A memoir is a kind of story. It is a story you tell about an experience in your life that mattered—something you lived through, something that changed you, something you want to understand by writing it down. As a memoirist, you can use any storytelling method you have learned: scene, dialogue, character, voice, the shape of a beginning and middle and end. A good memoir can read like a novel.
What makes memoir different from a novel is the contract with the reader. The events really happened. The people are real people. The writer is telling you about a life that was actually lived, the writer’s own.
The pieces in this section are all memoir in this sense. They are anchored in their authors’ real experience. They are also good stories—shaped, paced, written with care—because their authors have brought to the work the same skills they have developed in fiction.
Age does not matter. The subject of your memoir can be a single event that changed you, or a relationship that shaped you, or a place that mattered, or a passage of time you want to understand. What matters is that the story is yours and that you write it with care.