View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the mysterious alchemy of rules, practices, and inner secrets that memoir writers can best apply to their own work.

The memoir has become the basic literary messenger of our era, delivering news and secrets, gossip and heart-stopping revelation. It suits our time ideally well. As a writer who has (whether shamelessly or charmingly is a matter of opinion) written four volumes of memoirs, despite having done nothing in life except write memoirs, I feel particularly ripe to offer some counsel. Indeed, I have even written books on general ‘objective’ subjects – on the philosophy of eating (The Table Comes First) and the nature of learning (The Real Work) – that turned upon, or turned into, a series of memoir essays.

The memoir has become the central vehicle of our emotions exactly because we want our inner truths to be told. One of the basic purposes of writing is to make private life public – not in a narrow gossipy sense but in the richer sense that makes us love writers and diarists, from Boswell to Virginia Woolf. For their inner lives turn out to resemble our own, and even the madder music they make in their minds resonates with ours.

But how can we best write memoirs? What are the rules, the wise practices, the inner secrets, the way to do it? I’ll offer five rules – and more than five rules – that I’ve discovered in these forty-plus years of practice. They vary from the ingenious – every successful memoir has to make a left turn in traffic, a sudden departure from the main thread of the story you’re telling into a broader avenue of thought – to  the courageous: invariably, the part of your story that you feared publishing as too revealing, too vulnerable, too exposing, turns out to be the part that people are most moved and engaged by.

But it only happens – the twist – if that revelation is given a turn along the way that makes it less yours than theirs, less a narcissistic tic than a shared truth. What I’ve learned about the memoir is that it involves a kind of alchemy, where all of the ‘I’s you use somehow become ‘me’ in the mind of a reader. The ‘philosopher’s stone’ that has to go into the sorcerer’s pot for that alchemy to happen will be my subject. 

I’m going to offer some specific strategies that let this happen – and also consider some larger moral and ethical issues that making private life public engages. I’ll talk about my own work, of course, but also about memoirs that have moved or intrigued me – including my friend Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which she began as a pure personal project with no expectation of fame, and Jeanette Walls’ The Glass House, with time to talk about other writers, from Philip Roth to Lena Dunham, as well. I’ll try to be as specific as is possible, while also being as ruminative as the subject demands – indeed, one of my overlying points about memoir is that the flight from the particular to the philosophical is part of its secret sauce.

When we’re done, I hope the writers listening will feel both empowered – able to take sharper stock of the mysteries of what makes a memoir work – and also emboldened: less apologetic about attempting to make sense of one life for many readers, and more conscious of how high a literary accomplishment a memoir can be.

I look forward to talking more about a subject I can’t stop talking about.

– Adam Gopnik

Dr. Johnson to Boswell on journals and memoirs: “There is between the History and the Journal that difference which there will always be found between notions borrowed from without, and notions generated within. Your History was copied from books; your Journal rose out of your own experience and observation. I know not whether I could name any narrative more than a journal by which curiosity is better excited, or better gratified.”