(5 Tips for Figuring Out the Structure of Your Memoir.)

Moving up the family tree and to a shelf above my desk, another box file contains material generated by my father, but recorded by his mother, my Russian Jewish grandmother Anna Gendel. Anna’s handwritten account of growing up in the shtetl of Kurnitz near Minsk, and her life as an immigrant to New York was recorded at Milton’s request in the late 1950s and then typed up by my mother, the British aristocrat Judy Montagu. It is vibrant and spirited, a highlight being the account of Anna’s arrest after defending demonstrators on the picket line of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Strike in 1911.

A sideways shift to Judy whose service in the British Army as an officer in the anti-aircraft batteries can be traced through the lively correspondence between 20-year-old Captain Montagu on the front line of World War II and her mother, Venetia. One of the most remarkable letters sees Judy sipping a cup of tea in Reading when a German airplane, a Junkers drops a “Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!” Her actions in helping the shocked and wounded led to her commendation for bravery.

Venetia, whose maiden name was Stanley, has earned a place in the history books and bestseller lists for her own letter exchange with Prime Minister H.H. Asquith during the First War. At the height of their affair Asquith would write to my grandmother several times a day, from cabinet meetings often revealing state secrets. These indiscrete and fascinating missives are now kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but my family archive still contains papers relating to this historic exchange of letters, some as recently as 2024 when Robert Harris wrote about the relationship in his novel Precipice, one of 10 million books sold by this master of historical fiction.

Over the last few years the archive has been central to the publication of my mother Judy Montagu’s Greyhound Diary (Zulieka Books, 2025). The diary itself was the first part of my own archive, handed over by my father in 2000, in the same format as was typed up during Judy’s three-month, 9,000-mile tour of the US in 1949. To make the most of the diary, itself a well-written, often hilarious account of adventures such as riding in a Texan rodeo, tea with Mary Pickford in Hollywood, or the love affair with Governor Adlai Stevenson which started at the end of her journey, it needed an introduction and footnotes. Filed at home under ‘Stevenson, Adlai’ were letters of such tenderness that the romance was clear. A visit to Springfield, Illinois, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library where Governor Stevenson’s papers are held confirmed what my home archive had suggested.

Any treasured document of family history, given the right presentation, the correct context, is valuable. All it takes is research to discover the relationships a letter might describe, and the historical and geographical situation of its time. Even if the material you have is not hugely exciting, you can make it so by the way you present it and the narrative arc you conceive. This will be based on the highs and lows of your family’s life, the life-changing events that we all enjoy or endure. Moreover, databases such as Ancestry’s can support your own archive with public records to enhance a story about military service or a disputed legacy, or the birth of longed-for children.

The first step is to file your material so that you know where to find it. Depending on how many documents you have this may also be the moment to scan them; digitalized material is searchable. The most problematic issue in publishing may be gaining the agreement of family members if you have delicate or private material. Much of my archive will have to be kept sealed for some years to protect familial sensitivities. Here you will have to employ your greatest diplomatic skills to imply rather than reveal. Last of all, the physical qualities of old cards, photographs, old-fashioned handwriting can be compelling, and can make for fascinating illustrations to the way you write up your family history.

Check out Judy Montagu’s The Greyhound Diary here:

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(6 Types of Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)

What struck me most was not the punchlines or the details, but the act of slowing down. Of listening deeply. Of acknowledging that these moments are finite. We will not always have the people who matter most to us, but we can hold onto their stories.

And that, in many ways, is where compelling storytelling begins: with the willingness to notice the moments that sparkle.

Every writer has experienced this challenge: You know something meaningful happened in your life, or in your family, or in your childhood, but when you try to turn it into a story, it lies flat on the page. You can feel its importance, yet the translation from life to narrative is murky.

This is where the concept of the Sparkling Moment comes in.

A sparkling moment is a tiny, vivid memory—positive, resonant, emotional, or simply alive, that captures something essential. It’s not the whole story. It’s the spark that leads to the story.

The exercise comes from a chapter in my book A Story For Everything, and I’ve used it for years to help both new and experienced writers find clarity and contour in their narratives. It’s simple, it’s surprisingly powerful, and it teaches you two skills at once: how to listen and how to shape.

Below is the core exercise, and then we’ll break down how to use it in your writing practice.

Step One: The One-Minute Story

With a partner (or a voice recorder if you’re working alone), tell a very short true story, something happy, positive, or meaningful that can be told in 60 seconds. It could be something from childhood. Or something from this morning. The smaller the moment, the better.

Examples often sound like:

• “My daughter finally rode her bike without training wheels today.”
• “My grandfather taught me how to fold a fitted sheet when I was ten.”
• “Yesterday, a stranger paid for my coffee and it shifted my whole day.”

These are memories, not epics. They’re sparks.

If you’re working with a partner, have them listen fully without interrupting. Their only job is to be present. If you stall out before the minute is up, they can encourage you with gentle prompts like “Go on” or “Tell me more,” but they should avoid asking questions that steer the story.

Step Two: The Retelling

This is where the magic happens.

After you finish your one-minute story, your partner retells the same story back to you, from memory.

Sometimes I ask the reteller to speak in first person, as if it were their own story. Other times, I ask them to retell it exactly as heard. Either way, the real work is happening not in the retelling, but in your listening.

When you hear your own story told back to you, you immediately notice:

• Which details they remembered.
• Which details they dropped.
• Which parts they emphasized.
• Which parts surprised you.
• Which emotional beats landed without you trying.

This is live, instantaneous feedback on how your storytelling is being received.

