What Makes a Memoir “Great?”

I just finished reading Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed's memoir about hiking from California to Oregon after the death of her mother sends her life spiraling downward. I'm still aching from the powerful punch of this story, delivered with so much grace and humor that I didn't even see it coming.

This book didn't just knock my socks off. It knocked off my t-shirt, jeans and knickers, too. It's a gripping adventure story that's brutally honest on every emotional level, and I was left open-mouthed with awe by Strayed's brilliant observations about everything from what it feels like to wake up with thousands of tiny frogs hopping on your body to her profound grief over the dissolution of her family.

As a writer, I've been mulling over this book, trying to think about what made this memoir—along with others I've loved by writers like Bill Bryson, Mary Carr, Alexandra Fuller, Haven Kimmel, Peter Matthiessen, Michael Ondaatje, and David Sedaris—rise to the level of art that's good for the soul. Here are a few thoughts:

Make Your Memoir about More than Just You

Unless you're Bill Clinton or Mick Jagger, nobody but your best friend cares about your life story (and she might be pretending). How can you make your memoir compelling? Find something unique about your narrative and focus the book around that instead of navel gazing about your first dog, your last lover, etc. For instance, Haven Kimmel does a brilliant job of this in Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana. She broke out big with this book by weaving her hilarious observations of small-town life around her own coming-of-age story. And, in The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes about traveling in Nepal and tracking the snow leopard as he asks some of the deepest life-and-death questions common to all mankind. We learn about the flora, fauna, and culture of the deep Himalaya as we follow his spiritual quest and the two narratives meld to create a mystical, timeless read.

Don't Whine.

Enough said.

Do Your Research

Whether you're writing about kayaking through Brazil after your Wall Street breakdown or the summer at Aunt Mary's lake cabin when your father went nuts, do your research. This means reading up on Brazilian history and wildlife or interviewing family members until your memories of that lake cabin become vivid and true. (You'll be amazed by how much your memories differ from, say, your little brother's.)

Be Respectful

Here's the thing: you may have grown up in a dysfunctional family —if you're a writer, the odds are pretty high that this is fact. But writers, no matter how neglected or abused we were in our youth, have an unfair advantage: We have public voices. The people we're writing about often don't. Think long and hard about baring other people's secrets without asking permission.

Be Generous

Okay, so your mom liked to stand on her head naked in the back yard and forgot to pack your lunches for school. It was a tough life! But the point of writing a memoir about it is to show how you resolved conflicts, just like any character in a novel. This isn't therapy. The story has to go somewhere. The best memoirs are those where writers arrive at a place of acceptance and even forgiveness—as Mary Carr, Alexandra Fuller, and Cheryl Strayed do in their books.

Build a Narrative with Tension and Shape

From that first scene, you want to build enough tension into the narrative so that readers are turning pages to find out what happens. Think about the natural start and end points, and what the climax of the story looks like. Each chapter should be shaped like that as well, with its own narrative arc.

Play with Time

Your memoir doesn't have to be chronological. For instance, Strayed does a great job of playing with time, starting the book in the middle of her journey, at a point where her hiking boot literally tumbles off a cliff, then backtracking to where she was before she left. She proceeds on her trip and backtracks many times throughout the book to highlight various high (and low) points in her life story. By the time we finish reading about her journey, we understand why she had no choice but to walk the Pacific coast alone to mend her heart and soul.

Now that, my friends, is a truly great memoir.

Hey Writer! What's Your Brand?

Most of us are cynical enough by now to see that life is all about branding, whether we're being bombarded by ads for colleges, books, cars, shampoos, or a new designer line of t-shirts ($90 for a white GOOP t-shirt, Gwyneth Paltrow? Really?). Brands are built via movie placements, billboards, your Kindle's sleep screen, your radio station, your Twitter Feed and Facebook page. Sure, you can DVR your favorite TV shows and zip through commercials, but there's no hiding from the marketing trolls.

