Me, myself and I: How to write a memoir, according to someone who actually knows
Acclaimed poet and author John Kinsella discusses the many parts of a person and how to delve into them when writing a memoir.
We live in a world of memoir. We live in a world of the ego, of the self as a tangible identifiable object.
Self correlates with a soul and memoir tells stories of the body and soul functioning in the world. Or in parts or aspects of the world.
The properties of the self are defined through creating contexts, comparing and contrasting personal experience with the observed experiences of others, of the social organism one is part of or comes into contact with.
Memoir becomes an accounting of the self, often under pressure, always defining a point of view, a sense of the self in its similarities and differences from other people. Writing memoir, as much as reading memoir, we ask “what is the self?” and how do we discover the self in the pulsating contexts of human life, or in relationship with nature?
Though memoir as a genre is differentiated from diary, journal and even autobiography, through manner of focus and narrative, it is close kin to those forms.
For an experimental memoirist, those modes are essential not only as source material but often also integral to structure. Dos Passos’s novel trilogy USA, with its collage technique and many other innovative fictions, informed my personal memoir writing early on and, indeed, fiction, poetry and other genres are potentially active departures in telling aspects of a personal story, personal experiences.
I can’t remember the first memoir-type text I read, but early school encounters with bowdlerised colonial explorer accounts were a disturbing entry point into the actions of the “many” (as configured through “empire”) being focalised through an individual. One person’s account of their experience under a specific set of conditions.
If I wasn’t aware of the ironies of the narrative of surprise and wonder being manipulated by the militarised underpinning of the “expedition”, it wasn’t that long before I at least became conscious of it. I learnt that while memoir might be based on record-keeping (journals, recording of data, etc), it was also a manipulation of observation and entirely ruled by point of view.
An expedition funded by the Crown, by a royal society, or any other official body was pushing a very particular barrow, and its diarist becoming memoirist was an extension of that barrow.
By the time I came to The Confessions of St Augustine in my late teens, I was not surprised that an accounting of one’s sins is also a way of creating “entertainment” out of them. That a personal journey might be both a testament and a “good read”. This sounds glib, and it is.
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The motive in spreading the message of personal experience might be “educational” and compelled by a moral/spiritual purpose (to save others, to help them, to work as a how-to guide), even directed by some “higher power”, but in the end the writerliness and receptibility of the work is paramount. If it doesn’t work on the level of writing, no one will read it.
Even more disturbing to my still semi-intact idealism was the fact that memoir found on the shelves of many bookshops was primarily from either well-known public figures (musicians, actors, politicians, writers, artists sportspeople …) talking of their careers with side-dressings of a life-story that added up to autobiography.
Or it was from memoirists expressing some specific shift or unusual quality of life outside the construct of the ordinary that made their personal story relatable to by a wider audience, that made their story saleable.
I found the idea of a life as a commodity distressing. Maybe the authors didn’t intend this when writing it, but the “sell” was inevitably a version of exploitation on some level or other.
This all struck me as bizarre. Surely, we all have unique qualities and specifics of character that make the ordinary extraordinary. Trauma often features strongly in commercial memoir, and the process of “confession” might be cathartic for the writer, who likely also hopes it will be so for the reader – across the distance, shared experiences and crises that resolve through the abstracted community of writing and reading.
The issue of justifying why a memoir is being written and published is answered by that vicariousness.
A memoir of my illness, my loss, my discovery … a memoir of migration, of family, of community, of physical and mental transition, of sexuality, of a specific profession, and so on, are all relevant and important to a writer and potentially to their readers.
It is easy to mock someone’s personal journey if it’s in print while valorising our own journeys. If there is a question of validity, it usually relates to sincerity. What is the purpose of the writer in making the journey public and how is its authenticity affected by the public and/or commercial nature of book publication? Sometimes doubt is around mode, more than content. And this is where I see a distinct necessity for innovative approaches to memoir writing.
If capitalism takes our stories to profit from them … we also too often offer up our stories for any gain and reward we might accrue
I was keeping a journal from a young age believing it contained the ingredients of “my story”. I was convinced we are all memoirists, but I found the packaging of “memoir” in the bookshops almost universally painful. It seemed more about marketing a person’s experience than the actual experiences and relevance of them.
A book was like a form of Bundle Theory — no more than the sum of its properties. I wanted to upset the “genre” and still tell a story. Not so much by way of instructing or guiding anyone, but to question what it is that constitutes “the self”.
If capitalism takes our stories to profit from them, often without permission from the person or people whose story it is, we also too often offer up our stories for any gain and reward we might accrue from them.
Now, being broke and disempowered can be a pretty good reason for wanting to tell a story, but it might also damage the story as well. How does a writer — someone wishing to tell their story (for whatever reason) — avoid the obvious pitfall of selling their soul? Selling their self?
When I wrote my first memoir, Auto, I tried to disrupt both the narrative entailed in autobiography and the thematics assumed to be a part of memoir. I broke the chronology into episodes and the themes into fragments.
Self-examination, the key to any memoir, became fraught and indecisive. I kept asking myself how much can I ever know myself beyond the events of my life? Further, how can I liberate myself from my version of events and still tell of my experience?
An interesting case in point is reading, say, clinical observations by medical people of something one was experiencing (in my case to do with addiction), and contrasting with what one remembers (memory is a very flawed thing, and that’s interesting in itself and part of self-examination) and also with what one may have recorded at or near the time.
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It’s not only a case of personal unreliable memory, but collective misunderstanding and wilful misreading directed by professional “standards”.
Further, a memoir inevitably is peopled by characters, and you, as memoirist, might have at least semi-control over the presentation of self, but other people as characters, whether of more intense of lesser relevance to your story, will inevitably lack depth. Rounding them out makes them more fictional than real. Memoir also obeys the laws of fiction-writing.
Auto was not about the specificity of experience (though there is much of that in there too), but about impressions. It was experimental because there was no other way of telling a story that I hoped would also refuse to comply to the market demands for digestibility.
Who would read such a thing? The equally disillusioned? The doubters of an intact, complete Western subjectivity? Maybe. Some did read it. It came out with a small press, but it got a reprint.
When teaching memoir a couple of years ago, I used Lyn Hejinian’s masterpiece prose poem book My Life to disrupt the students’ certainties around what is seen and experienced. Looping through reframing, re-processing and grammatical shifts, the self’s perceptions with regard to a unified world come under pressure. A non-unified self is the result.
We might read in My Life: “I grew stubborn until blue, as the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of the bright breathless West.”
I also used Alison Cobb’s superb Plastic: An Autobiography to show how a strongly realised eco-ethical protest theme can become the mental scaffolding for the gradual revelation of a personal life. Life of the planet and the lives it contains.
And among many others, extracts from McKenzie Wark’s recent Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir were essential in addressing rights, intent, disruption, affect and agency.
The 1845 abolitionist memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was pivotal in addressing a powerful historical narrative of ethics and rights that resonates today.
Celebrity memoir might explain how one became a celebrity … but it rarely acts as a critique of genre or subject
As an activist, I asked students to think of class, privilege, identity … whether their lives were rural or urban or a mix … so as to situate their story but also to prompt self-awareness.
Innovation in memoir surely lies in critiquing as much as justifying the self. Celebrity memoir might explain how one became a celebrity, or the nature and difficulties of being that celebrity (those invasive paparazzi!), along with its gloating pleasures, but it rarely acts as a critique of genre or subject. A damnation of celebrity by a celebrity trying to sell books seems, well, not so convincing.
I feel that we are all made up of many selves, and many ways of seeing, and I asked the students to consider that the voice they use in their memoirs is a choice, a selection. Voice might remain consistent through their piece, or it might shift.
I introduced an idea of a fractured, multi-faceted self, similar to the once I used in my memoir Displaced: A Rural Life. The issue of location is pivotal to that work, but the “I” shifts according to whom they are speaking. The idea of a varied and multiple audience is in play.
In part, my Displaced memoir is a manifesto against the chemical industry, against colonial agriculture, against bigotry and the abuse of animals. But it intersplices this with intimate personal anecdote and scenes. Using various cut-and-paste techniques to randomise, say, chronology as a means of questioning the linear nature of experience, doesn’t mean the memoirist isn’t concerned with telling the story and effectively arranging materials that support that telling.
Given that memoir-writing inevitably draws on so many sources beyond the “self” (external reports, witness, recounting of other people’s roles and experiences, etc), an ethics of arrangement, transparency and a template for acquiring permissions and acknowledgements become essential, especially in the context of publishing.
These can thwart the freedom of memoir, and consequently the unpublished and unpublishable memoir is often the most honest, interesting and devastating. I have experienced the controversies around what can and can’t be said in print. The publishing experience brings new layers of self-scrutiny, even if they come after the fact.
I feel that the purpose of memoir writing is about realisation as much as confrontation. Disruption on the level of language and form — as an extension of content — seems essential to achieve generative change. And publishing need not be the raison d’être of memoir-writing.
John Kinsella’s new book of poetry is Ghost of Myself (UQP, 2025). His most recent memoir is Displaced: A Rural Life (Transit Lounge, 2020).