Writers spend so much time inside their own heads, shaping sentences and rearranging paragraphs, that they often forget a story is a two-way experience. Someone else has to hear it, understand it, and feel something from it. The Sparkling Moment exercise shows you exactly how much of your story is actually crossing that bridge.

In workshops, I don’t reveal this retelling step ahead of time. Inevitably, listeners laugh and groan when I tell them they’re going to have to retell the story, because most weren’t truly listening. They were half-listening and half-preparing their own story for when it would be their turn to talk.

Sound familiar?

Writers often do the same thing: Instead of staying inside the moment, they jump mentally to what’s next. Instead of sitting in the sparkling memory, they try to build the whole narrative arc before they even understand what the story is really about.

Listening is not passive. It is generative.

Step Three: Identify the Emotional Pivot

Once you hear your story reflected back to you, ask yourself:  Where did the story change?

Every compelling story has a pivot; the moment when something shifts. It might be tiny. It might be emotional rather than external. But it’s the pivot that gives the story meaning.

In the restaurant last week, my dad told a story about a painting he kept in his dental office for years, an image of the Patron Saint of Dentistry. He originally bought it from another dentist; recently, he passed it down to his nephew (my cousin), who is also a dentist. On the surface, it’s a simple story about a painting changing hands. But as he spoke, the emotional pivot became clear. It wasn’t about the sale at all. It was about passing the torch. It was about tradition, and pride, and the “spirit” of the profession he devoted his life to. The painting itself was an object, but its transfer from one generation to the next revealed continuity, identity, and legacy.

The pivot is where the story stops being a list of events and becomes an experience.

When you identify that pivot, you’ve found the beating heart of the story.

Step Four: Add Reflection

A true event becomes a compelling story when you add reflection, when you connect the moment to something larger.

Reflection answers the question:

Why does this story matter?

It doesn’t need to be profound. You don’t need to have learned a grand lesson. But you do need to articulate meaning.

Look back at your sparkling moment and ask:

• What did this reveal about me?
• What changed?
• What do I understand now that I didn’t then?
• Why did this moment stay with me?

Reflection turns memory into narrative. It’s where the sparkle becomes illumination.

Step Five: Expand the Edges

Now you have everything you need:

• A vivid moment.
• A clear emotional pivot.
• A meaningful reflection.

All that’s left is expanding the edges, adding just enough context and detail to immerse the reader without burying the moment.

Most writers do the opposite. They start with too much backstory or setup, drowning the scene before the reader ever finds what’s important. The Sparkling Moment exercise reverses that instinct. It makes you start with the moment that matters most, then build outward with intention.

The Spark Is the Story

Sitting around that dinner table with my parents and brothers reminded me that storytelling is not a performance; it is preservation. We talked for hours, savoring stories we’ve told before and discovering ones we’d forgotten. And as I listened, I felt something that has stayed with me since: These sparkling moments, once spoken aloud, become the way we hold onto each other.

A story doesn’t have to be big to be unforgettable. It only has to be true, told with presence, and anchored in the moment where something shifted.

You don’t need to be a “natural storyteller.”

You just need to notice your sparkling moments, and let them shine.

Check out Corey Rosen’s A Story for Everything here:

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Grandma was in her 90s and more than 60 years had elapsed since the family left Cuba, but my mother was not making a point about the passage of time; she was showing me a family tree made not of DNA or birthdays but one made of stories, shared experiences, and memory. As my mother’s only daughter, someday I too would be my mother’s memory. Perhaps that was already underway. 

I did not intend to use my grandmother’s and mother’s stories in my travel memoir A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana. This book is about the five days in Cuba that changed my life and my view of myself as a Cuban-American woman. But, as a young child learns from the world around them, I learned about Cuba from the words and actions of my mother and grandmother.

They made a mysterious foreign embargoed land accessible: My mother showed me Cuba’s place on a world map and told me that our family’s presence in Cuba that dated back hundreds of years, and my grandmother demonstrated what a day looked like in Cuba by introducing me to Cuban food, speaking a little Spanish around me, and teaching me about Cuban customs, hobbies, and pastimes. When I asked questions, they answered and added a little story or two. Their perspectives wove together, complemented, and informed one another, giving me a starting point for exploration and curiosity.

As I grew up, my mother’s stories evolved not because she had learned something new or because she had eureka moments of sudden remembering, but because my mother realized that she had become the custodian of a collection of my grandmother’s memories. My mother told me stories from Cuba and those first few years in the United States that my grandmother was a part of but never told me herself. My mother vividly recalled struggles faced as they adjusted to life in a new country. Those early challenges compelled my mother to safeguard her story, so that for years all I knew was, “We left Cuba one day and never went back. The End.”

She was not being vague or secretive; she was learning how to tell both her own narrative and her mother’s. She has embraced all aspects of her story from the harrowing tales of a child growing into adolescence while stuck between two worlds to lighthearted tales threaded with humor and joy. Her relationship with and her stories about Cuba will always be hers alone, and so will my grandmother’s. No story is ever complete and I have to acknowledge and respect that there are likely other custodians holding other parts of their stories. Still, I am glad that “The End” has been abandoned in favor of a flowing continuum and layering of stories from my grandmother to my mother to my mother’s version of my grandmother’s story and finally to me.

When I traveled to Cuba as an adult, I unknowingly packed a carry-on bag of matrilineal oral history that came to life as I experienced Cuba myself. As I walked Havana’s famous sea wall the Malecon, I recalled both my own memories of beach days with my mother and my grandmother’s stories of her beach visits when she was a young girl in Cuba. As I tucked into a plate of arroz con frijoles, fragrant with garlic, I remembered my mother’s innovative adjustment of the classic recipe for a slow cooker so that weeknight dinner cooked itself and how my grandmother guided me through a recipe for the classic Cuban dish arroz con pollo.

