Importance of Memoir in matters of ‘interpretation of events

Memoir is not just a fancy literary term for an autobiography. I say that from the start because I so often hear the terms incorrectly interchanged. An autobiography is your life story from birth to the present. A memoir is theme-oriented with anecdotes from your life that buttress a specific theme.

I can hardly know anyone who doesn’t have a story. But unless ones is a celebrity, a household name, most people beyond your family and close friends aren’t likely to care. They care about themselves and what your book offers them.

Hence, the theme must be reader-oriented, offering universally true transferable principles that will help them. The closest I have come to writing my memoir, Writing for the Soul, uses selected anecdotes about famous and interesting people I’ve met to illustrate points I make about writing. If an autobiography and not offered writing instruction, it would’ve been largely ignored. So your memoir should draw on anecdotes from your life selected to show how you progressed from some unlikely place to where you are today. In that way, it is about you, but it’s for the benefit of the reader.

Maybe some one:-

1. From the other side of the tracks
2. From a broken home
3. A victim of abuse
4. A recovered addict
5. An orphan

Yet one can achieve the:-

1. Financial security
2. Acceptance
3. Happiness
4. Health
5. Faith

One might start with how bad things once were for you and how unlikely it was that you would escape your situation. Then one would show pivotal experiences and people important to your transformation, what you learned, and how your life changed. Naturally, the better stories and the more significant someone changes the better his memoir. 

However, stories are not the point and frankly, neither are the memoirist. The point is the reader's takeaway. Readers should be able to apply to themselves and their situations the larger truths and principles your theme imparts. That way, one does not have to awkwardly try to apply your message to them. Individuals may be enduring something entirely different from what you did, yet one's story gives someone hope.