Articles on writing and publishing a memoir: where to start, structure, what to include, the legal and family risks, and why your life story is worth getting down.
Memoir, business book, or exposé, if your manuscript touches your time at a former employer, you have to reckon with NDAs, non-disparagement clauses, trade secrets, and defamation. Here is what your old NDA actually restricts, what non-disparagement really prevents, what counts as protected opinion, and how to write honestly about a former company without getting sued.
Founders who sold their company are sitting on the most underused authority book in the market. The acquisition memoir does commercial work no other format can. Here is what to include, what your deal documents legally prevent you from saying, when to write it, right after the close, and why the exit memoir is a book only you can write.
Hiring a memoir ghostwriter is not the same as hiring a business-book one, and most articles miss the difference. Memoir needs emotional safety in the interviews, a personal rather than professional voice register, and a writer who has actually done memoir, not one treating it as a business book with feelings. Here is what to look for that the usual advice skips.
Is my life interesting enough for a memoir is the most common question I hear, and the framing is almost always wrong. Memoirs do not win on dramatic biography; they win on a specific voice telling a specific story honestly. The question is not how eventful your life was. Here is the test that actually predicts whether a memoir will work, and why the answer is probably yes.
Memoir, autobiography, and biography get tossed around as synonyms, but they are different books with different structures, reader expectations, and markets, and the wrong label produces one that disappoints everyone who opens it. Here is how to tell which one you are actually writing, and why naming it correctly shapes every decision that follows.
Writing about family is the most legally and personally fraught part of a memoir, and the worry stalls more projects than anything else. The legal exposure is real but narrower than most authors fear, and the relational side has techniques memoirists have refined over decades. Here is how to write about family honestly without triggering a lawsuit or a permanent family rupture.
If you are a veteran, especially Vietnam- or Korea-era, the window for your memoir is closing faster than you think. Once you are gone, your children get fragments and your grandchildren get less than that. The memoir is what survives, in your own words and your own voice. Here is what I tell veterans when they ask whether they should start now, before it is too late.
A 71-year-old writing his memoir uses AI better than most professionals half his age, to find the gaps in his draft, to refocus when he loses the thread, to leave his ghostwriter notes on what to tackle next, and never once to write a word. He is the living model for augmented work. Here is exactly how he uses AI, and why it makes him a sharper writer than he was.
A revenge memoir is a bad idea for the writer and a worse one for the ghostwriter. I once turned down a former mob informant who wanted to name names and settle scores, then promised to keep my role secret, and I asked how he expected me to trust that while he wrote a book to expose everyone else. Here is who should not write a revenge memoir, and the better book hiding inside it.
If your career ran the whole arc of modern computing, mainframes to cloud to AI, you watched the world get rebuilt and helped build it, a once-in-history story, and the people who can tell it are retiring now. I came up through that same arc before I became a ghostwriter. Here is why the memoir of a career spanning mainframes to AI is disappearing, and why to capture it now.
The technical founder built something real, and the story of building it deserves a book, not the pitch-deck version, the honest one: the technical decisions that made or broke the company, the nights it nearly died, what you actually learned. Most founder memoirs are written by people who do not understand the technology. Here is how to tell the technical founder’s story honestly, by someone who gets the tech.
The technology executive’s career is a real story almost nobody captures: the arc from writing code to running the whole operation, the disasters survived, the political fights to fund critical work, the teams built and led. I lived that arc, coder to Director of Computer Operations, before I ghostwrote. Here is the technology executive’s memoir nobody is writing, and why yours should exist.
If you spent your career in technology, your story is worth a book, and it needs a ghostwriter who understands the world you came from. Most will flatten your career into mush, because they do not know what shipping that system meant or why the night it all failed mattered. I ran enterprise tech before I ghostwrote. Here is why the technical professional’s memoir needs someone who actually gets it.
Legacy systems do not die because your roadmap wants them gone. I kept ancient ones alive for years, including a dead-vendor system on unmaintainable hardware with a database that existed nowhere else, no support, but it ran the business, so we virtualized it to keep it breathing. Here is why the old systems that run the business beat every strategy that wants them retired.
The hardest part of ghostwriting is invisibility. If a reader senses a second hand on the page, the job failed, your name is on the cover, not mine, and the book has to sound like you wrote it. Here is how I capture a client’s voice closely enough that even they forget I was there.
Christmas is brutally hard to write, because its cultural weight pulls you toward generic warmth, the lights, the cookies, the sentiment every reader has heard a thousand times and feels nothing for. The fix is specificity: not Christmas in general but one particular Christmas, to particular people. Here is how to put the holiday on the page so it actually lands.
The hardest part of a memoir is never the prose; it is the people, the parent, the ex, the business partner whose presence the story needs and whose inclusion creates a problem no amount of craft can fully solve. All 54+ of my memoir projects hit this wall. Here is how to write about real people in your life without destroying relationships or getting sued.
Roger Enrico ran Pepsi during the Cola Wars and signed the biggest celebrity endorsement of its era, then wrote a memoir that defined the story rather than just telling it. That is the power these books hold. Here is why the most successful people in business, entertainment, and public life write memoirs, and what those books do for a career.
You are not short on material; the hard part is shaping decades of experience into something that holds a reader and captures what truly mattered. Some of my most rewarding projects have been memoirs for clients in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Here is a practical guide to organizing a lifetime into a memoir worth reading, written for seniors.
At seventeen I wrote my first memoir, my grandfather’s, a Navy cook captured at Corregidor who survived the POW camps and a march through Manila. The family’s version was secondhand and partly wrong, so I interviewed him for dozens of sessions and checked every fact. Here is what that taught me about turning a life into a book people actually want to read.
If this sparked something, let's talk about turning your expertise into a finished book.
On writing, publishing, and selling your book. Free, straight to your inbox.