My memories and my matrilineal narratives came to life and re-invented themselves in my Cuba, and I leaned into them as artifacts, no less solid than a fossil in a museum or a document in an archive, overindulging in detail in early working drafts of the memoir. A few years had elapsed between my trip to Cuba and my first drafts of the memoir, yet I could rely on photographs from my trip to Cuba to jog my memories of Cuba and of my childhood and earlier years. As I spelunked the cave of my own memories from my past and my experiences of Cuba to form the book’s arc, my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories surfaced and joined mine as the scaffold for my own Cuban narrative.

Because family narratives are handed down in images, snippets, stories, food, and tiny acts that seem insignificant, it’s easy to dismiss them as unimportant or lacking in meaning for others. But many women exist from day to day in the small spaces where barriers between cultures, customs, and languages dissolve. When readers start to tell me a story about their grandmother and her recipes and stories from her country of origin, I see the universality in my experience. What I have found in sharing my story built from my matrilineal line is that women seek a custodian for their stories, someone who can dust off the artifacts, make meaning by bringing an experience from long ago into the present day, and mark the individual swirls of fingerprints left on this world.

Check out Barbara Caver’s A Little Piece of Cuba here:

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(How You Can Write Like a Historian Without Getting a PhD.)

I had never heard of Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun until the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (where I live) held a retrospective of her work. Reviewers praised the paintings to such an extent that I went to see the exhibit. Vigée Le Brun’s canvases were riveting, her brief introductory biography intriguing. This unusual woman, I vowed to myself, would be the subject of my next book.

Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of an Artist, 1755-1842 is my fourth book about an exceptional woman who influenced European history. Along the way, I’ve learned a few things about researching historical biographies.

Dig deep; leave no stone unturned.

Extensive research in all secondary and primary sources that touch on your subject is essential, both as regards the subject herself, the times in which she lived, and contemporaries who had or may have had, some bearing on her life.

Build a bibliography. Read biographies of your subject to become familiar with the trajectory of her life and find basic sources. Pay attention to publication dates; more recent biographies can point to new leads.

Footnotes and endnotes often contain useful information.

Articles in periodicals have a narrow focus but in-depth information and useful bibliographies.

Original/primary sources.

Your subject’s letters, diaries, etc. are vital resources even if others have already reviewed them because every researcher is selective and may have omitted something you can use. You may not find exactly what you are looking for, but you will always find something.

Private letters usually reveal the writer’s personality. For example, in researching Queen Anne, (Good Queen Anne, Appraising the Life and Reign of the Last Stuart Monarch) I found that most secondary sources described her as foolish and easily influenced. Her letters showed a woman of strong common sense with a solid grasp of business and a mind of her own. Therefore –

Quote from original sources.

Read with a discerning eye. For example, in her last years Vigée Le Brun wrote her memoirs because she wanted to control how posterity would remember her. These memoirs were extremely useful but, thanks to reliable information gleaned from another source, I saw that the artist sometimes bent the truth.

Review every possible archive. Some are digitized, which is useful if you know the exact date and reference number of the document you need, but it is always productive to browse through your subject’s papers in person. When writing about Florence Nightingale (Florence Nightingale, Feminist) I found that dozens of biographies existed, and that “all” of her voluminous papers had been published.

Regardless, I traveled to England to review her papers, which were in several archives, one of them in a country house without heat in the middle of winter. So I sat at a rickety wooden table in my warm coat and gloves to pore over boxes of private letters and found a quote that I had never come across before, and which I eventually used as a chapter heading in my book.

Use your own translations for original sources written in a foreign language. Translators and editors can sometimes overlook nuances, even omit whole sentences that could be useful to you.

Cast a wide net. Important historical figures do not live in a vacuum.

Set the scene with a description of the times in which your subject lived and how those times and major historical events affected her.

A person is known by the company she keeps. To present a well-rounded picture of your subject, describe the important people in her life, such as family, friends, and other contemporaries, and review their judgment of her. That information can be found in her letters, memoirs, and biographies about her.

Researching and writing your book.

Chronology is preferable to organizing your story by subject. The latter method leads to skipping around in time, which tends to confuse the reader, and relies on repetition to remind the reader where you are in the account of your subject’s life, which can bore the reader.

I keep my research notes in narrative style, organized in chronological files, which I revise periodically. Thus, the writing comes easily; I’m always looking forward to getting the next chapter of a fascinating life into shape.

A final word.

Research is about casting a wide net, digging deep, and leaving no stone unturned. Examine every source relevant to your subject and her times as they affected her. You never know what you will find useful.

Have fun!

Check out Judith Lissauer Cromwell’s Louise-Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist 1755-1842 here:

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In this interview, Kristin discusses how writing an essay led to her new book, What Debt Demands, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Kristin Collier
Literary agent: Sarah Fuentes from UTA
Book title: What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Release date: November 18, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Elevator pitch: What Debt Demands follows my journey navigating my own devastating student debt burden—hundreds of thousands of dollars taken out fraudulently by a family member in my name—alongside my growing awareness of how debt shapes our physical, interior, and social worlds.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I spent all of my 20s and a portion of my 30s arguing with debt collectors and trying to find relief within a lending system hostile to student borrowers. This was, essentially, the start of my research process for this book, though I didn’t see it as that yet; I was just trying to survive. As I began to learn more about how this theft was possible and how it fit into the larger lending history, I realized that other people might be as interested in this subject as I was. So, I tried writing an essay about my debt—which was an enormous challenge!—to see what that would feel like, and the essay seemed to really connect with people. Sarah, my now-agent, reached out after reading it and asked if I had thought about writing a book, which I had.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

That’s a hard question to answer because as I noted, I was doing research for a very long time simply by attempting to pay or refute my student loan bills.  So, you might say that the book took me15 years to write. But the most concentrated research and reporting occurred over the three years I wrote a book proposal, drafted the book, and then revised the book. The core of the idea—that I would try to understand my debt and how it shaped my relationship to myself, my family, and the world—was always there, but I experimented with how much history and contemporary reporting I would weave into the narrative.

