How to Write a Memoir: Lessons From Finishing My First (Unpublished) Book
- Aug 15, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 17, 2025
When I first thought about writing a memoir, I had no idea how to approach it. I just knew there was a period of my life that demanded to be put on paper—something formative, something that mattered. The idea was there, but the question was: how do I tell it? I pushed through, wrote the book, and even finished the manuscript. And like so many first books, it now lives unpublished on my hard drive. But finishing that project taught me the most important lesson: simply getting through a book-length manuscript is the first step, not the last.
Since then, I’ve written another memoir that looks and feels completely different from the first. Parts of that early draft were salvageable, and I wove them into the new book, but the real growth came from everything I learned in between. Years of reading, writing, and teaching shaped the way I think about memoir. When I teach memoir workshops, I hear the same questions again and again: How do you start? What’s the right way to structure it? What makes a story worth telling?
The truth is, there isn’t a single formula. But there are a few things I’ve learned that I always pass on to my students.
Become an Expert in the Genre
When I set out to write my first manuscript, I wasn’t reading enough memoirs—and it showed. I didn’t yet understand how much of the craft seeps into you simply by paying attention to how others have done it. If you’re beginning your own memoir journey, reading isn’t optional. It’s your apprenticeship.
Read widely. Read books you admire and books you don’t. Read memoirs that mirror your subject matter and ones that feel completely unrelated. Each will teach you something. Maybe you’re a chef writing about your years in the kitchen. Reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential or Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter will show you how food writing can be about much more than recipes—it’s about the chaos of a line cook’s life, the scars and triumphs, and the strange beauty of obsession. But don’t stop there. Pick up Tara Westover’s Educated or Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime—books that have nothing to do with kitchens but everything to do with survival, identity, and voice. You’ll start to see how the shape of a story emerges not from subject matter but from perspective and storytelling choices.
The same goes for writers leaning into self-help–styled memoir. If your story is about overcoming trauma, read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or Glennon Doyle’s Untamed for examples of how deeply personal stories can also serve as guideposts for readers. Then contrast that with a traditional autobiography that simply lays out facts—you’ll immediately notice how much more powerful it is when the writer leaves space for readers to see themselves in the journey.
As you read, pay close attention. Notice how pacing changes in different sections. Study what gets left out, because omission is as important as inclusion. Mark where the voice feels alive versus where it falls flat. You’ll quickly realize there’s no single way to tell your story. That’s the lesson my grandmother’s stories gave me: freedom. She never told our family history the same way twice—sometimes lingering on a detail, sometimes brushing past it—but always in a way that revealed her truth.
Reading deeply in the genre will do the same for you. It will show you not just how to tell a story, but how to tell it your way.
Define the Container for Your Memoir
One of the biggest hurdles for new writers is understanding the difference between autobiography and memoir. An autobiography attempts to capture the entire sweep of a life, while a memoir zooms in on a slice of it. Memoir is about focus. It’s the restaurant’s signature dish, not the whole menu.
Think of your memoir as needing a container—something with edges and boundaries. That container might be a single season of life, like Anthony Bourdain’s early years on the line in Kitchen Confidential. It might be a transformative journey, like Cheryl Strayed’s months on the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild. Or it could be a recurring theme that ties different periods together, such as addiction, faith, or family secrets. The point is: your story becomes stronger when you give it shape.
For example, if you’re a chef writing a memoir, you could choose the container of your apprenticeship years in a grueling French kitchen, focusing on how that fire forged your identity as both a cook and a person. That book wouldn’t need to cover your childhood in detail or your later television fame—those fall outside the container. In a self-help–styled memoir, the container might be your battle with postpartum anxiety, framed as both a personal journey and a roadmap for readers who need hope. You wouldn’t need to include every struggle you’ve ever faced—only the ones that illuminate the lessons tied to that container.
Choosing a container also gives you permission to let go of good but distracting material. A mentor of mine once said: “If it doesn’t fit inside the container, it doesn’t belong in the book.” That single piece of advice can save you from wandering drafts. Just because an anecdote makes people laugh at dinner parties doesn’t mean it belongs in this manuscript. You can always save it for another project.
Memoir lasts because it’s shaped. A clearly defined container allows you to craft a story that’s memorable, intentional, and, most importantly—readable. Without it, you risk drowning your reader in details that feel endless. With it, you give them a path they can actually follow.
Explore Writing in Vignettes
When I was drafting my first memoir, I started writing memories as stand-alone essays. Each one was complete on its own, but once I had enough of them, I could piece them together to form a larger narrative. That approach gave me two important realizations: first, I didn’t need to document every single thing that happened during that period of my life; second, I could shape the book around what mattered most to the story.
