A first-time memoir writer who hasn’t read many memoirs has an extra hoop to jump through when figuring out how to structure her own. When I determined to write a memoir after having published several nonfiction books and a novel, I realized that memoir isn’t one of the genres I most often read. I got busy reading some right away.

What I discovered is that there are many different ways to structure a memoir. Consider the following forms, with examples, that I found enlightening:

1. Memoirs in essays

If you’ve already written some essays, or perhaps gotten some published over the years, consider adapting or collecting them into a cohesive volume.

Examples: Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives – a memoir in essays by Mary Laura Philpott (Atria Books, 2022). “It hit me,” she writes, “as we left our son again at the beginning of August, that I was standing at the beginning of a string of endings, proud and bereft at once.” This is from an essay in the middle of the book about the mixed feelings a parent experiences when her child is growing up. She goes on from there to call her grief “self-indulgent” in comparison with the less ordinary losses of many others, and I understand what she means. I’ve written about the same exact thing, and yet none of our words are the same. I stand by mine and yet I love hers.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (Vintage, 1992). This slim book (82 pages) began as a lecture, which was then expanded into an essay. Styron is the author of Sophie’s Choice and other novels, and this essay-to-bestselling-book is beautifully written and psychologically astute.

2. Memoirs that focus on a specific topic or a major episode

Example: Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro (Knopf, 2017). Shapiro, a bestselling novelist and memoirist, writes beautifully here about her 18-year marriage and how bonds change over time. She shares thoughts and memories of her sick child, her and her husband’s first date, anecdotes about her family and friends, and her career as a writer. It’s not chronological, yet she handles the shifts in time and space gracefully. Reading it reminds me of how it’s the writing that matters, in memoir as in a literary novel.

3. A memoir about a place that’s important to you

Example: Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir by John Banville (with photographs by Paul Joyce) (Knopf, 2018). I’ve read nearly every book Banville has written; he’s that good a writer. In Time Pieces, he tells us that his frequent visits to Dublin as a child were a treat, and “That the city itself, the real Dublin, was, in those poverty-stricken 1950s, mostly a grey and graceless place did not mar my dream of it.” He fills the book with unexpected anecdotes, and the photographs are at least as evocative.

4. Memoirs structured around objects, or letters of the alphabet, or just about anything

Can you come up with an anecdote from your life that some A-word evokes? Or perhaps choose a frame of numbers, or lies, or epiphanies, or friends, or your life as an activist or caretaker?

Example: The Sum of Trifles by Julia Ridley Smith (The University of Georgia Press, 2021). Smith’s book is in the form of essays about many of the objects left to the author when her parents died. Each object contains a story, such as a section about a Japanese screen, described in detail, including the background of the story depicted on the screen, and then moving on to exploring how Smith’s family of origin, her mother in particular, passed along her values about decorating a house. None of this detail is obvious or generic, but rather particular to the author’s family and life.

5. The “everything bagel” memoir

Such memoirs include everything (?) that has happened in the author’s life, at least during the period written about. To do this well, you might need to be a very good writer who takes excellent notes as you go about your life, and it helps if your nuclear family, at least, doesn’t mind your writing about them (which wasn’t always the case with the bestseller example below).

Example: My Struggle (Books 1-6) by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Archipelago Books, 2013-2016). I’ve only read one of his series, and I’m not especially interested in more, but Knausgaard’s writing offers some lively instances of how to concoct a scene that pulls the reader in, and all the detail he manages to recall throughout. One scene that comes to mind was when Knausgaard describes changing his toddler’s diaper in more detail than I’ve seen before in a book. Note also that among all the detail there isn’t a surfeit of description that doesn’t add to the scene. That is, he describes a person with a few carefully chosen words, but doesn’t necessarily tell you the color of the sofa unless there’s a good reason to.

6. The hybrid memoir, a newer format that some publishers seek

My own fits this description, though I had no idea of that when I wrote it. I began with chronological tales from my life that stand out in some way (usually due to their memorable emotional content, such as embarrassment or other distress), and combined those with some previously published essays, excerpts from my lifetime of journals, letters, and emails, as well as a few pertinent poems and a list or two. Another kind of hybrid might be combining photos with your words, or any other combination you can imagine.

Example: Priscilla Long’s latest creative nonfiction book, On Spaces and Colors (University of New Mexico Press, Nov. 2026), combines her original thoughts about spaces in our environment and moments from her own life with her prodigious ability to make everyday science (and everything she chooses to explore) a delight to read.