How To Structure a Memoir

Before you can start writing a memoir, you need to know how that differs from an autobiography. They're both very similar, but they're usually designed to do different jobs.

An autobiography is typically written in later life, after becoming very successful, or both. It's a chronological list of things that happened in the writer's life: birth, school, relationships, career. It’s popular among celebrities such as TV presenters, footballers and comedians, a kind of “this is your life” written by or ghostwritten for the person who lived that life.  Autobiographies don’t typically have a message or a theme beyond “here’s how I got from there to here."

Memoirs are technically autobiographies too, but they're a little different. They’re more reflective, more emotional, and more focused. They don’t usually attempt to describe someone’s entire life; just one part of it, whether that’s one story, one time period or one specific theme.

Find your focus

A memoir tells a story or has a message. What’s yours? The story I wanted to tell is what it’s like to come out late in life and why it took me so long. I could easily write a completely different memoir about a different theme, such as living with undiagnosed ADHD or trying to be a rock star. And who knows, I may write another memoir in the future that starts where my current memoir ends.

Don’t begin at the beginning

Unless the circumstances of your birth are a key part of the story, your memoir probably shouldn’t start at the beginning of your life: it should start at the beginning of the story. That could be when you were at school, when you fell in love with your soulmate or when you discovered that your uncle was a serial killer. My memoir starts with a spoiler: I’m trans and I've just thrown a grenade into the perfect life.

Starting at the end, or near the end, is a technique that goes back to the Ancient Greek poet Horace. It’s called In Medias Res (In the midst of things). You’ll see it everywhere. For example it’s used brilliantly at the beginning of one of my favourite films, Megamind: the film opens with the main character falling from what is clearly a fatal height as Will Ferrell’s voiceover says: “Here's my day so far: went to jail, lost the girl of my dreams, and got my butt kicked pretty good. Still, things could be a lot worse. Oh, that's right. I'm falling to my death. Guess they can't. How did it all come to this, you ask?” 

That film actually contradicts the “don’t start at the beginning” rule, because Megamind’s story does start when he arrived on Earth. However, unlike me and probably you too, he was a blue-skinned alien so he gets a free pass on that one.

Have fun with the structure

There's nothing wrong with telling a story in the order that it happened, using the past tense and telling it in the first person ("Everybody in the room thought I was amazing" or "I threw the turnip at his stupid face"). But that's not your only option. You can have fun mixing it up, for example by doing what I did and zooming backwards and forwards in time or going off on tangents, or by telling it in the present tense and second person ("Everybody in the room thinks you are amazing" or "You throw the turnip at his stupid face") like Kirsty Logan does so brilliantly in her parenting memoir The Unfamiliar. In Kirsty's case the style makes the memoir almost painfully intimate, which is the point. In mine, mixing up timelines and going on tangents means I can draw the sting from the sadder bits or make some connections more obvious. 

You can also mess around with the content. Some memoirs mix true stories and fiction – for example by inventing another character to talk to the author, or by describing fantastical events that don't exist outside the author's head. And some use what's called an unreliable narrator to make a memoir where some bits are true, some bits are not and the reader has to try and guess which is which. That's very hard to do well.

Some narrators turn out to be so unreliable that the book is really just fiction, such as James Frey's addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces. That started off as a novel but nobody would buy it, so Frey said it was a memoir instead. He ended up on Oprah and on the bestseller lists before his exaggerations – such as claiming he'd been in jail for 87 days when in fact he'd only been in for a couple of hours – were discovered. So if you're going to exaggerate, make sure you've covered your tracks.

Remember that people will read it

I know that's the whole idea. But when you're writing you don't really think about your memoir as a book that your friends, your family members, the people you went to school with, your arch-nemesis and the odd pop star might read. I didn't think about how open I'd been about some very personal stuff until I saw friends posting photos of the book cover on Instagram, at which point I got the fear. 
It's worth keeping that in mind. Are you sure you want them to know everything about that? Are you sure you're sure? Because once it's printed, you can't unprint it. And once they've read it, they can't unread it.
And that ties in with the next point:

Don't make unnecessary enemies...

If your story includes other people, you need to have a serious think about how you're going to include them and how they might react to that. That's really hard to predict, so for example I'm now dead to somebody I thought I was pretty reasonable about in my book. Other authors have found themselves on the wrong end of a libel suit. Even something as simple as forgetting to name a particular pal in your acknowledgements can lead to some pretty awkward moments. 

...but be your own worst enemy

If you’re doing memoir, you need to be your own toughest critic and be ruthless in your focus: if it’s not relevant to the story it shouldn’t be in the book. Keep asking the question: how does this move the story along? If the answer is “it doesn’t”, then chop it – but don’t delete it. Just because the scene doesn't fit doesn't mean your words aren't good words. They might just be the wrong words for this particular book at this particular time.
 

Carrie Marshall is a freelance writer, copywriter, broadcaster, podcaster and songwriter from Glasgow in Scotland. She's been a professional writer for 25 years and writes features, news stories, columns, web copy, brochures, advertorials, press releases, profiles, tutorials, reviews, scripts, blogs and books. Her debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category. Carrie is a transgender woman and her pronouns are she/her.

Get your copy of Carrie Kills A Man