Writing Your Memoir
Module 1Situation vs. Story

Finding Your Focus

How do you turn a whole life into a book with a center?

Learn it

Memoir is not autobiography. Autobiography tries to cover a whole life and answers to the facts. Memoir takes a slice — a season, a relationship, a reckoning — and answers to a meaning. Your memoir needs to be built around one controlling preoccupation, not a complete record of your years.

Here's the tool that makes this usable. The situation is your circumstance: the divorce, the illness, the year you ran away, the difficult parent. The story is what you've come to understand through it. Two people could live the exact same situation and write completely different stories from it, because the story is your angle of understanding, not the events themselves. When a draft feels flat, it's almost always because it's all situation and no story — things happen, but nothing is being figured out.

So distrust the big, obvious version of your subject and hunt for the smaller, hotter one underneath. “My childhood” is a topic with no center. “What did it cost me to become the adult in the house before I was ten?” is a question that organizes everything. You find your focus by asking what your material means until a real question surfaces — one you actually need to answer. And narrow your span of time on purpose: a tightly bounded period, deeply rendered, carries far more than a loose march across decades.

If you're writing essaysIf you're writing personal essays rather than a single book-length memoir, the same tool drives the work. A personal essay is one complete attempt to think something through on the page — the word itself means a try. The demand is identical: an essay needs its own controlling story, not just a situation. For the form itself, read Lopate in the list below.

Read this

The Situation and the Story
Vivian Gornick
The first half, on the personal essay, where she defines the terms (FSG paperback, through ~p. 90).
What to watch forHow she separates what happened from what it meant, and the funeral that sparked the distinction for her. This is the source of the whole idea.
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr
Ch. 6, “Sacred Carnality,” and Ch. 7, “How to Choose a Detail.”
What to watch forHow physical, sensory specifics — not abstractions — are what carry truth and keep “finding the story” from floating into vagueness.
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff
The first four parts (Grove paperback, approx. pp. 3–178).
What to watch forThe opening scene — a car boiling over atop the Continental Divide as a runaway truck with failed brakes roars past and over the edge — and how it plants the book's true subject (reinvention, and the lies it breeds) before the situation has barely begun.
The Art of the Personal Essayessayists
Phillip Lopate
The Introduction.
What to watch forThe standard map of the personal essay as a form: its history, its characteristic moves, and its range from the conversational to the meditative.

Try it

Situation / story pairs
Write three “situation” sentences about your material — what it's about on the surface. Under each, force a “story” sentence: what it's really about. Then pick the pair with the most heat. Example — Situation: “The summer I worked at my uncle's failing diner.” Story: “The summer I learned that loving someone doesn't mean you can save them.” Feel how the second sentence makes the diner matter.

Ask yourself

If you deleted every event from your project and kept only the preoccupation, what would remain?
Why isn't “everything that happened to me” a memoir?

Your project

Your project
Project Proposal

Write a one-page proposal, in prose, that does four things:

  1. State the situation — what your memoir is about on the surface (a sentence or two).
  2. State the story — what it's really about, the understanding you're after (a sentence or two).
  3. Name the span of time it covers, and make it deliberately narrow. If your span is “my whole life,” cut it down until it isn't.
  4. In three or four sentences, explain why that span is enough to carry the story.
If you're writing essaysFor essayists: write this proposal for a single essay — its situation, its story, and the bounded experience it works from. Planning a collection? Also name the preoccupation the essays will share and roughly how many you envision.
0 wordstarget: about one page
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Drawer-time: set a date to stop reading this and let it cool.
Check your work

Your story sentence should name a real understanding, not just restate the events with feelings attached. Your span should be genuinely narrow and you should be able to say why. And you should already sense a question your book needs to answer. If your story just echoes your situation, push it one level deeper: what did the experience cost you, or teach you?