What to Write About If You Don’t Want a Full Autobiography
You think you’ve led an interesting life, and you’d like to share it with readers, but what you have is a series of stories, not a singular or unified defining memoir theme. Can you be a memoir author if you have no obvious theme? Sure. Writers can write about anything.
First, don’t rule out the theme potential so fast. You may not have overcome an addiction, battled an illness, grown wise after a messed up childhood, or accomplished something extraordinary professionally. But try digging deeper into your past to check on whether you’re missing something. The theme may not be obvious, but that doesn’t mean it’s not lurking beneath the surface. Which rocks should you look under?
Choices
I’m watching a TV show from more than 15 years ago, “Being Erica,” that has the main character periodically transporting to the past so that she can correct choices. Her regrets range from little slip-ups to major life decisions. Sometimes she succeeds in making a new choice and sometimes she doesn’t, but she always learns something about herself and her life.
Erica thought her life’s theme was that she habitually made poor choices, which is how she ended up not fulfilling the early promise of success in all areas of life. Things are more complicated than that, but look at your own life. Did you consistently choose a path that led you to the life you have now? Perhaps it’s the opposite theme—the sort of “man plans, God laughs” variety of feeling as if your choices mean nothing because you don’t really have control.
Maybe you got very lucky and you can’t take credit for the good outcomes. Or it can be the reverse, that you tried every avenue only to be blocked over and over. Taken together in one wide-angle view, all of your choices may point you toward a theme.
Relationships
Unlike Jeannette McCurdy, who wrote I’m Glad My Mom Died, you may need a lot of introspection to narrow down your memoir to one relationship. Again, it may just depend on which lens you look through. Whether it’s a parent, sibling, friend, romantic partner or business associate, if there’s enough meat in that relationship it can form the theme of your book.
That doesn’t mean you leave out everything else in your life. It’s just that you see your life’s developments as connected to whichever relationship you’re describing. Sally Field’s memoir is ultimately a sort of tribute to her mother, but she still told pretty much her whole life story in the book.
And it can be more than one relationship. Maybe one bad romance set the course for a lifetime of dysfunctional love partnerships. Exploring all of that can make interesting reading.
Your “Truth”
You may have lived many years before facing or discovering some truth about yourself. By the time you trace the seeds for the reader, give all the examples, explain how you came to reinvent, accept or delight in the real you, and describe the ultimate outcome, you’ll have a whole book.
Thinking about this approach may reveal a secret you have. Maybe it’s a secret within your family. How has keeping that secret served you? If it hasn’t done much for you, a book with the big reveal might work out well.
Something Unusual You’ve Overlooked
Lives contain many singular events. Did something happen to you that you never gave much attention to, but now that you’re thinking about it, the incident is quite out of the ordinary?
Or, if it’s not a singular incident, it could be a pattern or a period of your life that might stack up a little differently if you want to write about it.
Truly No Theme—But Lots of Stories
If after putting your life under a microscope you can’t come up with a theme but still would like to write a memoir, make a list of all the stories you tell from time to time. We all have those stories! Good writing can make them interesting.
Then you have to decide whether to just go chronologically in your life or to contrive mini-themes. Either way can work. The funny thing is that when you look at that list, or maybe after you’ve written out some of the stories, you may notice a theme starting to form. You’ve been the same person all your life, and you approach life as that one person. There’s probably a theme in there somewhere.