I often worried that there would be too much memoir for people who wanted something more historical and journalistic, and too much research for the people who were interested in memoir. I still think that may be true, but I hope the inclusion of both will illustrate that while my story may, on the surface, seem startling or unique, it’s ultimately both a symptom of and the conclusion of a system built on inequality and predation.

In addition to trying to figure out how much personal narrative and research to include, I also wrestled with how to put these threads in conversation with one another within the same chapter, ultimately writing a few different drafts before landing on the book’s final form, which relies on each chapter finding a thematic center that the memoir and the research can work toward.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Before publishing the book, I had been a high school educator for 15 years and was on the older end of debut authors, and though I read widely and had gotten an MFA, I felt somewhat outside the literary world, which is to say, I guess, that this entire experience felt like a huge and extended surprise! I was lucky enough to have more than one press interested in the proposal, and figuring out which press and editor to work with was a bit like going on a series of speed dates before deciding whom to marry. Maddie Caldwell, my editor, really understood the project for what I wanted it to be while also pushing me to be more ambitious. In our initial conversation she spoke insightfully and with humor, something hard to pull off in a book about student loan debt. Both of us had to have a lot of trust; she had to believe that I was capable of writing the book I claimed I was, and I had to believe that she would help me get there. I think our trust was well placed!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

This is the first book I’ve written. Finishing it felt similar, though on a much larger scale, to completing an essay, which has always felt a bit methodical and mathematical while also feeling mysterious and magical. The draft wasn’t working and wasn’t working and wasn’t working, and I kept experimenting with it and getting feedback from friends and my agent and editor, and then all of a sudden something legible and interesting began to take shape. For me, writing can feel so messy and iterative and layered that I often don’t believe the process will result in what I want it to. And, sometimes it doesn’t! In this case, I think and hope it did.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope readers with student loans will read it and feel understood, less alone, and if they have shame, less ashamed. And I hope readers without debt will have a more complete and nuanced understanding of indebtedness. I hope all readers will understand our system as more than flawed, but predatory, and believe that we should be fighting for a higher education system that works for everyone, one in which public education is free.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Find strong readers who understand your voice and vision and who will give you rigorous feedback. For me, there’s no greater gift than someone generously lending me their time to read and comment on my work. And offer that to other writers as well. 

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(Writing Scenes With Your Senses.)

And yet, I also discovered something surprising. Once I gave myself permission to be bold, I was able to draw on my multi-genre writing experience to create a memoir that was uniquely mine.

When starting a memoir, there’s documenting, and then there’s The Truth—which, depending on point of view, distance from the events, and a hundred other variables, can be squishy and subjective. Writing Wayfinding meant hours and hours of fact-checking. But once you’ve done that hard work and drafted your story (or stories), you eventually get to the fun part: polishing the vignettes.

Still, even after polishing, one big question remains: How do you know if the structure is right?

My Accidental Memoirist Story

A few years ago, I set out to write a poetry collection—a chapbook about my father. I had already published several poems on this topic in literary magazines, and I wanted to go deeper. Our relationship had been complicated, and I needed space to explore. I planned to build a 48-page chapbook from four or five foundational poems.

Here’s the thing about great writing plans: They often fall apart once the words start flowing. That’s exactly what happened. After a couple of weeks, I realized what I was writing wasn’t poetry. It wasn’t a chapbook. And it wasn’t even entirely about my father.

The poetic form felt too constricting for what I wanted to say. Within weeks, I had already surpassed the limits of a chapbook. I was excavating, discovering, questioning. Writing Wayfinding became a journey of its own.

Here’s the thing. At first, I played it safe. I “reported the news.” The draft of the book was good—but not great. I hadn’t been vulnerable enough. I hadn’t fully shared the questioning, the pain, or the insights I uncovered.

Then I got an editor. That’s when the real work began—and how I ended up with a nonlinear-hybrid-quest/journey-epistolary memoir. Could it fit neatly into one category? Sure. But the point is this: You, the writer, get to choose the format and structure. If you can’t find a structure that works, invent your own. Be bold. Why should fiction writers have all the fun?

Why Structure Matters

There’s another side to this: the reader. Books don’t live in a vacuum. If you’ve come this far in your memoir journey, you’re likely hoping for others to read it. You want them to engage, connect, and feel. The foundation for that intimacy begins with structure. I’ve created a framework to help you get started and remove some of the guesswork.

Memoir has no single magic formula. Structure isn’t just about order—it’s about meaning. Your story may need a linear backbone, a braided weave, or something entirely different. Experiment until the structure reflects both your truth and the experience you want your reader to have.

