Most people think their life isn’t interesting enough to write about. They’re wrong.
I hear it almost every time. The slight hesitation before they say it, as if they already know how it sounds. “I’m not sure my life is interesting enough.” Sometimes it comes out differently — “nothing exciting has really happened to me” or “I haven’t done anything worth writing about” — but it’s always the same thing underneath.
But let me tell you, I have never once sat down with someone whose story wasn’t worth telling. Not once.
The assumption seems to be that a memoir is for people who have climbed Everest, survived something dramatic, or achieved something the world has already decided is significant. That your life only qualifies if it reads like a film synopsis.
That’s not what memoir is. That’s never what memoir has been.
What memoir actually is
Memoir is the specific. It’s the Monday morning your mother said something you’ve never forgotten. It’s the job you almost took, the person you nearly married, the moment you realised something fundamental had shifted and nothing would quite be the same again. It’s the texture of a particular decade — what you wore, what you worried about, what the world looked like from where you were standing.
None of that requires drama. All of it requires honesty.
The most compelling memoirs I’ve worked on haven’t been the ones with the most extraordinary circumstances. They’ve been the ones where someone was willing to be completely truthful about what it actually felt like to be them, in their particular life, at a particular time. That kind of honesty is rare. And when you encounter it on the page it stops you completely.
The things people tell me aren’t interesting
I’ve heard some version of “nothing exciting has happened to me” from people who then go on to describe:
Childhoods in places that no longer exist in the way they remember them. Careers that spanned the moment everything changed — technology, industry, medicine, education — and what it felt like to be inside that change. Relationships that lasted decades and what was learned, slowly, over all that time. Children raised and launched into a world that looked nothing like the one their parents knew. Losses survived. Reinventions made. Quiet decisions that turned out to matter enormously.
None of these people had climbed Everest. All of them had a story worth telling.
Who it’s actually for
Here’s who I think about when I think about memoir: the grandchildren. The great-grandchildren who will never meet you. The people in your family who will one day want to know what you were actually like — not the edited version, not the photographs, but the real thing. What you thought about. What mattered to you. What it felt like to be alive at this particular moment in history.
That’s what memoir preserves. And it’s available to everyone, not just people with dramatic stories.
Your ordinary life is someone else’s extraordinary archive. The question isn’t whether it’s worth writing. The question is whether you’re going to write it before it’s too late.
If you’ve been sitting on your story — certain it isn’t enough, not quite ready, waiting for the right moment — I’d gently suggest that the right moment is probably now. The Memoir Maker exists for exactly this. And if you want to talk it through first, I’m always here.