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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(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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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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(Dyslexia Is a Writer’s Superpower.)

I did not grow up believing I would write a book. I grew up with spatial dyslexia, which meant lines could tilt off the page, paragraphs blurred into brick walls, and sequences—left to right, up to down—refused to behave. But I also grew up with a father who believed the point of writing wasn’t to look smart; it was to be understood. When I finally sat down to write my memoir, Nobody’s Girl: Mother, Model, CEO On My Own Terms, I leaned hard on his newsroom rules and found my way through the maze—one clean, true sentence at a time.

Phrases and ideas fly in and out of my head on an ongoing basis, and the trick is to make note of them when it happens. Ultimately, I had an editorial village, too, but gathering your thoughts and crafting cohesive communication is quite a solitary process.

The lead is a lifeline

Writers talk about “finding the heartbeat” of a book. My dad called it the lead. “If you can’t tell me the story in one sentence,” Bill would say, “you don’t know it yet.” Because spatial dyslexia makes large outlines feel like quicksand, I wrote a one-sentence lead for every chapter before I wrote the chapter, starting with: WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN.

Those five words were my compass. When a paragraph wandered, I held it against the lead. If it didn’t serve the sentence, it didn’t survive. That discipline kept me from drowning in backstory and helped me write with the forward momentum a memoir needs.

Writing out loud

Spatial difficulties make tracking lines of text exhausting, so I drafted much of the book by speaking. I recorded scenes. Later, I transcribed the audio and edited on the page. That two-step process gave me three gifts:

• Voice. When you speak your story, you hear your rhythms, your humor, your silences. The page sounds more like you.
• Honesty. It’s harder to posture out loud. Whispered details found their way into the manuscript because I heard myself reach for them.
• Stamina. Talking let me cover emotional ground without simultaneously fighting the mechanics of reading.

For revision, I flipped the process and used text-to-speech to listen back. Hearing each line read aloud made clunky phrasing obvious and highlighted where I’d lost the thread of a scene.

Short lines, strong verbs

The newsroom taught me to trust short sentences. Spatial dyslexia reinforced it. I pared paragraphs to their bones, then added only what clarified or revealed. Strong verbs did the heavy lifting—”confessed” instead of “said sheepishly,” “bolted” instead of “ran quickly.” I broke long blocks with subheads and white space, both to help me track ideas and to welcome readers who read the way I do: in focused bursts, with frequent breathers.

Fact-check the feelings

Memoir isn’t journalism, but journalistic values serve it well. My father’s second-favorite question (after “What’s the lead?”) was “Who says?”

When I wrote about a pivotal conversation from years ago, I felt in my gut it was the truth, which doesn’t necessarily have corresponding documentation. If two memories conflicted, I wrote that conflict into the scene. Paradox belongs in memoir. Confirmation through intuition gave me the courage to tell how it felt without hedging.

Build a reporter’s kit for your life

Reporters carry notebooks or index cards. Each card can hold a scene: where it took place, who was present, and the sensory specifics that tether memory to the body. In my case, this “reporter’s kit” was so burned in my memory and my upbringing I had no need to keep a physical card. I’ve lived my life with the phrases as a steady and repetitive understanding of how to approach many situations: Who? What? Where? Why? When?

When my brain was tired, I could still sort notes into a timeline. Moving the story physically helped me see the arc when the screen would not. That was another of Bill’s lessons: If the copy won’t behave, change the format, not the truth.

What my book set out to prove

We are more than our test results or advanced degrees, and we have many untapped resources within us. In addition to my innate problem-solving skills, I was blessed with a sharp tenacity and bundles of energy. I also had a profound instinctive awareness that I didn’t fit any traditional mold, either in academia or jobs, and had to amass the skills to be my own woman. Penning my memoir took an extraordinary effort. My mission of helping others do great things with their lives against sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds kept me going page to page.

Find editors who see you

In a newsroom, copy doesn’t go to print without an editor. Neither did my chapters. Because spatial dyslexia makes it easy to miss a missing word—I “see” what I meant, not what’s there—I recruited a small, steady crew for structure, continuity, a bit of cheerleading, and the ultimate finish.

