How do you start your memoir when there are infinite places to begin, and every idea leads to ten new ones? How do you distill all of these disparate ideas to a beginning that best captures what you’re attempting to express?
You want to tell your story as simply as possible, but as you explore, your story starts to feel like a ball of yarn that is unspooling more rapidly than you can collect it.
In this article, I’ll explore how to start your memoir, go over what a throughline is, look at the importance of dramatizing your theme with a hook, and review some memoir examples. Lastly, I’ll give you a Story Weapon to make your own memoir memorable.
Knowing how to start a memoir begins with identifying your throughline — the consistent theme that filters which moments belong in the book and gives your opening its emotional authority. Rather than starting at the beginning of your life, the strongest memoir openings drop readers into a scene already charged with meaning, as demonstrated by Trevor Noah, Paul Kalanithi, Andre Agassi, and Jennette McCurdy, each of whom uses a hook to make the throughline felt before it’s ever explained.
Know your throughline
In William Zinsser’s classic writing guide, On Writing Well, he says that:
Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction.
If you’ve had the concern that your life isn’t interesting enough to justify a memoir, this should take some of the pressure off. You’ve lived through much more than will fit in the pages of a book.
Rather than being a recounting of all that’s happened to you, a memoir is a way to explore a rich theme and trace its influence in your life. In this way, your personal story becomes something universal to your readers. It’s not about you. You’re using your life as a lens to understand the broad ideas that many of us experience.
That throughline can be anything. It needs to be a consistent theme and you might only discover it after writing out some moments that you know you need to express.
The key to remember in starting your memoir is that it is less about the event you choose to begin with, but rather, the meaning you ascribe to that event. The beginning is where you are setting up this throughline by establishing your theme.
Memoir Examples
Let’s take a look at a few examples from famous memoirs to identify what makes a compelling throughline.
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
He chooses to explore not his successful adult life, but his childhood. Noah was born in apartheid era-South Africa, where it was illegal for black and white people to have intimate relations. As a mixed-race baby, he was “born a crime.” From a life that certainly touched many broad themes, as all of ours do, Noah and his editors made the choice to focus on a specific throughline. The book explores the topic of race and equality through deeply funny moments in his life, bringing light to a painful subject. It’s a great example of how revisiting difficult moments in a memoir can be a chance to heal and reframe your relationship with the past.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
In this book, the author focuses on the throughline of mortality. The premise of the story is beautifully ironic. Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon, tasked with protecting and nurturing health. At the age of thirty-five, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, despite never having smoked. Dr. Kalanithi died two years later, but not before he told his story. The irony of being a doctor who got sick gives the story a unique perspective, with insights into health and being on both sides of the doctor-patient relationship.
Open by Andre Agassi
This world-famous tennis player walks the reader through the highs and lows of his life. He doesn’t just describe his career. Agassi gives a painfully honest perspective: he hates tennis. Agassi wasn’t just a great player; he was a historic player. Despite that, he’s not kidding about hating the game. That perspective gives the book a rich throughline. It means moments of greatness and the low points are filtered through this perspective of feeling imprisoned by the game in which he excels.
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
As the title suggests, this book on McCurdy’s career as a child star is really about her deeply complex relationship with her mom. McCurdy’s mother is both the reason for her career and the reason she couldn’t enjoy it. As the person behind the pages untangles herself from her deceased mother, the book plays out for the reader as a commentary on fame and abuse. It elevates the events that happen to the level of literature.
Hopefully, these examples give you an idea of the type of throughline you’re seeking.
Your life has been defined by big things and your choices took you in interesting directions. The examples above pick broad themes: race, mortality, greatness, and parent/child relationships. The throughline helps filter the moments you choose to explore and gives you a non-linear order for them. Now you can use that to give your memoir a dynamic opening.
Start with a hook
The first few pages are an opportunity to show the reader your voice and introduce the throughline.
You don’t need to say it explicitly, but start off by showing your readers a moment that’s representative of that theme. By doing so, you’re communicating to the reader that you value their time. This isn’t going to be a self-indulgent traipse through memory lane. You have a perspective and you’ve been thoughtful about why you’re telling this story.
Several modern memoirs start in medias res: in the middle of the action. They want to get to the meat of the story as quickly as possible.
To get started on your own memoir, list episodes in your life that you feel are connected to your throughline. You don’t need to know how you feel about those moments yet. That will happen as you begin to structure your story. As you look at a list of these moments, try to pick one that you think demonstrates how this throughline has been a consistent presence in your life.
Opening hook examples
Let’s take a look at how our memoir examples have done this.
