A STARTER KIT FOR WRITING MEMOIR
“A memoir is an invitation into another person’s privacy.”
—ISABEL ALLENDE
“My first tip is don’t think how best to sell your memoir but how best to write it. Write the best book you can, the book that you long to pull down from a shelf and read. Assuming you long to read it, others – including agents and editors – will feel likewise.”
—PETER SELGIN
TOP FOUR MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT WRITING A SALABLE MEMOIR
1 A memoir needs to start in childhood.
Sorry, are you writing an autobiography? If so, you’re right – you should tell us all about your childhood, your middle-grade years, your high school experience, etc. But unless you’re famous – and we mean really famous – your odds of selling an autobiography are about as good as you selling an illustrated 700,000-word history of worm farming. (Actually, the worm farm book might have better odds.) A memoir provides valuable insight about a part of your life, and if the part where you wore diapers and scribbled on the walls with crayons isn’t relevant to your overall story, skip right to the good parts – and your wee years are very rarely the good parts, if we’re being honest.
2 A memoir is a good way to share the story of someone’s life.
A memoir is a good way to share story of your life. It can’t encompass the whole thing. It just can’t – you are large, you contain multitudes, and those multitudes cannot fit into one salable volume. Perhaps you curate stories from your adolescence and early adulthood with an alcoholic mother to explore addiction; perhaps you carefully select