In truth, I wrote a book about potential and belonging—to my own voice, to the people who held me accountable, and to a lineage of journalists who believe the truth can stand up to questions. Bill Crago didn’t make me a writer; he made me a reporter of my own life. The lead of Nobody’s Girl is simple: I learned to stop letting the shape of my brain be an apology and started letting it be a method.

If you are rigorous with facts and generous with feelings, others will feel your experiences. Hopefully, they will be inspired to live life on their own terms.

Check out Amber M. Brookman’s Nobody’s Girl here:

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(In Defense of Research for Writing.)

It began as an essay. I wanted to write about a phenomenon so typical of current Baby Boomer relationships in recent years. Many of us in the freewheeling 1970s had sidestepped traditional marriage and lifestyles and opted instead for informal live-in relationships.  (We didn’t have the term “domestic partner” back then.) We were committed to one another, but our relationship had no legal anchor or even a name. Now, many of us in our 60s and 70s are coping with our partners’ health problems. While we may not be their “next of kin” in writing, our emotional ties bind us to them in sickness just as they did in health.

I had hoped to submit the essay to the New York Times “Modern Love” column, but as I neared the finish line of the final draft, my relationship in real time took a dramatic turn. It changed the course of my essay (not to mention the course of my life) and I felt that I now had a deeper message for readers. In fact, to best communicate that message, I would need to expand the essay and tell the story in a full-length memoir. That would mean writing about individuals I met along the way and their roles in my life.

In any work of memoir or autobiography or creative nonfiction, as responsible writers we’re always mindful of the need to protect the identities and privacy of the people in our story. It’s more than simply changing names and locations. We’ll include a clearly worded disclaimer, avoid disclosing sensitive or embarrassing material, we might ask permission from those we write about. But in the case of a story that covers this span of time, in my memoir some of the individuals had passed away and their survivors didn’t know me or about me, certainly some had forgotten, there were many with whom I had lost touch and probably wouldn’t be able to find. Since the story ends with a mystery, I was afraid readers might be tempted to search out and approach these individuals in a misguided attempt to solve the puzzle. So how would I remain faithful to the story without compromising the privacy of the characters on my pages?

I grappled with the conundrum for many long hours. And then, once I knew I had taken all the necessary precautions, and the publisher had approved my disclaimer, I thought about my typical reading audience. I know them as mature and responsible. They don’t follow the lives of media or entertainment personalities, and I didn’t think they would be tempted to track down any of the individuals in my story. Instead of prying, they would accept my invitation to step back and take an honest look at how they themselves cope with life’s mysteries and their own searches for the truth. I felt that this invitation would provide an additional layer of privacy for the individuals in my story.

Another more curious phenomenon faces us. It’s the possibility that some of our readers may believe they see themselves represented in our story when, in fact, they’re not. It can happen whether we’re writing fiction, fact, memoir, or even science fiction! My mentor, Marion Roach Smith (The Memoir Project) believes it’s almost inevitable that someone reading our work will think we’re writing about them or someone they know. They’re not stalkers, just average people who misidentify a character we introduce. I’m reminded of an especially harrowing incident when a former friend from college contacted me about a novel I had written and excitedly claimed that the entire book was about her, when in fact she hadn’t crossed my mind in years! At some point, we need to remember that once we’ve been responsible with our writing, we have no control over what our readers read into our words.

Instead of seeing A Version Of the Truth as a story about my relationship and the people in it, I believe readers will accept my encouragement to see that we all face mysteries at some point in our lives, and we need to decide how we’ll cope. Do we go on searching in vain, do we cling to denial, or do we get a version of the truth we can live with, and live with it? The key to my own peace of mind was the realization that some truths will never be known, and I needed to find a version I could accept. When the memoir was published, I felt satisfied that I had safeguarded the privacy of everyone in it.

Check out Marsh Rose’s A Version of the Truth here:

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(6 Types of Personal Essays to Try.)

My debut essay collection, Uncanny Valley Girls, is mainly not about books. A mix of memoir and criticism, it’s about survival and interpersonal relationships, using horror movies—another early obsession—to think through the ways art can save and vex us in equal measure. In other words, it’s a book about love, in all its complex valiances. But I couldn’t write it without this other foundation in literature, both the interiority I found in memoir and poetry and the rigorous critical eye I found in theory.

