The Moi in Memoir

For many, writing a memoir is too off-putting because they think they have to remember everything but it’s really about remembering everything that matters. Even then, it’s difficult because you’re having to alternate between different events in a particular year or time-frame. One particular trick to remedy this is to write in order of theme - family life, love life, academic anecdotes, social life and post-academia career.

This allows you to be consistent when remembering things, although these categories can overlap…which is why it’s best to limit yourself to things pertaining to a narrow confine such as domestic anecdotes for the family category and love life outside of school. Once you’ve written the equivalent to five mini-books, you can then copy and paste each category to assemble a timeline.

There’s also the issue of how eventful that your life is. If you have so much to say about your career but you’re worried about invading people’s privacies then you could easily eliminate the personal stuff like what Mark Kermode did. In the noughties, he wrote his first memoir - It’s Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (which was published in 2010). Because he’s a musician, he reserved all of his musical anecdotes for another memoir - How Does It Feel?: A Life of Musical Misadventures (which was published in 2018).

One thing that isn’t necessary is creating composites because there are better ways of maintaining someone’s privacy. Also, changing someone’s name might cause confusion if there is someone else who has that name. Instead of giving someone a false name, I just come up with a nickname that serves as an in-joke that only I would know. For instance, if there is a guy who had a penchant for wearing beanie hats then he would be known henceforth as Beanie. I actually knew such a person but he doesn’t wear them anymore since the popularity of Damon Gough (mostly known as Badly Drawn Boy) fell by the wayside after the noughties.

Another good characteristic to have for a tell-all is to only use foul language when quoting someone. Otherwise, you will be seen as bitter or tasteless i.e. if you’re using foul language to express how much you like something - a trait that I don’t have (which makes me stand out as a metalhead). I’m not the sort of person to provoke the foul-mouthed wrath of others, so there’s hardly any swearing in my memoir. This is just as well because the cursing is mostly racial slurs. Even then, I could have easily written a book that was primarily about being a victim of racism but I chose not to because it would have been too long.

One sure-fire way to know that you have more than one book in you is if you are concerned that writing about a complicated situation or cultural aspect of your life is taking up too many pages to the extent that it feels like a sub-plot. If the subject matter isn’t commercially appealing enough to be a standalone memoir then you could turn it into a novel providing that names are changed because name-changing works if you’re writing within the context of fiction. Otherwise, people take it too literally if you’re writing a memoir.