How Interesting Does Your Life Need to Be to Write a Memoir?
What should you write a memoir about—and how do you know if your story actually works?
If you’ve ever thought about writing a memoir, you’ve probably run into this question pretty quickly:
What would I even write it about?
And it’s not a casual question.
It has a way of pulling in a bunch of other thoughts right behind it—whether you invite them or not. Suddenly you’re wondering if your life is interesting enough, if you have anything worth saying, or if you’re about to spend a lot of time writing something that only makes sense to you.
That’s a vulnerable place to land. It also happens to be a terrible place to start.
Because the moment you try to go from “I think I might want to write a memoir” to “this is exactly what my memoir is about,” the whole thing starts to feel high-stakes. Like you’re supposed to get it right on the first try. Like you’re choosing the version of your life that’s allowed to exist on the page.
Frankly? That’s a lot.
So, understandably, instead of writing, you think about it.
You circle it. You tell yourself you’ll come back to it when you have a clearer idea, more time, a better plan—something that feels a little more solid than “I have a lot of memories and no idea what to do with them.”
And then time does what it does. A few weeks pass. Then a few months. Maybe longer.
You still haven’t started.
Maybe you Google it and get the standard responses: start with a hook (nearly impossible if you’ve never done this before), write something interesting (cool, cool—but what?).
Then the imposter syndrome kicks up a notch.
What if my life isn’t interesting enough to write about?
That’s real fear, my friend. But it’s also not the full story.
Because I’ll tell you a secret: your life totally is interesting enough. You just need a way to get it out of your head and into something you can actually work with.
If you’re still Googling how to write your memoir, procrastinating when you finally get a few minutes to do something about it, and finding yourself staring at a blinking cursor? Not your fault. You just haven’t been given the right tools.
Because stalling on writing your memoir isn’t a lack of discipline—it’s a completely reasonable, human-brain response to being asked to define your entire life before you’ve written a single paragraph.
And the way this question is usually framed doesn’t help.
A Lot of Memoir Advice Is… Not Useful.
Most memoir advice immediately launches into things like hooks, themes, and where to begin.
Which is great—if you already know what you’re working with.
But if you’re sitting there like, “I have a life. I have memories. I have… vibes. That’s about it,” being told to find your angle is not exactly helpful. It’s like walking into a bookstore, staring at 40,000 titles, and someone cheerfully suggesting you “just pick something you’ll love.”
Oh, perfect. Thank you. Groundbreaking.
So you do what any reasonable person does.
You think about it a little more. You open a Notes app. You maybe write down three vague ideas that all feel equally correct and equally useless. You close the Notes app. You reward yourself for your hard work with a snack and a light identity crisis.
Rinse. Repeat. See you in six months.
And the frustrating part is, it’s not because you don’t have anything to say.
It’s because you’re trying to decide what everything means before you’ve actually written anything down. You’re asking your brain for a fully formed thesis when it hasn’t even had a chance to dump the contents of the folder onto the desk yet.
That’s backwards. (Also rude. To your brain.)
A better place to begin is much less dramatic.
Write something.
Not the perfect thing. Not the “this is my memoir” thing. Not the version you’d read out loud at a book launch while pretending this was all very intentional.
Just something that exists outside your head.
A moment. A memory. A scene you can actually see when you think about it.
It doesn’t need to be polished. It doesn’t need to be meaningful yet. It just needs to be there—on the page, where you can work with it instead of circling it like it’s a group project you didn’t agree to join.
That’s the starting point.
So, What Actually Counts as a Story Worth Writing?
Now that we’ve lowered the stakes from “figure out your entire memoir” to “write something real,” there’s still one very fair question hanging out in the background:
How do you know if something is actually worth writing?
Because not everything that happened to you belongs on the page.
Some things are just… things that happened. You remember them, they exist, they come up occasionally when you’re trying to prove a point or explain why you refuse to go back to that one restaurant ever again, but they don’t necessarily hold on their own.
And other things?
Other things have a little more weight to them.
Not in a dramatic, “this changed everything” kind of way. More like:
something shifted, even slightly
something didn’t land the way it was supposed to
something made sense at the time and absolutely does not now
That’s the difference.
A memory exists.
A story moves.
A Simple Way to Tell the Difference
You don’t need a complicated framework for this.
You just need to look at what happens when you take the story out of your head and put it on the page.
Start with the basics: Where are you? What’s happening? What changes?
That’s it.
No backstory. No “so basically…” No extended explanation to help the other person catch up.
Just the scene.
If you can write that down and it still holds—if you can follow it, if there’s a moment where something shifts, if it feels like it’s going somewhere—you’re working with something real.
If it falls apart without a full explanation, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad memory. It just means it might not be your starting point.
