Memoir Plus

Add a bonus to your personal narrative for a marketing boost.

- BY JENNA GLATZER

I like this proposal," the editor said, "but can you draw out the lessons a bit more?"

As a ghostwriter who specializes in memoirs, I became accustomed to this request. A client would come to me wanting to tell a personal story, and agents and editors would kick it back to us with the note that it would be more marketable if we could root it in something else: self-help, history, leadership ...

Fifteen years ago, pure memoirs were easier to place. Noncelebrities with uniquely interesting or relatable life stories had a reasonable shot of finding homes with publishers. But nowadays, for marketability’s sake, it’s much more common for editors to ask for memoirs to have a second genre element—what I’m calling “memoir plus.” And that can be good news if you're willing to put in the work because it opens up what you can write about. It can also create a stronger book. Or you might hate it. But let’s explore.

Why Does Memoir Need to Be Anything More?

In general, the reading public isn't clamoring to read personal stories by people they've never heard of.

Celebrity memoirs? Sure—they’re huge and regularly occupy significant space on the bestseller lists. But to get buzz behind a “regular person” story, it’s often helpful if you promise to teach them something: the history of hip-hop, how to start a business, how to advocate for yourself in a medical setting. This “something extra” can be primarily educational (like multiple memoirs from people who've escaped from Westboro Baptist Church), instructive (like Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman, a personal story that teaches techniques for parenting “the French way”), or mission-based (like Know My Name by Chanel Miller, which aims to inspire cultural change by illuminating the way we improperly handle sex crimes).