What Are You Really Writing About?

Discovering the deeper truths in your memoir

You sit down to write your memoir, fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to tell the story of your life. But then the questions begin: Where do I start? What’s worth including? How do I make my ordinary life interesting to strangers?

Here’s the thing most memoir writers get wrong from the start: they think they’re writing about what happened to them. But the most powerful memoirs aren’t really about events at all — they’re about transformation.

The Surface Story vs. The Deep Story

Your surface story is the chronological march of events: you were born, you went to school, you got married, you had kids, you faced challenges, you overcame them (or didn’t). This is the skeleton of your memoir, but it’s not the heart.

Your deep story is the invisible thread that connects all these events — the recurring themes, the patterns of behavior, the beliefs that shaped your choices, the moments when you fundamentally changed as a person. This is what transforms a collection of memories into a story that resonates with readers.

Consider Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club.” On the surface, it’s about growing up in a dysfunctional family in East Texas. But the deep story is about how a child learns to survive chaos through humor and storytelling, and how that survival mechanism becomes both a gift and a burden.

Finding Your Through-Line

The through-line is the golden thread that weaves through your entire narrative. It’s not always obvious at first — sometimes you have to write your way into discovering it. But once you find it, everything else falls into place.

Start by asking yourself these questions:

What belief about yourself or the world did you hold at the beginning of your story that was fundamentally different by the end? Maybe you believed you were powerless, and learned you weren’t. Maybe you thought love meant sacrifice, and discovered it meant boundaries. Maybe you assumed success looked one way, and found it looked completely different.

What pattern kept repeating in your life until you finally broke it? We all have them — the same relationship dynamics, the same self-sabotaging behaviors, the same limiting beliefs that keep us stuck until we don’t let them anymore.

What was the question you were trying to answer through your choices? Often, our lives are unconscious attempts to answer deep questions: Am I worthy of love? Can I trust myself? What does it mean to be a good person? What’s my purpose?

The Memoir Iceberg

Think of your memoir like an iceberg. The events — the births, deaths, marriages, divorces, career changes, moves — are the visible tip above water. But the real mass of your story lies beneath: the emotions, the internal struggles, the gradual shifts in understanding, the moments of insight that changed everything.

Readers don’t connect with events; they connect with the emotional truth beneath events. They want to know what it felt like to be you, what you were thinking, what you were afraid of, what you hoped for.

When Anne Lamott writes about her son’s birth in “Operating Instructions,” she doesn’t just tell us what happened in the delivery room. She reveals her terror, her overwhelming love, her fear of inadequacy, her moments of pure joy mixed with complete exhaustion. We connect not because we’ve all given birth, but because we’ve all felt simultaneously overwhelmed and in love with life.

The Transformation Test

Here’s a simple test for whether you’ve found your real story: Can you complete this sentence?

“This is the story of how I went from _______ to _______.”

If you can’t fill in those blanks, you’re probably still swimming in the surface story. The transformation doesn’t have to be dramatic — it can be as simple as going from isolated to connected, from fearful to brave, from confused to clear.

But there has to be movement. Static stories, no matter how interesting the events, don’t engage readers. We’re wired for transformation stories because that’s how we make sense of our own lives.

The Universal in the Personal

The paradox of memoir writing is that the more specific and personal you get, the more universal your story becomes. When you dig deep into your particular experience — the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen, the exact words your father said that changed everything, the feeling of walking into a room where you didn’t belong — you touch something that resonates across all human experience.

This is because emotions are universal, even when circumstances aren’t. Not everyone has been divorced, but everyone has felt rejection. Not everyone has lost a parent, but everyone has experienced loss. Not everyone has changed careers, but everyone has faced the fear of the unknown.

Getting Started

So before you begin chronicling events, sit with these questions:

What’s the real story you’re trying to tell? What changed in you? What did you learn about yourself, about others, about life? What truth did you discover that you wish you’d known earlier?

Once you know what you’re really writing about, you’ll know which events to include and which to leave out. You’ll know where to start and where to end. You’ll know what details matter and what’s just noise.

Your memoir isn’t just the story of your life — it’s the story of how you became who you are. And that’s a story worth telling.