The #1 Most Important Quality for Memoir (That Writers Often Miss)
how to make sure your memoir matters
Memoir is a genre that elicits strong opinions—people either love memoir or hate it. Those in the latter category bemoan memoir for its penchant for navel-gazing, the inherent self-absorption it takes to write a whole book about oneself. They also complain that memoirs tend to be depressing, which is certainly true if you’re comparing them to an escapist romp like you’d expect in a romance or suspense novel.
I’m firmly in the former camp—those who love memoir. In fact, it’s probably my favorite genre. Done well, a memoir reads like a novel but has the added amazingness of being someone’s real life.
I think I love them so much because of the way they transform the mundane into something extraordinary, creating meaning and beauty out of chaos, struggle, pain, and tedium. By crafting a slice of “normal” life into a compelling narrative, a good memoir performs a kind of alchemy, a transfiguration of the ordinary into something unforgettable.1
By crafting a slice of “normal” life into a compelling narrative, a good memoir performs a kind of alchemy, a transfiguration of the ordinary into something unforgettable.
Memoir is, at its core, a first-person telling of one aspect of the author’s life.
and Liz Morrow of Hungry Authors define memoir as “the recounting of an author’s transformation through a specific event or scenario.”2 In its pure form3, a memoir might be indistinguishable from a first-person novel, with imagery, dialog, and various narrative techniques, except that it’s all factually true. Unlike an autobiography, which tells the author’s entire life, a memoir focuses on a single aspect or part of that life, a single thread of the larger tapestry.The memoirist’s job is to trace that thread through to a meaningful conclusion. The insight offered about that thread forms the memoir’s “aboutness,” its central theme.
And here’s where many writers go wrong. They mistakenly think that because the narrative is about their own life that the insight should also be about their own life. To put it another way, they think the memoir is about their own transformation and stop there.
What they’re missing is this: a good memoir is actually about the reader.
I hear you thinking, What now? Didn’t she just say that memoirs are about the author??
Let me clarify. A good memoir is “about” an aspect of the author’s life in the sense that it narrates those experiences, but in a deeper sense, it is about something universal, something that touches the reader, too.
Take, for example, the story of Star Wars: A New Hope. It’s about how Luke Skywalker meets Obi Wan and rides on a spaceship and meets Han Solo and eventually destroys the Death Star by using the force. But it’s really about the universal desire to know our parents, to pursue our destiny despite risk, and to use our talents to improve our world.
emphasizes the importance of this deeper “aboutness” in her post “How to Write Memoir that Makes Room for Your Reader,” which starts by mentioning a memoir she gave up on a third of the way through. She writes,I stopped reading because this book proclaimed itself a memoir, yet it failed to do what a memoir must—which is to travel the length between the first-person particular and the universals of the human experience that we share. . . .
Simply put, the writing was a very fine personal journal, but it seemingly made no effort to make room for its readers.
Memoir is not—cannot be—a personal journal that’s cleaned up a bit and given a fancy cover. A memoir must invite the reader into the story by expanding its aboutness from the personal to the universal.
How? By identifying and developing a central insight that has universal application.
An insight is a deep, nuanced understanding of something, a “seeing through” the superficial explanations encompassed by cliches and platitudes to the truer reality beneath. It’s a realization, a discovery, an epiphany. It’s a shift in perspective that suddenly changes everything (even if nothing in the material world has changed at all).
For example, the mega-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love tells the story of how Elizabeth Gilbert left her old life behind to travel the world for a year and reconnected with her true self. But it’s about how she realized that, in order to fully live, we have to let go of shame, even if that means burning our old life to the ground.
To arrive at a universal insight, aka theme, I tell my students they need to come up with a complete sentence that articulates an important truth about life—about the world or human nature.
In this way, a great memoir dilates to encompass an experience much larger than that of one single writer. The particulars of the author’s story become one illustration of that larger theme, offering the reader a kind of mirror in which to view her own life with fresh eyes.
That’s why memoirs are so amazing—and so hard to do well.
They’re notoriously difficult to get published, in large part because so few of them manage to pull off that expansion.4 A friend of mine who’s a nonfiction acquisitions editor told me she keeps having to turn down beautifully written memoirs because they just don’t ever find the unifying insight they need.
