Memoir writing process Archives

Melissa Etheridge Explains How Memoir Writing Supports Healing After Tragedy

September 5, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Singer Melissa Etheridge has just written a memoir, Talking to My Angels, that includes revealing her grieving process after losing her son in 2020 to an opioid overdose. In a recent appearance on “Good Morning America,” Etheridge said her son’s death was one of the reasons she wanted to write the memoir.

Writing the memoir helped her with her grief, Etheridege said, in several ways:

Memoir is a vehicle for responding to people’s curiosity about you. Because Etheridge is a celebrity, she knew there would be questions about the circumstances surrounding her son’s death. “I knew as time went on that I would need to answer the questions, and I wanted to,” she said. “I’ve never really run away from truth, or life, as it’s happened, and I knew that I would need to explain this. So I thought that this might be a good time to do a book, so I can explain to people how I handled an addiction in the family, a death from the addiction in the family, and how we all got through it.”
For people going through something similar, memoir is a way to let them know they’re not alone. Etheridge explained, “I have seen, and know about, many parents who take on such a huge guilt and shame when one of their children becomes addicted, and has this problem, and dies from—this was fentanyl—and more and more this is happening. It can happen in any family. But the guilt and shame that so many take on…can really stop your own life.” She added that the person you lost doesn’t want you to stop your own life.
The process of writing is healing. Writing is “such a great healer,” she said. “To get it out…to then move on from it, not to just tell it over and over but to move on and say, ‘Yes, this happened.’”
Memoir teaches authors about themselves. “I have learned so much,” Etheridge said. “I learned how much I loved. Learning that can be so exhilarating. Wow, I loved that much that I hurt that much. And I love being human.”

Some of our Write My Memoirs members are finding a kind of solace just as Melissa Etheridge did—by writing out the facts of something unpleasant or tragic that happened to them and connecting with readers through their feelings about that time in their life. They’re discovering how powerful memoir is as a healing agent.

Why Do People Write Memoirs?

August 22, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Person leaving footprints in the sand on a beach

Facebook has several memoir groups, and on one of them a member posted the question, “What is the primary reason for writing your memoir?” Quite a few people responded in the comments.

Memoir as a Family Legacy

Some reflected the thoughts of many of our Write My Memoirs members—to write a memoir, as one commenter put it, simply for “posterity.” Another person hoped her memoir would become a “family heirloom.” She noted, “If I never amass a fortune to bequeath, at least I will be able to share my story.” Similarly, someone said she was writing her memoir “for my kids and grandkids to have a record of me should they someday want to read it.”

Memoir to Honor Someone Close

Some memoirs have the theme of capturing the life of someone who had a significant impact on the memoir author. The memoirist may intend to honor a parent, mourn a child who died young, or maybe relate the story of a great friendship or marriage.

In the comments on the Facebook post, someone wrote about writing her memoir to bring awareness to deaths from Agent Orange. Her husband was a sailor in the US Navy who died from the effects of the chemical. Another said her memoir commemorated the short life of her sister, who died at 19, and someone else said she was documenting all the good advice from her mother.

Memoir to Serve as a Note of Caution

One typical reason people write memoirs is to help readers learn from the author’s mistakes or warn them about dangers the author encountered. A number of responses fell along this theme.

One commenter said she was writing her memoir to help people who have been shunned by their families. Her family shunned her after she left what she calls a religious cult. Another person wanted to caution people about “medical gaslighting” and the medical community not believing you when you describe symptoms. Yet another person had addicts for parents and crafted her memoir to offer ways to break the cycle of addiction.

Memoir to Heal, Share and Reflect

Many lives are infused with humor and interesting anecdotes, and if you’re sharing those stories you might as well compile them into a memoir. One commenter had 30 snippets of stories she’d written over the years, so she went through them and laced them together. Another wanted to relate her quirky tales from being a lesbian southern belle. One said he simply wanted “to tell the world my fascinating story,” while another wanted to write about his “unusual existence.”

One commenter wanted to write her memoir before it was too late. “I feel the need to tell my story for future generations,” she said. “As a child during the Cold War, I was part of an exodus of unaccompanied children from Cuba fleeing Communism….We are elderly now. If we don’t write about it our stories will die with us.”

