Citations in a Memoir: Endnotes, Footnotes and Fair Use

A citation’s job is to hold up what you already said. Your thoughts, your conclusions and your words go in the text. The source sits underneath like a support beam, where a reader who wants to check it can find it and everyone else can ignore it.

Most writers get that backwards. They find a couple of paragraphs on the web that sound great, paste them in, and let somebody else’s words make the case. Memoir writers have the opposite problem. They’re so afraid of sounding academic that they leave out the source entirely, and then a claim that needs backing just hangs there.

I saw that play out in a memoir writing group. A writer had one sentence in a whole memoir that needed support: research showing kids with ADHD get more criticism from parents and teachers than other kids. Four studies backed it up. The question was whether to drop the citations, cram all four into parentheses at the end of the sentence, or rewrite the line to sound more scientific. The group split every which way.

I’ve written a lot of books with notes in them, my own and ghostwritten ones, and I’ve settled on how I do it.

Should a memoir have citations?

When it makes a claim that isn’t yours to make, yes.

Your memories don’t need citations. Nobody footnotes the night their father didn’t come home. But the moment a memoir steps outside your own experience and says something about the world, like a statistic, a historical fact, a medical finding or a quote from a book, the reader has every right to ask where it came from. A source answers that question without interrupting the story.

Some books don’t need any. An opinion book or a straight memoir that never leaves the writer’s own life can go its whole length without a single note. Other books need hundreds. People call the research-heavy ones hybrid memoirs, and readers who pick them up expect the sources to be there.

The ADHD writer was right to feel uneasy. A research claim without a source reads like the writer made it up, even when they didn’t. And memoir readers are a skeptical bunch. They know they’re getting one person’s version of events, and they’re already deciding how far to trust you. Give them a statistic with nothing behind it and you’ve handed the doubters a reason to stop believing the rest of the book. A small number pointing to four real studies takes that reason away.

Where should citations go in a memoir?

In endnotes. I do it that way in every book.

Parenthetical citations, the (Staff et al., 2023) kind, belong in academic papers. Drop four of them into the middle of a memoir and the sentence suddenly weighs a ton. The reader stops being inside your life and starts feeling like they’re reading a journal article. That’s the last thing a memoir should do.

So the claim goes in the text in plain English, close to the writer’s first option, with no names and no years. A small superscript number goes after it. The four studies go in the endnotes at the back of the book, where nobody trips over them.

Is one endnote in a whole book strange? No. One note is fine. It tells a careful reader you did your homework, and it costs everyone else nothing.

I use the Chicago Manual of Style for notes. Chicago is what most trade book publishers follow, and its notes system was built for this kind of book. My endnotes are only the reference: the author, the title, where it was published, when, and the page if there is one. I don’t explain the study or argue about it in the note. Who backs this up, and where did I find it? An endnote has to answer those two questions and nothing else.

A reader who flips to the back should find a numbered list grouped by chapter, each line a plain reference they can look up. If the note turns into a paragraph of commentary, it’s trying to be a footnote, and it probably belongs in the text or nowhere.

Some of my books run twenty notes. One ghostwritten book ended up with 250. That’s a lot of endnotes, and the book still read like a book, because every one of them sat at the back.

What is the difference between a footnote and an endnote?

I use both, for different jobs.

A footnote sits at the bottom of the page, and I use it for extra information that would clutter the story. Say I’m writing about the Roman emperor Claudius, and there’s a detail about his family that’s interesting but would stall the narrative. It goes in a footnote. The reader who’s curious glances down. The reader who isn’t keeps going.

An endnote is where the source goes. If I got a fact from an article, a book or a study, it gets a number and an endnote, so the evidence is out of the way at the back of the book.

Mixing them up makes a mess. A footnote stuffed with bibliographic details looks like homework, and an endnote full of good asides hides the good stuff where nobody will look.

Why should you record citations while you write?

Because if you don’t, you’ll forget, and finding them later is miserable.

Every time I find a fact I’m going to use, the superscript number goes in right then, and the endnote goes in with it. It takes thirty seconds. Skip it and you’ll spend hours at the end of the project trying to remember which of fifty browser tabs that number came from.

I learned that the hard way.

Early in my ghostwriting career, a client handed me a thick document full of material. This one was no memoir, just a pile of loosely connected pieces on his subject, and I assumed he’d written all of it, so I shaped it into a book. Then I found out he’d cut and pasted nearly all of it from all over the web, and he never told me. Every page I’d polished was somebody else’s writing with no source attached.

Every one of those passages had to be tracked down and cited, or rewritten. I ran the manuscript through a plagiarism checker. The checkers were primitive back then, but they could at least find the pages the text came from, and I built the citations one at a time from the links. It was a huge amount of work. I had to charge him extra for it, and I’d much rather have skipped every hour of it.

Now I keep citations as I go, on every book.

How much of someone else’s writing can you quote in a memoir?

Less than most people think.

Clients, memoir clients included, grab things all the time. A paragraph from a website, a page from a book, a long stretch of a speech. Most of them have never heard of fair use and don’t know how copyright works, so part of my job is teaching them. They aren’t trying to steal anything. They found something that said what they felt, and it never occurred to them that somebody owns those words. If the book goes out that way, it’s their name on the cover and their problem when the owner notices.

United States copyright law weighs four things when it decides fair use: why you’re using the material, what kind of work it is, how much you took, and whether your use hurts the market for the original. There’s no magic word count. A book is also a commercial product, so it has less room than a classroom handout.

My own rule keeps it simple. If I’m going to use more than two or three sentences, I rewrite it, and I mean really rewrite it, more than paraphrasing. It has to come out as my thoughts in my words, with the source in an endnote. A short quote can stay a quote when the exact wording matters. Anything longer gets put in my own words.

For the full picture of where copying turns into trouble, I wrote a longer piece on plagiarism and how writers get caught.

A citation should support your argument

Most people forget this.

They find something on the web that looks great, grab a couple of paragraphs, and those paragraphs become the argument. The writer’s own thinking disappears behind somebody else’s text. That isn’t how it works.

Back to Claudius. I tell the story of his life in my own words, with my own thoughts, conclusions and opinions. The notes then show where I did the research, and maybe a short quote or two where the exact words matter. The sources reinforce what I said. They never say it for me.

Memoir works the same way. The ADHD writer’s chapter is about their own childhood, the criticism they took and what it did to them. The research is the beam under that floor. It shows the reader they weren’t the only kid this happened to, and then the story picks right back up.

The beam under the floor

A reader walking through your memoir should feel the floor and never notice the beams. They’re there, they’re solid, and anyone who wants to crawl underneath and check them can. Everyone else just keeps walking through your life.

Endnotes do that job. For the ADHD writer, I’d use the plain sentence with one small number after it and four studies at the back of the book. For the rest of the memoir, it’s the stories, in the writer’s own voice.

If you’re writing a memoir and want help with structure, sources or the whole book, my memoir ghostwriting process covers how I work, and there’s more in the Memoir Hub. Two related pieces worth reading next are choosing a memoir format and the emotional truth problem in memoir.

From the author

Publish Your Book
Once the notes are in place, the book still has to get published. This is my guide to self-publishing, built from more than a hundred titles of my own.

Frequently Asked Questions