“Who will want to read my memoir? Who cares about my memoir?” asked enough times can bring your writing to a halt.

Of course, it’s a good question. Who will want to read about someone else’s life or even—horrors!—MY life.

“But,” you gasp, “isn’t that what a memoir is—the story of my life? What’s the point of writing if no one is interested?”

Well, yes, it’s true no one is interested in your specific life but no it’s not true that your life cannot make an interesting and compelling memoir. Be patient with me. This is big subject.

Perhaps we both agree that no one other than our children and a few others are interested in our lives, our chronology, but I think there is great interest in how an intelligent and thoughtful person—such as yourself, given a set of cultural, spiritual, economic, psychological challenges to identity or happiness or well-being or to something else that is essentially you and me and everyone else, how this person was able to meet and overcome life’s challenges. After all we all have challenges and all of us appreciate some mentoring.

Let me write this in other words.

While the external particulars of a lifestory—you were married on October 18, 1971—may not interest many of your potential readers, the account of the hero’s journey you found yourself on (and ultimately accepted and completed) as a result of this marriage on October 18, 1971, can be of great interest. That is, if you can write it up as an everyman/woman journey in some version or other.

There are some people who are indeed interested in how an individual was able to come to grips with an issue of the day, of a challenge of identity, for instance, and arrive at some integration of the conflict and its resolution, with how that individual learned to live a life worth living, a life that might even have been lived joyfully.

It is that accomplishment of finding the everyman/everywoman experience in your life that will make your memoir interesting—at least to people who themselves are addressing—or have addressed—those issues.

Let me assure you that there are some readers who want to read about your hero’s struggle and how you, in your own way, are emblematic of all people—as the Roman dramatist Terence said so many years ago Homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto (I am a human being and I don’t believe anything human is alien to me)—and even more, how you are /were emblematic of all people struggling to arrive at meaning and centeredness in this world.

People are not so much inherently interested, I believe, in big events as they are in big emotions. (I’ll say more below.) It is our task as memoir writers to find the big emotions in our lives and to write a memoir around that.

“But,” you insist, “aren’t the memoirs of famous people intrinsically more interesting?”

Well, I’m sure some people find them more interesting, but perhaps those people are not your audience.

The story of a famous person

Let’s take a story about a famous person that once produced a lot of hot journalism but is now cold for most people. It is a story most of us reading this remember—not so much with curiosity as with a certain disappointment. It is the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story. Twenty years after the fact, at a time when there is no security risk involved, are you really that interested in a memoir by Bill Clinton in which he writes about who he was talking to on the phone as Monica Lewinsky was having oral sex with him? All I can say is that whom he was speaking to is of no interest to me. All of that is part of yesterday’s news. It has no real life-changing value for me. Will Bill Clinton have to say, “Who cares about my memoir?”

There is something however that could remain current in such a story were it included in a memoir. Many of us would be interested in a memoir in which a man named Bill writes intelligently and insightfully about his sexual demons which had refused to grow up, refused to give him respite, and how at some point he organized his life energies to stop acting his demons out—stopped acting them out on the phone whether he was talking to the president of France or to his mother, made peace with his demons and integrated them into his life so that perhaps now he is no longer driven but has come to harmonize his sexuality into a life that has more peace for himself and for his family.

Granted such a memoir written would likely find a larger audience than the one by the man down the street. Both memoirs however—the one by the man called Bill and the one by the man I have never heard of before would interest me. Who among us has not had demons to integrate and who among us could not benefit from the mentoring of a sensitive person who has been there and done that. Would the man down the street have less of a struggle?

“Who cares about my memoir?” can depend on marketing as much as on subject.

So the question—”who cares about my memoir?”—in a new version remains: how many people will want to read my memoir? Let’s presume it is marketed properly so that its natural audience will know about it. The sexual demon memoir, no matter how sensitively written, will probably not go over big with the teenage girl crowd that is interested in more glamor and pizzazz than in a president of 20 years ago nor with the nonagenarian who has not thought of sex in years. But there is a market for this story—that it is written by the man down the street may be irrelevant—and if you or your publisher find this market you will find eager readers.

But marketing your memoir is a matter for later. Your challenge now is to write insightfully and well, to write an every person story.