Writing Your Memoir
Isn’t writing your memoir just like writing an extended version of your diary? Actually, it isn’t. Authors dig deep into their souls to make sense of the patchwork of their lives, figure out how they got from here to there, and wrestle with penning controversial portraits of family members still alive. They puzzle if they should follow strict chronological order, offer insight or just get it all offtheir chest, how to reveal painful memories, and if they can be funny.
Memoirs are so popular because of our curiosity about other people and how they overcame the challenges life dealt them. “The power of connection transcends race, ethnicity, era, and circumstances,” says Phuc Tran, author of Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In.
Let’s examine how four authors of recent memoirs handled this.
Tara Westover, author of Educated, a New York Times bestseller that sold four million copies, describes how, despite going to school for the first time at 17 After growing up in an isolated fundamentalist Mormon family in Idaho, she ultimately earned a PhD at Trinity College in Cambridge and became a research fellow at Harvard University.
Tran, whose family fled Vietnam in 1975, discusses his rebellious youth in
