Choose How to Structure Those Advice Components.
Many memoir authors include life lessons to help others who face challenges similar to their own. From illness and injury to abuse, learning issues and difficult relationships, our hurdles are never ours alone. Often, memoir authors believe that other people can benefit from reading how to manage or overcome hardship from someone who’s been through it.
But how do you structure a memoir that has both narrative and lessons? As always with memoir, there’s no single way to craft this, but there are some obvious options.
Deftly throughout the book
Readers are smart and will pick up on the lessons just from your narrative. Even if you want to mention resources or offer advice more obviously, you can weave that information throughout the book. Really, most memoirs have lessons inherent in the story. People get that.
At the end
One way to make it easy on yourself is to save the direct advice for one or more final chapters. By then readers know you, understand that you’ve overcome the same challenges they now face, and may be looking to you as a type of mentor. This structure gives readers the option to read these life lessons or not bother. You may not like that, but you can’t force lessons on someone anyway.
At the beginning
For some authors, the whole point is helping the next person avoid or deal with unwelcome developments in life. If you’re thinking of your book as more “how to fix yourself” than as a traditional memoir, it makes sense to start out by framing the issue you’re addressing. You can use the second person “you” and liberally sprinkle in “command verbs” so that it reads something like: “Make sure you follow your doctor’s orders,” or “Know that you’re strong enough to leave someone.” Then you can pivot to your personal story and come back to the advice later in the book.
Make each chapter a specific lesson
Perhaps your healing/recovery/triumph took place over a lot of steps. If you have enough, you can craft each of those parts as its own chapter with its own lessons. The title of each chapter will reflect that. Then you still have the choice of either weaving the advice into the narrative or separating it from the story.
At the beginning or end of each chapter
I just read a very good memoir, Heart of a Stranger by Angela Buchdahl. The author tacks onto each chapter a little aside that is related to the chapter’s topic. Buchdahl is a rabbi, and these sections are kind of mini-sermons. Either she quotes scripture, discusses the chapter’s topic in a broader context, or in some other way passes along the wisdom she’s gained in her life. It did work in this book. As with saving all of your advice for a final chapter, putting it at the beginning or end of every chapter signals to the reader that this is a part they can just skip. And, again, you may not like that, but readers who are there for the story and not the lecture will thank you.
Use essays rather than narrative
Instead of writing your story out with all the tools of fiction writing, you can write a series of essays. Taken as a whole, the essays may tell enough about your life to be considered a memoir. But chapter by chapter, you’re writing exactly what you want readers to take away from your book.
Write two books
If your traditionally written memoir becomes popular and you sell a lot of copies, you will become a sought-after author. At that point, you need a next book! You could fashion that second book as more of a how-to and round it out by reviewing the latest research on the challenge you overcame.
Ask a lot of people to read your book. No matter how you’ve structured it, if they feel that the advice comes across in too heavy-handed a manner, believe them. But if you do have distinct lessons to teach, don’t shy away from that. Add a layer of subtlety and a dash of humility, and readers may very well accept and appreciate your cautionary tale.