Finding the Meaning in Your Memoir
Imagine you’re an author who’s being introduced as a guest on CNN. The host begins your introduction by saying, “You may have never heard of our next guest, but they’ve lived a fascinating life. You can read this incredible story in their new memoir. I want to begin by asking: what’s your book about?”
Your answer shouldn’t be a rambling list of all the interesting, tragic, funny, exciting, heartbreaking stories you’ve written about. No — the imaginary interviewer’s question is teeing you up to share the message of your book.
That’s because a memoir with a well-defined message is powerful, engaging, and a sales driver. I recently explained the many reasons why your memoir needs a message; now, I’ll show how to find the message in your memoir and weave it into your story — all while staying true to the memoir as a genre. Using these techniques, you'll be well on your way to ensuring your book leaves a lasting impact on your readers.
First, you need to uncover what your message is.
What Does a Message Look Like?
In her memoir Four Funerals and a Wedding, Jill Smolowe describes a 17- month period where she loses her husband, her sister, her mother, and mother-in-law. The author describes the message she wanted to communicate as, “an understanding of why the cultural script surrounding grief is limiting, misleading and often an impediment to healing.”
The review of Smolowe’s memoir by Publisher’s Weekly tells us exactly who this message reaches: “An absolute must-read for people struggling with loss.” We don’t normally think of memoir readers as people with problems who are looking for solutions. But, unless you’re a celebrity with millions of Twitter followers, your writing needs to address a specific audience who’s clearly interested in what your story means. Her book is proof that savvy memoirists can thread the needle of sharing a powerful message while still staying clearly within the confines of the memoir genre.
To discern your message, start by thinking of a problem your writing solves for a specific kind of potential reader.
Find Your Message by Getting it All Down
Jill Smolowe is no amateur writer. This is her second memoir and she worked for over 30 years as a journalist writing for Time, Newsweek, and People magazines. A pro like Jill probably knew what her message was before she typed a single word. But most first-time authors struggle to figure out their message. As a book coach and a ghostwriter, I’ve learned that many novice memoirists need to write out all their stories first. Then, reviewing that initial draft, they can look at the bigger picture and decide what the overarching message of their memoir is, what kind of person will read their book, and then address that unique audience in the rewrite.
Remember to anchor your message from your personal perspective. What did you learn, feel, or discover from your experiences? Is there a recurring theme or consistent thread that runs through the key moments you’re sharing? Does the same lesson keep cropping up? What kind of person were you when you were learning (or needed to learn) these lessons? You may be able to identify readers that resemble that version of you. Write to that audience.
The tricky part is sharing your message without becoming overly prescriptive. Readers rarely like to be preached to or ranted at by authors. Readers also tend to resist accepting a message — no matter how well intentioned — when it’s presented as a cure-all solution. So, let’s look at techniques for conveying your message without proselytizing.
Show Don’t Tell
If you’ve done any research on how to improve your writing, you probably came across this tip. But it applies especially well to memoirs. The idea is to “show” what the message is through your storytelling rather than to outright “tell” the reader the point you’re trying to make.
I have a client who is a lawyer and a single mother. She went through law school while raising two young children on her own. Her target audience is young women in corporate professions who feel like they have to decide between having a career or having a family. The message is that you can do both — and you don’t have to wait until your career is well established and your biological clock is ticking away. I’ve encouraged her to show, rather than tell, how she juggled those two herculean responsibilities at the same time. So, my client wrote a story about taking her final exams alone, in a separate room, while breast feeding her youngest child under the stern gaze of a female exam proctor. The message jumps right off the page: “If I could do it then so can you!”
Jill Smolowe used her experience as a journalist to choose stories that would “show” the reader what worked for her while coping with a tidal wave of emotions. “While writing, I kept my lens trained firmly on what exactly got me through so much illness, loss and grief. If an anecdote served my purpose, I used it. If not, I cut it, no matter how poignant.”
As long as you stick to your story, you won’t risk colouring outside the lines of the memoir genre. But we have to be honest about our writing abilities. Showing a message through stories alone is not always easy. Sometimes we have no choice but to directly “tell” our readers exactly what we learned from the life we’ve lived. The key is to make the “telling” as gentle as possible to preserve the feel and style of a memoir.
Use Hindsight as Your Superpower
Memoirs and autobiographies are often about evolution more than resolution. Unlike a novel, you can’t always tie everything up with a neat literary bow when the story is finished. Rather than a big dramatic shift where all the pieces suddenly come together in fiction, real existence is often more of a steady, incremental improvement. To create a sense of concrete resolution, memoirists sometimes put too much focus on what they learned and then try to convince the reader to make changes based on the author’s experience. But doing this puts you perilously close to making advice, rather than narrative, the focus of your book.
