audience, and a strong, satisfying conclusion.
And by satisfying, I don’t mean where all problems have disappeared and everything is rainbows and butterflies. As I tell my coaching clients, your memoir will end when you reach the point where you have risen to your challenges to the best of your ability. If yours is a story of a marriage in decline, you might ultimately get divorced. You did all you could and, yet, the marriage dissolved. And you accept this reality and the change this journey has resulted in. You don’t need a happily ever after but you need to show your transformation and the lessons you learned from it.
Finally. . .
Writing is hard. Writing memoir is really hard. And yes, you can quote me on that! It’s hard mentally, physically, and, maybe most of all, emotionally. I gave my advice for working through the challenges of writing your memoir in this article about cutting yourself some slack. And I’ve suggested stepping stones for building up to tackling a memoir in this article about journaling.
If you are ready to tell your journey story, I’m ready to guide you. Please let me know how you feel about applying the three-act structure to memoir writing in the comments below.
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
Memoir, a subgenre of creative nonfiction, is often the home of stories of trauma. As I point out in my blog post Writing About Trauma: What Memoir Is and Isn’t, memoir has a bad reputation for being all about trauma. It’s an unfair assessment. Yet, as a memoir writing coach and editor, I do find that the majority of my clients want to write a memoir about emotional pain, loss, grief, addiction, disease, or toxic relationships.
My personal feelings are that people are more motivated to share the negative aspects of their lives (rather than the good times) because those are the experiences they have reflected on and learned from the most. This is true of my own life. I have spent much of the past three and a half years analyzing my failed second marriage. From that failure, from that disappointment and emotional pain, I have learned more about myself than at any other time in my life. I could not have become who I am now—someone I am happy with and proud of—if not for that experience. Maybe there’s a memoir in my own future.
Mass Trauma—It’s a Thing
I’m compelled to write a second time about addressing trauma because I have heard more and read more about trauma in the last two years than the previous twenty combined. And the reason? The pandemic. Globally, COVID has sickened more than 393 million and killed almost 6 million, as of this writing. No one in the world—literally no one—has remained unaffected by COVID’s impact. Subsequently, health experts on TV, radio, podcasts, social media, and in writing have been forced to discuss the worldwide fallout with terms like mass trauma, collective trauma, and traumatic stressor event.
Trauma, once most often the psychologically painful side effect for war veterans, survivors of domestic violence and rape, serious accidents, natural disasters, harassment, witnessing violence, and the like, has driven tens of millions of US citizens to seek mental health counseling and medication for the first time in their lives. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, was first added to the bible of mental health disorders, the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual), in 1980 primarily as a descriptor for the mental health challenges faced by military veterans, particularly those who served in the Middle East. My father served in World War II. He definitely suffered from PTSD, then referred to as combat fatigue or battle shock. Upon returning from Europe in 1945 at the end of the war, he received no treatment and no counseling. And he never fully recovered.
Trauma, whether we like it or not, has become a household word—a mental health problem that knows no boundaries among class or color or gender or ethnicity. However, as I stated at the beginning of this, the dark experiences of our lives tend to be the ones we reflect on and learn from the most.
Therapeutic Journaling Can Help
Have you been journaling during the past two years? I wrote about the mental health benefits of therapeutic journaling a while back. This practice became more popular than ever during the last two years. Have you documented the day-to-day challenges you faced on your own, or as a parent, employee, employer, or caregiver? What lessons from this unprecedented time in our history will we learn and share for our children and future generations to help them navigate the difficult challenges life throws at us?
What have you learned about yourself since early 2020? Is there a memoir about survival, creativity, or transformation in you? Let me know in a comment. And take care.
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.