A couple of commenters mentioned writing as a way to heal; memoirs are well known to help people heal from trauma or work through grief. One commenter said she was motivated “for self-healing and to share life experiences.” Another said sharing her life story was “nothing short of transformation, for myself and others.”

For some people, writing a book is a goal. One commenter said she wrote her memoir “to prove I could do it. I first dreamt about publishing a book when I was a little girl.”

And for people who are natural writers, a memoir is an obvious task. “I write because writers can’t not write,” one commenter remarked. “And I write my story because I believe we all have stories that matter.” At Write My Memoirs, we agree with that!

Lessons for Athletes Who Want to Write Memoirs—And Vice Versa

July 11, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

This week in July 2023, the National Senior Games are taking place in Pittsburgh, and I’m competing in track and field. If you’re over 50 and enjoy athletic competition in any sport, check out Senior Games. It’s fun. But that’s another topic for another time, or here’s a link to read a piece I wrote about a previous Nationals event. But what you all want to do is write memoirs.

We All Have Our Gifts

In regular life, I’m a writer, editor and memoir coach. I’m good at all three. My writing comes naturally, so that part’s a gift. I learned to edit by going to graduate school in journalism, so that’s my training. When I kind of accidentally became owner of Write My Memoirs, I taught myself little by little how to coach memoir authors, so that expertise comes from trial and error, consulting with colleagues and other types of experience.

In athletic competition, I run, jump and throw. I’m bad at all three. I was never an athlete of any sort. I can swim and I played tennis as a teen, but I was never good enough to compete in any sport. Track and field is way out of my wheelhouse. Despite that, in middle age I started running for exercise—just two miles most days. So when my husband began competing in Senior Games, I got tired of being a spectator and decided I’d enter some of the running races. Eventually I added javelin and two jump events.

The best I can say for myself is that I don’t always come in last. Sometimes I do. In this group of exceptional senior athletes, I am simply not very good. I don’t have a gift the way I do with writing, but I don’t mind. I can train and practice and teach myself.

If you’re feeling that, as a writer, you’re simply not very good, I can relate because of what I do that I feel inadequate about. But you know what we say in Senior Games? Even when you land in last place, you beat all the people sitting at home on the couch. Try thinking in those terms when you write your memoir. You’re doing something a lot of people want to do but never get past page one.

Here are a few ways I can align your desire to write with my desire to compete in track and field.

Lessons from Comparing Athletic Competition to Writing a Memoir

Like my triple jump, your writing is something you can improve. I watched videos and read information to figure out the steps for the triple jump. I knew that it wasn’t a popular event, which is how I came in seventh place in my age category in this year’s Nationals! Okay, that also was last place, but I got a ribbon. I know it seems as if everyone is writing a memoir, but in terms of percentage of the population, you are a rare bird if you take your memoir the whole way to publication. Even if you don’t write the best memoir ever published, you still get a ribbon! You’ll be an author. You’ll have a book to hand out to friends and family. It’s huge.
Just as I don’t enjoy running, you don’t have to enjoy writing in order to write a memoir. I run as part of my general fitness program, not because I attain a “runner’s high” or whatever dedicated runners seem to feel. You can look at your memoir as something you’re doing for yourself—not the part of yourself that wants to spend time doing something enjoyable, but the part of yourself that wants a targeted result. You want to produce your memoir. To realize that goal, you have to sit down and write it, or at least hire someone to take your information and write it for you.
In competition, experts tell us all to just compete against yourself. Go at your own pace. Don’t burn out. So I run as much as I can as long as I can get myself to do it. That comes to two miles at least three times a week. If it rains or something unexpected comes up in my schedule, I wait until the next day. Writing is not that different. You don’t have to finish your memoir within one year or commit to a writing regimen of at least 30 minutes a day or set up an ideal writing environment. You know when you’re slacking, so at that point pick up the pace. Just don’t let it go completely. As with running, you keep putting one foot in front of the next, and sooner or later you get to the finish line.
I’m the only “me” there is. Each of us is unique. There are so many aspects to being a person, and we differ in all of them, from the way our bodies are built to the way we think to the way our lives have progressed. My challenges in competing are different from other athletes’ challenges. Some have it easier, but many have it harder. I’m lucky to be able to run at all. Because you’re unique, your memoir will be special. If your story were already out there, you wouldn’t have to write it. Value the way you approach a project like memoir writing in your own way. Appreciate that your unique life will make an interesting narrative.