What You’re Really Looking For
At this stage, you’re not trying to find the most important story of your life.
You’re looking for something that has enough shape to work with.
Something you can write about without immediately getting stuck.
Something that doesn’t require a 20-minute preamble just to make sense.
That’s the bar.
And once you have that, everything else becomes a lot easier to see.
Where Do You Even Find These Stories? (Without Turning It Into a Whole Thing)
At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, cool. I get the difference between a memory and a story. Love that for me. Still unclear where I’m supposed to find one.”
Fair.
Because if you sit down and try to “come up with a story,” your brain will immediately present you with two equally unhelpful options:
your entire life
absolutely nothing
There is no in-between.
So instead of trying to generate something, shift your focus to noticing what’s already there.
Because the stories you’re looking for are usually not hidden. They’re just not labeled.
Start With What Already Shows Up in Conversation
You don’t need to dig deep for your first story. You need to pay attention to what’s already coming out of your mouth on a regular basis.
Think about the last time you were talking with friends and something came up that made people pause, laugh, or immediately ask a follow-up question.
Not the story you planned to tell. Not the one you think makes you sound impressive.
The one that just… happened.
The example you use without thinking. The story you reach for when you’re trying to explain something else. The one that somehow makes it into the conversation even when it wasn’t the point.
That’s not filler.
That’s material.
Pay Attention to What People Come to You For
Every group has a pattern, whether anyone says it out loud or not.
There’s the person people text when something goes sideways. The one who always has a take. The one who can explain something in a way that actually makes sense, or at least makes it more entertaining to think about.
If people consistently come to you for something—advice, perspective, a very specific kind of story—that’s not random.
That’s a throughline.
And throughlines are what memoirs are built on.
Look for the Moments That Still Have a Little Static
Not everything that happened to you is going to feel like a story. That’s normal.
But some moments have a different quality to them.
They stick around a little longer. They show up at weird times. They feel slightly unfinished, even if you’ve technically moved on.
Maybe it’s:
something you understood later than you wish you had
something that made sense at the time and doesn’t anymore
something small that quietly changed how you see things
It doesn’t have to be dramatic.
Honestly, the more it sounds like something that “shouldn’t” matter that much but clearly does, the better.
That’s usually where the interesting stuff lives.
You Don’t Need the Whole Story Yet
This is where people accidentally make things harder than they need to be.
You don’t need:
the full timeline
the backstory
the explanation
the lesson
You need a scene.
Something you can write down without opening 14 other tabs in your brain to support it.
Where are you? What’s happening? What shifts?
That’s enough to start.
Everything else—the meaning, the pattern, the “what this is actually about”—can show up later, once you have something real to work with.
A Quick Reality Check (Because This Is Where People Talk Themselves Out of It)
At some point, you’re going to look at a story and think:
“This is too small.” “This is too random.” “This doesn’t feel important enough.”
Cool.
Write it anyway.
Because you’re not trying to prove anything right now. You’re trying to see what holds.
And the only way to figure that out is to get it out of your head and onto the page.
Because once you have one story that works—even a little—you’ll start to notice something.
Other moments connect to it.
Patterns show up.
Things that felt unrelated start to look like they belong in the same conversation.
And suddenly you’re not staring at your entire life trying to pick the “right” story.
You’re following a thread.
Which is a much easier (and much less dramatic) place to be.
What to Do With the Story Once You Have One
At some point, this turns into a very practical question:
Okay, cool. I have a story. Now what am I supposed to do with it?
And this is where things can get weirdly complicated, weirdly fast.
Because the second something feels like it might work, there’s a strong urge to zoom all the way out and figure out where it fits, what it means, and whether it belongs in the future Table of Contents of a book that currently exists only as a vague concept and a Google Doc titled Memoir??
Understandable.
Also… not especially helpful.
A much less chaotic option is to stay close to what you already have and write the version of the story that’s actually in your head.
Not the cleaned-up version. Not the one that makes you sound insightful and emotionally well-organized. The slightly uneven one. The one with a sentence you keep rewriting and a detail you’re not sure matters but refuse to delete.
That version.
If You Want Help Getting It Out of Your Head
If a story’s been quietly following you around—showing up in conversations, resurfacing at weird times, refusing to fully mind its own business—this is exactly what You Should Totally Write That is for.
It helps you take “oh, I totally want to write a memoir” from this vague, intimidating “maybe someday” thing and starts turning into something you can actually work with.
Turning it over. Noticing what’s there. Writing pieces of it before your brain has a chance to file it back under “I’ll deal with that later.”
Grab You Should Totally Write That
It’s free. You can try it today.
And by the end, you’re not staring at a blank cursor anymore—you’re looking at something on the page and thinking, oh… okay. that’s something.
