No one elected me the boss of memoir. I speak for no one but myself. Every writer worth her salt is sui generis. Memoirists’ methods—with regard to handling actual events, memory, research, dealing with family and other subjects, legal whatnot, voice, etc.—differ from mine as widely as their lives do. Where I’ve learned from others, I add it. But this is no compendium of popular approaches to the form.
Also, there’s a place in hell for writers who quote themselves and a few times, I am forced to recap adventures reported elsewhere. If I didn’t have to pay out the wazoo to quote from better books than my own, I’d have way more Nabokov in here. An appendix at the back cites great memoirs. A concerted study of those will no doubt pay off for you as it did for me. Maybe the methods I use to parse books will help you fall in love with those masterpieces.
Special thanks to masters of various nonfiction forms I interviewed for this book: Philip Gourevitch, Kathryn Harrison, Michael Herr, Jon Krakauer, Larissa MacFarquhar, Jerry Stahl, Gary Shteyngart, Cheryl Strayed, Geoffrey Wolff. Over the decades, conversations with others have schooled me: Martin Amis, Maya Angelou, Fr. Edward Beck, Bill Buford, Robert Caro, Frank Conroy, Rodney Crowell, Mark Doty, Dave Eggers, Lucy Grealy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Phil Jackson, Fr. James Martin, SJ, Peter Matthiessen, James McBride, Frank McCourt, Carolyn See, Lisa See, John Edgar Wideman, Tobias Wolff, Koren Zailckas. Dmitri Nabokov informed my thinking about his father’s memoir.
Finally, much of what I say may well apply to writing novels or poems or love letters or bank applications or parole board pleas—in short, any kind of scribbling. But since it’s memoir they’ve paid me for, I’ll stick to it.