Why vignettes work so well:
Manageable pieces. Writing a full-length book can feel overwhelming. Breaking it into short, contained essays made the work less intimidating and helped me actually keep moving forward.
Freedom with structure. Once I had a collection of vignettes, I could rearrange them like puzzle pieces. Nonlinear storytelling often reveals connections and echoes you wouldn’t see in a strict chronological draft.
Publishing opportunities. Because each essay was self-contained, I could submit them to journals and magazines along the way. Those publications not only built credibility, they also made pitching the full manuscript to publishers easier—proof that parts of the work had already found an audience.
Writing in vignettes taught me that memoir isn’t about including everything. It’s about crafting the most powerful version of the truth that fits inside your chosen container.
Experiment With Form
When I began drafting my first manuscript, I defaulted to straight, chronological prose. That seemed like the “proper” way to write a memoir. But the more I read—Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness—the more I realized memoir doesn’t have to follow a traditional arc. Writers have always bent and reshaped form to reflect the truths they’re telling, and sometimes the form itself is the meaning.
Take the “hermit crab essay,” a form where the story hides inside an unexpected shell: a to-do list, a recipe, even medical records. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s Tell It Slant is full of examples. Imagine a chef writing about the collapse of their restaurant as a multi-course tasting menu, each “dish” revealing a different stage of loss and resilience. Or a caregiver writing their memoir through hospital charts, where the sterile language of vitals and symptoms is pierced by the raw ache of love and grief. The form makes the experience visceral in ways straightforward narrative cannot.
Then there are fragmented or lyric approaches. In Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, hundreds of numbered prose-poem fragments orbit the color blue, grief, and desire. The form mirrors the way memory itself works: nonlinear, repetitive, searching. Or look at Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which blurs poetry, myth, and memoir. These aren’t just stylistic flourishes—they’re vessels built to hold stories too jagged or too slippery for neat chronology.
Even popular memoirs bend form more than we think. Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things isn’t a single narrative but a collection of advice columns woven into a portrait of her life. Kiese Laymon’s Heavy shifts between second-person address and traditional first-person storytelling, a choice that forces intimacy and accountability.
Experimentation isn’t required. Many memoirs are best served by straightforward narration. But knowing what’s possible matters. It means when you’re stuck, you can try writing a memory as a letter, a set of instructions, or a prayer. You might discover the structure itself unlocks what your voice alone couldn’t reach.
Sometimes the form is the key. It shapes not just how you tell the story, but what truths you’re able to reveal.
Unearth the Larger Story Beneath the Situation
Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story reshaped how I think about memoir. Too often, beginners assume that writing memoir means laying bare private details and hoping readers will find them compelling. But memoir is not about shock value or voyeurism. The external events—the divorce, the illness, the cross-country move—are only the situation. The true power comes from the story beneath, the current that flows underneath those events.
Take Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle. On the surface, it’s the story of an unconventional, often chaotic childhood with nomadic parents. But the deeper story isn’t “look how unusual my life was”—it’s about resilience, longing, and the complicated ties of family love. That’s what makes it resonate with readers who never lived in poverty or ran from bill collectors.
Or consider Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. The situation is a young neurosurgeon facing terminal lung cancer. The deeper story is his reckoning with purpose, mortality, and the question of what makes life meaningful. You don’t need to be a doctor—or dying—to feel the weight of those truths.
This is crucial for any writer, whether you’re a chef writing about your career or someone crafting a self-help–styled narrative. A chef could frame their memoir not just around the chaos of the kitchen (the situation) but around the story beneath it: the search for belonging in the brigade, the hunger for perfection, or the way food becomes a language of love. In self-help memoirs like Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass, the situations—financial struggles, career pivots, heartbreaks—matter less than the story beneath them: self-belief, transformation, and agency.
As writers, our job is to listen closely to what our own stories are really about. The event is the entry point, but the deeper narrative—the universal truth of identity, love, fear, survival, or transformation—is what invites readers to stay. Once you find that thread, pull on it. Follow it. That’s where your memoir stops being a personal account and becomes a story that belongs to everyone.
Breaking Down Barriers
When I share these points in class, I see students visibly exhale. Many come in feeling paralyzed, worried about telling too much, stuck on the idea of writing a whole book, or convinced their story is too small. Once they understand that they don’t have to write chronologically, that they don’t have to tell everything, and that the story’s power lies in the universal themes rather than the raw events, the process loosens up. The fear quiets down. They start to write with more freedom.
That’s exactly how my own books finally found traction. Playing with form and digging into the story beneath the surface gave me a way forward. And every time I teach it, I watch those same tools help someone else find theirs.
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