Memoir Or Autobiography? How To Choose The Right Genre

A memoir and autobiography are similar genres that detail a life story.

In literary circles, the definition between the two is sometimes a little fuzzy.

Both record the author’s life story and are written in the first-person point of view. That is, I was born, I lived, and I married the man/woman of my dreams.

Perhaps the best way to define each genre is to say that one is a factual biography, and the other is a memory of a particular time.

Memoir vs. autobiography

You are in the process of writing your story.

Of course, it’s about you.

But which genre will you choose when the day comes to publish your book?

With the major self-publishing services, such as Amazon KDP or Draft2Digital, you can usually select only three genre categories.

So you might be tempted to choose both, or even add biography.

It might not seem like a big deal.

However, depending on how you write your story, you need to categorize your book in the most appropriate genre to attract potential readers.

For a quick definition, Writer’s Digest says this.

An autobiography focuses on the chronology of the writer’s entire life, while a memoir covers one specific aspect of the writer’s life.

With that said, let’s have a look at some tangible differences between a memoir and an autobiography.

What is a memoir?

The main feature of a memoir is that it is about a specific time in an author’s life.

The story is often a memory or reminiscence of a life-changing event.

It often documents a story from the aspect of a specific challenge through to a resolution.

More focused than an autobiography, a memoir is an intimate look at a moment in time. Source: Celadon Books

In other words, the storyline will detail a personal experience.

It may involve periods of sadness, difficulty, friendship, and happiness.

Some memoirs touch on life subjects such as divorce, illness, professional challenges, or family issues.

Similar to a novel, it is a story with a protagonist.

The only difference is that it is not fiction, and the protagonist is the author.

But because it is a story, an author can use various storytelling literary devices when writing it.

Such elements could be suspense, drama, danger, a climax, and a dénouement.

One notable aspect of a memoir is that it doesn’t necessarily deal with hard facts.

While it is definitely a nonfiction work, some elements may be embellished to enhance parts of the story.

Because it is a memory from the author’s viewpoint, a memoir focuses more on the feelings and emotions of the time to drive the plot.

What is an autobiography?

If you remove the prefix, you have a biography, which gives you a clue to the meaning.

A biography deals with facts from a third-person point of view. It usually covers a person’s entire life and is written by someone else.

Elvis Presley, the famous American rock and roll singer, was born in 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi.

He lived in Memphis, Tennessee. The world mourned when he died in 1977.

When you put the auto prefix back, it is impossible for an author to write their own full biography.

An autobiography can only cover the period up to the present because the author is still alive.

Unlike a memoir, it is far more fact-based than emotional, not delving as deeply into feelings.

It usually follows a strict chronological order of events, is heavy on facts and details, and is always written in the first person.

For celebrities, politicians, and people of fame, the book could be written by a ghostwriter.

But a strict definition is not so easy.

For example, The Living Handbook of Narratology uses this definition.

Notoriously difficult to define, autobiography in the broader sense of the word is used almost synonymously with “life writing” and denotes all modes and genres of telling one’s own life.

More specifically, autobiography as a literary genre signifies a retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of it, seeking (at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal development within a given historical, social and cultural framework.

When you are writing, the process will be much less about telling a story. It will be more about documenting a collection of facts in the correct time order.

Does it matter which one you choose?

In the end, you could say there is very little difference between an autobiography and a memoir. Most books in these genres are a mixture of the two styles of writing.

It would be difficult reading if there were no story, only a list of facts and figures.

Every book needs emotion and characters that readers can connect with.

Scribe Media makes a good point about any differentiation.

Memoirs are autobiographies without the elitist attitude.

It’s like saying a dog is different from a canine. Or a car is different from an automobile.

It’s up to you as the author to decide what you are writing.

But in all honesty, it isn’t easy to separate the two. A memoir can be an autobiography, and the reverse is true.

The most important ingredient is how you tell your life or part of your life story from beginning to end.

Summary

Good writing is always good writing.

However, writing a story using the first-person point of view is always challenging.

Jane Friedman gives a clue about how to use this POV to create a story.

First-person POV is fixed, in that it’s limited to what you knew and experienced at the time of a given scene. However, the fact that your perspective changed over time is what makes a memoir a story.

To create the most powerful story, use your perspective today to identify scenes that were aha moments, where your perspective on your theme changed. The moment when you faced a fear directly. The moment you escaped someone else’s expectations. The moment you realized you were in love with the wrong person.

If you focus first on the inner journey, you’ll find the best scenes to bring that transformation to life.

The decision you make about your particular genre hardly matters because your story will fit into both.

However, if you plan to publish a book and your emotional memory is the basis of your story, you might want to call it your memoir.

Related reading: Will Self-Publishing Save The Literary Fiction Genre For Authors?