Because really, both these modes of writing saved me. “My silences had not protected me,” Audre Lorde famously wrote. “Your silence will not protect you.”

In memoir and creative nonfiction, I found the commitment to truth-telling that led me to believe my own truth could be told, the importance of sharing experiences with violence—sexual, physical, structural—and their aftermath. Through foundational authors like Lorde to contemporary writers like Melissa Febos, Johanna Hedva, and Elissa Washuta, I discovered ways to document said experiences and their bright aftermaths, the way hope can be practiced even in the wake of structural harm without negating the reality of said harm. Through these authors and others, I found the fortitude to end my own silence.

Uncanny Valley Girls is a book concerned with enduring pain, but it is also a book concerned with how to make a life we can live within. In it, I write: “The miraculous thing about a wound, after all, is not its capacity to heal. Many wounds do no such thing. The miracle is our capacity to live and love despite this wounding.” It was important for me to think—and feel—through my life to highlight this living and loving, and memoir was the most immediate way for me to do so at the time.

But as I wrote the book, I also was interested in thinking holistically and expansively about the media we consume. The essay collection is focused on horror, which for my money is the genre most concerned with violence’s aftermath—which, given the inescapability of violence between people in an unequal society, makes it the genre most concerned with intimacy and relationality as well. In Uncanny Valley Girls, I use horror as a mirror into my own life—a disabled trans woman in relationships with other disabled trans people, someone who had to construct a previously nonexistent faith in community in order to survive. The book itself is an act of community-construction too, a way to solidify and think through the ties that allowed me to live.

Though while I draw from memoir to construct this community, I also am interested in the long history of feminist and queer horror criticism as a form of truth-telling, too. Some of these works of criticism I draw from I cite explicitly—Julia Kristeva’s seminal monograph Powers of Horror, Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting,” Willow Catelyn Maclay’s trans reading of the pubescent werewolf movie Ginger Snaps. And some of my other antecedents, including Carol J. Clover’s equally seminal Men, Women and Chainsaws and Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, I only allude to. Regardless, given the existing brilliance of so many horror scholars, I was interested in writing a book with a robust citational practice—a book that, in addition to conveying the emotional and material truth of how art can save a life, also engaged that art with intellectual rigor.

Which is, of course, something that Lorde believed in, too. Throughout her collected essays—Sister Outsider most famously, but also my favorite book of hers, A Burst of Light—she cites rigorously and widely, documenting a reading and thinking life. Even in constructing this essay, I built a false dichotomy; for all the memoirists and essayists who have most inspired me have similarly substantiative citational practices too. The thing about being saved by books is that it’s a recursive sort of salvation; books almost always point to other books, too. Even as I was engaging with film, which I do throughout the whole essay collection—good movies and bad movies, movies I hate that almost everyone else I know loves (like Black Swan) and movies I sometimes feel I’m a singular defender of (like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist)—I couldn’t keep other books and writers out. I love them too much not to include them. In giving me models for a writing and thinking life outside of the bounds of my own town, they helped me live, too.

In her essay “Believing in Literature” from her essay collection Skin, the lesbian feminist working-class writer Dorothy Allison, a creative and political lodestar of mine, talked about her own motivation for writing. She said: “What did I want? I wanted the thing all writers want—for the world to break open in response to my story. I wanted to be understood finally for who I believe myself to be, for the difficulty and grief of using my own pain to be justified.”

I see this same motivation in theory, which is concerned with understanding the world through understanding and analyzing texts; and I see the same motivation in memoir, too, which is concerned with understanding the world through understanding the self. They’re both searching for the same understanding, which I tried to capture in Uncanny Valley Girls as well. How could I not? I wrote a book about survival, using the tools from memoir and criticism that allowed me to survive in the first place. It’s only through both, after all, that I was able to see my life in its full, shining wholeness. It’s only through both that I was able to break open my own world just a little, that I was able to live.

Check out Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls here:

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(See the winning entry list here.)

