How to Write a Memoir at 70 (And Why You Should)
I didn't write this to prove I made the right moves. I wrote it because I loved every glorious, stupid minute of it.
The advantage nobody mentions
Writing a memoir at thirty is an act of optimism. Writing one at seventy is an act of accounting, and the accounting is the whole point. You finally have the one thing the form actually requires, which is not talent and certainly not a remarkable life — it's distance. You can see which decisions mattered. You can see that the job you agonized over for a year was noise, and the offhand conversation in a parking lot in 1978 rerouted everything.
Start with the scuffs
Everyone's instinct is to open with a résumé. Don't. Nobody has ever, in the history of literature, been moved by a list of accomplishments. Open with the thing that embarrassed you. Open with the footrace you lost to a chicken.
The common thread is an incurable curiosity and a willingness to be fascinatingly scuffed.
The honest scuff is the door into the room. Once a reader believes you'll tell them the humiliating part, they'll follow you anywhere — including into the parts where you did well, which they will now actually believe.
Practical mechanics that worked for me
- Write one scene, not one chapter. A scene is a place, a day, and a thing that happened. Chapters are an organizational problem for later.
- Talk it before you type it. Record yourself telling the story to a friend. Your speaking voice is almost always better than your writing voice. Transcribe, then trim.
- Chase the sensory detail, not the timeline. Nobody remembers what year it was. Everybody remembers the smell of the car.
- Write the ones that still make you flinch. If a memory has heat on it after forty years, that heat is the material.
- Finish badly, then fix. A finished bad draft is a book. A perfect first chapter is a hobby.
The courage part
Here's the real obstacle, and it isn't craft. It's that an honest memoir requires you to admit, in print, that you were sometimes foolish, occasionally unkind, and frequently lucky in ways you took credit for. That's uncomfortable. It's also the only version worth anyone's time.
You are not writing a defense. Nobody's prosecuting. You're writing a report from a country the reader can't visit — 1963, a chicken coop, a beige box on a desk in 1984 — and the only thing you owe them is that the report be true.
Why now
Because the coop goes. Because the people who could confirm the story are leaving on a schedule you don't control. Because seventy is not the end of anything except the excuse.
Mine turned into A Beautiful, Chaotic, Leaky Symphony, and I have never been more glad to have done a difficult thing badly for a long time until it got good.