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.
AI WritingRichard Lowe joins Ian Gatzke on The Expert Method to talk about turning expertise into a book people want to read: the interviews that find the book, why a memoir is never the whole life, the three-act structure, what makes…
MemoirMemoir drafts are full of verdicts the writer hands down on himself, and readers trust a self-condemning line no more than a self-flattering one. How to replace each verdict with the scene behind it, using a copied ecology report from…
MemoirA memoir can cite research without reading like a journal article. Here's how I handle sources in memoirs and ghostwritten books: endnotes in Chicago style, footnotes for asides, citations collected as I go, and my rule on quoting.
AprilMaya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis. An editor told her autobiography as literature was close to impossible, and she answered with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She wrote it, and six more volumes,…
Co-AuthoringJames Fox read Keith Richards's manuscript aloud so Richards could edit by ear. J.R. Moehringer turned down cover credit on Open. The best-known memoirs were written the same way: long interviews, real access and a draft the subject recognized as…
LeadershipThe autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, written with Peter Petre, covering his childhood, two tours in Vietnam and his command of the 1991 Gulf War from Central Command at MacDill. He retired to Tampa afterward.
LeadershipGeneral Tommy Franks's memoir, written with Malcolm McConnell, runs from an enlisted soldier in 1965 to the commander of U.S. Central Command who led the 2001 Afghanistan campaign and the 2003 invasion of Iraq from MacDill. It debuted at number…
LeadershipGeneral Frank McKenzie's account of commanding U.S. Central Command from MacDill between 2019 and 2022, a stretch that included the Soleimani strike, the fight against ISIS and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He now leads a national security institute at the…
LeadershipAdmiral William McRaven's memoir of a life in special operations, from a childhood in France through SEAL training to the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Captain Phillips rescue and the bin Laden raid. He later commanded U.S. Special Operations Command…
LeadershipGeneral Stanley McChrystal's career memoir, from West Point to commanding Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the international force in Afghanistan. It's a long, detailed account of how he changed the way his task force fought.
MemoirThe account of the November 1965 Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, written by the battalion commander who led it, Hal Moore, and Joseph Galloway, the reporter who fought beside his men. It became the 2002 film We Were Soldiers.
LeadershipThe autobiography of William Bainbridge, the fifth Sergeant Major of the Army, written with retired Sergeant Major Dan Cragg. It runs from a World War II prison camp to the Army's top enlisted post.
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