I know this. Yet, somehow I was still shocked when a writer friend recently asked me to change her quote after I interviewed her for a magazine story.

“I can't say that sort of thing in print,” she explained. “I've worked hard to build my brand, and I need to be consistent.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. I edited the quote, but I was stunned. When did writers start being brands?

This question led me through a maze of other squirrely musings. If you write a memoir, are you forever a memoirist? Is a writer of so-called “women's fiction” always doomed to have a slender woman's body parts on her book covers? What happens if a thriller writer dares to try his hand at romance?

Did Mark Twain have a brand? Was it “Southern novelist and humorist?” What about Hemingway? “Lion hunter, womanizer, and minimalist?”

These questions really made my head spin as I was redesigning my web site. (These days, a writer without a web site is like a McDonald's without the golden arches.) I had a perfectly lovely web site—one that I paid to have built when my first book was published--but it was constructed using a software program that made me sob like a napless toddler every time I tried to navigate it, so I decided to switch over to every writer's best friend, WordPress.

In the process, I had an identity crisis. What was my brand? Who was I?

I hadn't felt this confused since trying to follow the plot of those Bourne movies. My first book was a memoir. My second one was a novel categorized by some reviewers as literature, by some as women's fiction, and by others as that poor stepsister of women's fiction, “chick lit” (which everyone knows is sexier and will probably catch the prince's eye at the ball).

My third book, The Wishing Hill, is being published by Penguin in spring/summer 2013. It, too, is a novel. This one, though, is decidedly not chick lit, and more women's fiction/literature. However, my next book—the one I'm writing right now--is a paranormal novel featuring a dead voodoo priestess.

Oh, and I also write humor essays and feature articles for national magazines--usually about parenting, psychology, or health.

So, who am I? What's my brand? Do I have to spell it out in a theme of five words or less?

It would certainly be a lot easier for marketing purposes if my work could fit neatly on one shelf in a bookstore (even a virtual one). Think of bestselling writers who have household names, and you'll see what I mean: Elizabeth George writes British mysteries while Toby Neal sets hers in Hawaii. Stephen King writes books that make you look under your bed at night. John Grisham is known for his legal thrillers; each of Jodi Picoult's novels is women's fiction with a contemporary news hook; and Elin Hilderbrand writes books about women falling in love on the beach. See what I mean?

On the other hand, what about writers who ignore the rules? I've just finished two splendid books by writers who dare to scribble outside the lines. One was Wild, a terrific memoir by Cheryl Strayed, whose first book was a novel and who is widely known as an advice columnist by the name of “Sugar.” Another is Carsten Stroud's skin-crawlingly creepy book, Niceville, a horror novel along the lines of Stephen King, but one that reads like a police procedural with snappy bad guy dialogue worthy of Quentin Tarantino or maybe even Raymond Chandler. Previously, Stroud was known for his nonfiction and more standard crime novels.

What about Tom Perrota? His early novels, like Election and Little Children, were satirical edgy domestic dramas. Then he gave us The Leftovers, which crosses over into another realm ( literally), as he explored what would happen if there really was a Day of Rapture where only some residents of a certain town were chosen to be whisked into the heavens.

How do you brand Tom Perrota, other than calling him “brilliant?” And don't even get me started on writer Neil Gaiman, a man who grinds through every genre like a happy kid with one of those multipacks of tiny cereal boxes. Gaiman has one quote on his Amazon page that says what I feel: “I make things up and write them down.”

At the end of a good day, that's what any good writer hopes to do.

Ultimately, I decided to stop worrying about my brand and just put myself out there. What I want people to be able to do is find me—and find out about me. I chose the tag line “Writer and Red Dirt Rambler,” because my favorite place on earth to write—and ramble—is Prince Edward Island in the Canadian Maritimes.

Whew. Thank heavens that's over. My new web site will be live soon. Meanwhile, I can go back to making things up and writing them down.