the best ones come from the soul of a human unit oddly compelled to root out the past’s truth for his own deeply felt reasons.

Mainly, the better memoirist organizes a life story around that aforementioned inner enemy—a psychic struggle against herself that works like a thread or plot engine.

What do people usually like and dislike about you? You should reflect both aspects in your pages. 2. How do you want to be perceived, and in what ways have you ever been false or posed as other than who you are? (Lovers/family yelling at you when they’re mad have answered this one for you, btw.) 3. Is there any verbal signpost you can look for that

I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

be generous and fair when you can; when you can’t, admit your disaffinity. My general idea is to keep the focus on myself and my own struggles, not speculate on other people’s motives, and not concoct events and characters out of whole cloth.

In fact, every memoirist I know seems doomed to explore the past in an often-agonized death march down the pages.

Nabokov, who proves that sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there’s suffering involved.

In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory.