![]() ![]() All my life I've been visited by unexpected flashes of memory unrelated to anything taking place at the moment. "The British satirist Auberon Waugh once wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph asking readers to supply information about his life between birth and the present, explaining that he was writing his memoirs and had no memories from those years. (Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, 2nd ed. Of course, the boundary between these genres was not-and still is not-as clearly delineated as I have made it sound." More often, 'memoirs' (always preceded by a possessive pronoun: 'my memoirs,' 'his memoirs') were a kind of scrapbook in which pieces of a life were pasted. These famous person memoirs rarely stuck to one theme or selected out one aspect of a life to explore in depth, as the memoir does. The term memoirs was used to describe something closer to autobiography than the essay-like literary memoir. "Like many people today, I confused 'the memoir' with 'memoirs.' It was easy to do back then, when the literary memoir was not basking in the popularity it currently enjoys. Stick to the facts." (Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everybody else, in part a comic figure. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. The Golden Rule isn't much use in memoir. Be harder on yourself than you are on others. "Here are some basic rules of good behavior for the memoirist: ![]() (William Zinsser, "Introduction." Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events." We like to think that an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. Good memoirs are a careful act of construction. If a writer seriously embarks on that quest, readers will be nourished by the journey, bringing along many associations with quests of their own. Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are, who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us. "A good memoir requires two elements-one of art, the other of craft. "nce you begin to write the true story of your life in a form that anyone would possibly want to read, you start to make compromises with the truth.".So, memoir vs autobiography: you now know what separates them. You may prefer to tell your whole story, or even more, like Brian Tolson did with his Story Terrace book, The Merrybent Kid, then the all-encompassing nature of the autobiography might be a more suitable option. If you want to discuss a specific event in your life, like Row Smith did in her Story Terrace book, The Earth Moved, depicting her journey of survival after the 2015 Nepal earthquake, then perhaps a memoir is a better option for you. This could include the date and birthplace of your great-great-grandparents, or when your grandparents moved to a new town and bought their first house, or even the history of your family name. In an autobiography, you can include as much detail spanning as vast a breadth of time as you see fit. Perhaps a thorough understanding of their childhood is essential to understand their life story. This might not necessarily have a direct effect on the major events of their life, but provides a broader background for the narrative account of their lives. The autobiography often includes more intricate details such as family history. Need help deciding what to include in your story? It's way easier to narrow down what you want to include when you've got it all in front of you! Read our article on Creating a Timeline for a Book About Your Life - which includes a free download - to find out more. A memoir often makes for a much more in-depth analysis of a shorter period.Ī memoir is a vehicle for written accounts of wars, businesses, tell-alls by celebrities and many more! This allows the writer more opportunity to reflect on emotional aspects of their life rather than just the straight facts. Memoirs focus more on certain aspects or events. Contentīeing narrower does not necessarily mean less content. The autobiography, in this case, would be the photo album or entire movie.įor more information on how to structure your life story, have a read of our article, How To Write Your Biography: 5 Approaches to Structure Your Life Story. Consider the memoir as a series of snapshots from an entire photo album or a few scenes from a movie. ![]() Unlike its autobiographical counter-part, which could span an entire lifetime, the memoir is a narrower, more personal, approach to particular stories relating to its writer's life. It makes sense to start at the beginning, which, of course, is the basic structure of the memoir.
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