For example, in your memoir you might write about losing a relationship because you simply could not stop drinking or gambling. There’s not always a happy Hollywood ending for memoirs. The slow, incremental evolution often lacks the resolution a reader craves from a story. But what you can do is look back in hindsight and write something like this, “After years of therapy I realized, I had such low self-esteem that I would never have stayed married to Jane. At the deepest level of my psyche, I didn’t think I deserved her, or anyone like her. Drinking was how I numbed the pain of being abandoned by my mother; until I dealt with that gut-wrenching rejection, I would never be in a happy long-term relationship.”
Using hindsight as a superpower accomplishes several goals. You give the reader a sense of resolution from your realization. You also share your message in a clear, encapsulated way. But, most importantly, you reveal your message without clobbering the reader over the head. It feels more “story-like” to share the insight this way, as a kind of acceptance that was hard earned in the journey of life, rather than a prescriptive step the reader has to take.
One of the benefits of writing a memoir is that you now know what would have helped you in the past. Use that wisdom — but do so sparingly. If you’ve been doing a decent job at showing, rather than telling, then the reader will have almost arrived at the same realization you’re pointing them toward. You just need to confirm what they are probably figuring out on their own. So, spell it out. State the message clearly with your superpower of hindsight. But stop short of proselytizing or offering obvious solutions to the readers’ problems. Let them connect the dots from your storytelling and hindsight.
Let Other Characters Carry Your Message
When it comes to messaging in a memoir, the biggest danger is turning your work into a polemic — especially if you’re prone to ranting. Many of our clients have lived difficult and extraordinary lives, so they often feel passionately about what they have learned. But in aiming to express their lessons, their first draft often loses a memoir’s narrative thread. If you have a lot of prescriptive messaging to share, you might want to consider the pros and cons of switching to a genre like a leadership or self-help book. Thankfully, there is a device for being more direct in your message delivery while still keeping within the confines of the memoir genre.
I’m ghostwriting a memoir for a criminal lawyer who has lived a life of tragedy and redemption. The one thing that sustained him through forty plus years of challenge is writing in a journal every day. His main message is that journaling essentially saved his life and it could save the readers’ lives too. Over four decades of journaling, he’s developed some unique methods for diarizing his life, and he wants to share those tips without straying into self-help territory.
Luckily for my client, he has become a kind of mentor to a younger lawyer. They often talk about the benefits of journaling to cope with the stress of their profession. As his ghostwriter, I can use stories of the interactions between my client and his protégé to communicate his prescriptive messaging on journal writing.
You can also flip the relationship if you, the author, had a mentor, friend, coach, or teacher that imparted (or at least tried to impart) lessons about life. You may have completely disregarded their advice at the time and so not considered including those stories in your book. But if there was a real person who tried to guide you, their attempts to point you in the right direction may be the perfect vehicle to “show” the reader what the message from your life might be. You can recreate scenes and dialogue from your past where the mentor tells your younger self, and therefore the reader as well, what the message is. This technique comes across as a more literary approach by having someone else do the communicating for you. Both of these methods feel very much like storytelling and gently ease the reader toward the insight the author is aiming for.
Connect with Current Events to Make Your Message Relevant
Imagine you’re writing a memoir about living in isolation for a period of time. Maybe you escaped from a cult or were shunned by your family after leaving their religion. Perhaps you moved to a new city after a breakup and didn’t have any friends. You were alone in a crowded world and struggling to find your way forward. Your memoir’s message is about the importance of relationships to mental and physical health.
You could compare what you went through during your isolation to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research now shows how damaging lockdowns were for mental health, especially for teens and elderly residents of care facilities. Now every one of us can relate to that feeling of being cut off from the world. You can compare those common but more recent experiences to what happened decades ago in your personal life. The pandemic-related research on isolation will give weight to your message and make it relevant to your readers without turning you into an overt advice giver.
These are just a few ways to identify and insert messaging into your memoir while staying true to your story. I also recommend reading lots of memoirs and autobiographies with a keen eye to the author’s methodology on messaging.
Unlike Jill Smolowe, most memoirists will only write one book. So, make it matter with a message that will reach a very specific audience. These techniques will help you share the lessons you learned in life while still maintaining the magic of a tale well told!
Steve Donahue is a bestselling author, book coach, ghostwriter and speaker. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated into multiple foreign editions. Steve is the founder of Storyglu.com, a book coaching and ghostwriting firm that helps nonfiction authors write books readers can’t put down.