What is a memoir? Meaning, examples and how it differs from an autobiography

A memoir is a work of non-fiction in which the author tells the story of events from their own life, selected around a theme. Three features set it apart.

• It is true. The author may reconstruct conversations from memory, but does not invent events.
• It is selective. A memoir might cover a childhood, a career, an illness, a marriage, or a single year. It leaves out what does not serve the story.
• It is reflective. The author does not just report what happened but says what it meant, then and now. That second voice, looking back, is the heart of most memoirs.

In practice the line is blurred, and publishers use both words loosely. A useful test: if the book could be summed up as “the story of…” followed by something narrower than a whole life, it is a memoir.

• “This Is Going to Hurt” by Adam Kay (2017): a junior doctor’s diaries from NHS wards, funny and devastating.
• “H Is for Hawk” by Helen Macdonald (2014): grief for her father, told through training a goshawk. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year.
• “Educated” by Tara Westover (2018): growing up in a survivalist family in Idaho and leaving it through education.
• “Becoming” by Michelle Obama (2018): from Chicago’s South Side to the White House, organised in three parts rather than year by year.
• “Testament of Youth” by Vera Brittain (1933): a generation lost in the First World War, seen by a nurse who lost the man she was engaged to and her brother.

Notice that each one has a clear thread. That is what makes them memoirs, rather than complete life histories.

No. Most memoirs written today are never sold in a bookshop. They are written for a family: a grandfather’s years at sea, a mother’s arrival in Britain in the 1960s, a couple’s fifty years in the same village. Their readers are children and grandchildren who will one day wish they had asked more questions.

Ordinary lives make good memoirs because the details are irreplaceable. Prices in 1958, the name of a teacher, the smell of a kitchen, what people said when the news came on. Nobody else can supply them.

1. Choose the thread. Not “my life”, but “growing up above the shop”, “forty years as a nurse”, or “how we built the farm”.
2. List ten scenes you remember vividly. Not summaries, scenes: a place, a day, who was there, what was said.
3. Talk before you write. Many people find it far easier to tell a story out loud than to write it. Record yourself, or ask someone to interview you.
4. Keep the second voice. After each scene, add a sentence or two about what it meant to you then, and what you think of it now.
5. Check the facts you can. Dates, names and places are worth getting right; family will read it closely.

The most common situation is not someone who wants to write their own memoir, but an adult child who wants their mum or dad’s stories kept while there is still time. Writing is a big ask at 80; talking is not.

That is how a life story book works at Notre Livre. Your parent, or you on their behalf, answers questions in a guided interview, in writing or by voice note, at their own pace. The book is written only from those answers, in the first person, and nothing is invented: you read and correct every page before it is printed and bound. It is not the same as a professional ghostwriter spending weeks with them, and we say so plainly, but it costs far less and the words stay theirs.

If you are looking for a present rather than a project, our guide to gifts for a dad who has everything covers other options too.