The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.
The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.
