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.
Should the memoir run chronologically, circle a single theme, or jump across time? Nearly every memoir project hits this wall, a lifetime of material and no obvious shape, and the wrong choice can turn a remarkable life into a book nobody finishes. The format decides how a reader experiences everything. Here is how to pick the structure your story actually needs.
In his nineties I sat with my grandfather and his lifetime of journals to write his memoir, and discovered the story I grew up on, that he survived Bataan, was wrong; the truth was a march through Manila, no less harrowing. Family narratives drift. Here is how to turn a lifetime of stories into a memoir, and how to tell which memories hold up.
At seventeen, my grandfather handed me his World War II diary and asked me to turn it into a book. He had served on the USS Panay and survived being marched through Manila as a prisoner. That first project became a career of 54+ books. Here is how it started, and where it led.
Introvert, ADHD, autism: by every measure I should avoid a stage, yet I now speak regularly and keep seeking more of it. It did not come naturally. It came through grief, a camera, and a lot of practice. Here is how losing my wife and learning photography slowly turned someone wired to stay quiet into a speaker.
Moehringer moved to Las Vegas for two years and logged 250 hours with Andre Agassi to write Open, a memoir that aired the hatred of tennis, the abusive father, the drug use, everything a sanitized celebrity book leaves out. The result changed the form. Here is the real story behind one of the greatest ghostwritten books, and what it teaches about the craft.
My grandfather never spoke about the war, three years a prisoner, marched through Manila, held in Japanese camps, not at dinner, not when asked directly. It stayed locked inside for decades, until one day I asked the right question and it poured out. Here is how to capture a loved one’s story yourself, before it is gone, as the most lasting gift you can give.
Sit people with complicated histories around a table with too much food and no easy exit, and wait. Someone says the wrong thing, someone drinks too much, someone raises the forbidden subject, and every buried family tension surfaces at once. That compression is gold. Here is why Thanksgiving scenes are some of the best material going in memoir and fiction.
Most memoir attempts collapse in the middle, not from weak material but because the writer started before knowing what the book was actually about. Across 54+ memoirs, every one began not with writing but with discovery, hours of interviews finding the real theme. Here is where to start your own, why the interview comes first, and why most attempts stall.
In Letters from Iwo Jima, a soldier who knows he will die sits in a cave under artillery and writes to his mother, not about honor or strategy, but about missing her cooking. That is what the best executive books are really made of, the human truth beneath the credentials. Here is why the letters these leaders never sent are the stories that matter, and how to find yours.
Two months after my wife died, I stood in the most spectacular wildflower bloom in Joshua Tree’s recorded history, 45, newly widowed, and lost. I could have reached for medication or given up in a chair. Instead the desert my father used to take me to pulled me back, and the bloom showed a way through. This is how grief sent me to Joshua Tree, and what healing there taught me about stories.
I proposed at Wendy’s on our third date, and then we married four times in a single week. It is not a story about a couple who kept getting it wrong; it is about finding your person and watching the universe test whether you mean it. Most people carry a story like this and never write it down. Here is mine, about love, logistics, and what actually makes a marriage work.
The people who can verify your stories are getting older, and some are already gone, the brother who was there, the roommate, the mother who knows the family history you never asked about. A memoir is not just your memory; it is a reconstruction built from everyone who was present. Every year you wait, you lose corroboration, detail, and context only they could give. Here is why it cannot wait.
Every person carries a whole world inside their head, decades of lessons, turning points, close calls, failures, and when they die, all of it vanishes. Your grandkids inherit photos and a few secondhand stories that shrink with each retelling, until by the third generation you are a name on a tree and a face nobody can place. A memoir pulls it out of your head while you can still reach it.
Someday someone in your family will try to tell your story at a funeral, and they will get the broad strokes wrong, forgetting what defined you, scrambling the timeline, flattening decades into a few generic sentences. Within two generations, nobody can answer who you really were. Here are four real stories of what happens when a memoir gets written in time, and what is lost when it doesn’t.
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