It’s not easy to figure out where readers need background info.
Knowing how much to explain in your memoir is one of the trickiest aspects of writing it. You may be humming along in a chapter about working at your first job when you hit a roadblock simply because you don’t know whether readers will need background information to fully set the scene.
The level of detail involves three areas: specifics about you personally; information that enriches the reader’s knowledge about a broad topic such as a period in history, a location or a famous person; and a quick reference to a phrase or pop culture tidbit that someone might google if you don’t supply it—or the opposite and get kind of insulted if you do.
Let’s take them one by one, using that example of the chapter about your first job, teaching high school history. It’s important to your story because you moved to the city to take that job, and the school is where you met your spouse, who also was teaching there. You want to talk about the courtship, but the job wasn’t very significant because after two years you moved on to a different line of work.
Personal Details
If your whole point is to include this job because it’s where you met your spouse and the city is where you decided to live, you may feel that you’re going down a rabbit hole to explain why you took the job to begin with. And is there any use in comparing your own high school with this one? Talking about the memories it brought back? Should you bother saying that the principal reminded you of your uncle because of some quirk they had in common? And if you wouldn’t otherwise mention your uncle, do you have to explain a little about him?
These decisions are a good example of the difference between a first draft and a final manuscript. Throw it all in there at the beginning. Then in subsequent drafts, surrounded by all the other chapters in your book, this first job will feel either substantial and worthy or distracting and off-topic—content a reader might just skim.
This also is an example of what “they” mean when they tell you to kill your darlings. You may get a lot of satisfaction from reminiscing about this time in your life, but if it doesn’t serve the plot or delight the reader, cut it out. You may find your memories of your uncle to be amusing, even to a stranger, but does it have anything to do with your theme? There’s no right or wrong here, but don’t waste readers’ time or risk boring them.
Encyclopedia-level Information
Then there’s the information that isn’t really about you or your life. With the high school as the setting for dating your future spouse, what should you say about the school itself? You might describe walking through the halls just as you remember. Readers have been to high school and will be able to picture it without any description, so I wouldn’t go overboard. But when you walked into your future spouse’s classroom, what was on the wall? Or in your own classroom, was there a map? A screen of any sort? It’s helpful to supply some of that detail
You spent only two years in teaching. Should you educate the reader on the history of the teaching profession and what it means to people? No. What if your whole career was in teaching? Still no, not unless your book’s theme is you as a teacher.
But you moved to the city in which the school was located, and that became your permanent home. Talking about the city, from its geography and history to the climate, business community and people, could be germane to your topic.
Common Knowledge—or Not
There was a time when we all read newspapers and watched the same three television channels. Common knowledge was universally common knowledge. With that no longer true, it’s hard to know what references in history or pop culture will go over readers’ heads. How much explanation do you owe your readers? When does it become condescending?
I was reading a book review in The New York Times that mentioned Andy Warhol and then said the book’s prose style was “unlikely to be anyone’s cup of soup.” To smile at that, you have to be familiar with Andy Warhol’s painting, “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” you have to know the phrase, “Not my cup of tea,” and you have to pick up on the way the writer conflated the two. You can’t get away with explaining a joke, so the reviewer here did not offer the reader any help. You either got it or you didn’t. Readers of NYT’s Sunday book review section probably need no backup on this one, but it’s still an assumption on the reviewer’s part to include the reference at all. For readers who get it, though, it’s fun.
Conversely, I just finished the audiobook memoir All About Me! by Mel Brooks, and when he talks about being served Limoncello in a restaurant, he explains what Limoncello is—a lemony liqueur—because when he drank it someone had to identify it for him. He doesn’t mention that Limoncello is generally served between courses to clear the palate, which is the only important thing about Limoncello. So I’m not sure his explanation served any purpose at all. Since Brooks was 95 when he wrote his memoir, I’m not going to pick on him for this.
Customize for YOUR Books
From these examples, you can see that you must have a reader in mind to take an educated guess about how much explanation readers will need about the common knowledge part and somewhat about the encyclopedia-type of information.
But also think about how your narrative is flowing. Does the reader need a little break from the drama? That might be a good time to describe the city in detail. Are you writing your memoir partially in the hope that you’ll educate readers? Then you need background on that illness or country, the science or history, a building or method. But if you’re writing to show off how great you are at descriptions, it’s better not to indulge in that sort of thing.