Is Your Memoir a Fish?

This elegant structure can pull your story together

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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Hi everyone,

Before I get into this week’s post, I want to share this LINK to my LA Times book review of Rachel Khong’s Real Americans. The novel is a tricky read that draws you in quickly yet keeps you guessing what it’s really trying to say. I’d love to know what you think of the book, especially if my review persuades you to read it!

As for today’s post, awhile back, Martha sent this prompt for our WriteOn! Roundup:

Would love to hear more about how to go about finding a structure for a memoir. When I read inspiration for novels I find it hard to transfer those tips into memoir writing. Is it key to create a storyline for a memoir? And how do you create a storyline about your own life?

For some macro answers to these questions, I’d refer you to my last post on this subject:

Structuring (and Restructuring) Your Memoir

But Martha’s prompt also reminded me of the “Basic Fish” lesson I used to teach my MFA students. I’m going to distill that lesson below.

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The story is in the structure

Every memoir tells a story, just as every novel does. Unlike autobiographies, memoirs do not necessarily tell the story of your entire life, much less your whole genealogy. But what memoir does tell is a particular story about some aspect of your experience, relationships, and awareness that changed your understanding of yourself and the world around you.

Your story could well center on a specific relationship, like Susan Cheever’s memoirs about her parents, Home Before Dark about her father John Cheever and Treetops about her mother Mary Cheever, or Note Found in a Bottle about her relationship with alcohol, or As Good As I Could Be about her relationship with her children. Those four memoirs are all autobiographical, but not one is an autobiography. And though all contain overlapping information about Cheever’s life, each tells a very different story about her life.

The best structure for any memoir is the structure that best delivers the meaning of the story it’s trying to tell. As in a novel, the structure must establish a pattern that weaves together multiple threads of perspective and plot to illuminate key moments of transformation.

Most memoirs rely heavily on timelines to form this pattern. They often have two primary story arcs, one tracing the most recent front story, and at least one other from the past. These plotlines are remembered and told by the same older “I” narrator, but each must reflect the relative age and perspective of the “I” at the time events happened. A clear pattern can help guide readers and prevent confusion as the story moves back and forth in time.

One of the most common, simple, and elegant structural patterns for memoir resembles a fish: