Aim to grab the reader from the very start, but don’t sweat this too much.
In guiding you through writing your memoir’s first sentence, in the previous post I gave examples of openings from the celebrity memoirs I’ve read. That list contained memoirs of actors, and I left musicians and comedians for this post. So let’s jump in.
Patti Smith, Just Kids
“When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell and an arched stone bridge.”
Smith begins her memoir in her childhood but, wisely, doesn’t waste her first sentence on something as mundane as pinpointing her childhood’s geographic identity. Yet, in her poetic prose she does just that. If you know Chicago, you will recognize the area of Humboldt Park or possibly the Prairie River.
The artistry of her phrasing is what’s important—memories are like impressions on glass plates, and items in the rest of the description roll out like a painting in front of your eyes. She lets you know that she had a mother who was engaged with her enough to take her on walks. She sets up the reader to expect skilled writing, and she follows through on that. Smith’s memoir won a National Book Award, and I think these are good first two sentences.
Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones
“I have this recurring nightmare. I want to quantum leap back to my younger self and tell that person all the stuff she needs to hear.”
Leslie previews for the reader that her memoir will look at all the mistakes she made and maybe reassure her younger self that everything will be okay. She uses “stuff,” indicating that she’s going to write the way she speaks. And, indeed, she does.
I liked this memoir a lot. As with most of these celebrity memoirs, I didn’t want it to end and missed Leslie when I finished the book and she stopped talking to me. But I’m not a fan of this type of opening sentence. It’s a tempting way to start—saying if I only knew then what I know now—but it’s not anything different from the rest of us. So, yes, it’s a sentence we can all relate to, but I want a memoir to begin with a nugget that belongs solely to the author.
Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
“I am ten years old, and I know every crack, bone and crevice in a crumbling sidewalk running up and down Randolph Street, my street. Here on passing afternoons, I am Hannibal crossing the Alps, GIs locked in vicious mountain combat and countless cowboy heroes traversing the rocky trails of the Sierra Nevada.”
I really like the first sentence but not so much the second, which feels to me as if Springsteen is trying too hard, struggling to be a real Writer and, with that ambition, to create a visual simile from what he’s seen and prove to us that he knows about more things than music. But I do think the first sentence is relatable. As children, we all knew our streets like the back of our hand.
Ricky Lee Jones, Last Chance Texaco
“Oh, the skies were beautiful, pink and yellow and blue. Down along the end of the street was a well, a concrete circle about five feet in diameter. There you could find all manner of water-loving creatures, drawn from the desert to the shade.”
Jones had a chart-topping hit in 1979 called “Chuck E.’s in Love,” and the audio version of Jones’s memoir opens with a short song. I’m not sure how this is conveyed in print. Following the tune, the memoir’s opening line supplies an answer to the Chapter One title, “What Were the Skies Like When You Were Young?”
Jones reaches out to readers to get them to picture the skies of youth’s memory and imagination. She establishes her memoir as a detailed story, mentioning the desert right away because it influenced her art and life. Like Springsteen, she provides a description of her childhood street. So it’s not the most original beginning, but I think of the two of them, Jones wears it better.
Dave Grohl, The Storyteller
“‘Dad, I want to learn how to play the drums.’ I knew this was coming. There stood my eight-year-old daughter Harper, staring at me with her big brown eyes like Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
Chapter One in Grohl’s memoir is titled, “DNA Doesn’t Lie,” which gives this sentence a little context. It shows Grohl as a drummer but also a father so involved with his children that he knows who Cindy Lou Who is. He’s introducing readers to his world, in which father and drummer are equally important, and he’s showing that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. I think it’s effective.
Molly Shannon, Hello, Molly
“I went to a nun psychiatrist who asked me to draw a picture of my family. I drew a picture where my dad had really long arms, and all the women had chopped-off arms.”
I like reading comedians’ memoirs because of all the humor in them. Molly Shannon was raised by her father after her mother was killed in a car accident. The preview of her limited, literally chopped-off, experience of having women as role models along with the funny image of trying to explain her childhood drawing to a mental health professional makes this a good opening sentence, kind of funny even in a chapter that deals with her mother’s death. Molly had me at “nun psychiatrist.”
Keith Richards, Life
“Why did we stop at the Fordice Restaurant in Fordice, Arkansas, for lunch on Independence Day weekend? On any day? Despite everything I knew from ten years of driving through the bible belt.”
In his very long but well-reviewed memoir, Keith Richards goes into detail about his childhood and pretty much everything else in his life. That’s why I’m happy with this opening that starts in his young adulthood, giving us the pleasure of meeting him right before the fame kicked into superstar gear, back when we formed our own opinions of all Rolling Stones. We can predict what goes wrong in this anecdote, but we want to know exactly how it goes wrong.
With this opening, Richards displays his naivete and arrogance all at once. And then the book goes on to fulfill our expectation to be candid and thorough.
One Non-celeb Example of a Memoir Opening
Let’s look at the example of probably the most successful recent memoir by a previously unknown author. Tara Westover’s opening two sentences to Educated are:
“My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened.”
Brilliant? Not to me. I think Educated is an excellently written memoir, but it wasn’t the opening line that kept me reading. I find it almost a throwaway, nothing new to us or particular about the author. We all experience a blur between memory and imagination sometimes, especially as children. I think Westover, like Leslie Jones, could have launched her story without that introductory explanation of what she’s about to tell us.
Is the Opening Sentence the “Make or Break”?
From that example combined with those from the celeb memoirs I’ve shared with you in this post and the one before it, I think that maybe the trend today is that your opening sentence doesn’t have to be so much of a grabber. With online reviews readily available, people may start the book with an expectation already in mind and not depend on the first sentence to reel them in.
By the way, writing up these first-sentence posts made me realize that I’ve neglected one category of celebrity memoir—the sports memoir. So right now I’m listening to Andre Agassi’s Open, which is considered to be a well-written memoir about his tennis career. My beef is that Andre has someone else reading his memoir on Audible. But I do like his opening. He takes us right to a pivotal match very late in his career, and after that chapter we go back to his childhood. That’s my favorite structure.
Ultimately, the goal of your first sentence is to get the reader to want to read the second sentence. Then you want that to lead to the whole paragraph and little by little have your memoir become a book that readers can’t put down. So you do need to hook them immediately, but you also have to follow through with a lot of great sentences, some perhaps even better than sentence number one.