Reflections on Writing Memoir

I am using the "Reflections on Writing Memoir" prompt.

Here are two problems that authors writing memoirs face.

After reading two memoirs, I feel I am at least minutely acquainted with the with the writing style. The two memoirs I read were very different: a man's upbeat take on a crippling disease, and how a woman's young life was difficult due to her impetuous parents. Both books, like many other memoirs, were about struggles of normal, relatable, people. I think the way that memoirs make people captivated or emotional is the way people can relate to the stories within the book. The writing in the memoirs is so detailed that if they wrote about walking in the woods, you would remember the last time you went on a walk. Of course, the writers can't just talk about what happened to them that morning because much of the story is about their childhood life. That means that all of those inconspicuous details littered throughout the pages are all precisely what occurred in their life 5-50 years ago. I can't remember the names of people that I met the week before, so Jeannette Walls recalling the pattern and color of her neighbor's purple striped laundry almost 30 years ago while she was on fire seems not just unlikely, but impossible. This supports the undeniable fact that even though memoirs are supposed to be the exact truth of somebody's horrible' life, that there is no chance that all of, or possibly even half of anything written in the memoir is true.

When was the last time you were embarrassed about something, or you did something wrong and didn't want anyone to find out? In a memoir, you are revealing your entire life to the public for critique, with your shameful mistakes included. In both memoirs, the people talk about how embarrassing things would be but never admitted anything in the memoirs that wouldn't either induce pity or do nothing at all. Jeannette talks about how she would be embarrassed to tell others that her mother is homeless. She thinks that it would make others see her as someone lesser than them because she was raised by two parents who are either homeless or died early. But, throughout the entire rest of the story, she keeps revealing flaws in others but seems to keep quiet about her own mistakes. She is sometimes self-deprecating in the story during her younger years but never says that other intellectuals think of her like that. In her story, she seems to make herself a  Mary-Sue, or an idealized character. She is without mistake, and when it is her mistake, the odds were against her or it was someone else's fault. If every memoir author lets every detail about themselves go, without adding bias or outright lies, they would lose a lot of respect when people find out that they aren't the perfection they claim to be in their book.