So how do you structure a memoir?  One of my students asked me this in my advanced non-fiction class last week and as usual I had to say, I don’t know. I’m pretty good on the structure of a personal essay (if you’re looking to get an essay published in a magazine or newspaper there are some definite guidelines), but for a book length memoir there are no guidelines for structure, no blueprint to follow. You can have a straight forward narrative in chapters, telling your story from beginning to end (as Monica Holloway does in Driving With Dead People), or you can start at the end and then jump back to the beginning and go from there (Jeannette Walls in The Glass Castle), or weave the story back and forth through time (Mark Dody in Heaven’s Coast), or keep circling back to the beginning (Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking) or write it like snapshots (Linda St. John in Even Dogs Go Home to Die ) or in vignettes (Abigail Thomas in Safekeeping) or as a series of letters (Genevieve Jurgensen in The Disappearance) or even combine journalism with your story, (Blair Tindall in Mozart in the Jungle).

The best way I think to find the shape for your own book (this includes novels too) is to simply start writing the story.  Maybe it’ll come out like squares of a patchwork quilt in bits and pieces of memory or story, or maybe in a long continuous narrative.  For most of us, (for me anyway) one of the hardest parts in writing a book is to find the shape for it. I have talented writer friends who meticulously outline the whole book, and others who haven’t a clue where they’re going, they just know they have a story to write and will figure it all out as they go. There’s just no right way to do it.

As for the voice, meaning the tone, the character that comes through whether it’s yourself or a character you’ve made up, sometimes it’s there from the first word, and other times it takes real work to find it.  When I started Writing Out the Storm,  I couldn’t find the voice for my own story until I went back to some notes I’d written while I was going through the experience itself, and those notes – verbatim! – turned into the first chapter.

Also – reading other memoirs will inspire you, and might show you the way to write yours.  Be sure to check out some of memoirs I mentioned above, and let us know what books you’re reading and find helpful. 

And if you love dogs be sure to read Mark Doty’s beautiful new memoir, Dog Years, about his two beloved dogs who helped him through the death of his partner.