How to Write the Perfect First Sentence for a Memoir

KNOWING HOW TO WRITE THE PERFECT first sentence to a memoir is not a magical process. It is not something that you can force, nor is it the least bit mystical. What it is, though, is work — but wondrous work, indeed. As the great Ursula Le Guin has written, “First sentences are doors to the world,” and in that offering she precisely prescribes the task before you: You must create a portal through which a reader agrees to walk. But note that word “world.” That opening sentence of your memoir must suggest what world we are about to enter, as well as who is the guide to that world.

Sound intimidating? Of course it does. So let me walk you through my approach, so you can learn how to write the perfect first sentence to a memoir.

If I looked at all the pieces I’ve written and published, I am quite sure I would be reminded that almost none of them got published with the opening line that first topped the piece. Equally true is that the writing of each began with some sentence or phrase that entered my head that I probably thought was brilliant and true and perfect, and that later got knackered a bit, or edited heavily or even thrown out entirely.

The Nature of Writing

This is the nature of memoir writing. As it should be. Why? Because if you are not learning about yourself as you write memoir, you are not really writing memoir. And this is perhaps the most difficult thing for me to teach. Gripping the handlebars too tightly and demanding that a piece remain as you imagined it is a sin, or maybe just a crime. It’s surely a mistake, and one the reader can smell right at the outset. Instead, if you loosen that grip a bit and see where you are led, you will be magnificently rewarded with knowledge and language — and, in the end, a piece that takes us somewhere we need to go. In all, you will create a world we want to enter and explore.

I will not speak for fiction writers, but I come to this challenge with a lot of experience on the topic of writing what you know, whether those writings be blog posts, short essays, op-eds, long-form essays or books. I have written and published all of them, as have my thousands of clients and students.

As I always say at the outset of my online memoir classes, memoir writing is the single greatest portal to self-discovery. I do not know how I feel about anyone or anything until I write it down. And nearly every time I say that in a class, I follow it with the story of the day I found my husband standing in our driveway in his shirtsleeves when I knew he was supposed to be at his office.

I tell them that it was an otherwise promising May afternoon.

As I pulled into the driveway, our child strapped into her car seat, I knew two things: that if my husband was in the driveway in his shirtsleeves, that something about my life was about to change forever, and that I would not like it. He is a newspaperman through and through, part of a breed that believes news must be conveyed by the fastest and most truthful delivery system possible. That’s why he was there: He was afraid that someone else might call and tell me the news that he, himself, needed to deliver.

And as I slowed down, eyeing him from behind the steering, the babysitter, who also should not have been there, came out of the house, making no eye contact with me, and head down. When I had the car in park, she simply opened the backseat door of the car and removed our child. And now I did not want to get out of the car. The babysitter disappeared into the house with our child.

I slid out of my car only enough to shout over the roof.

“Who’s dead?”

He looked at me and did this thing with his lips he does when he is thinking before he speaks. He gestured to come to where he is, and as I got out he raised his eyebrows the way he does when he is in pain. And I thought to myself, oh, he needs me. This is not about me. And then I was standing next to him.

“We have lost Susannah,” he said simply, and I felt his firm grip on my shoulder, his arm securely behind me, his right hand tightening, pulling me in.

“Lost her? Where did she go?”

I have wriggled free.

“I don’t understand. Where is she?” I was searching his face, and then the yard behind us.

“She died.”

“Died? No. No. No. She was just here, three weeks ago. We saw her at Easter. We made cookies.” Now I was muttering and shaking my head, staring at the pavement, walking in a small circle next to him. We were under the bow of a large maple tree in our driveway, and I would not go so far as to leave the bowl of its shade.

He was silent as he waited there while I circled, muttering, until I snapped up and looked at him.

“Was it her breast cancer? Did it come back?”

I knew that he knew that I was now looking for ways to live with this. That’s a good sign, right? So why wouldn’t he visibly relax?

“No.”