Your Memoir is Important

This isn’t a zero-sum game. I can compete alongside athletes much better than I am, with no delusion that I might win, and still be valuable as a participant in Senior Games. And you can offer a memoir that will add to the literature of what it’s like to live a particular life.

Think About the Future, Not Just the Past, When Writing Your Memoir

June 27, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Memoir writing is so tricky because you think you’re writing about events in your past, but you really have to consider three versions of yourself: past you, present you and future you. If you’re having trouble getting started on your memoir or sticking with a writing schedule, the consideration for future you may be a factor.

Past and Present

It’s difficult to get back into the brain of your earlier self and remember your life’s important facts, much less the colorful details that give them meaning and context. As you write, you try to feel the emotions you were feeling at the time of the incident you’re relating. As you relive an episode in order to write about it, you open up all of your senses and strain to see, hear, taste and smell everything that went on. That’s the way to share your story accurately, candidly and in a way that’s true to yourself.

You also have to contend with who you are at the time you’re writing your memoir. Perhaps some memories are so painful that you have to prepare yourself before you sit down and write about them. Now that you’re older, you have a different perspective. While you may be writing about your childhood, as an adult you know a lot more about what was happening to you. So by necessity, your current self is all over this book. The story is in the past, but the writing is in the present.

You’re the Most Important Reader

Then there’s the you of the future. You may not think much about this person, because you’re focused on the past. But don’t lose sight that “future you” is who will show up next.

We talk a lot about writing for your target audience. You want to make sure you’re describing details for your reader. You have to figure out what you can assume the reader knows and which information you need to fill in for the reader. In short, when you’re writing your memoir you’re trying to think like your ideal reader.

But you know who is probably the most important person you should want to please? You! Not the you who’s writing the memoir, because you’ll make sure you like your work before you publish it or share it in any way. But what about the way you’ll feel some years from now? Don’t forget about that person. That’s an important reader—maybe the most important reader.

Try to Have No Regrets

You can’t possibly know exactly how you’ll feel a decade from now when you pick up your own book. But you can consider this eventuality. Will you have to forgive yourself for anything that’s in your memoir? If reading an anecdote you wrote embarrasses you a little right now or makes you cringe, will that improve or be even worse years from now? Maybe now that you’ve gotten some of these stories out and on paper, they don’t have to make the final cut in the published version.

A lot of your memoir is likely to involve stories about other people. In the future, will you wish you hadn’t named someone who harmed you—or will you wish you had named everyone and not used pseudonyms? Do you think you might be kind of over your anger or hurt by then? Or are you stepping too gingerly—avoiding hurting other people when protecting their feelings will come at the sacrifice of your own?

“Future You” Can Help with Hard Decisions

As you zoom ahead and picture yourself in the years to come, rereading your own work, it may help you now to decide which way to go in terms of including certain content and the tone you use in the writing. Ultimately, you want to be glad you told your story and wrote your memoir in the fashion that you did. Think about how you’ll feel looking back not at your life, but at what you chose to tell about your life and the way you chose to tell it.

An Easy Way to Start Your Memoir Writing Habit

June 13, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Neon light saying "We are all made of stories"

If you’re having a hard time getting into a writing habit to start your memoir, you may think you have to follow the broadly accepted advice to set aside a time each day—or at least each week—to force yourself to sit down and write. Even if all you write is a sentence, the thinking goes, you’re establishing a habit and soon the writing will flow.

Or it won’t.

A Different Jumpstart for the Writing Habit

If scheduling your writing isn’t working for you, try a different approach. Really, scheduling first is the tail wagging the dog. To be motivated to write, you have to want to get a story down so it won’t be forgotten. So instead of trying to come up with ideas when you decide to sit down and write, try reversing the process and sitting down to write when you have ideas.