1. Born a Crime makes clever use of an epigraph at the start of the story. It reprints an excerpt of the Immorality Act of 1927, which made Trevor Noah’s birth a crime. The first chapter then starts with a clear hook:
Sometimes in big Hollywood movies they’ll have these crazy chase scenes where somebody jumps or gets thrown from a moving car. The person hits the ground and rolls for a bit. Then they come to a stop and pop up and dust themselves off, like it was no big deal. Whenever I see that I think, “That’s rubbish. Getting thrown out of a moving car hurts way worse than that.”
We’ve been introduced to the throughline and now we need to know why he himself was thrown out of a moving car. Without spoiling it too much, I’ll say that the story is very much connected to the throughline while still being funny and joyous.
2. When Breath Becomes Air makes similar use of an epigraph and a hook. There’s a reason we recommend these methods: they’re tried and true. The epigraph is from T.S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality”:
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Without needing to say it himself, Dr. Kalanathi expresses the throughline. He then starts the story at a pivotal moment of his life:
I flipped through the CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. Cancer, widely disseminated. I was a neurosurgical resident entering my final year of training. Over the last six years, I’d examined scores of such scans, on the off chance that some procedure might benefit the patient. But this scan was different: it was my own.
We’re given an immediate reason to keep reading: Dr. Kalanathi’s perspective on his own health. You’ll notice this hook puts the reader right there in the room with him. He’s not telling us how he was diagnosed a few years ago. He’s taking us to the very moment it happened.
3. Open begins at the end of Agassi’s career before transporting us to the start of his life. Fittingly, the first chapter is even called “The End.” As you’ll read, Agassi chooses to state the throughline clearly. It’s totally an option. Some throughlines aren’t stated exactly, but the title and the hook make it pretty obvious here. Try to spot the similarities between this excerpt from the first few pages of Agassi’s memoir and the other examples here:
Upon opening my eyes I’m a stranger to myself, and while, again, this isn’t new, in the mornings it’s more pronounced. I run quickly through the basic facts. My name is Andre Agassi. My wife’s name is Stefanie Graf. We have two children, a son and daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City, because I’m playing in the 2006 U.S. Open. My last U.S. Open. In fact my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.
4. I’m Glad My Mom Died begins with the moment Jennette McCurdy realizes that it’s happening. It’s impossible for anyone to fathom their parents dying, but it was especially difficult for McCurdy. This hook gives us a sense of their relationship without explaining everything. It starts with McCurdy and her siblings at their mother’s bedside, trying to wake her from a coma. They’re talking about the big developments in their lives, hoping she’ll stir. Here’s McCurdy’s perspective:
I pull the squeaky chair close to her bed and sit down. I smile. I’m about to bring the big guns. Forget weddings, forget moving home. I’ve got something more important to her. Something I’m sure Mom cares about more than anything.
“Mommy. I am . . . so skinny right now. I’m finally down to eighty-nine pounds.”
I’m in the ICU with my dying mother and the thing that I’m sure will get her to wake up is the fact that in the days since Mom’s been hospitalized, my fear and sadness have morphed into the perfect anorexia-motivation cocktail and, finally, I have achieved Mom’s current goal weight for me. Eighty-nine pounds. I’m so sure this fact will work that I lean all the way back in my chair and pompously cross my legs. I wait for her to come to. And wait. And wait.
Your story weapon: Begin in the middle of becoming
Most memoirists spend their first few writing sessions either:
- Starting too early — trying to establish context that the reader does not yet need
- Or starting too late — after the interesting part has already happened, summarizing rather than inhabiting the experience
Both of those impulses come from the same protective instinct: the desire to make sure your reader is comfortable before things get complicated. But readers don’t pick up memoirs for comfort. They want to experience something true through another’s eyes.
The truest moments are rarely the easy ones.
Take the throughline you have identified, the consistent theme that runs beneath the surface of the experiences you need to write about, and ask yourself where that theme first presented itself to you with real force. This is not necessarily where it began chronologically, but a moment that you keep returning to, the one that still carries heat when you think about it. The moment doesn’t need to be dramatic in the conventional sense, but it needs to be true and specific enough that the reader can stand inside that moment in time with you.
Put yourself back in the room, at the table, on the street corner, wherever it happened. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you know in that moment that you did not know before, or what do you know now that you did not know then? Give yourself permission to write poorly here, you’re just panning for gold. The raw material will only arrive if you let yourself go back there without pressuring yourself to make it perfect from the get go.
You don’t have to have all the answers, just curiosity and patience. The story is hidden, posing as an ordinary life. You’ll find it as you continue to write. Pretty soon, figuring out how to start a memoir will be in the rearview mirror.
Every memoir begins with a single moment of honesty and a willingness to explore what that moment means. If you’re ready to uncover the deeper story within your own experiences and shape it into a compelling narrative, join my next 90-Day Memoir workshop.