And if I tell you what he said over the course of the next ten minutes, as he gently doled out each piece of information, one detail at a time, managing to allow me to ingest them and then metabolize them into individual, tolerable ideas, leading slowly and carefully, but inevitably, to the realization that my dear friend had thrown herself out of her 16^th floor window on Manhattan’s West 86^th Street — which he knew is the only way I would be able to live on with this fact — then you will understand why I will be with this man for the rest of my life.

“This is characterization,” I say to my students, exhausted at the end of this story, and frequently in tears. “I only need to show you what he did that day for you to understand the connection. When writing it, I don’t need to use the word ‘bond,’ or ‘commitment,’ or ‘love,’ or ‘marriage.’ You get it.”

And they do.

“That is how you show it,” I might say, but I never add, though I might, as well as show us what it takes to get on in life without her and know the depth of your love for your friend, knowing I still cannot say that part out loud.

That story replaces any phrase I might use about my husband that declares, say, “He’s great,” or that I love him. The first time I wrote it down, that story allowed me to unroll several kinds of love and have a look at them and their power. But consider this: That story is something I have not published anywhere but here. Why? Because I have not yet got an opening line for it, and here’s why: I’m not yet sure what that piece would be about. Or, to repurpose that in terms Ursula Le Guin might appreciate, I do not yet know what world I am creating. Which brings me to my next point.

You Need to Learn to Wait

Writing is a process. When I was at The New York Times, I witnessed the miracle of a room full of people typing copy that would sometimes go immediately onto the front page of the world’s greatest newspaper. In deadline reporting, there is a great deal of process at work, but it is almost instantaneous. The most exquisite example of this are the people at what is known as the rewrite desks, who can take facts dictated by another reporter on the street and turn them into elegant or evocative front-page copy in moments. I’ve seen it done many times. It’s remarkable.

We are not doing that when we write memoir, and so we should not behave as though our first draft is newsworthy. Instead, memoir writers really need to bring consideration to the work, even when writing on deadline. And make no mistake: We often do write on deadline. For example, op-ed writing based on your personal experience is the art of responding, sometimes immediately, to a situation at hand, and in that process you annotate, pulling from what you know to respond to some breaking news of the world. I teach a class in how to write an op-ed. If you are interested, go see the description.

But when writing most other forms of memoir, we need to consider what we think is the topic and then consider, too, what we know — all the while learning what it is we truly believe. In that example above, where my husband tells me of Susannah’s death, it was not until I wrote down some notes for the piece that I learned why he and I are bonded. I learned as I wrote. Even the impact of that tragic day didn’t embed that knowledge in me — not until I wrote it did my understanding emerge.

What to Do While You Wait

So you write, and you make notes, and all the while you consider that first sentence. That’s not to say that you do not open the early drafts of the piece with something. You do. But you do not stay wedded to it. Why not? Because that first sentence, if you cleave to it, will act like a bad lighthouse and beckon you toward it in the copy that follows. Instead, if you treat it with those slack hands, that loose grip, knowing full well that the opening sentence will change, you can write what you know – what you truly know, as you are discovering it – about something.

Fall in love with that first draft of that first sentence and you write right onto the rocks. I probably see more writing gone awry for this one reason than any other single problem: The piece starts out with one, finely honed sentence, then tries like hell to stay there, ultimately falling apart before our eyes.

So wait but write. Write. Every day. But know that sentence is not necessarily what will open the piece. You will be paid handsomely for doing so.

What Are We looking For?

Here are some of my favorite published first lines by great authors. More to the point, here are first lines that taught me something when I read them. So much so that I’ve collected them here for you.

• From Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
• From William Kennedy’s Ironweed: “Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods. The truck was suddenly surrounded by fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead.”
• From Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
• From Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
• From Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
• From Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
• From Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking: “Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan.”
• From Toni Morrison’s Paradise: “They shoot the white girl first.”
• And, of course, this inimitable portal from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: “All children, except one, grow up.”