The Dead Whale

by Carol Keeley

Both dogs are leashed as we exit the car. We’d heard there was a dead whale on the beach earlier. It hit me like dread. A dead whale feels so portentous.

It’s my brother’s first walk on sand. Mike was in a neuro-ICU for the past week. He showed up on Thanksgiving eve with a fractured eye socket and brain bleeds, oblivious to his injuries. It’s still a mystery what happened. He was released to in-patient rehab, but instead the three of us are winging it. Typical of our stubborn clan. Mike is the eldest of eight. Our younger brother, Ter, is the upbeat host. I’m the worrier. Today’s goal is a beach walk.

When I called from the airport, Ter said Mike was excited to see me. I got teary. Crisis is an opportunity for repair. I was grateful Mike felt that too.     

“I don’t think he remembers,” Ter said gently. Meaning: remembers that we’ve been in conflict for years.

Neither of us can recall when we last saw each other. It might have been our father’s memorial, where family fissures widened. Or that’s my take. We’re a family of ten. We all have our own versions of everything. And stories tend to harden with age.

On the beach, I see a sad mountain of grey, the elegiac tail. Surrounding the mythic rib cage are marine biologists in bright orange waders. A giant crane bucks as it lowers its shovel. My brothers head toward the water, where the sand will be more firm for Mike’s walk. Ter pulls the barking dogs. I head to the whale.

This time with my brothers has been precious, as well as bruised. It’s hard to see my big brother so frail, but it invites a rare openness. He shares stories new to me. Ugly stories about our father, but also old hurts from high school and life.

“I was never the smartest guy in the room,” Mike says, “or the most athletic, or handsome, or socially graceful.”

I had no idea that he felt such quiet exiles—ones I feel, too. It’s the opposite of how I see him. He’s the pioneering eldest son. He’s the first openly gay deputy mayor in the U.S. He oversaw the budget for Los Angeles. To me, he’s always been dazzling.

 I ask whether that sense of not fitting in related to being gay—long before gay rights or parades. He shrugs, fading. I leave space, mindful his brain is still healing. And we don’t usually have such conversations.

The wound of not belonging seems to infect our family. A niece told me her dad insists none of us think he’s smart. Another brother is sure he’s called fat. My labels are broken and failure. We can’t know, of course, the true source of such shame splinters, though they’re common in alcoholic families. We seem to savage ourselves with judgments we ascribe to each other. No wonder connection feels thorny and fraught.

“We are the family of hurt feelings,” Ter said once. Hurt can shapeshift into bitter distance and mistrust. Into warring narratives.

They detached the head earlier, a biologist explains. The whale, a humpback, is too huge to remove without sectioning. Now a crane digs into the creature’s belly, hoisting buckets of gooey organs.

“Most dead whales are calves,” a dog-walker interrupts her, addressing me. “They get separated from their mothers during storms and can’t fend on their own.”

“Is that what you think happened?” I ask the biologist.

“Calves wean after a year,” she says. “This one was two and had a full belly of food, so seemed to be faring well.”

“It’s the wind farms,” a woman says, tugging her sweater. The biologist pauses before responding.

Yesterday morning, Ter dropped a stack of books on the kitchen counter, all about death and dying. I welcomed the topic. But it quickly veered into climate change, then a battle between his Catholicism and my Buddhism. Mike paced the kitchen as Ter and I argued, his hands clasped behind his back. Ter insisted that Buddhism lacks a creation story, so is somehow illegitimate. It’s not a religion, I said, confused.

“Just answer this,” Ter said, “Who created the universe?”

“Why is that the litmus test?” I laughed. “That’s random.”

The premise was absurd, but I delight in such arguments, and I knew we didn’t actually disagree. We were just in the wrong starting block. I tried to describe the view, not unique to Buddhism, that everything is an interwoven web of continual, mutual change. This is as true of a single tree—which depends on the soil and weather and industries—as it is of families and moods, our planet and this very moment.

“Let her finish,” Mike said, when Ter interrupted me. Then, “Don’t both speak at once.” Then, “No, that’s not what he said,” when I distorted something.

This delighted me, too. I’d forgotten how Mike used to referee our heated arguments as kids. His deep listening helped transpose sibling tension into something greater than its warring parts.

