TL;DR: In memoir consultations, the question I hear most is whether someone’s life is interesting enough, and the framing is almost always wrong. Memoirs succeed on a distinct human voice telling a particular story with honesty, and dramatic biography has little to do with it. You can see how that plays out in my memoir process.
The wrong question, and why authors keep asking it
The “is my life interesting enough” question almost always comes from comparison. The author has read a memoir about an extraordinary biography, war service, a famous parent, surviving something most people never face, and concluded that memoir requires that level of biographical material.
By that standard, their own life feels ordinary. The conclusion is that they don’t have a book. For more, see memoir, autobiography, and biography and how to hire a memoir ghostwriter.
A writer at comfortable distance from hard material produces a press release for the life.Share on X
I wish people would stop asking this question, because it kills good memoirs before anyone writes a page of them. The comparison standard is wrong. Dramatic biography sells some memoirs, but it doesn’t make them work as books. The memoirs that sell in large numbers, win prizes or build careers do it on voice, on honesty, and on the particular angle the writer brings to material that may or may not be dramatic. Many of the most successful memoirs of the last twenty years have an ordinary life at their center.
What those books share is the writer’s relationship to the material. It’s the first thing I listen for when someone starts telling me about their life, and a small-town childhood from someone willing to look hard at it gives me far more to work with than a war story told from a safe distance.
I wish people would stop asking this question, because it kills good memoirs before anyone writes a page of them.
Someone I talked with started off by telling me he didn’t know what he’d write about, because he wasn’t that interesting. Then he talked about the hard times he’d been through, the businesses he’d built and the company he runs now, and kept going. Finally he paused for a while and asked what I thought. I said, “Dude, you’ve got an excellent book there. We need to write the damn thing.” He said, “Really?”
What is the test for memoir material?
The working test has three components. First, is there material in your life you can’t help thinking about?
Material you return to in conversation, that’s shaped how you see other things in your life? Second, do you have a perspective on that material that’s yours, not a perspective that anyone with similar material would share? Third, are you willing to tell the truth about it, including the parts that make you look bad, the parts that contradict your preferred self-image, and the parts you’d normally leave out?
If you can answer yes to all three, you have memoir material, regardless of whether the underlying biography is dramatic.
Voice and honesty make a memoir work, so passing all three questions matters more than having a dramatic life.
The yes-to-all-three gives a memoir voice and the voice makes the book work. Authors who have dramatic biography but can’t pass the three-part test will produce competent biographical writing that doesn’t function as memoir. Authors with ordinary biography who pass the test will produce books that work.
The third part is where most people balk, and it’s the one I push hardest on. In interviews I go looking for the failures and setbacks on purpose, because readers want the ups and downs and how you recovered from them. A cleaned-up version where every decision turned out right gives them nothing to hold onto, and they stop trusting the narrator long before the last chapter.
What makes a memoir work with ordinary material?
Memoirs of ordinary biography work because the author’s perspective on ordinary material is itself the value. The reader is there to spend time with a particular mind thinking about the material. That experience is interesting when the mind is interesting. Examples include a childhood in a small town, a parent’s slow decline, a marriage that worked for a while and then didn’t. The material is ordinary. The mind looking at it can be anything but.
The quality that makes the mind interesting is honesty about things people usually leave unsaid: the flicker of relief at a relative’s death, the moment you realized you had been wrong about something important for years, the way you talked yourself into a decision you knew was bad, the resentments that shaped a relationship. None of that material is dramatic in the news sense. All of it is the material that makes a memoir feel alive to a reader, because the reader recognizes a human voice willing to say what most writing avoids.
I get impatient with the advice that a memoir needs a trauma, a hook or a famous name before it deserves readers. That advice sends ordinary people off to inflate their lives, and readers can tell when a life has been inflated.
What fails with extraordinary material
The opposite failure is the writer with dramatic biography who can’t pass the three-part test. The book ends up reading like a press release for the life. Achievements get listed. Events get described. The narrator stays at a comfortable distance from the harder material. The reader closes the book thinking it must have been an interesting life but never feeling the author was there on the page. That book doesn’t sell, doesn’t get assigned in classes, and doesn’t start the career the author was hoping it would start.
Extraordinary material amplifies whatever voice the author brings to it. A writer who does the honest work gets a memoir that breaks through. A writer who won’t gets a record of an interesting life that never lets readers meet the person who lived it. That second book frustrates me more than any other kind, because the story was right there and the author kept it at arm’s length.
The questions that bring out your book
Some authors know what their memoir is about and are just asking permission to write it. Others have material but can’t quite see the shape of the book yet. For the second group, certain questions bring out the book reliably. What’s the period of your life that still affects you most? Which belief from ten years ago do you now think was wrong? What relationship keeps producing the same pattern of conflict and what does that pattern reveal?
And which decision did you make under pressure that you’d still defend, and which one do you regret?
The answers to those questions usually produce the spine of a memoir. Not all four. Often just one, deepened into the central thread of the book. I keep the rest of this together in my Memoir Hub.
A memoir that started with the question “what relationship in your life keeps producing the same pattern” might become a book about your mother. The memoir that started with the question about regret might become a book about a career decision and everything that followed. Questions uncover material.
The material becomes a book if the author is willing to look at it without flinching. The Book Discovery Intensive runs a formal version of this surfacing work, where the questions get asked in structured interviews and the material gets organized into a working outline.
A good interviewer proves their worth at this stage. Anybody can ask what happened. The hard part is asking the follow-up question the author has been avoiding for years and staying with it long enough for the true answer to show up.
My take
Yes, and the drama in your life matters less than you think. A memoir works on an honest voice telling a particular story. Big achievements told from a safe distance read like a press release. That book frustrates me more than any other. Start with the period of your life that still affects you, or the decision you regret, and write down what happened without softening it. (See turning regret into scenes.) Then find an interviewer who’ll ask the follow up you’ve been avoiding.
The “but my family” worry that often kills the project
Even authors who pass the three-part test sometimes stall on the family question. The honest memoir touches on relationships with living people, and the author worries about how those people will react. The worry is legitimate. It also has working solutions that experienced memoir writers know, and the solutions don’t require dishonesty in the memoir or estrangement from the family. A piece on writing about family without legal or relational problems covers the techniques, which include composite characters, scene reconstruction, name changes, and conversations with family members in advance about what will appear.
Authors stalled here don’t need permission to write the memoir. They need a way to handle the real people in it, and that process exists. I hate it when a family becomes the reason somebody never finds out whether they had a book, because the family loses that story too. If you have the material and you’re willing to look at it, you have a memoir, and the ordinary life you’re embarrassed by is very likely the reason it’ll work.
Once you know your story is worth telling, the next step is getting it on paper. The Ghostwriting Advantage explains how to get your book written for you.
