How to Write a Memoir: Read Memoirs

Memoirs and Books on Writing (photo by author)

When I decided that “memoir” would be the best way to tell the story of our foster daughter’s journey from her family’s rural, Catholic, Guatemalan village to our family’s suburban, Jewish, West L.A. community, at the top of my towering list of challenges stood one fact: I was not a big reader of memoirs.

My bookshelves burst with novels, and a fair share of biographies from a phase when I needed extra inspiration and looked to Eleanor Roosevelt, Katharine Graham, Madeleine Albright, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh to provide it. Apart from Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, a cherished gift from my first baby shower more than twenty years ago, my memoir reading list was skimpy.

If I was going to write a memoir, I needed to understand the craft of how the best writers opened up. I needed to read more memoirs, and books on the craft of writing memoir.

Best Books on Writing Memoir

Here are a few of my favorites from this process (in no way a complete list).

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Every dogeared page of my copy of this book is engrained in my psyche. I first read it decades ago, when I was starting to write about my days, the minutiae of life as a mom with babies. Both the writing and the life advice helped me create an…