Types of Life Stories: Structuring Your Memoir
“Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.”
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Many people want to write their memoirs. Memoirs help us make sense of our experiences and connect us in our humanity. Writers often find relief, closure, and renewed insights when they write about their lives. Readers gain companionship, understanding, and inspiration.
If you’re wondering how you should go about your memoir, you may first choose a structure that’s best for conveying your particular story. Below is a basic list of the current trends in memoir writing. This is a basic list, and more categories are being “invented” every time a writer does something a little different. The bottom line is to make sure your readers can follow along in your journey without getting confused.
Types of Life Stories
Legacy Memoir/Autobiography: Autobiographies are often written by celebrities or someone in the public eye, such as a politician. The author covers their life from birth to the present. If you’d like to tell your life story, and your main audience is your own family (and you’re not famous), then a family legacy is what you’re going for. There are many legacy book companies that will interview you and put together your life story along with a select number of photographs or other memorabilia as desired. Of course, if you’re a writer, you can save money and do this yourself. Self-publishing will be easy since you’re just planning to print a few copies for your loved ones.
Classic Memoir: Rather than covering your whole life in chronological order as an autobiography or family legacy does, a memoir focuses on a particular theme, which might be more appealing to a broader audience (especially if you’re not famous). A popular example is Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. The theme is Strayed’s journey along the 1,100-mile-long Pacific Crest Trail, which becomes her catalyst for overcoming challenges and starting a new life. While she walks, she has flashbacks and remembrances of what motivated her to hike in the first place, alone, without any previous outdoor experience. While memoirs do often cover a person’s whole life, they do so with more of an overview, and it’s not necessarily in chronological order. The theme is what pulls the narrative together.
Memoir-in-Essays: People used to say essays never get published—a classic example of a rule meant to be broken. Essays might be a harder sell, but many writers have turned their essays into popular blogs, which they later compiled into a book. Now comes the memoir-essay hybrid. A great example is Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. He interrupts his life story with short essay chapters on the reality of life in South Africa. These interesting historical, political, and societal facts are not about him specifically but obviously influenced his life a great deal. There’s still a theme pulling it all together—his mother. Writing a memoir in essays is doable so long as the essays are meaningful and the reader can connect the dots.
Hybrid Memoir: A hybrid memoir is part memoir and part nonfiction book. The author incorporates facts, research, and/or how-to sections along with their life story. A great example is A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Bryson hilariously recounts his unsuccessful attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail with his inept friend Stephen Katz. Along the way, Bryson incorporates an incredible amount of research about the trail, how trees live, the history of strange towns along the trail, people he met or learned of, and other tidbits on sociology, ecology, and conservation. This style is especially appealing to publishers, because memoirs can be a hard sell to a wider audience (since so many people write them). If you can use your life experiences to support a self-help topic or a call-to-action, readers basically get two books in one, which makes both aspects more engaging.
If you don’t know which style your memoir should be or which direction you want to go in, that’s okay. Sometimes the journey reveals the destination—which happens a lot when the journey is writing.
Enjoy the process!
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