Starting a Memoir at 70 or Older: Finding Your Three or Four Big Themes

The most common reason older adults stall when starting a memoir is the chronological approach. They open a notebook, write I was born in 1948 in Pittsburgh, and within two pages they have lost steam because eight decades feels like a mountain. The chronological approach is not wrong. But it is rarely the right starting point. Professional memoir teachers, including those at the Story Circle Network and the National Association of Memoir Writers, recommend a different opening: find your themes first. The themes are the three or four threads that run through your whole life. Once you have them, the chronology fits inside the themes, not the other way around.

A theme is not a topic. A topic is the army. A theme is what the army taught me about my father. A topic is my first marriage. A theme is what I learned about commitment from the marriage that did not last. Themes are deeper. They are the patterns you would describe if a grandchild asked you what your life had been about. Most people, when they look honestly, find that their life rests on three or four big themes. Identifying them turns a wall of memories into a manageable structure.

How do you find them? The exercise that memoir teachers use most often is the timeline of turning points. On a single sheet of paper or a long index card, write down the ten or twelve moments in your life that changed everything. The day you left home. The day you met your spouse. The death of a parent. A job offer that moved the family. The diagnosis. The decision to come out. The trip that opened your eyes. The child being born. The injury. The retirement. Look at the list. Patterns appear. Maybe six of the ten moments involve some version of leaving a place behind. That is a theme of departure and reinvention. Maybe five of the ten involve caretaking. That is a theme of how you carried other people. Maybe three involve faith stretched or broken. That is a theme of belief.

Most lives have three or four themes that do most of the work. A senior who served in Vietnam, married late, raised stepchildren, and converted religions in midlife might find their themes are service, finding family through unexpected paths, and the search for spiritual meaning. Those three themes can hold the whole memoir. Every chapter becomes one of those themes told through a specific moment in time.

Writing from themes also solves the problem of audience. A theme-organized memoir reads like a real book, not a list of dates. The reader, often a child or grandchild, can dip in anywhere and find a complete story. The book becomes something the family will actually read instead of putting on a shelf. That outcome matters because the point of memoir is not the writing. It is the reading by people who love you.

Finally, themes give you permission to skip the parts of your life that do not matter to you. You do not owe the reader a year-by-year accounting. If 1979 was a year that did not shape you, you can leave 1979 out. The themes tell you what to include and what to set aside. That single permission, the permission to skip, frees more first-time memoir writers than any other technique.

(Sources: Story Circle Network — National Memoir Writers' Network resources; National Association of Memoir Writers Pillars curriculum; Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir, HarperCollins 2015; AARP Writing Your Life Story course materials)