The Hidden Flaw in Most Memoir Drafts

Bysteve
Illustration of a woman at a writing desk, her shadow on the wall showing her younger self reaching outward—a metaphor for the two selves required in memoir writing

Most memoir drafts have one fatal flaw: only one version of you shows up on the page.

There’s the you who lived through the event—confused, scared, hopeful, probably wrong about everything. And there’s the you writing the book, who can see the whole arc from the distance of years.

Both need to be on the page. Almost every first-time memoirist gives us only one.

The “experiencing self” draft is immediate and raw, but the reader never knows why any of it matters. Events accumulate without meaning. The author keeps telling us she was devastated—without knowing why we should be too.

The “reflective self” draft is the opposite. It explains everything. “I now understand that my fear of commitment began here.” But there’s no scene, no moment, no felt experience. It reads like a therapy session.

The technique is to weave both. Keep the experiencing self in the scene—present tense of the past, as if you don’t know what happens next. Let the narrative self comment from the future, but sparingly. One sentence earns it: “I wouldn’t understand why she’d said that for another ten years.” That does the work. You don’t need a paragraph of analysis on top.

Quick test: pick any scene from your draft. Ask, “Could the person living this moment have written this?” If yes, you have experiencing self. Ask, “Could only the person looking back ten years later have written this?” If yes, you have narrative self. If all your scenes pass only one of those tests, you have something to revise.

Take one of those single-self scenes and rewrite it. If it was all experiencing self—fully in the moment, no distance—add one sentence of reflective commentary from the future version of you, something only the writer-self knows: “I wouldn’t understand what she meant by that for another decade.” If it was all reflective self—analysis and explanation with no concrete scene underneath—find the specific physical moment that prompted the reflection and put it back in: what the younger you saw, heard, or did before you understood what it meant. The version that feels alive in your body, not just in your head, is the right one.

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