If you want to write memoir, you need to set caterwauling narcissism to the side. You need to soften your stance. You need to work through the explosives—anger, aggrandizement, injustice, misfortune, despair, fumes—toward mercy. Real memoirists, literary memoirists, don’t justify behaviors, decisions, moods. They don’t ladder themselves up—high, high, high—so as to look down upon the rest of us. They yearn, and they are yearned with. They declare a want to know. They seek out loud. They quest. They lessen the distance. They lean toward….
Maybe memoir, for some, is the Queen of the Nasties—the medical horror story, the impossible love story, the abuse story, the deprivation story, the I’ve-been-cheated story, the headline-making you’re kidding mes. But plot (which is to say the stuff of a life) is empty if it doesn’t signify, and the unexamined tragedy—thank you, Socrates—isn’t worth the trees it will be inked on or the screen that fingers will smudge. Some of the best memoirs are built not from sensate titillations but from the contemplation of universal questions within a framed perspective.