Writing a memoir requires a lot of searching for the truth—questioning what you think you know, digging up the past to ask what really happened, hauling secrets out of the back of the closet, and comparing different people’s recollections in an effort to pin down the real story. Most of the time, this digging and searching happens behind the scenes, off the page. It’s the research that allows the author to then sit down and write the truest possible version of the story.
But some memoirists incorporate this process of digging and searching and questioning into the narrative of the book itself, in a style I like to call the “memoir as a detective novel.”
The Form
In a memoir as detective novel, the search for the heart of the story is the story. The desire to uncover the truth is the driving force of the narrative—the author brings the reader along on their quest, much like we go along for the ride in a detective novel or a crime procedural TV show. Except instead of “who done it,” it’s a search for answers to more diffuse questions like, “Who am I?” “Where do I fit in my family?” or “What is the truth of my past?”
This is the form I used for my memoir, . At its is the story of my father’s life, art, heroin addiction, and death, and the narrative starts 20 years before I was born. Woven in with my father’s story is the story of my adolescence, which was largely defined by my grief over his death when I was 12. But it’s the third narrative strand that provides the backbone for the book and pulls readers through—the story of the 10 years I spent piecing together the truth of my father’s life by reading his notebooks and letters, studying his artwork, and interviewing more than two-dozen people who knew him. It’s the story of this search that holds the other narratives together and provides forward momentum in the book.