“Who made all of this?” Ter demanded, waving his arms.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we don’t need to agree on how it was generated to share a sense that it’s sacred and worthy of protection.”

Mike stopped pacing. “I agree,” he said.

I nearly levitated with joy.     

The differences in our family are vast—of politics, faith, sexuality, and income. In times of intense conflict, Mike would oversee a discussion, then conduct a vote. We are a messy democracy. It’s glorious when it works. But it’s felt brittle since our father’s death. I fear we’re as cleaved as the nation is by siloed certainties, by talking about instead of to one another.

I watch as the biologists take tissue samples, mark slippery bags, then drop them into buckets on a several rows of white tables.

They won’t know the cause of death until they do a full necropsy, the biologist says, if then. It’s often a vessel strike. There are many more shipping boats now. But this whale had no signs of an impact injury. Propellor gashes are obvious. All these scientists are volunteers, many from out of state. “People assume we have tons of funding,” the biologist tells me. “We don’t. We just care about this work and these animals.”

I leave the whale to catch up with my brothers down the beach. In the distance, Mike looks fragile, with his shuffling walk and bent head. Ter is animated beside him, juggling the dogs as they strain their leashes. I used to call my six brothers the Sequoias. All noble, sheltering wonders.

“What did I miss?” I ask eagerly.

“We were talking about you, actually,” Ter says. They both look grim.

My heart wobbles with fresh dread.

I believe our father is the crux of the family ruptures, not each other. After his death, I wrote through my fear of him, to break the spell of dark secrets. There were reactions. Terrible things were said to and about me. That’s my take on it. But Ter says the family felt rejected and judged. That I didn’t go to Thanksgivings anymore was hurtful.

No one tested any of these theories. They just grew into chasms on their own.

We head back up the beach, toward the dead whale. They’d been discussing the time two brothers came to my small town with our father. The root system for this wound feels more vast than the incident. We walk into the wind. It quickly goes sour.

They had every right to come, Mike and Ter argue. A niece lives here, too. Who was I to say her father couldn’t visit her? Of course, I say. I never said or thought that. I wasn’t told they were coming, so had other visitors. That’s why I didn’t see them. I can feel the tension as I walk alongside them. This fallout has festered for years.

Again, the argument seems to be in the wrong starting block. The conflict is embedded in a faux premise. Defensive anger climbs on all sides, including mine. So far this week, we’ve been able to discuss even difficult things with the love I know lies underneath, until this one conversation. So I stubbornly hope.

“Look, I want to do the repair,” I say. “I do. But this doesn’t feel like the right time or place. Can we pause for now?”

“We didn’t know about you and Dad then,” Mike says curtly.

 I stop walking, try to quiet my rioting heart. Then say, “I assumed you all knew and I didn’t matter.”

“That’s ridiculous,” they both hurl into the wind, as we draw near the dead whale again.

One of the fruits of a Buddhist practice is learning to question the perceptions we mistake for reality, to notice when we constrict. As anger surges, I pause to look at it. It’s tempting to reenter the story, the one that feeds my sense of grievance. But instead I ask, what’s being resisted? What feeling is that story constructed to avoid? Anger is often a shield for shame or fear.

That’s when I see that behind my heat-blaze is the sense of not mattering enough to believe, to protect. Touching this young injury frees me. The anger dissipates. I breathe along with the ocean’s pulse, softening. My brothers have supported me in countless generous ways, so their reaction in the moment makes sense, too.

“There’s no hierarchy of pain,” I tell them when we try, and fail, to have the conversation again days later. “Dad impacted all of us. Your hurt matters too.”

It’s not clear what killed this whale, the biologist tells a fresh crowd, as Ter wrangles the frantic dogs. This humpback had been dead for weeks. Most of her wounds, including a broken tooth, were from banging up and down the coast as a corpse.

Dead whales keep washing up on this shoreline. They’re taking samples to look for infections or parasites, for any possible cause, the biologist explains. But in many cases lately, they’ve unable determine a definitive cause of death. No, they don’t think it’s wind farms, she says to another beach walker. The biologist is too polite to say that claim is false and has been liked to the fossil fuel industry. That it persists despite being discredited.

