On Choosing Literary Memoir
“The best memoir is about something, and that ‘something’ is not me.”
—Marion Roach Smith
People sometimes assume memoir is simply autobiography by another name. In reality, literary memoir asks something much narrower—and much harder. It is not about telling the story of an entire life. It focuses on one experience, relationship, question, or season of life and explores it deeply enough that readers find themselves within it. The writer’s life is simply the lens through which that larger story is told.
Most readers aren’t looking for a complete account of a stranger’s life; they are looking for a story that helps them better understand their own. At its best, memoir transforms one deeply personal experience into something another heart recognizes as its own.
That understanding changed the way I approached my own writing. It changed not only how I wrote, but what I believed the book itself should become.
People often assume that a memoir about grief should offer answers. They expect a roadmap through loss, a list of lessons learned, or the reassurance that healing is possible if you follow the right steps. But the story I needed to tell wasn’t one of answers—it was one of learning to live alongside unanswered questions.
It was in learning to live with those questions, rather than resolve them, that I discovered the kind of story I wanted to write. The more I wrote, the more I realized I wasn’t searching for answers. I was searching for the truest way to tell a story.
When I began writing Really, God?: Child Loss, Faith, and the Unlived Years, I wasn’t trying to tell the story of my entire life. I was writing about one year—the year my twenty-five-year-old son died, and everything that followed.
I wanted to explore how one defining year could illuminate larger questions about love, grief, faith, and what it means to live after unimaginable loss. I wasn’t interested in explaining grief or prescribing a path through it. I wanted to tell the truth as honestly as I could—not the polished version that hindsight often creates, but the lived experience of loving, losing, questioning, and learning to live again while many of the questions remained unanswered.
Early in the writing process, I found myself resisting the urge to make sense of everything. There were moments I wanted to tie loose ends together, to arrive at a conclusion that would reassure both the reader and myself.
But each time I tried, the writing lost something essential. The story became neater than the life I had actually lived. That realization changed the book. I stopped trying to write toward certainty and began writing toward truth. Instead of asking what lesson each chapter should teach, I asked whether it faithfully reflected the experience as I had lived it.
That shift became the foundation of Really, God? and ultimately led me to embrace literary memoir.
Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Her words have stayed with me, not because they promise meaning, but because they acknowledge something deeper: stories help us live with uncertainty. They do not erase grief or resolve contradiction. They allow us to bear witness to both. That, to me, is the work of memoir.
I don’t want to tell someone what faith should look like after unimaginable loss. I don’t want to suggest that every tragedy has a reason or that every question can be answered. Life has taught me otherwise. Instead, I hope to create a place where readers can sit with uncertainty, recognize themselves in another person’s story, and perhaps leave feeling a little less alone. To me, that is the quiet power of memoir.
The books that have remained with me are rarely the ones that tried to teach me. They are the ones that invited me into another life so completely that I emerged seeing my own a little differently. They reminded me that empathy is not born from instruction, but from witness. That is the kind of writing I aspire to create. It is also the kind of writing I hope to leave behind.
Memoir cannot promise healing, nor should it. It cannot answer every question or make sense of every tragedy. What it can do is tell the truth with care, honor the complexity of being human, and reveal the universal within the deeply particular. For me, that is enough.
