Like me, you’re nobody famous, but you want to write a memoir—or you’ve already completed some drafts. Before you put your story on the page or publish the finished manuscript, make sure you meet the expectations of today’s readers. By “readers,” I don’t mean your family and friends.

What A Non-Celebrity Memoir Isn’t

Let’s clear something up first: a non-celebrity memoir is not a life story. That’s an autobiography—and nobody cares about the life story of someone they never heard of.

The memoir also isn’t a greatest-hits album of trauma. It’s not a revenge piece to expose an ex’s narcissism. It’s not a judgmental hatchet-job disguised as insight. It doesn’t include the memoirist’s birth or—heaven forbid—their conception. There’s no “looking back now, I understand.” There’s no “years later, I figured this out.” There’s no tidy wisdom sprinkled on top like garnish.

People who write those types of memoirs can sound needy, preachy, or, worse, downright bitter.

You don’t want that.

There’s nothing more boring and detached than telling the reader how events made you sad, upset, distraught, or some other thesaurus-driven response. That’s a violation of the “show, don’t tell” doctrine which would read like a Wikipedia page. Unless you’re writing a sleeping aid, you want to avoid that.

You Want An Emotional Snare

Instead, you want to entangle the reader in your story so they experience the same emotions you did—to empathize with you and root for you.

This exasperating voyage will take place over a stretch of time—sometimes a year, sometimes a week, sometimes a single unraveling—and never lets up. (This is a nod to the “murky middle,” where books go to die.)

If your memoir doesn’t enlist the reader in your experiences, if it doesn’t elicit an emotional response that refuses to let them go, it will fail on the most fundamental level.

Your Memoir Should Read Like a Novel

A memoir isn’t a piece of fiction, but you want yours to read like one. The only difference is your memoir reflects your lived experiences. As with a novel that pulls you deep into the story, you want to immerse the reader in events as you first experienced them. You want the book to trap you and the reader inside the confusion at a time when neither knows what the hell is going on.

That close narrative distance isn’t a flaw.

That’s the whole point of your memoir.

You Don’t Want Retrospection

To keep readers engaged, you don’t want a pause in your memoir to tell them what it means or what they’re supposed to be learning. That’s pedestrian. What you want is for the substance to accumulate quietly the way it does in real life—through repetition, escalation, and consequences.

You want the reader to pull for you while they accumulate helpful information along the way. If you spoon-feed the lesson or theme, the reader will have no reason to keep turning the pages. Besides, people don’t ordinarily like being preached at.

You Want to Assemble a Collection of Scenes

Because the memoir should read like fiction, it must comprise scenes that include interactions with other people. Conversations that end too soon. Sounds that interrupt things. Timers. Doorbells. Text messages that shouldn’t have been sent.

You want dialogue, disagreements, interiority, and everything else that’s part of your everyday life.

That’s what builds tension and conflict—and interest in your writing.

If every chapter of the memoir doesn’t have you and others interacting in scenes, then you’re doing it all wrong. Memoir is at its best when the reader watches you repeat the same mistake again and again while you’re convinced the next time will be different. Yes, you often fail in your endeavors—until one day you don’t.

Your Voice Is Your Superpower

It’s not your fancy prose that makes the memoir effective. It’s your voice—the tone, word usage, and attitude that are unique to you.

Your voice has to feel lived-in—authentic. It should be regretful, a little defensive, and sometimes comical in the way people get when they’re cornered. You don’t need to be likable. All you need to be is precise, specific, and willing to tell the truth without checking first to see how it lands.

Your memoir must reflect honesty, no matter how self-deprecating it is or how horrible it makes you look. Most important, you can’t lie, but that doesn’t mean you give up all literary license.

In writing your memoir, you’re allowed to condense events, characters, and locations—and even recreate dialogue that you don’t remember exactly—as long as it’s in the spirit of what happened.

Tell the truth as you remember living it.

You Don’t Have to Grow

There’s no rule you must undergo radical change in your journey from page one until the end.

Personal growth stories are clichés. On the other hand, a memoir where the narrator struggles, fails, and becomes a terrible person is a book that can hold a reader’s attention. It’s your thematic story arc—whether it’s tragic, funny, or somewhere in between—that leaves the reader with a message they won’t soon forget.

You don’t have to reassure the reader that everything will be fine. You don’t have to promise that you’ll grow. You don’t have to make the reader understand. The memoir comprises the facts of your story and how you react to them—nothing more. By the end of your book, you’ll become a different person because of the emotional experiences you and the reader shared.

As memoirists, we sometimes never find the answers. Many of us still guess, still question what we’re doing, and still lie to ourselves.

That might be you—and also why your memoir will work.

You Keep Them Engaged Until the End

A contemporary, non-celebrity memoir succeeds when it says, “Stay here in the emotional gutter with me.”

You don’t want the reader to pull away from the close entanglement. There’s no need to explain the meaning of your lived experience, nor is there a need to clean it up or attach a tidy bow.

Resist the urge to explain the “why” of your story. Don’t make the mistake of letting your older, wiser self explain things along the way. Life doesn’t let us reflect in real time. It hands us moments—ones that embarrass us, ones where something almost happens, ones when things can’t be undone, or ones when we’re joyful and happy.

Communicate a single idea: “Watch what happens next.”

Anything else is a retrospective essay wearing a memoir’s coat.

If you write your memoir to give the readers the emotional journey they crave, it will become…

…unforgettable.