Memoir Structure Types

• Chronological/Linear: Start-to-finish, such as childhood to adulthood. I began Wayfinding this way, but later found that other structures better captured the fractured nature of my journey and better served the story.
• Nonlinear/Fragmented: Moves around in time and space, often circling a central theme. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
• Braided/Threads: Weaves two or more storylines together. H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald.
• Themed/Topical: Built around a single theme (e.g., addiction, trauma, travel). Wayfinding ultimately took this form, organized by forms such as letters, themes like redemption, and geography. It is a complex structure, and it took trial and error to get it right.
• Hybrid: Mixes forms—essays, lists, poems, fragments. Wayfinding incorporates essays, prose poems, and letters.
• Epistolary: Told through letters, texts, diary entries, emails, etc. Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker.
• Quest/Journey: Centers on a physical, emotional, or metaphorical journey. Wild by Cheryl Strayed.
• Circular/Returning: Begins and ends in the same place (geographically or emotionally). Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

5 Tips to Help You Find Your Memoir’s Structure

1. Identify your memoir’s core theme(s).
If you’re unsure, ask for input. Common themes include trauma, relationships, resilience, and personal growth. Your theme often suggests a structure: A lifelong journey may suit chronology, while a series of linked events may work better in a nonlinear or themed format.

2. Define your memoir’s scope or timeframe.
Does your story cover decades or a short period? Solito by Javier Zamora focuses tightly on his two-month migration journey, while Becoming by Michelle Obama spans a lifetime.

3. Shape your story arc.
Like fiction, memoirs need emotional arcs. You might start a chronological memoir in the middle of a dramatic moment, or group stories by geography or theme instead of adhering to strict chronological order.

4. Be brave and explore possibilities.
Most memoirs default to a linear structure: “I was born, I lived, now I’m older.” I thought that would work for Wayfinding, too. But early readers challenged me. Eventually, I dismantled the book and rebuilt it in a nonlinear, thematic way—closer to how I experienced the events themselves. Masterful examples of nonlinear memoirs include Inheritance by Dani Shapiro and Mean by Myriam Gurba.

5. Leverage your storytelling tools.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. For some of the toughest material in Wayfinding, I shifted from narrative to epistolary—writing letters to characters and even an apology letter to my own body. At first, rewriting finished sections felt strange, but it turned out to be exactly what the book needed.

Your memoir deserves a structure that carries its deepest truth. Be bold. Experiment. Let the form not only serve your story but also foster meaningful engagement and connection with your reader.

Check out Renee Gilmore’s Wayfinding here:

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What does it mean to relate a healing story? It’s exploration, really.

(Why I Wrote and Published My Memoir.)

You tell a story about a part of your life impacted by a traumatic event even if the event covers a broad stretch of time, like the Holocaust, a war, a prison sentence, or if it was a singular event like a beating, a rape, an overdose, a car crash, an arrest… You need to reflect on those events and what they mean in relation to you and to others in your life. It’s about coming to terms and making sense of your life.

Even if it appears senseless, meaning can still be made of it. And isn’t that what we want when we talk about healing? To make the suffering meaningful? It allows us to tell our story and make the suffering transcendent.

When I got a call to lead a workshop at Pasadena City College for formerly incarcerated students and their families, the organizer told me they wanted to focus on writing healing narratives. I had led workshops in different settings: colleges, literary organizations, PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program, and the unique Southernmost Writers Workshop in the World at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station when I worked in logistics.

Even as a student of creative writing, we readers were confronted with some sensitive material to critique. Never once had I heard it called a healing story. Sure, we knew about catharsis in its literary context, but this was different. I agreed, having learned techniques to share. I’d spent the last decade struggling to write about my experiences of being incarcerated, which resulted in my book, Of Time and Punishment: A Memoir.

What you have been through.

In Trauma and Recovery, the author and clinical psychiatrist Judith Herman wrote that Stage Two in the process of recovery from traumatic experience is the sharing of a personal narrative with those who understand and won’t judge them. Dr. Jonathan Shay has confirmed this in his work with veterans suffering from PTSD as told in his books Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America. During World War One psychologists used “the talking cure” to help heal shellshocked soldiers.

In my case, for my memoir, I wrote about my arrest after aiding and abetting a friend in the theft and getting rid of a machine-gun from our armory. In that moment I lost my military career, became a felon, lost the future I thought I’d have, and turned 21 in prison serving two years. I had to process the guilt, my stupidity, my family’s pain, and the horror that followed in its wake. When I finally wrote it right, I felt a strange relief.

You can tell this in an unfolding way without the presence of the present you. The reader can experience your life as you lived it. Consider moments, the scenes in film terms, to propel the dramatic action of your story. Can you use digressions to serve the present narrative as in The Odyssey? But be aware they can sap the narrative drive from your story. Are you engaging the reader’s sympathetic imagination?

A great strategy is to write a character study of your younger self. Remember that person is gone into the past and essentially a character in your life story. You are someone else now. This can help create emotional distance and enable you to write honestly.

Who you are/were.  

American philosopher Martha Nussbaum tells us, a bad-enough experience in adulthood can wreck the noblest of character. In other words, events can alter who you are. It’s not uncommon for family members to say of someone who underwent a catastrophic event that they don’t recognize the person who came back.

In an essay, “Rough Road,” I published in The Sun, I find myself drunk out in the desert looking back at Las Vegas, trying to sober up before riding the 10-speed bicycle back to the halfway house. It was the first time I’d drank since my arrest and risked being sent back to prison. I considered my childhood of growing up in the desert a good kid and the city I moved to and lost my way and fell hard like a rebellious angel.

In narratives such as this, it is good to reveal yourself through the action of the story. Reflect on who you were in the past when the trauma occurred in relation to who you are now. You can frame your past story. You can use the present self or a narrator that represents another time after the event you are examining. Hindsight allows reflection and the opportunity to make meaning in direct ways.

There is a point where most of us realize we’ve changed, whether it was slow or sudden. What does it mean? What is the transformational realization as you look back?

Others in your life then and now.

Dr. Yael Danieli, a trauma researcher, describes secondary trauma. She began her work with Holocaust survivors and their families. She has noted veterans, who have not been treated for the “psychological and moral injuries” suffered during their military service, tend to pass on their trauma to their families.

