“How do I write the last chapter of a memoir?” coaching and editing clients will sometimes ask me. It is a good question because the last chapter of a memoir is your final shot at affirming your theme and at creating a satisfying and meaningful ending to the story the reader has been engaged in […]

“How do I write the last chapter of a memoir?” coaching and editing clients will sometimes ask me.

It is a good question because the last chapter of a memoir is your final shot at affirming your theme and at creating a satisfying and meaningful ending to the story the reader has been engaged in for perhaps 200 or 300 pages—or even more.

Revising the last chapter is also something I have been working with on my childhood memoir—which, alas, is still nameless.

As I write this

For a while now, I have been contributing to the text of the second half of my memoir, and the text has become a bit rambling. Without much awareness that I was doing this, I filled it with vignettes—my “little darlings” as many writers refer to these vignettes—I had forgotten to include elsewhere. Some of them are going to have to submit the fate that writers refer to as “killing their little darlings.”

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