… and I lived happily ever after.
If only writing the end of your memoir was that easy! But life doesn’t always resolve neatly. What if you didn’t make it to the top of the mountain or your child is still an addict? Writing about loss? Chances are your person is still dead. How can your ending still satisfy readers—while leaving an opening for your next book?
Memoir already lacks suspense. While novelists can tease out tension by suggesting a character might not make it, readers already know you survived—you wrote a book about it. Novelists can work out their relationship problems, imagining the closure they’d like to have or forgiving characters inspired by people the writer can’t forgive in real life. But memoirists must stick to the truth, and if the truth doesn’t have a big dramatic payoff, we’re still stuck with it.
While many memoirs don’t have happy endings per se, we can still show ourselves making a choice or taking an action with a positive outcome, and a little of the hopeful aftermath. The most satisfying memoirs end with a sense of resolution, but also suggest the writer’s future as they live past the end of this particular dramatic arc.
If you’ve been stuck writing—or
