Are your pastimes and passions worthy of inclusion?
Typically, in your memoir you’ll write about your career and family, but what about hobbies and memoir—are they compatible? If you decide that your pastimes and passions worthy of inclusion, how do you present them?
The quick answer is yes, anything about yourself that you want readers to know can be appropriate to include in a memoir. However, memoirs typically have a theme. It’s tempting to shoehorn your favorite stories about your life into that theme, but the reader may not support such indulgence, even if you successfully pull off the justification you contrive for the inclusion.
But let’s say you decide to take that chance. Then you have two choices: dedicate a separate chapter, or sprinkle the hobby throughout the book.
A Dedicated Chapter
Dedicating a chapter to your hobby is the simpler of the two options. Find a place for that chapter that feels organic and doesn’t stop the action. Let’s say you’re an avid tennis player in a memoir about surviving domestic abuse. You’re going along chronologically without mentioning sports. But there’s one tennis game you remember playing against the abuser—a parent, spouse or partner—and during the game the person criticizes your abilities or yells at you, or maybe the game itself is the trigger for intensified abuse. That’s where you can insert the chapter.
Start this chapter either by setting the scene for that game or introducing your love of tennis to the reader. I’d lean toward the former. You set the scene, and then you spend a few paragraphs or pages on your tennis experiences. You go over the background of why you started playing and also can go into the future with information about later tennis achievements. Then come back to where you are chronologically in the book, at that game with your abuser, and describe that scene.
Recently, I helped a memoir author do something like that. I’m currently coaching an author who is writing mostly about her paranormal experiences and theories but wanted to include her love of opera. We crafted a chapter that picked up where her story was chronologically and linked her attendance at an opera at about that time with a paranormal experience she had. Then we traced other operas she’d attended both earlier and later in her life, describing her travel to cities to see them and any odd occurrences that took place.
A Sprinkle Throughout the Book
If you go in the opposite direction, by the time you get to the story of playing tennis with your abuser the reader already knows about your love of the game. One advantage of this is that you can build suspense about the eventual scene of your tennis match. You can have a paragraph like this:
“He suggested a game of tennis to see whether, at my young age, I could beat him. Since I’d already made plans to play with Lily that day, I had a legitimate excuse to turn down the invitation. The last thing I needed was for him to ruin one more passion for me. But I knew that, sooner or later, the invitation would morph into a command, and I’d have to face him on the tennis court. Once he got an idea in his head, he never let it go.”
Helping the Reader to Know You
Now let’s say you love to read. A lot of your down time has found you on a sofa or in a hammock, on a beach or in your bed, with a book or Kindle in your hands. You follow certain authors and feel that for people to really know you, they have to be aware of your taste in fiction. Does that belong in a memoir?
With skillful writing, you can get away with a lot. You can tie in your favorite books with events in your life or your introversion or what you had in common with the person you married. It can be enough for the reader to accept it as a way to fully know you.
I understand. Above you see a photo of me preparing to run a race in Senior Games track and field just last week. If I wrote a book about my later years, no matter what the theme, I think I would have to include some mention of how I transformed from a never-athlete into a senior quasi-athlete.
There are lots of ways to sneak in your hobby. Just be careful not to alienate your reader!