I was born in the early morning hours of April 3rd, 1985. Easter was the same weekend. Every congratulatory card my parents received had baby chicks and easter eggs. Every birthday after that, there seemed to be bowls of jelly beans not far behind. But Easter wasn’t my favorite holiday. In fact, I never really understood how to reconcile Jesus’ resurrection and a rabbit with a basket… 
You’re probably wondering where any of this is going. Or, why it matters? Or, whether to even keep reading?
If you’re wondering what my birthday has to do with memoir, you’re feeling exactly what readers feel when they buy one book and receive another. They expected a memoir. Instead, they got a chronological report of someone’s life.
As a memoir coach, developmental editor, and someone who formally studied memoir during my MFA, I see first-time memoirists make this mistake all the time. They assume two things:
- To tell the story of my life, I have to tell my entire life.
- I should start at the beginning.
Some of the confusion between autobiography and memoir lies in the fact that both are autobiographical. They’re both based on lived experience. The difference isn’t whether the events are true—it’s how those events are shaped for the reader.
Autobiography reads like history. A reportage documenting life chronologically and focusing on what happened and when. An autobiography captures the highlights reel of one’s life.
If you go to any nearby bookstore and ask for the autobiographical section, you’ll find that most autobiographies or biographies (books about someone’s life written by someone else) are predominantly about notable figures that a wide population of people would be interested in. Think former presidents, celebrities, Noble Peace Prize winners.
Mixed in with that section will be memoirs because they are also based on a real person’s life, but they are their own genre. They have their own craft. A memoir still relays the author’s experience, but it does so in a way that reads more like fiction and less like history.
A memoir tells the truth of a person’s experience, using the tools of storytelling to make that truth come alive. Character. Scene. Conflict. Dialogue. Tension. Reflection. The same craft that makes a novel impossible to put down also makes a memoir unforgettable. What a fiction writer uses to craft a page-turning novel, a memoirist also uses, allowing the reader to feel like they’re right there, experiencing life alongside the main character (the author).
How the book is written isn’t the only difference, however. A memoir is usually about a contained amount of time from the author’s life or a recurring theme that spans multiple years. A memoir isn’t to recount every moment from birth to old age (or even death), as an autobiography does. A memoir curates specific moments that tell a particular story. Often, memoirs are about the author going through some kind of change, adversity, or transformation, and the reader gets to watch that journey take place.
Underlying that particular “journey” is the feeling or lesson that resonates with the reader. Some call it the universal experience or universal element. I call it the heartbeat. That heartbeat is what makes a book about an author’s life actually land with a reader and help them understand why this author’s story matters. Through the heartbeat, a part of the author’s story starts to belong to the reader.
Through a tale of divorce comes a story about identity and reinvention. Through a cancer diagnosis and recovery comes a story about uncertainty and living life to the fullest. Through a career change comes a story of finding one’s purpose. The heartbeat helps the story transcend from being about the author to being about the reader. (And if you want to be able to sell your memoir or have readers leave good reviews, they need to see themselves in the story.)
To simplify all of this to one specific idea for you to walk away with, it’s this. Autobiographies document a life, and memoirs make meaning from one. Autobiographies seem to answer “…and then what happened?”, while a memoir always asks, “Why did any of this matter?”
So, if you haven’t started your memoir yet, perhaps start with these questions first as a place to think more deeply about the story of your life:
- Which season of life changed me the most and why?
- What truth did those experiences teach me?
- Why might a reader need my story today?
If you’ve already begun a draft, now is a good time to pause and consider whether it reads more like an autobiography or a memoir. And if it’s the former, that’s what revising is for. It’s not too late to start writing the book you meant to in the first place.
Author Bio:
A.Y. Berthiaume is the founder of The Write Place, Right Time, where she works as a memoir coach and developmental editor. She is the author of the award-winning books Dear Universe, I Get It Now: Letters on the Art and Journey of Being Brave and Being Me and Do Not Write a Book…Until You Read This One. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and lives in Vermont with her husband and son.
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