What memoir are you inside of?
If you don’t know, you haven’t found your ending
A memoir is an autobiographical story about your life, with a theme (an adventure, a political tenure, grief) that takes place over a select period of time.
Even professional memoirists (who are always thinking about what they will write next) fail to recognize when they’re inside of an important story. That’s because, to see the full arc of your story, you need to know how it ends.
Take, for example, my 2013 travel memoir, Walden on Wheels, which follows me around from the ages of 21 to 28, as I try to buck conformity and live an original life while dealing with student debt.
For most of that time, from 21 to 28, I didn’t know I was a character in a story because my story… sucked. I’d been given a bewildering beginning (debt) and was experiencing a possibly never-ending purgatorial middle (paying off debt, working jobs I didn’t like, living in a state of anxiety). As I flipped burgers, changed beds, and struggled with finances, I didn’t feel like I was on a hero’s journey. Rather, I felt lost, stuck, and pathetic. According to my 25-year-old self, the adventure-travel stories I’d write about hadn’t yet happened.
Sometimes we don’t know we’re inside a story until we get to the end (or at least until we see the end coming). When we find that ending, it’s then when we can look back and say, “Ah, I now see that that was a chapter, or an act, of my life.”
For those of you who are not memoirists, I still think this question (are you a character inside a yet-to-be-written memoir?) might be a helpful way to comprehend and give structure to your life. The question might even help you identify what you need to do to get out of your purgatorial middle and move on to your next story—your life’s next “act.”
