Why write a memoir?

We don’t remember our lives as stories, but in fragments. Over time memory becomes incomplete. Scenes without order or emotions without context. A memoir tames those fragments and forms them into something that can be understood narratively:

To Craft a Narrative 

Memoirs differ from biographies in that they are not intended to recount the entirety of a life, but to shape one's memory into a narrative thread. A memoir is rememory, not just a recount. It has a central conflict like a novel: ambition, perseverance, grief, love etc. Not everything you remember is useful in a memoir. But when pertinent memories are gathered like loose threads and woven into a single narrative, meaning begins to emerge. Both narrative and meaning emerge from patterns, which you discover through writing down your past. When you take the time to recount your life, you will inevitably understand the story you have been living. 

To Order the Past

The devil’s in the details but the details are what escape our memory first. When someone would ask me about my childhood I would tell them I don’t remember much and recount my earliest memory of being a toddler eating a worm in the grass of an apartment complex in Columbus, OH. But recently I began writing down everything I could remember and forgotten memories started to resurface. Some in vivid detail, both good and bad. But writing your memories can give you clarity on them, or people, or places. I’ve reread the memories I've written down and had new meaningful revelations that have informed on how I see others. And the past on paper gives a new vantage point. Maybe you misremembered a key detail in the narrative of your memory that changes your perception of it. Or a fragmented memory can turn into a day dream. Regardless, writing down a memory gives it form and permanence. And one day your memories could stop emerging. Memories fade but narrative does not. 

To Be Preserved

“Manuscripts don't burn" – The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Manuscripts stay on bookshelves and in the memory of those who read them. In 1930 Mikhail Bulgakov, who lived in Stalinist Moscow, was forced to memorize his manuscripts and burn them or be caught with his anti-soviet writings. Years later he rewrote what he had to burn, but in secret. He knew that if he could write a good enough narrative it would remain in the minds of those who read it. And sure enough, his most notable work, The Master and Margarita, was published thirty years after his death. Writing a memoir will keep your memory alive after death, and if it’s a narrative that someone relates to or finds useful, it will live on with them. 

A memoir is much more than retelling your life, its form, interpretation, discovery and meaning. You may have forgotten much of your past already, but even more a reason to start writing your memoir now. Once written it’s no longer subject to being forgotten.

Write Now can help bring your memoir into reality through careful editing, design, and guidance, so that what you have lived can be held in a professional form that lasts. Click the button below for more information:

Learn more