What is 'good memoir'?

I’m often asked for 'an example of good memoir writing,' so I thought I'd walk you through a short piece and show you what I see. I hope you find it helpful!

Common Language by Karin Jones was one of the winners of the 2021 International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir. In broad strokes, it is the story of a woman longing to be a mother while being married to a man who doesn’t want children. Most of the story takes place during a trip to Namibia.

This is the opening two paragraphs of Karin's 2000-word story. Notice how she ‘shows’ rather than tells, how rich and unique the descriptions are, how firmly the story is placed in its setting without just giving us information (ie. 'We were travelling through Namibia in a jeep when we saw two children in the distance.').

They were two upright pillars in the heat-soaked distance. As we got closer, it was clear they were children, a boy and a girl, who looked to be about ten. Dan slowed the Land Cruiser to a halt. It was hard to say who was more surprised, the disoriented travellers crossing paths with a couple of kids in the arid country of northwest Namibia or the desert dwellers themselves, looking both impassive and dazed, as if a bus had arrived on schedule, powered by wings.

The boy wore tight braids plaited forward, resting on either side of his face like the horns of a young wildebeest. A beaded loincloth hung loosely from around his ramrod waist. The girl’s skin was tinted umber and her coiled hair caked with coppery dried mud. Around her neck and wrists were rings of woven reeds and leather.

The next excerpt is from midway through the piece, when the story goes from ‘travel anecdote’ to something larger. Again, Karin ‘shows’ the dilemma of the story through dialogue and reflection, rather than ‘telling’ the reader: 'The fact that I wanted to have children and Dan didn’t was a growing problem.'

“Where are your children?”

Children? I looked at their faces, all veiled with a genuine look of confusion. We were a couple after all, still young, married by evidence of the rings on our fingers, and rich enough to afford this palatial home on wheels. It was a fair question.

Dan answered apologetically. “We don’t have children.” His feigned remorse was so convincing I just about grabbed a can of corn to hurl at him. If it broke open his chest, what would spill out? Imagined calamities? Yowling fears? The songs of his absent father?

“No,” I said, addressing the woman and shaking my lowered head. “No children.”

Lastly, here are a few lines from the end of the story. The bracelet she refers to was a gift, a maternal talisman of sorts, from an old woman in the scene above.

The copper bracelet traveled in the glove box. It crossed the Atlantic and passed through the Suez Canal. It made its way up the North Pacific and now nests inside a basket woven of desert grass, smelling of salt bodies and earth. The old woman lives there still, in the scent of it, her song echoing a long line of mothers who have kept the fabric of humanity intact. I will pass it on some day to the next woman who needs it.

Karin’s story is a glittering example of memoir writing for many reasons: its carefully sculpted language, its pacing, deft use of dialogue and description, but also, crucially, because it does what all good memoir writing must do. It take us beyond ‘here’s what happened’ – that’s an anecdote -- to why what happened matters.

If you'd like to read the whole story, go to www.amyaward.com and look for The Amy Award Anthology.