What feeling is the wind farm story constructed to avoid? That we’re all interdependent. That we are fragile and finite and this planet is our home, the ocean our lungs, the whales our relatives.

There was a morning news story about gay men being drugged and robbed in New York. But Mike wasn’t robbed. It’s still unclear what happened. It might have been a spiked joint or the meds he was taking for pain. It could have been many things. It’s a troubling mystery. I long to know, if only to protect him.

Climate change has shifted food sources closer to shores, the biologist explains again as more gather, and cargo shipping has spiked since Covid. The causes for this animal’s death aren’t clear—they might never be—but the tragedy is.  

We watch the crane lower into the whale’s cavity again and lift its ghastly offering to the sky. We don’t have to agree on causes to know what’s worth protecting. That’s why I’m here. I couldn’t bear to lose any of my beloved seven siblings.

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In this interview, P.E. discusses using their journalistic skills to help write their new book, Breaking Awake, their advice for other writers, and more.

Name: P.E. Moskowitz
Literary agent: Melissa Flashman 
Book title: Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs
Publisher: Atria (S+S) U.S.; Bloomsbury U.K.
Release date: September 9, 2025
Genre/category: Memoir; nonfiction
Previous titles: How to Kill a City; The Case Against Free Speech
Elevator pitch: In August 2017 a car ploughed into a crowd of peaceful marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I was reporting on a far-right rally. For me, this was a shattering near-death experience, followed by a nervous breakdown. As I willed myself back to life using a variety of drugs, both prescription and illegal, I started to wonder: why do so many of us need drugs to quell the pain of modern life?

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What prompted you to write this book?

I experienced a PTSD-induced mental breakdown in 2017. And I thought my life was over. It took several years to rebuild a semblance of a life. Drugs became important parts of the healing process for me. They helped me quell the pain I felt from nearly dying. And, later, they helped me gain perspective and reenvision my life and therefore rebuild it. The story we’re so often told about drugs is purely negative, so I wanted to use my journalism skills to show a different side of them—how they helped me, how they can help other people. To that end, I wanted to write about my own story but also travel the country and write about other people who use drugs in interesting ways, ways that counter the mainstream narrative on drug use.

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

I first had the idea for a book based on my experience of PTSD and drug use about five years ago. After that, I wrote a pretty standard book proposal and attached an article I’d written about antidepressants for The Nation and sent that to my agent. She helped me edit the proposal a bit, and it sold pretty quickly after that. The actual writing and reporting process took about 2.5 years from there, and then editing and publication another year or so.

The overall structure of the book is very similar to what I’d envisioned—combining memoir, reportage, and history and theory. But a lot of the reporting I did changed my mind or redirected my research, so the actual content of the book is different than it was at the very beginning.

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

This was the first time I’d gone through several rounds of edits on a book. My editor, Stephanie Hitchcock, is brilliant and thorough and really pushed me to concretize my arguments and make the memoir sections as effective as they could be. I don’t know if that was a surprise per se, but in an era when thorough editing is ever-rarer, it was very welcome. I really enjoyed being pushed to say what I mean; in essence, to become a better writer.

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

Every reporting trip was a learning moment for me. My favorite part of being a journalist is getting to know random people on a deep level for a few days or weeks and learning from them. Meeting drug users and people dealing with trauma from so many different backgrounds helped me feel less alone in my own struggles. And I guess I was surprised by just how similar all of our stories are—whether we’re taking antidepressants in the suburbs or taking heroin on city streets, so many of us are simply trying to quell the pain of our particularly depressing era.

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

I hope it helps people feel less alone. We’re so often conditioned to think of our struggles as individual or chemical in nature, when really we’re all facing the same pressures of an increasingly frayed and dangerous world. There’s no solution to this era of encroaching fascism that isn’t worked on as a collective, and forming a collective starts with realizing we’re all in the same boat, that our internal struggles are really one, big external struggle.

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

Be weird. Listen to all the advice you can, understand structure, understand how things should be done, but then get weird with it. Don’t be afraid to experiment with structure and prose and form. So many nonfiction books follow a very similar formula these days. I hope more people push the boundaries of that!

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