Memoir is a corner of your life, one phase, not your autobiography, not your whole life, but one part of it.  It’s about growing up in a family of crazy people, or growing up in an environment so conservative and staid that you thought you were the crazy one (perfect childhoods are hard to write about – though Cheaper by the Dozen and My Family and Other Animals come close).  A memoir can be about the time of your divorce, or when you faced down a life threatening illness, or when your child was in trouble, or you lost your parents or someone  else close to you – or any life changing events you’ve gone through. 

Since the early 90’s when Mary Karr’s wonderful book The Liars’ Club was published, memoir has become as popular as fiction. We want to know the truth about other lives, we want to know how people get through hard times. Fiction of course shows all this, but it seems that people want the real stuff now, not life filtered through imagination. (Though of course your imagination shapes memoir. Life doesn’t come as tidy a narrative as memoir makes it appear.) But the writing of memoir imposes order on your life, gives it shape and meaning and that’s why we write it – to conquer our own ghosts and dragons, to explore our own lives.

In the exercise for writing the personal essay from the previous post you might have came up with experiences too broad and complicated to write into 750 words. The personal essay is one moment of experience or maybe an overview of a broad experience, while memoir is chapter by chapter of what you’ve gone through.

In class on Tuesday students read the first drafts of their personal essays.  Some students found their subject right off the bat, others veered off into another direction and needed to be guided back with questions asking what their essay was really about. Some could cut the first page, others needed to put more of themselves in their essays. Incredibly, two of the essays were about the same subject: small kittens in big trouble, and both were written by the two men in class. One kitten lived, and one died.  Both stories were incredibly moving. And all the essays read had potential.

Please comment below how your essay is going – or any problems you’re having with the writing, or finding time to focus on it.

We also did a warm-up exercise in class for this week’s homework assignment which is to write a memory.  The exercise starts with the words: I remember…..and you write for five minutes. 

Try it.  If you get on a roll with a memory, keep going.  If you can only come up with one sentence, write I remember again and find another sentence. Maybe you’ll have a whole list of “I remembers”, more like a poem.  Or maybe you’ll write your way into a memoir.