What Is Memoir?

Greetings, readers! Are you interested in writing your life story? Or have you ever just wondered what the difference is between autobiography and memoir? The short answer is that autobiography tells a person's lifetime story. A memoir focuses on a slice of that lifetime. 

Here's a few specifics on memoir that I've shared at presentations I've given about the art of writing memoir. I learned these things before and during writing my own memoir, Undertow.

What is memoir? 

1. It's a personal investigation: your blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights. 

“… the memoir writer takes us back to some corner of his or her past that was unusually intense childhood, for instance or that was framed by war or some other upheaval.” (i.e. Russell Baker’s Growing Up). From On Writing Well, by William Zinsser

2. It's about a specific time of your life.

“It’s an act of writing frozen in a unique time and place.” ~ Zinsser

3. It's a narrative of “then.”

“Think narrow, then, when you try the form. Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition.” ~ Zinsser

4. It's a reflection on “then.”

“…both the unprocessed feeling of the world as I saw it then and a reflective vantage point that incorporates or suggests that these events made a different kind of sense over time.” From The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, by Sven Birkerts

Thanks for reading!

Charlene