I thought a lot about the people who were around at the time of my arrest. I felt ashamed about my mother. I considered how she must have felt when she watched me marched in cuffs on the 6:00 news and how it affected the rest of her life. The essay that sprang from this was, “Momma Tried,” forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review.

The strategy is to write the story from another’s point of view who was around at the time. While you’re the protagonist in your story, you’re not in others. With someone you knew well you’d know how they reacted as events unfolded. With other minor characters, you can explore other reactions. When you start to imagine them in their world and their point of view, you will find rich truths and uncover new ways of looking at your story.

What your dreams were and are.

A therapist told me to bring stability to my life; I needed to grieve for the boy who died in me when I was sentenced. He was gone and the life I could have led is impossible even though the desire is still in me.

The military, paramedic, or a cop were no longer options. I needed to accept that and become someone new. It would give me peace, but I didn’t. My obsessions about reclaiming the past failed, and I collapsed into a life of addictions instead, which are explored in my memoir.

It is sometimes interesting to compare what your dreams were before the experience to who you’ve become later in life. Is there a reconciliation between the past and the present of the story?  

Write for the self or publication.

I encouraged those writers to be honest with themselves. Trust the process and let yourself go. Kim Barnes, said, “Writers, all artists really, must be comfortable in the unknown to make their art.”

In a way, it’s like living and making meaning of your life. I also cautioned them that if they were still vulnerable, then they shouldn’t share their story yet. Write for themselves, journal and start the journey. But I also made it a point to say that while writing a healing narrative can be freeing, it isn’t professional therapy.

You don’t have to try to tell everything in one essay, story, or poem. You can keep telling stories in different ways from different perspectives and discover deeper meanings. Over your lifetime, you can create a lot of stories and become better at writing them—ars longa, vita brevis—art is long, life is short. A beautiful thing to consider is that your writing will still be making meaning for others long after you’ve run out of breath.

Check out J.D. Mathes’ Of Time and Punishment here:

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(How to Add Value With a Prologue.)

We all have had the experience of hearing a song from our teen years and having flashes of memory from our high school dance from decades before. Suddenly we see the disco ball shooting shards of light across our friends faces, we smell the perfume or cologne of our dance partner, we feel our feet shuffle on the floor to the rhythm of the music, we taste the flavor of our favorite gum.

Smell is the most effective sense in evoking memories since it has a direct connection to the parts of the brain that affect emotions (amygdala) and memory (hippocampus) unlike the other senses that must first pass through the thalamus for processing. The direct connection to the brain makes those olfactory memories feel more vivid and significant. Scent memories are often from early childhood, a period of significant emotional experiences and intense sensory learning.

I first learned how the power of the senses could evoke detailed memories decades ago in LA in a sense memory Stanislavski Method acting class. Our teacher instructed us to recall a childhood memory to share and after a warmup, I sat in a chair in front of the class and described the memory.

My father had died when I was seven, so I didn’t have many memories of him, but the most vivid memory was of a summer day when I was about four. As he tended to his strawberry patch, I watched as he chose the biggest, reddest, strawberry in the patch, wiped off the dirt and popped it into my mouth. “I see the deep red, ripe strawberry. I see it’s red heart shape, and the green, pointy cap and stem…” I continued to describe in vivid detail the taste of the succulent red juicy sweetness bursting in my mouth and dripping on my chin. My father’s gentle gesture made me feel happy and loved. As we walked to a white lattice arbor heaving with honeysuckle, I described the delectable fragrance that filled my head. My father inhaled deeply as the sun shone on his nose and tiny beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.

I intentionally chose what I thought was a happy memory of my dead father but as I continued this exercise, emotions began to roil in my stomach and up into my chest and throat that were unfamiliar to me. When my acting teacher asked me to speak out loud to my father I resisted and hesitated, then I gasped and snuffled. The feelings that bubbled up did not match this deeply touching memory of him. I squirmed in my chair and choked on the words “I’m mad at you.” I was shocked because I had no idea that I was angry at him for dying and leaving me.

When my father died, no one explained anything to me. No one said it was very sad that my father had died but that he was very sick, and his body was too worn out to heal. No one said that I needn’t worry—even though my father had died, my mother was healthy and young and would not die. No one said that we would grieve properly, and missing him would hurt, but we would all be okay.

Of course, then, it was a revelation to me that I had unprocessed grief, sadness, fear, and yes, even anger that my father had died nearly 20 years prior. It was a powerful sense memory acting class that uncovered what needed to be embraced and processed for my healing.

Years later, I used that sense memory exercise to write the scenes in my upcoming book My Pretty Baby. In the first chapter I describe being in a dark voting booth with my mother. Inhaling her luscious Estee Lauder Youth Dew perfume, I gazed at her black shiny high heels, reached out and touched her smooth black nyloned calf, and felt a tingle all over my body as I listened to her quiet yet excited whispers. In contrast, at my father’s funeral I described the details of my dead father’s waxy face as he lay in his white satin lined coffin and the overwhelming nauseousness as I inhaled the stench of carnations.

Try this exercise to incorporate the five senses into your writing: Close your eyes and recall a childhood memory. Connect to the place. Feel your feet planted on the ground. As you recall the memory, write down one detail for each sense.

1. Smell: What did the place smell like? Can you smell cigarette smoke, bacon cooking, fresh mown lawn, a summer rainstorm? Layer the senses gradually. Sometimes less is more and two vivid senses is enough.
2. Sound: What do you hear? Is it loud, soft, muffled, nearby or faraway? Do you hear the rattle of the pans as your mom cooks in the kitchen. Do you hear the loud “potato-potato” rumble of a Harley motorcycle outside your window?
3. Taste: Can you taste the metallic tang of fear in your mouth as you hear the creak of floorboards in the middle of the night. You can also use contrast: do you taste the sweet chocolate cake while sitting at the kitchen table listening to your parents argue?
4. Sight: What do you see? Colors, light, shadows, movement? Describe in microscopic detail the texture, pattern, or grain of the wood floor or carpet in a room. You may not necessarily use the entire description, but this practice will reveal nuggets of richness that will make your scene vivid.
5. Touch: What is the temperature? Hot, cold, clammy? What bodily sensations do you feel through your skin? soft, scratchy, sharp, smooth?

As psychologist James Pennebaker’s research suggests, writing with your senses in not just a craft tool; it can also be a healing practice. And as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma is often stored in the body. By listening to the body’s memories with the senses, we can gain access to emotions and trauma that are hidden in the body. In this way, sensory writing becomes both a creative practice to enliven your writing, but also as a personal path to unearth, heal, and integrate past emotional experiences and traumas.

Sensory details anchor the reader in the experience, not just in the explanation. Engaging the senses can transform flat details that tell what happened into a three-dimensional narrative that creates vivid cinematic scenes that pull readers into the heart of a story and show them not only what happened but how it felt to be there.

Check out Wendy B. Correa’s My Pretty Baby here:

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My daughter was an adult when I began writing about her childhood. Though focused on my personal arc, my story overlaps hers—making privacy another issue I’ve had to navigate. She gave me her blessing, and I promised to delete anything that made her uncomfortable.  

Writing about your child can be tricky—ethical questions arise with no clear answers. Like, when is a child truly capable of consent? Is a parent naturally entitled to expose details about their child? Where’s the line between authenticity and exploitation?  

Yet, our stories are important. Raising a child with a physical or mental illness is often painfully isolating, and parenting memoirs can be a powerful source of solace, offering validation, hope, and a sense of community.  

I spoke with seven nonfiction writers whose work examines how they dealt with a child’s illness, disability, addiction, or death. We discussed their approaches to privacy and consent, what drove them to share their stories, and advice they’d give other writers. I’ve edited their responses for clarity and length. 

Prioritize Consent 

Most of the writers waited years to start their memoirs. By then, their children were grown. They asked for consent (including the use of real names), agreed to change or remove content upon request, and kept their kids’ current lives off limits to protect their privacy as adults.  

One exception was Jaclyn Greenberg, who is writing a parenting book about accessibility and has published numerous articles featuring her 12-year-old son, who is disabled and nonverbal. Because he “doesn’t fully understand the implications” of consent, Greenberg consults her husband and oldest child instead. 

The writers whose children passed away checked in with the other parent and surviving siblings.  

Balance Honesty and Privacy  

In her memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, Casey Mulligan Walsh included details about her contentious divorce, family divisions, and the sudden loss of her oldest son at age 20. Throughout, she strove to portray her three children as kids caught in a difficult situation, rather than as difficult kids.  

“Writing through that lens, I included scenes that illustrated how they were affected by the conflict in our lives and how they behaved in response—sometimes badly—but gave space for their positive qualities and my empathy for them, even in the middle of these scenes. I excluded things they might see as personally embarrassing or would be particularly difficult for them if made public,” she said. 

Eileen Vorbach Collins, author of Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, a memoir in essays about losing her 15-year-old daughter, said, “Although I wrote about my daughter after her death, I was still aware of privacy issues and considered how she might feel about what I was disclosing. Though I couldn’t ask her permission, I tried not to write something she’d have been uncomfortable sharing.”  

Go Where Your Story Leads You 

As is often the reason for writing memoir, these writers originally hoped to make sense of what happened—or as Jessica Fein, author of Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes, said, “to get some control of the narrative in a world that was upside down.” Fein’s daughter, Dalia, was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease that ended her life at age 17. 

By staying open to—and exploring—the deeper narrative themes revealed during the process of writing, each author transcended their child’s story to create a work with emotional resonance and broader appeal.   

Ann Batchelder wrote her memoir, Craving Spring: A Mother’s Quest, a Daughter’s Depression, and the Greek Myth That Brought Them Together, to figure out when and how her daughter’s struggles began.  

“Halfway through writing the book, I realized: This isn’t about her, it’s about me,” she said. “That changed everything—the focus, the intent, the need to be more open and honest about my reactions to her depression and addictions.”  

Mulligan Walsh said, “I set out writing what I thought was a story of relentless resilience in the wake of repeated loss. The thread that tied it all together was the search for belonging.” 

Be Authentic  

As parents, the instinct to protect our children can test our writerly responsibility to the truth.  

When writing her memoir, Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, Karen DeBonis had to overcome fears that her son “would realize how I’d failed him and hate me.” Recognizing the value of authenticity, she owned how her people-pleasing nature contributed to her son’s delayed diagnosis.  

“I knew others, women especially, would see themselves in my story and hopefully not make the same mistake I did in stifling my voice,” DeBonis said.  

Batchelder added, “As mothers, we all want to paint ourselves in the best light. But when you dig down and you’re honest about some of your motivations or your anger or frustration—as well as your love for your child—you create a character in your book that’s much more relatable.” 

Remember Why You’re Writing 

Alicia Garceau is writing a memoir about her daughter’s mysterious illness and her family’s two-year search for answers. “When I approached my daughter about writing the memoir, I explained why I wanted to do it, but gave her the final say. She was ultimately diagnosed because of another memoir, Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan, so she expressed a desire to ‘pay it forward’ and hopefully help others,” she said. 

