The Question Your Memoir is Asking
Memoir Meaning-Making: Choose Your Own Adventure
Put on your glasses and warm up a pastry because in this month’s newsletter we’re going on a memoir meaning-making adventure. Two of the memoir-writing craft messages I received last week are connected in such important ways that I’m answering them both. The first message is from
:“I have a pile of stories for a memoir, and would love a few tips turning them into a narrative.”
Thank you for this message, Mary.
One of the most helpful ways to begin sorting through your material is to keep in mind that a memoir is a specific period of time or experience about which the memoirist is trying to solve something and/or understand something about themselves and/or relationships. Because a memoir is not only about what happened but about what you make of it now, you will want to select what you include in your memoir based on how it shines a light on your journey of self-discovery.
To begin with you can look for scenes where character-you faces a choice or recurring pattern in your behavior or a crucial moment. You can then move ahead in time and back in time to show how you coped, changed throughout, and ultimately became who you are now.
When looking at the scenes and events you’ve written ask yourself what work they are doing. Does your scene/event show:
how you had to make a decision?
how you recognized or confronted a pattern in yourself?
how you came to grips with the truth about someone/something/your actions/yourself?
If you are not yet sure what work your material is doing, push yourself to further explore and see if you can uncover more of what you’re trying to say. If you can’t seem to make certain sections resonant, you can turn them into backstory, summary, or perhaps cut them.
Reverse Outlining
You can listen to this interview on Let’s Talk Memoir with
about her memoir How to Share an Egg and reverse outlining. Reverse outlining is an excellent way to get a handle on your material and what it is you’re trying to say. You can look at what you’ve written and ask yourself what work that chapter is doing in the narrative. Remember that memoir is more than the events that occurred, memoir is about the memoirist’s emotional and psychological arc: the story, not just the situation. For more on why the story matters, here’s my interview with Vivian Gornick.Remember, when deciding what material to keep and where to cut ask yourself:
What work does this scene do, why is it important?
Do you already have a scene like this?
What does it illustrate about my dynamic and the question my memoir is asking?
The Promise of Change
Mary Austin’s question dovetails very nicely with this one from
:“Hi Ronit, I would love to hear about the promise of change which writers of memoir need to offer their readers and write effectively/weave throughout their narrative. I am currently working on my memoir proposal and am trying really hard to pin this down so any thoughts you have on that would be so welcome! I love your podcast and Substack pieces, they have helped me so much, thank you!”
Thank you for this question, Philippa, and for being a Let’s Talk Memoir fan!
The promise of change is such an evocative way to describe this journey of self-discovery we invite readers to experience when they read our memoirs. At their heart, memoirs are a story of becoming, and when we are clear about the central question our memoir is asking we can structure our manuscript (and proposal) in dynamic and page-turning ways.
The central question has to do with what is still unsolved in you, the memoirist, that has you revisiting your experience to try to make sense of it.
When we begin work on a memoir we often don’t know what the central question is until we have written a large chunk of our draft. If you have already written a bit of material but feel you need more tension, more story vs. situation, ask yourself what work these pages are doing. What dynamic do they show and how do they provide opportunities for narrator-you to interrogate your behavior?
Let’s take a look at this example from Jaclyn Moyer’s memoir On Gold Hill. Here’s how
describes the story:“A young South Asian American woman’s story of reconnecting with her identity, family, and heritage through sustainable farming.
In 2012, 25-year-old Jackie Moyer—the daughter of a forbidden marriage between a white American father and a Punjabi American mother—leased 10 acres of land in Gold Hill, California, and embarked on a career in organic farming. With a fractured relationship to her heritage, Moyer saw an opportunity for repair when she learned of a nearly lost heirloom wheat variety called Sonora.”
I love using the following excerpt from the beginning of On Gold Hill in my memoir classes because of how effectively Moyer leans into what is unsolved in her.
In the opening pages of On Gold Hill character-Jaclyn is at a local farmers’ market when she notices a stand from a farmer now farming the land she once farmed but had to leave:
I begin to look for a way out of this conversation, a way to move my body away from this stall before I smack into the question I imagine she’ll ask next: What happened?
What’s so hard about that question anyway? We’d simply chosen to leave, to let it all go and move on. I’d typed up the letter terminating our lease, sent it in. And yet, there were those tired questions, bubbling up again in my mind: What if we’d only stayed another year, what if I’d been a shrewder businesswoman, a harder worker, a better farmer? Would things have been different? Had I made a mistake, was farming the good life and I’d given it up? Had I chickened out? Gotten out? Sold out? Dropped out? Failed out?
Here, a hardworking organic farmer, diligent and prosperous, doing the good work, bettering the world while living out wholesome, worthwhile days. She plays the part well, I think. Maybe she is the part. I watch her and wonder, Why wasn’t I?
As you can see, early on in the memoir we learn that Moyer is unsettled. The loss of her farm nags at her and seeing this farmer thriving reminds her that she didn’t succeed in the same way; something she had very much wanted. Even if you haven’t yet read this memoir you understand that part of Moyer’s quest will be about answering this question or coming to peace with how she didn’t succeed in the way she envisioned.
Not only is On Gold Hill about losing a farm (which is the situation), the memoir is about Moyer’s reckoning with herself and her identity (which is the story). Homing in on that dynamic would be the promise of change/the story of becoming a proposal for this book would include. You can listen to my interview with Moyer on Let’s Talk Memoir here.
In order to engage your readers and agents and editors who will review your proposal keep in mind the question your memoir might be asking/what is unsolved in you/what readers will discover alongside you as they read. That promise of change can be a deeply satisfying source of tension and curiosity.
I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from
who in her book In Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book writes:“Yes, the great gift of memoir is showing readers ‘you’re not the only one who felt like this’. But unless you are writing National Book Award-level prose our personal pain is not enough, no matter how honestly we express it.”
“Paying attention to your plot will help your memoir matter to the reader. Just like a novel you must engage them in your problem in the beginning, then give them hope you’ll solve the problem, and fear that you may not.”
Bringing it home
Ask yourself: What is the narrator-you going to help the character-you figure out? This will be about more than physical locations or departures, breakups or resolutions. It will be about what you are grappling with, where you need to make peace, where you don’t want to, why something feels too hard for you to do.
And knowing this will help you decide how to begin your memoir, how to structure it, and ultimately what to include and what to cut.
Once you zero in on what’s unsolved in you, you will be on your way to guiding the reader through your journey of self-discovery and delivering your promise of change.
Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter and if you aren’t yet a subscriber, doing so is free. It’s my pleasure to think about and talk memoir craft and I will be launching some new classes soon. If you know a writer who would enjoy monthly craft advice and my podcast Let’s Talk Memoir, please do share away!
Thank you for being here!
"It will be about what you are grappling with, where you need to make peace, where you don’t want to, why something feels too hard for you to do." Sometimes I think I should take up painting instead. :)) Thank you Ronit for providing us with answers to the questions. You are a treasure!
Sometimes we think our memoir is about one thing and that changes as we write it. I thought Honeymoon at Sea was a love story/travelogue, which it is, but it turned out to be the origin story of a writer. Judy Reeves had the same experience writing her lovely memoir, When Your Heart Says Go.