We muse over our own life stories all the time, especially when we’re committed to, or even just considering, writing a full memoir. Since we carry around our phones, we always have a way to text ourselves or keep a notes app for things we want to remember. The next time an episode from your life crosses your mind, just take out your phone and write a few words as a reminder of what that story is.

You may find as you continue through your day that the story keeps returning to your mind. Then when you find yourself near your computer or a legal pad or however you want to write down everything, you’ll want to get that story down. It won’t feel like you’re forcing anything.

The Writing Habit Forms on Its Own

This doesn’t mean you have to write perfectly crafted text. It’s still a rough first draft of one story. But it’s something. Later you may feel like going back over the same story and giving it more texture or improving the writing if you can, or you can leave that story and start adding to it with more episodes in the same way you did the first one.

Talk about a habit! Once you start doing it this way, you could find yourself sneaking over to a corner during a party, pushing “pause” while you’re watching TV, stopping yourself in the middle of a conversation with a friend, taking a moment during work, or doing a talk-to-text while you’re driving.

Be careful not to edit yourself as these stories come to you. Write every story that comes to mind without mulling over whether it belongs in your memoir. Writing it gives you practice in telling about your life whether that story makes the final cut or not.

Decide Later Whether to Include Each Story

When you reach the next step—putting these stories into chapters and connecting them with transitions—you’ll make the decision, story by story, about whether each of them is relevant to the overall narrative you’re telling.

If you want to write a memoir, it’s because your life is full of stories you want to relate around a certain theme. The events are already in your mind. All you have to do is put them into publishable words. Try letting the stories come to mind first, and then do the writing second. You may find it easier than sitting down and staring at a blank screen.

First Line of Your Memoir is the First Hook for the Reader

May 9, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

We’ve talked a lot about where in your life you should start your memoir to really hook the reader. Successful memoirs start anywhere and everywhere, but today I’d say they most typically begin with a compelling, pivotal incident that took place in, say, the first third of the person’s life or the period of time the memoir addresses. I think that’s a great way to get readers invested from the beginning—they will want to see what comes next as well as what came before to lead up to that episode.

One Rule: Be Compelling

But some memoir authors start right at the beginning. Richard Nixon’s memoir launches his life with the sentence: “I was born in a house my father built.” Janis Ian’s 2009 memoir, Society’s Child: My Autobiography, begins, “I was born into the crack that split America.”

The idea is that even if you want to follow the simplest format—start with your first appearance in the world and proceed chronologically—you still should begin your book with something more interesting than the simple time and place of your birth. Add a fact, offer a surprise, be sarcastic—keep in mind that the reader can always put the book down and never pick it up again, so with each sentence, give readers a reason to keep reading.

Salvador Dali starts not with action but with thought. He opens his memoir by revealing how confident he was even as a child: “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” So you see there are no rules. I would have said this type of passive beginning would not work as well as a moment of high action, but it does work. It sets the mood for how the book will roll out.

Writing Order: Again, No Rules

Just because the reader will read your first line before anything else doesn’t mean you have to write the first line before anything else. You don’t even have to write the first chapter first.

Many authors find the way they can most easily start writing is to write about an episode they know very well but one that does not require a lot of emotion for them to tell. Then little by little, you’ll get accustomed to writing about yourself and it won’t be so difficult. When you’re ready, you can write a great first sentence, first paragraph and first chapter even if you’ve already finished much of the rest of the text.

Yes, It’s Still a Memoir When It Includes Extensive Info About Other People in Your Life

March 28, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Part of the buzz around actor Sam Neill’s new memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, comes from the information Neill shares about his friend Robin Williams. While Sam Neill is a pretty well-known celebrity, he enjoys nowhere near the devotion and popularity that Williams continues to have nearly a decade after his death.

Drop Names to Sell Books

Name-dropping is a good way to get your memoir noticed. Celebrities hang out together and are expected to share details they glean from their personal relationships with people who may be even more famous than they are. In Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe divulges liberally about his co-stars, including Tom Cruise, from the movie “The Outsiders,” as well as everyone else he knows. It’s just a normal part of an actor’s memoir to dish about fellow celebrities.

