Should You Start Your Memoir at the Beginning? Not always.

The now-famous second line of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield reads, “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born.” Now, David Copperfield
is fiction, and fiction now written more than a century ago, but does
that line interest you? If it were a memoir, would it inspire you to
keep reading?

The truth is that our lives’ stories—at least the ones we want to
write about—only sometimes begin when we are born. There are people
like Robert Renteria, author of From the Barrio to the Board Room
(Writers of the Round Table Press, 2008), whose stories really do begin
at childhood. The circumstances of Robert’s youth (poverty, being
abandoned by his heroin-addicted father, living with his hardworking
mother) directly affected how he became the man he is today.

But your story—again, the one you want to write about—may
not have begun until you were twenty, dropped out of college, and
decided to backpack, broke, across fifty countries in the next year. Or
until you were forty-seven and, against all odds, gave birth to
triplets. Or maybe what you really want to write about, at sixty-two,
retired, and with twelve grandchildren, is your longtime, intensely
dangerous career as a firefighter.

The point is that, like fiction, your memoir must have a story arc.
Memoirs that meander through the author’s first thirty years of life
relating amusing anecdotes, random encounters, and disjointed
epiphanies before getting to the real story are rarely, if ever
successful. So before you begin to pen that life story, figure out which
life story you want to tell. Calculate how many years it spans (two?
twenty? sixty?). Most importantly, define your “plot.” For example:

“A lifelong child of often abusive, neglectful foster care, I was
released into the world as an ‘adult’ at eighteen, only to find myself
homeless and soon addicted to alcohol. This is the story of how,
between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, I reinvented myself into
the CEO of a multi-million dollar company.”

“This is a hilarious, heartbreaking account of how, after teaching
at a small, private high school for twenty-seven years, I took a
yearlong job as an English professor at the hardest-partying university
in the U.S.—and failed miserably.”

Compare to:

“This is the story of everything I’ve learned by being a parent.”

“I want to explore how friendship is the most transcendent relationship there is.”

The last two “plots” are vague and not engaging, but worst of all,
they will not guide you in writing your memoir. In defining a plot, you
will figure out when your story really begins—and be well on your way
to putting it on paper.

Recommended reading: Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt