Writing Memoir While Young

I was in a room full of writers talking casually about getting published.

“It’s brutal!” said one. “I used to work as an agent’s assistant in New York. I should know!”

“You really have to know someone,” another said. The conversation went on, everyone feeling negative and discouraged. It was a conversation I had heard before.

So I spoke up and told the room about how I had queried my memoir; I didn’t know any of the people I was querying, nor was I introduced to anyone. I got a gratifying number of requests for a full manuscript.

“Of course they were all rejected,” I said with a laugh. It hadn’t been funny at the time, but now I knew the manuscript wasn’t ready. I was (am) working on a new draft.

“Maybe you should wait until you are old enough to have something to say,” one of the writers (maybe in her late fifties) said to me. I stared at her, shocked.

A million responses rushed to my mind. The first was, “I’m older than I look!” The next response involved some cussing. The third was, “You don’t understand the difference between writing a memoir and writing memoirs do you?”

What I actually said, because I cannot shake the Southern-bred and retail-honed habit of being polite to a person’s face no matter how I feel, was nothing. I turned to the younger woman next to me and asked her about her writing. She was in her early 30s and writing a memoir.

A memoir is not a biography, it is the telling of one story or theme (or interconnected stories or themes) of your life. The younger woman had worthy stories to tell. I heard a few of them over the course of the evening.

Who hasn’t loved a coming-of-age story? Why can’t a person write more than one story about their lives? It seems so obvious that people have interesting/hair-raising/introspective stories to tell at various ages and voices.

Age is yet another kind of diversity. No one wants to hear just from late middle aged people (except maybe the bitter writer I was talking to). And dismissing other people’s work in a roomful of writers is just plain wrong.

What’s your favorite young/old/middle-aged piece of nonfiction?