The ethics of writing memoirs

Writing about my family and acquaintances in my new true crime book is not easy

Biography.com’s best memoirs of 2023 — well worth reading

Writing a memoir is hard

Hello and welcome to the A-B-C of Writing True Stories.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the art and craft of writing a memoir. I’ve always loved life writing and my favourite writers of memoir include James Herriot, Joan Didion, Frank McCourt, Hunter Davies and Bill Bryson.

I have so many favourite memoirs. I could mention Jean-Dominique Bauby’s incredible The Butterfly and the Diving Bell, Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man and Neil Simon’s two fabulous books Rewrites and The Play Goes On. I could tell you about Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, about Elie Wiesel’s Night and about Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. And I still wouldn’t have told you about the works of Primo Levi.

What a wonderful library of personal writings there is out there. Go and take a look for yourself, dig deep into the shelves. You’ll be richer for it.

But writing a memoir, as I said at the top, is not easy. In fact it’s very hard.