Here are two possible portraits of memoirists.
He’s around 65, or older. He sports a beard, smokes a pipe, and has a PhD in English Literature. He’s very opinionated, and has an answer to your question even before you finish asking it. But he’s oh, so very, very educated.
She was an Olympic ice-skating star. After she won a gold medal, she went to Hollywood and became a famous star.
Are these good candidates for sitting down and writing their life story? Possibly.
But someone with a much better shot at writing an engaging memoir is the guy or gal who sits down in a restaurant and says to a friend: “I’m so glad we got together today. Wait till you hear about my absolutely crazy week!”
This last person is much more qualified than the first two to write a memoir for two significant reasons: he knows exactly who his audience is, and he has an urgent story to tell.
If you can’t identify a unifying theme for your memoir when you begin writing, don’t worry. It will come to you eventually.
Contrary to conventional thinking, you don’t need to be highly erudite or famous to write a memoir that people will want to read. But if you have a compelling story to tell, you’ll be off to a running start. I grant you, you’ll need more information to set down on the page than the account of one crazy week you so passionately wanted to relate to your friend. But if you trust yourself and let yourself drill down, you’ll discover that you can mine an abundance of engaging stories out of your past — stories of many days, weeks, and months.
Why do this at all? Why go to the trouble to write a memoir? After all, as with any extended piece of writing, it involves a lot of hard work. Also, you have no guarantee, once your memoir is finished, that you’ll manage to get it published.
But there are a number of reasons why you should set out on such an ambitious project. For starters, it will help you make sense of your past. You’ll finally figure out why you didn’t accept a particular job that looked fabulous, or walked away from a relationship that could have been the love of your life. You’ll also find you can admit to yourself (and a yet-unknown reader) things you might even have difficulty admitting to a psychotherapist. You’ll discover that resentments, rage, and regret over the past all tend to melt away when you set them down on paper.
If you’re retired or on the verge of retiring, you’ll automatically come up with a revealing piece of the puzzle about how you’re going to spend the next few years of your life. Lastly, you’ll leave a legacy for your children, who eventually have to fill in the pieces of their own particular life-puzzle.
How should you go about it? The best way is to just write things down, but don’t get caught writing. This is the advice of the noted essayist and teacher of writing William Zinsser, who counsels his students to “be yourself, speak freely, and think small.” He further advises to write about past incidents as they come to you, and to put these chunks of the past (no need at this point to call them “chapters”), once you’ve written a first draft, in folders. As you approach an end of sorts, spread the pages from the folders out on the floor, and then begin putting the pages in some kind of order. Ultimately, you’ll be able to write transitional sentences and paragraphs to link the various parts into a coherent manuscript.
If after all this, you’re still consumed by your tale as was our hypothetical story-teller in the restaurant, it’s time to think about publishing your work. At this point, look for the unifying thread or theme that will inspire and excite readers. Had you escaped death on a number of occasions? Are there opportunities you chose to walk away from to be there for your family? Have you overcome an impoverished background to become very successful?
The best memoirs all have a theme or central focus. In The Year of Magical Thinking, noted author Joan Didion writes of the grief and desolation associated with the loss of both her husband and daughter in the same year. In Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg writes of the challenges in having to deal with a bi-polar teenage daughter. Music critic Tim Page in Parallel Play discusses his late diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome after a lifetime of feeling set apart due to his strange but comfortable attraction to “steady routines and repeated patterns.”
If you can’t identify a unifying theme for your memoir when you begin writing, don’t worry. It will come to you eventually.
If the very idea of starting such a project seems daunting, you can jumpstart your memoir with just about any physical remnant of your life: letters, tax returns, credit card receipts, old family movies, or reports you wrote for your job. Years ago, when actress Shelley Winters announced on Johnny Carson that she had begun a memoir, Johnny asked her how she got started. She told him she had assembled years of cancelled checks which, in turn, stimulated memories of things she bought and therefore places she had been.
Should you employ the services of a ghost writer? While ghost writers provide a valuable service, I would advise against using one to write your memoir. If you’re concerned about the time it takes, know that you’ll still have to take the time to assemble the same fragments, documents, and pieces for the ghost writer that you’d be using if you wrote the memoir yourself. And you’ll still have to rack your brain for the same memories you’d be summoning to do your own writing.
Realize too that if you’re fortunate enough to locate a top-notch ghost writer, there will always be a way in which the memoir represents her particular view of your life rather than your own, no matter how self-effacing she seems to be. Even in the unlikely instance that you manage to publish your memoir and it sells well, you will sacrifice something, not to mention money: insight, intimacy, or the aha moment of a particular memory.
The most important thing to keep in mind about your memoir is that you need to tell the truth. This is no time for sugar-coating or making excuses. What’s done is done, and you’ve survived to tell the story. Ultimately, the way you tell your story is everything. Its impact on your reader will depend on your courage to face the truth.