The Door and the World

If we refer back to the Ursula Le Guin quote that opened this piece, you will remember that you have two things to consider when writing that first sentence: What is your world, and what might be the door to it?

I have written extensively about my own experience in writing the magazine piece that launched my career. This experience is recounted in my book on how to write memoir, as well as in several of my recorded online classes.

In my twenties, working at The New York Times, and completely without the working knowledge of how to do so, I was tasked with writing what turned out to be the first detailed first-person piece on Alzheimer’s Disease, which was published in The New York Times Magazine. It was a daunting assignment. It’s now hard to imagine, but few readers had heard of Alzheimer’s at the time, and a remarkable editor at the magazine entrusted me with this assignment. My mother was 49 years old when she developed the symptoms. My goal was to describe our family’s struggle.

After months of work, I had finished the body of the piece, but nothing worked as a lede. One night, sitting with my editor, trying and trying again to fix what was then the opener, he turned to me and, with great patience, said, “How did all this begin?” to which I replied, without thinking, “I thought my mother was going mad when she killed the cats.” I watched him type a version of that sentence onto the screen, gently and quietly. I thought then, and I think now, that he was trying not to scare me. For if you open with a lede like that, you are inviting the reader into a world that can be no less vibrant.

The lede for the book that followed the magazine article became this: “I always say that it started when my mother killed the cats.” The experience of writing that piece and that book remains the single greatest writing lesson I can pass along on this topic of how to write an opening sentence of a memoir: Create a world, but while you are waiting for that portal into that world, write the piece.

Write to Your Pitch

You noticed in that scene above that the power of two people was essential to my success. The editor drew that lede from me. At this point, he and I knew that piece backward and forward. We had the copy on the screen. We just did not have an opening line.

What does this mean for you? Find another person, and pitch your piece to them in one sentence. Tell them what it is about. No, do not tell them the plot. Tell them what it is about in the universal sense. Use my little algorithm for this. Don’t know The Memoir Project Algorithm? It’s this:

It’s about x as illustrated by y to be told in a z.

What does that mean? That your piece of memoir must be about something universal (x), as illustrated by something deeply personal (y) and that you are going to tell it in some format (z) — whether that be a blog post, essay, op-ed or book. Remember: Your piece is not about the plot, and it is not about you. Instead, your piece is about something universal and you are the illustration.

Try considering your piece in these terms and you begin to understand the world you are creating and what portal will be needed to invite someone into that world.

And then you can write to your pitch. For more on that, read this piece on how memoir is a three-legged stool. It’s one of the most-read pieces on my site.

If you write to your pitch, you will truly write what you know, pulling from yourself the scenes that show the reader how you learned what you know now. Then, and only then, you will be ready to build that door.

When Will You Know What Your Piece is About?

I am that person you see driving while writing. Or is it writing while driving? Either way, it’s dangerous, I know. I have a notebook tied to the gearshift of my car. Why? Because when my brain in engaged in one of the single most dangerous activities humans engage in -– driving — it seems to free up something in me and yes, I admit it, I scribble these thoughts down as I drive.

I also have a great flow of incoming information when I chop vegetables using that terrifying, terribly-sharp German kitchen knife I own. So, as I say all the time to my memoir writing students, be hospitable. One way that you do that is by having a notebook nearby where you can record your scribbles. You will be inundated with thoughts when you can least handle it — maybe while driving or chopping, as I am. So catch those thoughts. Never assume your mind is not working on your lede. It is. And you must have something to write with to get it down. Of course, you can record it onto your phone. You probably have that nearby when chopping vegetables, because you are also probably listening to music. So grab it and say something to yourself you can use later. Trust me, it will occur. And, if it is does not, you’ll wait, like I’ve waited to use that story about Susannah. Someday you’ll find a place for it. I think I just did.

But capture your ideas. Make a list of them and consider them as you finish the piece.

Capture them, and then capture us and invite us into your world. We cannot wait.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the upcoming Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.