Many aspiring memoirists wonder: how true does my memoir have to be? It can be daunting to think about the holes in our memory, the times we disagree with others about what really happened, or the way time has altered our perception. No one wants to become the latest scandal for lying in a memoir!

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How True Does My Memoir Have To Be?

This should go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: your memoir has to be true. You can’t talk about eighty-seven days in jail if you were there for a couple of hours, and you can’t talk about living with wolves and killing a soldier during WWII if you were a schoolgirl in Belgium. Writing about things that didn’t happen is what novelists do—and we love it! Writing the truth from your own life is what memoir writers do, so stick to the truth.

WHAT IF I CAN’T REMEMBER?

Don’t stall out before you begin. It’s fine to fill in some details that have become fuzzy over the years. That’s something that readers expect for a rich reading experience. They don’t assume that you documented absolutely everything as it unfolded in your life and that. If you didn’t sketch in some sensory details that you might not remember, the memoir would be a pretty dry read.

The key is that these details can’t be vital to the story. So you can describe your sister’s green shoes, or talk about the antiseptic smell in the hospital corridor, or mention the weather on a sultry summer day. Or those shoes could be yellow, and the smell could be coffee, and the storm could have passed. Those details don’t really matter, so filling them in to make a world come to life is good writing technique.

Dialogue is a common concern for memoir writers. Of course we don’t remember every conversation, complete with tone of voice and exact words. Does that mean that a memoir needs to be all exposition, without any dialogue?

Fortunately, readers understand that you didn’t go through life recording all important conversations. If you capture the correct essence of a scene—this teacher pushed you to apply for a scholarship, this boss called you out over coming in late, you and your spouse frequently argued over budgeting—it’s okay to put words into your and others’ mouths.

What About LITERARY TECHNIQUES?

Novels are constructed with scenes that build on each other and lead us toward the climax. Editorially, I have often suggested that an author cut characters, condense the timeline, and eliminate scenes that aren’t advancing the story in order to tell a tighter and more compelling narrative. But life isn’t so neat. What is the line between how accurate the details in a memoir have to be? Can we use these techniques from a novel to increase tension and improve storytelling?

The answer is yes—sort of. If, for instance, you’re writing a memoir about overcoming addiction, you don’t have to detail every single wild night you had. Picking a couple of the most compelling ones gives the reader enough to understand what’s going on without hitting the same note over and over. Or you could combine some of the experiences—going to this particular bar, having a fight with a spouse—even if they happened on different nights.

But you do have to stay close to the truth. Combining a night out and a fight at home that actually happened two days later tells a tighter story without straying too far from the truth. But if you combine drinking at a new bar, fighting with the bartender, hitting a mailbox, coming home to an empty house because your spouse left, and getting laid off from your job to all happen on a particular Tuesday—even if those things all happened, but over a course of months—that’s changing reality too much. It might be more dramatic, but it’s too far from the truth.

Sometimes authors choose to leave important characters, like a girlfriend or children, out of a narrative completely in order to protect them. I applaud the sentiment, but it does often lead to a manuscript feeling incomplete. When we take some of the most important people in our lives out of our memoir, it creates a hole in motivations, relationships, and explanations that can lead to either confusion for the reader or the author making things up to patch over those holes.

Chrissy Metz handles this really well in her memoir This is Me: Loving the Person You Are Today. She talks about her troubled relationship with her stepfather growing up. Rather than never talking about her mom, which would leave readers confused, she simply tells the reader that she has spoken with her mom as an adult about what happened in their home. She considers her mom’s perspective her own story to tell, but she explicitly tells that to the reader, rather than leaving us wondering where Mom was in her childhood.

That’s really the key. Combining characters and scenes to tell a tighter story, or omitting important pieces of a story to protect others, can be done—as long as the author is upfront with it about the reader.

WHEN MEMORIES DIFFER

Eyewitnesses are well-known for substantial disagreements about what they all saw. Add in the passage of time, and it’s no wonder that others might have different accounts of what really happened.

I do suggest that you talk to the others involved in your story, if possible, to check your version of what happened. Sometimes journals, photo albums, or resources like newspapers can confirm memories. But it’s very possible that you and someone else involved might fundamentally disagree on some important events. Tara Westover mentions this in her memoir Educated, when her memory differs from others in her family. Telling this to the reader helps establish trust. Instead of ignoring other versions of history, acknowledging that others disagree but that this is what you remember is an honest and effective way to proceed.

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