You may not know any celebrities, but you may finding yourself focusing whole chapters of your memoir on other people. Perhaps you want to use your memoir to pay tribute to—or expose the misdeeds of—your parents. Or if you were abused by a spouse, you might write so much about the spouse that it’s practically a separate biography within your autobiography.

Still Your Memoir

Does this change the nature of what you’re writing? Are you still the author of a memoir, or is it some more general type of nonfiction book?

When you’re telling your story from your point of view, it’s a memoir. Even if you devote quite a bit of ink to someone else’s story, unless that person is truly the focus of the book, it’s still your memoir. One of the most famous books about two people is Just Kids by Patti Smith. You could argue that Just Kids is as much about the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as it is about Patti Smith, but the book still is considered to be Smith’s memoir.

So go ahead and write all you want about other people who’ve had an impact on your life. That won’t change the way the book is perceived or marketed if you want to sell it. This will be your memoir, about you and the people who played a role in your life.

Memoir or Biography, Sometimes Extensive Research Is Necessary

February 28, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Often memoir authors look back at their lives only to find a lot of missing pieces. Memory takes us only so far, especially in a long life. Write My Memoirs advises everyone to keep a diary—you never know when you might decide to write your life story, and a diary makes the process not only much easier but also more accurate.

With no diary to rely upon, you may end up doing research. It’s common for memoir authors to visit cities where they once lived, request public records involving themselves and their family, and pore over newspaper clippings offering facts and figures pertinent to the story.

Biography Writing

When you author a biography, which Write My Memoirs is also happy to help you craft and publish, you don’t even have your own memories to source. Maybe the person about whom you’re writing is alive and, even if that’s not the case, you may find people who knew the person and are willing to speak with you. Or you could be writing about someone whose life span is too long ago for that. In either case, you’ll probably need to pursue independent research and original reporting in order to write a biography.

A friend of Write My Memoirs told us about her cousin, Debbie Taussig-Boehner, who found out firsthand how much research it takes to flesh out a story. In her case, it was more of a mystery, even though it was about her own father, Vladimir George Taussig. It started with a simple suitcase Taussig-Boehner and her sister took possession of when Taussig died. For decades that followed, neither of the sisters opened the suitcase. Finally, looking for something to do in her early retirement, Taussig-Boehner decided to crack open the suitcase and have a look inside. From that moment on, her retirement would not be boring.

Fleshing Out a Mystery

Emptying the deteriorating suitcase, Taussig-Boehner discovered letters, pictures and artifacts. There were matchbooks from restaurants and government reports. Soon a story emerged. Her father had grown up in what was then Czechoslovakia and spent time in England and China before settling in the United States. He led an exciting life filled with adventures and political intrigue, plus he was a bit of a playboy.

For Taussig-Boehner, it became an irresistible call to flesh out the entire saga. Following the breadcrumbs led her to New York, Montreal, Prague and Shanghai. She met people who could fill in some blanks and identify people in photos. After two years of research, Taussig-Boehner brought in a young writer, Lauren Housman, to help her put together the narrative. By then she had the information organized and knew she had a lively tale. The co-authors then published their book, The Suitcase: The Life and Times of Captain X.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by how much information you still have to gather, know that you’re not alone. Many authors spend months or years ferreting out the facts. Everyone says the writing is the hard part, but it’s only one of the components. Good research produces true-life, compelling stories. Every life may not be as fascinating as Taussig’s, but to family and friends it will be just as interesting when it’s accurate and rich in detail.

Writing a Memoir with a Co-author

January 17, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Robin Roberts interviewing Maya Moore Irons and Jonathan Irons

On “Good Morning America” recently, Robin Roberts interviewed Maya Moore Irons and Jonathan Irons, co-authors of a new memoir, Love and Justice: A Story of Triumph on Two Courts. The book chronicles the love story of the married couple along with the path Maya Moore Irons, a celebrated former basketball player in the WNBA, followed in order to achieve justice for Jonathan Irons, who had spent 20 years in prison for crimes he did not commit.