A memoir must invite the reader into the story by expanding its aboutness from the personal to the universal.
How? By identifying and developing a central insight that has universal application.
Ok, so if you’ve read this far, you know your memoir needs a central insight that makes the personal universal. But how do you actually find one in the tangled threads that make up the intricate tapestry of your life?
You’ve learned so many things over the span of your story, and if you’re like most people I work with, you’re not even sure which parts of your life to focus on anyway. You could literally write thousands of pages about all the crazy, beautiful, hard, amazing things you’ve been through. How in the world are you supposed to narrow it down to one “slice” or angle, much less one single insight?
Lucky for you, I’ve got a FREE resource to help you do precisely that.
“How to Find the Heart of Your Story” is a simple but powerful exercise that will teach you how to find that central, unifying message in 10 minutes or less + give you tips on how to weave that theme into your writing. Click HERE to sign up with your email and receive the PDF in your inbox right away.
That free download is a great tool to get you started, but if you’re serious about writing a memoir and you want more comprehensive support, consider joining me and a handful of other writers just like you for the 2025 cohort of Unearthing Beauty: Memoir Edition.
It’s a brand new twist on my life-changing, 12-week personal narrative writing program, this time focused on giving you everything you need to write a book-length memoir.
Together, we’ll use a repeatable process to unpack a formative event from your life and turn it into a compelling memoir full of beauty and meaning. With expert feedback on your writing every single week, you're guaranteed to grow in your writing and story craft along the way.
After this program, you’ll walk away with
a detailed outline of your entire memoir,
polished drafts of at least two key scenes,
a toolkit of strategies for strong writing, and most importantly,
a deeper sense of who you are – of the story God is telling the world through your life.
The 2025 cohort kicks of in late January. Click here to learn more and sign up!
For now, I want to leave you with one last thought:
Writing your story will change lives, starting with your own.
If you’ve been feeling that persistent nudge to write your story, you’ve also likely been plagued by doubt that anyone would ever want to read it. How do I know that? Because literally every writer is, no matter how famous or acclaimed or successful.
But your story matters. It could be the lifeline someone out there needs to keep hope alive when all seems lost or the shot of adrenaline that enables them to finally make the change they’ve known was needed but didn’t have the courage to initiate.
And even if no one else ever reads it, writing your story will change you. You’ll gain a clearer sense of who you are and who you’re becoming, so you can better fulfil your purpose on this earth.5
If you’re like most clients I work with, that nudge isn’t going away. It will just get stronger. So do yourself a favor and get to work.
Everyone has a story worth telling—as long as they take that essential step of moving from the personal to the universal and inviting the reader in.
I’d love to help you turn your story into a compelling, life-changing memoir.
Save your seat for Unearthing Beauty: Memoir Edition right here.
That must explain why I don’t care for celebrity memoirs; their lives are usually too non-ordinary for the kind of alchemy I love to fully take place.
By “pure” I mean straight memoir, rather than hybrid memoirs, which have become increasingly common. Hybrid memoirs are a blend of memoir with prescriptive nonfiction (self-help or personal development, mainly, though sometimes investigative journalism), such that the book is a mixture of stories from the author’s life and instructive material (typically using second person “you”) aimed at helping the reader achieve a desired and parallel transformation to the author’s.
Memoirs also need to have truly exceptional writing, and they need a really compelling hook in order for a publisher to take a gamble on them. Sadly, people just don’t buy memoir the way they buy fiction or prescriptive nonfiction. Let’s change that, shall we??
That’s the explicit focus of my signature personal narrative writing program, Unearthing Beauty, which guides you through a step-by-step process to uncover the compelling parts of your past, identify the heart of your story, and reveal its redemptive beauty in captivating, well-crafted prose. Join the waitlist now to be the first to hear about the next cohort.
This is so good!! A memoir has to also have that universal truth/big idea that makes it applicable to the reader. Sharing in my monthly endnotes for November!
It's too bad I found this post too late for your class, but I'm glad I found it nonetheless. Thank you for distilling in such a beautiful way that transformational power that memoir holds not just for the author but for the reader, too. I'm writing my own memoir and I'm starting to make that transition from "I need to let this story out" to "How will the reader see it? What can they take from it?" It's a challenge, but it's an exciting one.