On Writing a Memoir

Introducing 'The Midlife Shift'

“The memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life…”

—William Zinsser

Good memoirs are hard to write.

The truth is I’m not a celebrity. Who would want a window to my dull life littered with failures?

I started writing this memoir seven years ago while pursuing my MFA in 2017. Although I stopped and started many times, I did finish it, not without the help and support of many people, most notably my writing coach.

Thank you,

Julie Artz

The most important thing was not just finishing it but that I wrote simply and honestly, not caring what people would make of my life.

The initial feedback that I’m getting is that people resonate with my rawness and vulnerability.

Why Memoir and Not Self-Help

My last book, The Shift, was purely Self-Help. However, after being inspired by so many memoirs, I felt that people would resonate if I stopped telling readers what to do and instead shared my own life, experiences, and stories, precisely how they happened.

I decided: I’m a memoirist—not a self-help guru.

These days, we are inundated with self-help material in the form of seminars, viral blog posts, New York Times Best Sellers, and YouTube shorts, all of it telling us what to do and how to do it.

However, all that “how-to” content doesn’t compel us (the readers) to make significant change. Maybe we get inspired for a few hours or days—but then that video or lecture or book fades away to make space for newer and more interesting information.

Don’t get me wrong, self-help books, podcasts and seminars are an excellent place to start, but after a while they lose their effect and diminish in value.

Inspiration without action becomes a frustrating exercise in futility.

In today’s personal development world, information flows incessantly. This week it is affirmations. Next week it’s how to “let go.” And then there’s the infamous “law of attraction,” always the centre of some seminar, book, or show.

It’s hard to know where to look and who to trust.

However, this all changes when the information we take in becomes charged with emotions; our odds of getting into action rise dramatically. When we—as bloggers, writers, or even motivational speakers—share our personal experiences, we help others to viscerally relate to our material. In effect, we become memoirists: “I’m telling you what I did. See if it helps or works for you.”

In sharing ourselves and our experiences through the craft of memoir, we replicate the age-old tradition of storytelling. Here, emotionally compelling tales are handed down from generation to generation. These stories allow us to connect dots and grasp the lessons that relate to us.

Scientific research confirms that reading others’ stories and empathizing with them raises our levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin.

In writing terminology, “other people’s stories” means memoir.

A memoir, as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a narrative composed from personal experience.” It is also “an account of something noteworthy.” A memoir differs from autobiography in that it usually covers one specific aspect of the writer’s life, while an autobiography focuses on the chronology of the writer’s entire life.

We can trace the origins of the memoir back to 371 A.D., when St. Augustine wrote his “Confessions.” In trying to understand the misdemeanours of his youth, he wrote honestly and explicitly. His vulnerability had an enormous impact on the history of Christianity. Through his words, multitudes of people realised that we humans can be fallible, but that we can always change our ways and seek redemption.

Only in the last 50 years, however, has the memoir genre exploded into our literary world. It’s not so far-fetched to foresee it soon overtaking the self-help franchise in popularity.

The process of a memoir is itself significant; by unravelling their stories, memoirists give the reader the power to unravel his or her own. The reader may not have lived the same precise details as the memoirist, but we all share common threads and themes.

For instance, in sharing how he or she became aware of past traumas and dealt with them, the memoirist gives hope to the reader. The memoirist tells the reader, “I’ve been through pain, but I’ve survived. There’s hope for you too.”

In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr further explains this function of generating hope. She writes:

“When I asked a class of undergrads what they liked about memoir, I heard them echo the no-doubt-naive sentiment that they drew hope from the mere fact of a writer living past a bad juncture to report on it. “It’s a miracle he even survived!” was written on many papers. The telling has some magic power for them, as it does for me. “Tell it,” the soldiers in Vietnam begged Michael Herr, and in Dispatches, he told it.”

In reading the stories of our fellow human beings, we discover empathy for their lives. We see how they lived and understand why they reacted to specific circumstances in certain ways. The sharing of pain and the communal, “tribal” healing that follows binds us human beings to one another in a distinctly positive way.

The famous memoirist Tobias Wolff had a particularly difficult childhood. A lack of real parenting and support left a lasting imprint on his future self. However, in writing his memoir, This Boy’s Life, Wolff not only recalled the memories that defined who and what he had become, but also extinguished their paralysing effect on him by translating memory into words.

After reading his memoir, I understood why he decided to join the army (and many other things). It gave him the authority and self-possession he lacked. This decision ultimately led to his success as one of the best American writers.

In Out of Africa, Karen Blixen uses her pen name Isak Dinesen to write a memoir about her years as a farm owner in the Ngong foothills outside Nairobi, in what is now Kenya, East Africa. What I find most interesting about her story is that she seems less interested in facts, figures, dates, history, or politics, and instead focuses on her relationship with a male-dominated colonial settlement in East Africa.

I saw a different Africa, probably a more authentic one, than the Africa I live in today. Her viewpoint expanded my perspective, even though it was written almost 100 years ago.

In When Breath Becomes Air, brilliant neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36. However, this book doesn’t just detail the facts of his cancer, but rather proffers a more profound look at life and death.

The way Kalanithi approaches death with courage, dignity and grace—and the skill with which his experience is translated to the page—left me questioning my own sense of mortality.

The Midlife Shift

We can only share information we’ve owned—knowledge that has arisen from or worked in our lives. We can only preach the lessons we’ve learned and the changes we’ve made.

We are all interconnected. Writers and readers. We need to dig into our own experience—and one another’s—to reconnect over and over again.

When we do (through reading and writing memoirs, for instance), we acknowledge our shared humanity. We give away parts of ourselves. We say, “I get you,” “I can see where you’re coming from” or, “I feel you.”

When we charge information with emotions, we become ready to change—in a way that is uniquely us.

In my memoir, I’ve admitted that I’ve often failed. I’ve also accepted that I’m not in total control of my future. I’m only on a path that feels right, even if I’m unsure of the destination.

There was no Hollywood moment where I was transformed into a superhero. Instead, it’s been a long grind of one step forward and two steps back.

To put on paper that acceptance and understand it was freeing for me.

I hope you read my book, which is coming out on Amazon this Tuesday, 12th November, and that you will allow a few sentences to touch your heart.

Thank you.