After publishing a long-form essay about her experience, Garceau received emails from parents in the U.S. and abroad thanking her for writing it. “Being able to make people feel less alone in whatever they’re going through encourages me to keep writing,” she said. 

Fein echoed a similar response to her memoir: “I’ve heard from other parents that they feel less alone when reading my story; that they’ve gained new perspective.” 

Writing and publishing their stories also allowed the writers to feel less alone and better understood. The act of re-examining painful events through a literary lens helped them uncover new layers of meaning and continue moving forward.  

Greenberg said, “I initially started writing because I felt like my son and I were both isolated from friends, family, and the community because of his disabilities and my caregiving responsibilities. Sharing breaks down those barriers and brings people into my world in a positive way.” 

As Batchelder said, “When we share our stories, we heal ourselves as well as others.” 

Central to Batchelder’s healing was knowing that her daughter approved of her memoir. “She has often told me she’s proud of me for writing it. She said it helped some of her friends understand their mothers.” It helped her daughter understand Batchelder, too.  

“I was nervous when I first gave her my manuscript to read—some of it was hard for her to read, and we both cried. But after she finished, she looked up and said, ‘This is a love letter to me, isn’t it?’” 

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(The Messy House of Memoir.)

Throughout that time, if either of us saw something that reminded us of the other person, we’d DM or email. Once we both got cell phones, we’d text occasionally. He sent me a lovely note when I got remarried telling me how happy I seemed in my wedding photos, and how happy it made him to know that. Every six or seven months, I’d write him to say, “Hey. I’m still working on this book project about our marriage. Are you still okay with it?”

Maybe because I did that so often and no publication was forthcoming, I often felt like The Girl Who Cried Book. I wondered if he even believed I was writing anything at all as the years dragged on and on. Sometimes I wondered that same thing as I navigated parenting a young child with a full-time job with this elusive dream of a book always hanging over my head. No matter how real it felt to him, though, my ex-husband always said the same thing when I asked, “For the rest of my life, I promise you can say anything you want about me.”

Now, after more than 20 years of stalled attempts, that book is finally coming out. And once it became clear that the book would be published, I started to talk to my ex-husband more. I sent him the manuscript. We chatted about it, which eventually led to comfortable chatting about the rest of our lives. When I was in Chicago last year, we had dinner. When I was back in Chicago recently, we had brunch. We talk fairly often now, over email and text—sometimes about the book but mostly just about life: Movies we’ve watched lately, documentaries, podcasts, TV shows, songs we like, updates on family and friends.

During that long time I was writing our story, it was easy for him to feel like a character I’d invented. But I knew I’d be sharing stories about intimate moments of our life together. I knew in order for my story to make sense I’d have to include details of his life that it had taken him years to be able to say out loud: among other things, the fact that he’d spent his adolescence in conversion therapy and then not shared the full details of that with me until several years into our marriage.

When we’d chat, though, I’d be reminded of the stakes of what I was attempting—the reality that this was a living, complex, sacred human being with whom I’d shared seven years of living, complex, sacred human time. I hope that the gravity of that responsibility comes through in the way I wrote about the two of us. It’s meant more than I can say to hear from readers and writers who’ve already read the book that they think it does.

About a year ago, in order to finalize the plans for the manuscript, the legal department at my publisher needed my ex-husband to sign a waiver that read, “I agree that I have been fairly represented in the manuscript, and I give my consent to publication of the material relating to me.” He immediately did so and returned it to me before I’d even closed out of my email.

I’d never been worried he would refuse at the last minute to sign off on the manuscript. I knew he knew enough about it and about me to trust that I wasn’t going to betray or exploit him. So, it wasn’t necessarily relief or at least it wasn’t only relief I felt to know he was signing off on the final project. I think the more accurate way to describe how I felt would be validation.

He was the only other person in that marriage I’d been excavating for two decades. Because of all this, no matter how the book is ultimately received or reviewed, there’s no endorsement that will ever mean more to me than that signed waiver. And no love letter I ever received from him meant more.

Because you doubt yourself constantly when you attempt to write anything at all, especially a story that really happened. So, to have the other person involved in the story say, “This really happened—not just the facts, but the emotional truth of it. The depiction of me feels honest and accurate. I agree to let this person who used to be married to me share these details of our life together,” undid me for several days in ways that not even my most effusive endorsement has done since.

I don’t know that there are any universally applicable rules to how best to write about someone else’s life, especially if that person is alive and able to contradict or refute what you might say or worse, to be wounded by the way you might say it. In my particular case, I constantly wrestled with how much of anyone else’s story to share in telling mine. I knew I didn’t want to center myself in his story or to share anything I felt was only his to tell. I knew I wanted to tell my own story and have that be the focus of the narrative.

But here’s the thing: None of us live a life in which there are no other people. If we’re going to write about our own lives, then other people will always be implicated in those stories. One approach I took to ethical treatment of others in my work was that before publishing anything that included someone else, I showed them what I’d written: my college roommate, my parents, my brothers, etc. I could do that because I love and trust all those people, and they are all safe people for me. I know that’s often not an option for other writers telling stories that involve unsafe people.

No matter what, I think it’s important to constantly interrogate your own memory and motivations. I’ve read several memoirists who said they’d never write unless they felt they could do it from a place of love. I’ve heard others who say that particularity is the key. Both those approaches—love and particularity—resonate with me deeply.

Ultimately, maybe it’s only in remembering how wrong you can get it that we can ever be right when we attempt to put a 3D human being onto 2D paper. It makes me feel connected to adherents of religions that never attempt to draw the Divine. We will never get all of it right—the entirety of any holy mystery—but maybe if we keep that in our minds, we can get closer.

Check out Kelly Foster Lundquist’s Beard here:

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