The question of what to include in a memoir is one that stops more projects than almost any other.
Everything feels either too important to leave out or too ordinary to put in. The significant events seem obvious, but the space between them, the texture of daily life, the private thoughts behind decisions, the moments that didn’t seem significant at the time, is harder to assess. And so the project stalls, waiting for a clarity that never quite arrives.
This guide offers a practical framework. Not a definitive list of what every memoir must contain, because no such list exists, but an honest account of the elements that consistently make memoirs worth reading and the ones that consistently don’t.
The Fundamental Principle: Show, Don’t Summarise
Before getting into specific elements, it helps to understand the principle that governs all good memoir writing.
Memoir works through scenes, not summaries. A summary tells a reader what happened. A scene puts them in the room when it happens.
“My childhood was difficult” is a summary. It’s accurate, probably, but it tells a reader almost nothing. It doesn’t distinguish your childhood from anyone else’s. It doesn’t make them feel anything specific.
“The kitchen always smelled of cigarettes and something sweet I could never identify. My mother was usually at the table when I came home, looking at nothing in particular” is a scene. It’s specific, sensory and particular to one person’s experience. A reader is in it immediately.
The most important thing to include in a memoir is scenes. Everything else, the context, the reflection, the analysis, serves the scenes. When you’re uncertain whether to include something, ask: does this help a reader feel present in the experience? If yes, include it. If it merely informs them of a fact, find a scene that carries the fact.
What to Include: The Core Elements
Early Life and Childhood
Almost every memoir benefits from a substantial engagement with childhood, even when the memoir is primarily about adulthood.
Childhood is where character forms. The relationship with parents and siblings, the particular environment a person grew up in, the early experiences of loss or joy or uncertainty, all of these shape the adult who appears in later chapters. Without them, a reader lacks the context to understand why someone makes the choices they make.
However, childhood material works best when it’s specific and sensory rather than general and reflective. The reader doesn’t need to know that your childhood was happy or difficult. They need to be shown what it looked like and smelled like and felt like to be there.
Include the physical detail of your childhood environment. The house, the street, the school. The people who were present and what they were like in daily life, not in summary, but in the texture of ordinary moments. The things that frightened you and the things that delighted you. The particular quality of a specific memory you can still access clearly.
The People Who Shaped You
Every memoir is, at its heart, a story about relationships. The people who shaped who you became deserve substantial space, not as background figures but as full human beings with their own complexity.
Write about these people with honesty and with care. Honesty means rendering them as they actually were, not as a sanitised version of themselves. Care means acknowledging that they are real people with their own perspectives on the events you’re describing.
The most common mistake in memoir writing is to make other people flat. Parents become either heroes or villains. Partners become perfect or impossible. The truth, which is almost always more interesting, is that the significant people in any life are complicated and contradictory in ways that resist simple characterisation.
Include specific scenes that show who these people were. Not what you thought of them, but what they did and said. Let the reader form their own impression from the concrete detail you provide.
The Turning Points
Every life contains a small number of moments where everything shifted. A decision made that changed the direction of the story. A loss that reshaped who you were. An encounter that opened something or closed it. A period of difficulty that turned out to be formative in ways you only understood later.
These turning points are essential inclusions. They provide the memoir with its dramatic structure: the before, the moment of change and the after. A reader who understands your turning points understands why your life took the shape it did.
Identify the three to five moments in your life that genuinely changed things. These are the scenes to develop most fully. Give them time and space. Let the reader feel the weight of what was at stake.
The Interior Life
The most common omission in first-time memoir writing is the interior experience: what you were thinking and feeling at the time, not what you think now about what you were thinking and feeling then.
The interior life is what distinguishes memoir from biography. A biographer can describe what you did. Only you can describe what it was like to do it, from the inside. That interiority is the irreplaceable contribution you make as a writer.
Include what you were afraid of at each significant moment. What you hoped for, sometimes correctly and sometimes not. What you thought was happening, even when you were wrong about it. The private version of the story, the one that existed in your head at the time, is often entirely different from the version that was visible to anyone watching.
Mary Karr, whose writing on memoir craft is essential reading for anyone attempting the form, argues that the first question a memoirist should ask of any scene is: what was I feeling? Not what happened, but what was it like to be there. That question leads to the material that makes memoir genuinely powerful.
The Difficult Sections
Include the difficult parts.
This is the advice most memoir writers resist and the advice most necessary to give. Every serious memoir contains difficulty: failed relationships, poor decisions, periods of genuine hardship, moments where the writer was not at their best. These sections are also the ones most writers are tempted to gloss over, compress or omit entirely.
Resist the temptation. The difficult sections are where memoir earns the reader’s trust. An account of a life that contains only achievements and positive experiences reads as incomplete, because no life contains only these things. When a writer acknowledges difficulty and navigates it honestly, the reader trusts everything else they say.
You don’t have to include everything. You’re entitled to decide what belongs in your story. However, make that decision deliberately, not out of discomfort. And remember that the section you find hardest to write is usually the one that most needs writing.
What to Leave Out
Knowing what to include in a memoir requires an equal clarity about what to leave out.
Leave out the sections that are comprehensive rather than vivid. Many first drafts include everything that happened in chronological order, out of a sense that completeness is a virtue. In memoir, it isn’t. A decade covered in two pages of vivid, specific scenes is worth more than a decade covered in twenty pages of sequential summary.
Leave out the reflection that hasn’t been earned. Insight and understanding are valuable in memoir, but they need to arrive from the material rather than being imposed on it. If you find yourself writing “this taught me that…” before the scene has had a chance to teach the reader anything, the reflection is premature. Let the scene carry the weight first.
Leave out the material that exists primarily to protect yourself. This is the most important category of omission. Some things get included in memoir because they make the writer look better or because they justify decisions that need no justification. Readers sense this. The memoir that’s trying too hard to be understood or forgiven is a less trustworthy document than one that simply tells what happened.
The Question of Length
A memoir can be almost any length, but most family memoirs work best between 20,000 and 50,000 words.
Under 20,000 words, a memoir tends to feel thin. There isn’t enough space to develop scenes fully or to give the significant relationships and periods the time they deserve. Over 50,000 words, a memoir requires the sustained reader engagement of a long novel, which is harder to maintain without a professional narrative structure holding it together.
For most Legacy memoirs, 30,000 words is a natural target. Long enough to be comprehensive, short enough to be read in a few sittings.
When the Question Itself Is a Sign
If you’re still asking what to include in a memoir after reading this, it may be a sign that you’d benefit from professional guidance rather than more advice.
The question of what to include is ultimately not a theoretical one. It’s answered by sitting with the material, by conducting thorough interviews, by understanding which parts of a specific life carry the most weight. A memoir writer UK does exactly this, building the structure of each memoir around the particular person rather than around a general framework.
If you’d like to discuss what a memoir might look like for you or someone you love, start with a free 20-minute consultation. No commitment, just a conversation.