The ONE Thing Every Great Memoir Must Have

[image description: A white woman standing behind a stack of vintage books. She’s wearing a short, white lacy dress and is holding an open book in front of her face.]

If there’s one thing that was drilled into me in years of creative writing classes and dozens of workshops outside of college, it’s that every story has a conflict. Characters moving from point A to point B should not be easy or linear.

Fiction is good about this nearly 100% of the time because an author would be hard-pressed to hold readers’ attention in a fictional world with no conflict. Well-written nonfiction is also good about this, though it’s trickier for some genres more than others. Namely, the genre I see struggle with this most often is memoir.

I’m not normally swayed by books that spawn from viral events, but with one recent memoir, I couldn’t help myself. It was written by the widower of a beloved writer who’d died of ovarian cancer a few years ago and days before her death had written a beautiful and moving essay in the Modern Love column of the New York Times encouraging her soon-to-be-widowed husband to find love again when she’s gone. The memoir I read is the husband reflecting on their life and family together, as well as coping with her death.

I bought the memoir because I remember the wife’s essay going viral and learning of her death soon after. This was around the time I was planning my own wedding and contemplating the nature of love (and its potential future absence if anything were to happen to my husband or me) was common. I saved the memoir for a time when I was ready to be emotionally distraught. What better time than a pandemic when I’m already emotionally distraught?

When I neared the halfway point of the book, I kept wondering how this story that had once so fascinated me now bored me. Then I realized, it wasn’t the story itself––it was the way the story was written. It was very this happened, then this happened, then some more things happened. There was little introspection. The memoir was written like a long, highly sanitized journal entry. Like an exercise for a support group. Like the author is decently smart and understands the academic mechanics of grammar and the five-paragraph essay, but has no sense of the art of writing.

It’s challenging because, while I’d never say an author should fabricate drama in nonfiction, I do think memoirists owe it to their readers to reveal something of themselves and the people they’re writing about that the readers didn’t know before and perhaps wouldn’t have guessed. This memoir read like “here’s the story of our nearly perfect marriage and family, and the only bad thing that ever happened to us was my wife dying of cancer.” I find it hard to believe that any marriage, especially one that lasted 26 years and produced 3 children, was without conflict.

Perhaps “conflict” isn’t the right word. Conflict, at least in terms of fiction, is manufactured. In non-memoir forms of nonfiction, conflict is revealed and amplified. Maybe the right word is “risk.” For a memoir to be great, the author needs to put something at risk. In the case of this memoir, the idea that their marriage and family were perfect should’ve been put under the microscope. What is a memoir without some blood on the page? The story doesn’t have to hemorrhage, but I need to know the author actually looked within and thought about their story within a larger universal context. I need to see vulnerability, not fear. Vulnerability, not a fairytale or PR stunt. As this memoir reads, everyone but the dying wife feels flat and one-dimensional.

The other thing that’s been drilled into me since I’ve been writing nonfiction is that if you’re not emotionally ready to write something, it’s going to show. If you haven’t sat with the story and done the inner work to put yourself on the page in a meaningful way, it will not escape your readers’ notice. While I understand the push toward timeliness and the rush to maintain relevance, especially in an ever-shifting spotlight, sometimes the best thing to do is take your sweet time.

As I talked about last week on the blog, I have a hard time objectively reviewing and criticizing memoirs because it feels too personal, like I’m personally attacking the author. However, I’m trying to push back on that assumption because that’s not a healthy or productive belief for me to have if I’m ever going to publish my memoir. I want to hold the genre to a higher standard. I want to see the memoirs that are truly works of art shine. I want to discourage publishers from handing out book deals like they’re lollipops just to capitalize on a viral event or reward a mediocre writer just because they have a large following or are otherwise thrust into the spotlight for things other than writing.

Mostly, I just want to read better memoirs. Half the memoirs I read are so well-crafted that I swoon just thinking of them. The other half, I scream internally at having picked them up. I’ve seen what beautiful creations memoirs can be and I want everyone who’s bold enough to be a memoirist to hold themselves to the standard of the memoir artists (memoirtists?) who have gone before.

What are your favorite memoirs? I’m always on the hunt for some good ones.