The Memoir & Me

Authentic vintage handwritten letters on a rustic table with pens.

By: Laiba Khurshid (Hopewell)

As a lifelong reader, I never read any sort of nonfiction, much less a memoir, until I was in college. Sure, there had been the occasional reading of one in class, but it was never something that I picked up myself. That changed when back-to-back I read the memoirs Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. Due to their pervasive popularity in the book world at the time, I had decided to give them a try. I found myself floored by how raw and well-written they were.

There was this idea that I had that most nonfiction books, including biography and memoirs, were just a regurgitation of information with no regard to narrative, prose, or readability. But that couldn’t be further from reality.

Memoirs and biographies especially are highly narrative, since they often tell a person’s life-story in the same way you might tell a fiction novel. Reading Crying in H-Mart was a gut-wrenching narrative of sickness and loss, only enhanced by knowing that this was something that actually happened to Zauner in the aftermath of her mother’s cancer diagnosis.

But narratives aren’t the end-all, be-all. Some of the most emotional experiences I have had were while reading memoirs that don't fit the idea of a narrative structure. Maxine Hong Kingston’s classic memoir The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts consists of five chapters which are all stories that paint a picture of Kingston’s life and relationship with her mother. Her writing is not only mystical but purposeful. And it does that while not feeling like a novel at all.

My favorite of all has been Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang. A poet, Chang forgoes the traditional memoir format to instead present letters she has written to those she has known throughout her life, intermixed with an interview she did with her mother. It is pure emotion on the page and quite unlike anything that I have ever read. Poetic language is interrupted by mixed-media art, all to convey Chang’s life to the audience.

A vast majority of people desire to be understood. Very few go as far as to make themselves known to an endless possibility of people. Because in a way, that is exactly what you are doing when you are publishing a memoir: You are giving the world, whether or not they take it, the chance to see yourself fully. To be understood.

So then, to read a memoir is an exercise in understanding. That is what I find to be the best part about it.

Besides the aforementioned memoirs, here are a few more that you can read (all of which are available at Mercer branches):

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