I do not know anything about how the book was written. Maybe the two authors contributed equally to the book, or one was the primary author, or maybe they had a ghostwriter. But it got me thinking about how you go about writing a book with someone else. I don’t mean a story about one person who writes the book with the help of a professional writer. I’m talking about a book that has two authors because both are involved in the story they’re telling.

The Writing Process

I’ve edited a lot of writers’ work, and I’ve had editors edit my work. That’s a clear process. Good editors do not change the author’s voice or coopt the writing voice to make it their own. Still, the editor’s voice comes through a little bit. But that’s not the same as co-writing.

You can put both authors’ names on the cover without having them both do the writing. They can decide together on the chapter topics and organization, and then the writing can go any of these ways:

The two authors can split the writing work equally, each writing half the chapters in the book. They can each choose the parts they feel most comfortable with, they can alternate chapters, or one can write the first half and the other the second half. There are no rules, but if they want equal contribution, it’s easy to do that.
One author can write most of the book while the other writes just a few parts. Both are authors of the book.
One author can be the writer while the second author does the research. This can be efficient. While the second person is interviewing people and checking facts, the first one can be writing the portions that are ready.
One author can write the first draft and pass it along to the second writer to do more than an edit and really write a whole new draft based on the first draft. This second draft may include additional information gathered while the first draft was being written. The second draft may also reorganize the order of presenting the story. This method will take longer, since the second person doesn’t start until the first person has completed a full draft.
The two authors can literally write the book together. They can read passages aloud to each other as they collaborate and agree paragraph by paragraph.

Analysis of Each Method

That last option, truly writing the book as a meeting of the minds, may be possible, but I can’t imagine it going smoothly. I think eventually the writers would give up and have one of them write the book.

Splitting the writing by chapter or in other ways will result in a mix of two voices that will most likely make the book less cohesive than if only one person wrote the whole book.

If one author writes the first draft and the other the second draft, the result will be a uniform book with the second draft author having the dominant voice. If that’s okay with both authors, this method will take a long time but produce a coherent book.

I think the best choice is to have the better writer do the writing, as long as the authors can agree on who is the better writer. The second author can help with gathering the facts and interviewing any sources for background information or quotes. If photos will be included, the second author can gather those as well. The second person also can read the text as it gets written and point out errors, holes and organizational problems.

Advantages of Two Authors

If the story truly belongs to both authors, like the one the Irons couple is telling in their new memoir, both people deserve the title of author. They co-own this story.

When you write with someone else, you’re accountable to each other. You’ve decided together that you want to accomplish this goal. This is such a big benefit, because it motivates you to stick with the project. Then when you have your book, you share the joy with someone else.

If you’re considering writing a memoir with someone else who shares the story, go for it. It will be a powerful bonding experience.

Have 4 to 12 Wednesdays Free? Take an Online Memoir Writing Course!

February 2, 2023January 3, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Sign saying "This is the sign you've been looking for"

The very beginning of your memoir journey can be the most daunting phase. Once you get going, momentum can carry you through. As you get comfortable and confident with writing, you’ll make steady progress on your memoir.

How do you start?

A friend of Write My Memoirs specializes in coaching new writers through the first steps. She’s offering a 3-part online workshop beginning January 18, 2023, with each part made up of four weekly sessions. You can take all three segments or just one or two.

“I help non-writers focus on getting their story down and generating pages,” our friend and colleague Barbara of Writing Life Stories says. “It’s all about leaving your stories as a legacy to your family and friends! Not about learning to be a writer! Or publishing!”

In her coaching, Barbara motivates, teaches and inspires using a process proven to be effective for thousands of people over more than 30 years. While this process results in a full memoir for the participants, it has benefits that go even beyond that.

“Research shows that you will gain increased resilience and self-confidence, more compassion for others and a greater appreciation for life using this method,” Barbara says.

When you finish the workshop and complete your first draft, come back to Write My Memoirs for editing/polishing and publishing! We will finish the project so that you have a wonderful book to distribute to friends and family in 2023. It’s still only January. This is the year you’ll do it!

“You may wish you knew more about your father or grandmother who passed away, but it’s too late,” Barbara says. “Your family loses by not knowing YOUR story. Isn’t it time to write it?”

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!