The Memoir Playbook I Wish More Writers Knew

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Today’s post is by Jacqueline Salmon, a ghostwriter and editor who has collaborated with authors on memoirs spanning personal trauma, family, politics, and military service.

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After 30 years in ghostwriting and editing, I can tell you this: plenty of aspiring memoirists underestimate the craft. Here are three truths I’ve learned from the authors (traditionally, independent, and hybrid published) I’ve worked with, as well as from decades analyzing the form.

Because one of the best ways to learn memoir is to study writers who actually pulled it off.

1. Pick a theme.

When I gently suggest to memoirists finishing their first drafts that they settle on a theme or focus on a time period, I often hear: “But my life story is interesting.”

Publishers—large and small—respond with: Interesting to whom? And to enough people to make the book profitable?

Frankly, unless it’s your mother, nobody wants to hear your life story starting with your birth and grinding through to the present (the reason so much political memoir induces reader’s coma).

Which leads to an actually useful writing cliche: An autobiography is the story of your life. A memoir is a story from your life.

Debbie Friedman, author of Guarded: Women, Water, and Saving Lives, understood that distinction. In her salty, sometimes raunchy, tale of her pioneering career as one of California’s first female ocean lifeguards, she focuses specifically on the 1970s and 1980s, when she first aspired to be a lifeguard, through her years on the job. No mention of her life afterward. Not because it wasn’t interesting, but because it wasn’t the story this memoir set out to tell.

Similarly, in Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s Operation Dark Heart, a New York Times bestselling memoir, the focus was on the pivotal period of his service as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. In our initial draft, Shaffer and I had included several chapters on his early years, which I thought cast light on his later choices. But St. Martin’s Press editor Peter Joseph wisely sliced out the back story to keep the narrative tightly centered on the high-stakes period at the center of the book.

Other memoir structures are just as effective.

When I worked with former CIA officer and U.S. Rep. Will Hurd on American Reboot: An Idealist’s Guide to Getting Big Things Done, we organized his memoir around his five prescriptions for America, using personal stories to bring each one to life. In the chapter on the broken US health care system, for example, Hurd highlighted his parents’ experiences navigating it as his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease took hold.

A more intricate structure is What My Bones Know, a memoir about complex trauma, where Stephanie Foo brings readers along on her journey as she unravels her baffling condition. She weaves in her interviews with scientists and psychologists, experiences with innovative therapies, while moving the narrative around in time.

Particularly for family memoir, an epistolary approach can work. I’m working with a family on a memoir of their grandmother that features dozens of letters she wrote home as a college student in France in the 1920s, along with her later writings about childhood and her work as an antiwar activist. Included is her account of being carried out of a US senator’s office when she was in her seventies while protesting the Vietnam War.

2. Interview like a journalist.

Foo is a journalist, so interviewing came naturally. But even writers with no background can learn. For Guarded, Friedman conducted more than 100 interviews and conversations.

Yes, triple figures.

Extensive interviewing is not unusual in memoir work. Honestly, I’m not sure how you write a strong memoir without talking to other people. It adds depth and structure, fills in gaps, and jogs memory.

For Will Hurd’s American Reboot, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews with people around him, including staff, relatives, and close friends.

When you’re interviewing, dig deep for details: “What color dress was mom wearing that day?” “Which brand of cigarettes did dad smoke?” “What was the weather like during the baseball game?”

For a profile in her memoir on Joyce Hoffman, the first California woman ocean lifeguard, Friedman tracked down the 90-year-old women who had sewn Joyce’s first lifeguard patch on her bathing suit—a surprisingly poignant moment.

But sometimes these are difficult conversations. You may stumble across old wounds, buried conflicts, even past traumas. Keep going. They often provide the best material.

For Tim Wendel’s memoir, Cancer Crossings, he interviewed family members about how the family healed after his younger brother’s death from childhood leukemia. It entailed excruciating talks with his parents about his brother’s final days in 1973. Tim spoke with them over several sessions. Those were the hardest conversations of his life, he said.

If your story involves abuse, choose conversations carefully so you don’t push yourself past your limits or compromise your safety. At the same time, other perspectives on traumatic events can add depth and emotional resonance to the story. In one book I collaborated on, the author chose to interview the relative who had physically abused him. That tactic is very much the exception, and for most people, not realistic.

What if memories conflict? Your buddy is convinced you landed a salmon on that summer 1999 fishing trip; you remember a tuna. Hooray! Now you’re really into memoir-writing because memory is messy and subjective. Fortunately, there are established ways to handle it on the page. Mary Karr elegantly embeds her acknowledgments of conflicting memories into the narrative of her mordantly funny memoir The Liars’ Club: “Lecia says I misremember one specific night … I can see it like yesterday’s breakfast, but Lecia claims it never happened.” (Credit to Bill Loizeaux, retired Writer-in-Residence in Boston University’s English Department, for that insight.)

In the opening pages of Educated, Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir of her survivalist family, she writes that some family members remember the same events differently than she. Throughout, Tara also asterisks and notes other incidents where accounts conflict.

After publication of Cancer Crossings, one of Tim Wendel’s brothers said he remembered several family scenes differently. A sister’s tart reply: “Well, if you remember it differently, write your own book.” (In this family, that didn’t start a feud. In yours, it might.)

Sometimes, you stick to your version. I worked with an author whose memory of a party was utterly different from the recollection of the person with him, right down to the location, house, food, music, and guests. The author used his account. As he told me, “These are my memories and my book.”

3. Make your memoir bigger than you.

If you’re non-celeb pursuing a traditional book contract, “hybrid memoir” or “memoir plus” can be the strongest path to publication. Translation: memoir that weaves in other people’s stories and connects to a larger cultural narrative. (I’ve also heard it referred to as “reported braided memoir” because the book publishing biz has a flair for incomprehensible labels.)

That’s what Friedman did: she places her experience in the broader context of sexism as women surged into the workforce during that era. (Only Debbie’s version comes with a bathing suit and a rescue tube.)

When I worked with psychologist Mike Valdovinos in 2023, he had a gripping story of personal trauma and resilience. I helped him shape the book’s core concept of moral injury to broaden the potential audience. Mike later landed a contract with Simon & Schuster for the forthcoming Moral Injuries, which explores moral injury through his story, others’ experiences, all grounded in research.

Of course, publishing loves to prove its own rules wrong. Karr’s The Liar’s Club was published when she was still described by The Paris Review as an “obscure poet.” The book transformed her into a literary celebrity and sold bazillions of copies. (She’s written two additional memoirs, Cherry and Lit.)

But the traditional publishing world is different than 20 years ago, when Karr’s book launched a revival of confessional memoirs. These days, publishers, at least the large ones, want memoirs from recognizable names with platforms that will sell millions of copies ASAP. Case in point: Friends star Matthew Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, that focused on his long battle with addictions.

At lunch recently with a well-connected New York literary agent, I tried to pitch her on a memoir, but she cut me off when I confessed that the author wasn’t a celebrity.

 “I can’t sell those,” she told me.

That leads to advice I offer any aspiring memoirist I can corner: Stop assuming that only a traditional publishing contract will validate your work. Hybrid publishing or self-publishing, done well, have become opportunities for success.

Friedman selected self-publishing. In the last eight weeks, she’s sold 600 books, and more than 100 people attended her book-launch party. As a result of her DIY marketing, Guarded is being carried in local bookstores and at California state park stores, and she has lined up appearances at book clubs and a local library. She’s having a blast.

Traditional publishing is a weird, shortsighted, fickle, maddening business. Whether or not your memoir fits its narrow demands, never forget that your story has value. This business does not get to decide that.

You do.