A Memoir Should Be a Conversation, Not a Monologue

It’s about suggesting, right there on the page, that the writer is no more important than the reader.

I’ve gotten my fair share of grief through the years for advocating on behalf of what I call “the universal” in memoir—that element, that moment, that question, that scene that somehow binds the writer and the reader not by virtue of circumstance, but by the presence of transcending humanity. I’ve asked memoirists to write toward the world, and not just toward themselves, and they have sighed (and sometimes moved on to other teachers). I’ve asked them to find the words for the broader truths they believe their own stories reveal—an over-ask, some have said, for the unleavened particulars of their lives are, as they see it, intrinsically, sufficiently interesting. And besides, behold the pretty sentences.

Claire Dederer, writing for The New York Times Book Review a few years ago, could not agree with my detractors more: “A good memoir says what happened, not how to live,” she asserted. “To read (or write) a memoir as a kind of self-help book is fundamentally to misunderstand the project. It is the job of the literary memoirist simply to write down her experiences with as much art and truth as she can muster. . . . We don’t require transcendent wisdom. A writer does not have to be a phoenix.”

It’s true: This craft, this industry, so often demands magical insight and transformative prose from, for example, women writers or writers of color (and definitely women writers of color). But is connecting a singular life to the experiences of readers the same thing as a self-help book odyssey—or does it have to be? Is seeking wisdom or insight somehow on a par with producing a manifesto, or a screed? And if a life is worth writing down, shouldn’t that life carry some meaning? Something beyond the breathless monologue of this is what happened to me?

It can, I know, be hard to believe, but memoirists are not always the most interesting people in the room. Readers, too, are living the sacred and the strange. Readers, too, are on a journey. Certainly a memoirist can choose to present herself as if an actress on a stage—her script in hand, her costumery arranged, her audience at a comfortable distance. But when memoirists conceive of themselves as conversationalists in search of understanding, when they honor their reader by implicitly acknowledging their reader, when they profess an interest in exploring the greater meaning of the shared human condition, the memoir project takes on a welcome fluidity. Both the writer and the reader gain.

But what do I mean by meaning? What is it that I am hoping for, annoying my students by asking for? Let me be explicit: I am hoping for those moments when the writer presses pause and wonders out loud, or establishes a theme, or hints at what has been learned or cannot be learned, or attempts to articulate one small aspect of the confounding human condition, or suggests, by way of story, Your future might live in my past. When the writer says, to the reader, you are not alone.

When Alexandra Fuller rises up out of her story of loss in Leaving Before the Rains Come to grant that “most of the things that change the course of our lives happen in fleeting unguarded moments; grief buckling us at the knees, fear shattering through us like buckshot; love pulling us out of an unseen tide,” she is finding new words for a truth we have no doubt encountered in our own lives. Indeed, finding those new words most likely was the point—her way of grappling, personally; her way of offering, publicly.

When Annie Dillard writes that what is most important, most restorative is “coming awake” and experiencing the “electric hiss and cry” of our present world in An American Childhood, she is conceding that the story she has been telling about her own awakening is not her story alone. She is describing what it is like to live, with words that only she could write.

All of which is a far cry from writing the purely autobiographical I, of putting down “what happened,” of focusing exclusively on the particular facts of a particular life.

Go bigger, I whisper into the ears of my students; I write it into my notes; I pronounce it over Zoom. Consider the roundedness of the life you have lived—what lurks behind the facts, what yearns inside the lines, what words you need to say the hard things most truly, how your most truly may just be (and why not find out?) a prelude to a bigger truth that could (it’s possible) jolt a reader awake to their own story.

Readers, too, are living the sacred and the strange. Readers, too, are on a journey.

We can convert our singular lives into universally tinged stories by shining a light in dark places. This is what Judy Goldman does in Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap: “When the present presses in so hard we can’t imagine a future, the past hints at a larger order and shows us why and how we’ll move forward. It can be like a map.”

We can bring our readers news from the mountaintop, a strategy Casey Gerald deploys in There Will Be No Miracles Here. We can offer our readers cautions, as does Marion Coutts in her memoir, The Iceberg, about the cancer and death of her husband. We can write about grace and its timetable when writing about hawks and a father’s death, as Helen Macdonald does in H Is for Hawk. And we can assert that it really is okay to be incomplete, even broken, as Durga Chew-Bose does in the essay “Too Much and Not the Mood.”

None of this, in my accounting, poses as self-help. None of it presents itself as instruction. These universal wisdoms have been wrestled with; they are in flux. They are the yield of journeys made over time and through the mind. They are the transitory lessons stolen from beauty and grief, love and forgiveness, time and memory, choices and fate. They acknowledge our common humanity—despite and perhaps even because of the fundamental fact that we are each so very particular, each living lives that no other will ever live. Stretching toward the big stuff—as hard as it can be, how often inconvenient—is as much about framing the right questions as it is about delivering answers. It’s about suggesting, right there on the page, that the writer is no more important than the reader, that every life does matter.

Memoir, I say, to the students who are still listening, is where the conversation begins. Memoir, I dare to declare out loud, is not a monologue.

Spare me the universal talk, some of my students still say. What happened to me is enough. But often it’s the very student who has not yet finished her book who protests most loudly—the student who can’t find her story’s start or finish, the student who restlessly builds and unbuilds her memoir’s frame because none of the structures really work, the student who cannot decide what to put in and what to leave out, the student who struggles to move past scene to story.

Give it a chance, I’ll say; maybe I’m pleading by now. Lift your writerly eyes from the page and imagine the reader who is right there, reading, the reader who is imagining you. Make room for them between the lines, pause as they wrestle with their own constructions of meaning, as they, inspired by you, remember. Find a place for a “we” inside your pages. Step down from the stage. Lower the lights. Mingle with the audience.

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This essay was adapted from a chapter in the author’s book We Are the Words: the master memoir class.