Your opening introduces your readers to your world.
You’re in good company if you’re stuck on how to craft your memoir’s first sentence. Understandably, the opening line and paragraph of a memoir are important to every memoir author who wants to capture the reader’s interest right away.
You Don’t Have to Write the First Sentence First
Start writing your memoir anywhere you like, with any story from your life you think you’re going to want to tell. You may not end up including that story, but it will get you writing.
Then think it through a little. What happened in your life that will get readers to want to read the rest? Many memoirs today start at a pivotal moment or with the part of the author’s life most central to the memoir’s theme. Still, a lot simply begin in childhood, because there we find the seeds of who we are. Once you decide which moment of your life will launch your memoir, you’re ready to think about the words that will best express it.
So write something. The best sentence you’ve ever read may come to you immediately, or you may change your first sentence multiple times. When you have it, I think you’ll know.
What’s Trending in First Sentences of Memoir?
Good writing will always be good writing, but like everything else, memoir trends change. Readers are more sophisticated than ever, wise to a contrived opening line that’s trying too hard or designed to be clever above all else.
Writers rely on collective memory, a sort of modern-day lore that we know everyone knows. The thing is, though, that today you can’t count on all of us knowing the same things. We’re long past the days of three networks broadcasting nightly news and showing a regular weekly television schedule that everyone watches. Today, we seek information and entertainment from all over the place, from apps and social media, obscure cable TV shows, podcasts and blogs.
With our collective memory shattered, the opening sentence to Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, wouldn’t ring a bell to a lot of people:
“Like Holden, I don’t feel like going into all that David Copperfield kind of crap, although in my case, a little about my parents you may find more interesting than reading about me.”
Holden? Holden Caulfield is the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, which has an opening line referencing David Copperfield. I think most of us do get the reference to David Copperfield at least.
With society’s evolving norms, I think you’ll be wise not to assume that we all agree on anything. It will probably put off some readers if you call a thought “a truth universally acknowledged,” even if you don’t mean it to be one-hundred percent accurate. This opening sentence is not from a memoir but from the iconic novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, written in the very late 1700s:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
I mean, where do we start with that? Even the commas aren’t necessary, much less the thought.
What Should Readers Get From an Opening Line?
Experts in memoir suggest that your initial sentence should open the door to your world. It should intrigue readers about whatever you’ll be tackling in your memoir. You can achieve this in a number of ways:
- Introduce a character—possibly the character of you—in a notable way. Make the introduction funny, self-deprecating, mysterious, surprising or truly shocking.
- Start out with something very relatable to get readers to feel as if they are in your shoes, because they recognize your experience.
- Plop the reader into the middle of the action of the most dramatic story in your memoir. Get the reader’s heart racing.
- Provide a tidbit of information that gets the reader asking questions. Readers who need their questions answered will keep reading.
- Craft a beautifully worded sentence to inspire confidence that your book will be full of wonderful descriptions at a high literary level.
“I didn’t realize I was black until third grade.” This is often cited as a great opening sentence. It belongs to Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld. This takes you into Abdul-Jabbar’s world by both introducing you to the character of little Kareem and getting you to ask the question, “Why? Do you not have a mirror?” And it’s just plain disarming. A-plus to the big man.
GreatOpeningLines.com, which bills itself as “history’s first website devoted exclusively to the celebration of great opening lines in world literature,” mentions that line along with this other one I noticed. As I write this, the news is breaking about Joe Biden’s decision to leave the 2024 presidential race. So it’s serendipitous that I find this opening line to Biden’s 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics:
“Joe Impedimenta, my classmates hung that nickname on me our first semester of high school when we were doing two periods of Latin a day. It was one of the first big words we learned. Impedimenta—the baggage that impedes one’s progress.”
Here, Biden divulges what was probably the most humiliating aspect of his life, either to get it over with, to garner some sympathy from the reader, or perhaps to offer something to which the reader can relate.
In Part 2 of this post, I’ll share a lot of first lines from celebrity memoirs and get to the bottom line of how important your first sentence is—or isn’t.