Notes on Memoir Structure

and structure in general!

Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve been working on multiple book projects and spent six weeks back home in the Philippines to see family and research for my novel, so I lost my newsletter mojo for a bit. But I’m back and excited to share writing ideas with y’all. I asked folks from the Fairest Writer FB Group (which you should join if you want to be in touch more often) for writing questions and now I have a list!

Totally gratuitous beach picture from the Philippines… I was reading a book so it counts, right?

The first is this one from Vesna Jaksic Lowe (edited for length and clarity):

I have been struggling a lot with how to structure my memoir and would love to learn more about that - how memoir writers end up settling on structure, what structures have they played with before settling on one, what books have inspired them around this topic, etc.

What a wonderful question! Of course, every author has a different answer and there are an infinite number of ways to structure a book. I also have different suggestions based on what phase of the process a writer is in, so I’m going to subdivide:

Early Drafting Stage

Two initial ideas that really helped me in terms of structuring Fairest come from Porochista Khakpour and Rakesh Satyal respectively. In a workshop I took with her, Porochista suggested keeping a memory journal where you just bullet-point list significant things that happened to you on a daily basis, and then check it from time to time. Another part of the memory journal is systematically going through every significant memory you could think of from childhood onward, an exercise I did over a few days that unlocked quite a few relevant stories that ended up in Fairest.

Then over lunch with Rakesh, he mentioned jotting down a dozen or so key moments in your life that are relevant to the book you want to write, then writing scenes around those moments to give you a place to start. Both ideas were really useful to me, and I ended up having a fair number of vignettes and scenes already written by the time I felt ready to try to assemble Fairest into a full proposal.

Proposal / Complete Draft Stage

Once you’re at a point where you have enough material to write a proposal or complete a draft, I think the most important thing is to listen to the material rather than try to impose an external structure. Every project is different and will call for a different arrangement of events, a different set of stories from your life to include or exclude. So here, I can’t propose a cookie-cutter solution, but instead describe a case study that demonstrates how authors have arrived at their memoir structures.

I had the good fortune to interview Carmen Maria Machado for the publication of In the Dream House, a memoir that's structured as a series of genre tropes that document an abusive relationship. Here's what she says about how she came up with her memoir structure:

There's this really lovely program at Iowa in the summer. It was a summer kids camp, a writer nerd camp basically. I was teaching there and talking to the students a lot about genre. I was discussing it at great length and at some point and I also had a lot of spare time when I wasn't teaching, so I was wandering around Iowa city and thinking thoughts, and at some point I was like, "Huh, I wonder if maybe thinking about this story in a sort of a more Gothic or haunted house tradition would be interesting."

And then I was like, "Yeah, but wouldn't science fiction also be interesting?" And then at some point I was like, "Wait, what if I did all of them?" And by the time I had left Iowa City a couple of weeks later I have a notebook just full of lists and lists and lists of a lot of tropes and genres and all these things, a lot of which appear in the book.

Earlier in the interview, Machado describes how she was trying to write In the Dream House as a conventional memoir and it kept feeling staid and boring. It was only when she started writing in different genres and positing her experience of partner abuse as an endless maze of rooms in a metaphorical house that she found a structure befitting the themes she wanted to explore—the mind as a house, the house evoking the domestic setting of a relationship, genre as a set of conventions and the use of so many in the book an embodying of how confusing her experience was, and how she kept searching for new genres that can describe it. In the Dream House is such a great example of an author listening to the material of her life and finding the perfect structure to contain it.

Revision / Editing Stage

I find that the more you get into the weeds with memoir, the more structural decisions you end up making, and at finer and finer levels. For me the biggest lesson has been learning to listen to my gut, to not be satisfied with what I’ve written just because it’s already there, to always be willing to try something else, always be willing to cut when something isn’t working.

It’s so tempting to let the desire to be finished with something take over, especially when you’re eager to get work out into the world. But one of the biggest differences I see with more developed writers is the shift from asking, “So, am I finally done?” to asking, “Is there anything else I can do to make this better?” and the willingness to set aside whatever feelings they have (exhaustion, ambition, frustration) to answer that question, then do the work if there’s work to be done.

For Fairest, that meant cutting about ten thousand words out in the very late stages of finalizing the manuscript, mainly sections that, while I liked them, either didn’t fit into the overall structure of the book or felt redundant. So structure not only becomes about thinking through the organizational elements of the memoir, but maintaining the integrity of that organization once you reach the latter stages of writing the book.

Some Final Thoughts

If what I’m describing sounds like a ridiculous amount of work, it is. But it’s work that accumulates over a long span of time, so as long as you don’t get ahead of yourself and just take it day by day, you’ll be fine. It’s also work that isn’t linear, so that you can find yourself feeling blah about the project over a long span of time, only to find a breakthrough that makes you realize that the blah period was just you working through the problems of your book.

Whenever I’m feeling blah, I read, both to get inspiration and ideas from other books, but also to remind myself that other writers have managed to finish, so I can too. I’m tempted to write out a reading list, but this is getting way too long already so I’ll save my memoir and memoir-adjacent recommendations for a future post.

My parting reminder: keep writing and listening to what you’ve written. Most of the answers can be found in the writing itself.

Until next time,
Meredith