Writing a Memoir

By Sharon May

Is it egotistical to write a memoir when I’ve done nothing to be famous for or nothing of importance for the world? I suppose it is. But all writers are egotistical in a way. We believe we have something important to say and can say it in a unique fashion.

Let’s be clear. I am not writing an autobiography. To me, that means the record of someone’s life from birth to the point of writing the autobiography in order to reveal something about himself or herself that the world should know in order to understand that person’s life and accomplishments. Famous and infamous people write autobiographies.

Dictionary.com defines a memoir as “a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.” The memoir reveals the writer’s personal life but not all of his or her life, only those in the context of an event or series of events. These events reveal the universal struggles of humans through the personal struggles of the writer.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking focuses on the death of her husband but is about loss and one’s reaction to it. In Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Stryon brings to light the struggles of depression and the road to recovery. Appalachian writer Lee Smith’s Dimestore: A Writer’s Life focuses on loss with the death of her son, Josh, who suffered from mental illness but died because of the medication he took, and with her struggles as a writer. 

So what do I hope to achieve in my memoir? A better understanding of growing up Appalachian, the despair of mental illness and challenges of finding the medications that control the disease, the despair of an unwanted pregnancy and the process of having an abortion, the power of family relationships that forever bind me to Appalachia. That may be a lot to introduce, but these events are so closely related that one cannot be fully understood without the others.

Until my mother has passed on, the memoir will be unpublished though I may try to have shorter pieces published. My mother has requested I not reveal the details surrounding my birth until she has died. I respect or fear my mother enough to keep that promise. In the meantime, I will share my memoir in workshop and among friends so that I may improve my craft.

We have all heard people who do not write say “I should write a book about my life.” We writers usually scoff at their pronouncement. I usually don’t scoff, but I do encourage them to find a writer to help them capture their story because I believe most people have a memoir in them even though they may be thinking of an autobiography.

What would your memoir reveal about you?  What universal truths would we find in your story?