Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

A Love Story as a Memoir

Roses around a piece of paper that someone is writing on.

When you remember that a memoir is not your entire life story but just an episode or time segment in your life, you can see why sometimes a memoir is little more than a love story. It’s that place and time, recalled through sights and sounds, food and conversation. It’s that one who got away or the romance that blossomed into a long marriage. It’s the ultimate joy of your life, or it’s loss and grief. The memoir tells one or more aspects of what that love was about.

Why Write a Love Memoir

You might write your love story memoir because you want to document:

  • Your happy marriage. This type of memoir honors your spouse, who’s likely the most important person in your life. It will trace your life from the time you fell in love up to the present day or, perhaps, to when your spouse died.
  • Your troubled marriage/relationship. Love doesn’t always bring together the most compatible people, and in some cases the relationship is explosive. Maybe you want to document that. Sometimes it’s not about compatibility but about abuse. At Write My Memoirs, we hear from people who want to explain how and why they left an abusive relationship that, at least at one time, involved being in love.
  • The loss of your partner. Whether the relationship was brief or long, losing someone you love is tough. One way to process the loss is to write about it, as many people do. This memoir can express your admiration for the partner, but it also can contribute to the general discussion of how we move on alone.
  • More than one love. You can devote a memoir to your romances without limiting it to just one. Maybe you’ve noticed a pattern in the people you’ve loved, or you just want to walk down memory lane and relive the experience of each romance.

Other Love

Your love memoir may not be a romantic story at all. Love comes in many forms, and a love memoir can reflect any of them. Let’s do this in rhyme:

The love for a child,
The love for a pet,
The love for an icon
You have never met.

People write tributes to their siblings or parents in the form of a memoir. There are memoirs about the love for a friend. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, by Ann Patchett, recounts the friendship the author had with writer Lucy Grealy. Among the tributes to Fred “Mr.” Rogers is I’m proud of you : My Friendship with Fred Rogers, a memoir by his friend Tim Madigan. And there’s Just Kids, a memoir we love here on Write My Memoirs, about singer Patti Smith’s love for her late friend, artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Start Today!

But today is Valentine’s Day, and romantic love is always fascinating, always a unique story. So if you want to reminisce about a romance you experienced that may or may not still be in bloom, today is a great day to write that first word. You can practically smell the flowers.

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Then just set up a chapter and start writing your memoir. Don’t worry about rules. There are no rules to writing your memoir; there are only trends. These trends are based on techniques and features identified in current top-selling memoirs. At best, they’re the flavor of the month. If you’re capturing your life in print for your family, for your own gratification or to inspire readers, rather than aiming to set off Hollywood screenplay bidding wars, these trends don’t even apply to you. You’ll write the memoir that suits you best, and it will be timeless, not trend-driven.There are no rules, but there are four steps:

1. Theme/framework
2. Writing
3. Editing/polishing
4. Self-publishing

You’ve researched this, too, and you’ve been shocked at the price for getting help with any one of those steps, much less all four. That’s because most memoir sites promise to commercialize your work. They’ll follow a formula based on current memoir trends, because they want to convince you that they can turn your memoir into a best-seller. These sites overwhelm you with unnecessary information not to help you, the memoir author, but to address Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithms so they can sell more.

That’s not what we do at Write My Memoirs. Our small community of coaches, writers and editors are every bit as skilled as any you’ll find, and we charge appropriately for their expertise and the time they’ll spend helping you craft a compelling, enjoyable read. But you won’t pay an upcharge for other websites’ commercialization, the marketing that follows, and the pages of intimidating “advice.” You can sell your book if you like—we have ISBNs available for you—but our organic process of capturing your story takes a noncommercial path.

If you want help with any or all of the four steps above, choose from our services or save money by selecting one of our packages. If you’d like to talk about what’s right for you, schedule a call. One year from now, you can be holding your published memoir in your hand. And at that point, it will be a big deal!

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