All Memoir Writing Asks a Question. What’s Yours?

DOES YOUR MEMOIR ASK A QUESTION, or do you need to create one? Although I’ve been teaching memoir for more than a quarter-century, as well as working as a memoir coach, I recently had a new insight into the work that I must share with you. It has to do with the fact that all memoir writing asks a question. That’s right. All memoirs – whether a book, an article or an essay – needs to ask and answer a question. Intrigued? Read on.

My insight developed because I recently was invited to interview Huma Abedin live onstage at an event for several hundred people sponsored by The New York State Writers Institute. It was both a real honor and enormous fun, but it turned out to be more important as a learning experience.

To prepare for the interview, I read Huma’s fine memoir, Both/And, A Life in Many Worlds. About halfway through reading this thoughtful and candid book, I was suffused with a sense of wonder at what she was doing in the pages – and unexpectedly gifted with an insight that might help you successfully write your own book-length memoir.

Some memoirs contain a built-in question that the reader quickly and easily identifies. For example: How will this person ever sober up? How is that person ever going to recover from sexual abuse? How can that Type-A maniac ever find peace? In these books, the set-up and payout is a relatively simple matter that you might consider a call and response. You call out the question in Act One, explore the struggle to find the cure in Act Two and show us life after the cure in Act Three. Question asked and answered.

All Memoir Writing Asks a Question

If you are famous, as Huma Abedin is (though perhaps for the wrong reasons, as you’ll see upon reading the book), your memoir might be a simple, direct response to the question that readers have about you. In her case, she knew she needed to address this question: How in the world did she survive the treachery of her husband, and do so on such a public stage? You enter the book with that question in mind. Yes, she is Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, a job she rose to hold after joining the then-First Lady’s team as a White House intern. But few people are as interested in the remarkable experiences she had, and the insights she developed – through her time in the White House, on the U.S. Senate staff, as a top aide to the Secretary of State, and then in a presidential campaign – as they are in the horribly public way that her marriage exploded.

My new insight about the need for a question when writing memoir began to emerge when I noticed that Huma does not even mention her ex-husband until well into the book. She could easily have opened the book with the public humiliation she experienced – because a dramatic scene might have been a way to capture readers’ interest quickly. Indeed, the book reveals myriad scenes of betrayal and exposure. But Huma chose to begin instead with a deep history – details of her parents, who they were and what she learned from them, as well as more about her Muslim upbringing and strong personal beliefs, her education, and more. Why? Because she is arguing that everything she has on her went into not merely surviving but thriving after the betrayal of her husband. All that she is, the book makes clear, was on her all the time, and she called upon it, deploying her skills as she endured her trauma. That is the book’s argument: that you have on you what you need to meet life’s challenges.

Two Types of Memoirs, But Both Must Ask The Question

Huma Abedin’s question was born of where she ended up after a series of events in her life. This is the case in many celebrity memoirs, as the reader wants to know how someone became a great songwriter, or how someone else became a Supreme Court justice or an accomplished athlete. With our question in mind in every page we write, we know that we must reveal the details that paved the road to answering that universal question. And that’s true of memoirs of not just famous writers, but for memoirs with such clear questions as how the writer achieves sobriety or overcomes abuse. Readers want to witness the transcendence.

But for every memoir writer who comes with a built-in question, there are just as many of us writing a second type of memoir: those for which a question must be formulated. This second group of writers struggle harder, but the results can be no less compelling.

For those who have not got a built-in question – about a habit that must be changed or an addiction that must be quit, a challenge to overcome or a burden to shed – a different form of inquiry must be set into motion. The question the memoir may need to ask and answer might be considered more cosmic or elusive.

One such question might be, “Is closure a myth?” What about, “Can a dog really teach us what skills we lack to live in the world?” In these cases, the writer must present a book opener that provokes the reader’s interest to know what challenge we faced, what skills we did and did not have to face it, and what life was like after we got those skills we needed to move on. Specifically, these writers must locate the question, pose it in Act One, pursue its answers in Act Two, and show what life is like after the resolution in Act Three.

Having a Question Makes Writing the Book Far Easier

In either model – whether the question supplies itself or must be created – the very existence of that question will help you succeed as a writer. You’ll be better able to avoid what I frequently call the Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday version of one’s life. Both types of memoirs – those that come with a built-in question and those for which we must create a question – benefit from having this question firmly in mind as we write, since not understanding what question we are asking and answering leaves writers too likely to stuff in everything they remember, as opposed to addressing the question at hand.

The question, therefore, is tantamount to your success. It will help you sort through and curate correctly, as you choose which details support your story and which are extraneous.

The Three Tools of Memoir

The way I currently teach memoir, I put three tools in everyone’s toolbox: The algorithm, the argument and the plotline. And when asked how to choose which details go into the story, I always remind the writer that you are proving an argument and that the details are like beads on an abacus that must add up to that argument.

I think it’s time to expand the toolbox I teach to include this fourth handy accessory: the question you are asking. For everyone who has ever struggled to come up with an argument, this idea of the question you ask and answer should precede choosing that argument. If you know what you are asking and answering in your memoir, you will be better equipped to shape your argument. For example: “Is closure possible?” might be something you dangle in front of the reader in Act One, only to ultimately argue in Act Three that closure is a myth.

So: What question are you asking and answering, and is it implied, and readily apparent? Or do you need to create it for the reader in the Act One?

Sometimes the Question Comes From Elsewhere

I’m kind of surprised that I missed this all these years but, as we say, better late than never. After all, my first book, which chronicled my mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease at age 49, was written when I was a 27-year-old grieving daughter who was neither famous nor came fully formed with a cosmic question to answer. I was woefully ill-equipped for the task when I got my first book contract, and it wasn’t until I saw some promotional copy written by Houghton Mifflin for the book that I really understood what I was assigned to do.

On the day that the copy arrived, I was still writing the book. As I took time out to read the copy, a line emerged that changed my work – something about how loving and letting go are part of the same experience. “Are they?” I wondered. They are. If you love, at some point you’ll need to let go. At 27, I was not yet aware of that, nor was I going to go gracefully into that idea. My father had just died and my mother was losing her mind in handfuls to an illness I did not understand and for which there was no help at the time.

Yet that little phrase in the promotional copy asked a question of me as I read it, one that informed my writing from that moment on, that became the question that I realized the book had to answer. And the book got finished.

So apparently, I’ve had this idea on me for a long time, though only recently did it come to the forefront of my mind as potentially fundamental to my work as a teacher of memoir.

Ask yourself, then: Does your memoir have a built-in question, or do you need to come up with one, and answer it in the work you’re doing? That, my writer friends, is the question of the hour.

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 upcomingMaster 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.

Photo by Matt Walsh on Unsplash