A sample assignment sheet is also provided for instructors. Because the personal memoir is more demanding than the personal essay, for both writer and reader, it doesn’t fit into introductory courses as well as the personal essay. An intermediate level course is a good place to introduce the memoir. However, if the instructor takes the time. A list of 52 memoir prompts that will inspire. Use them to get over writer's block, as blog post topics, or as starters for longer pieces.

If you are having a hard time writing your memoir, you should check out memoir examples that we've prepared for you. These wonderful samples will show you what a truly good memoir is and what it might look like. We've also explained what a memoir is, chose interesting tips, and provided a memoir essay structure for you.

📝 Memoir Definition

A memoir is an account of your experiences related to events from your personal life or history that you witnessed.

A memoir is sometimes also called an autobiography, as the two terms share the same meaning to some extent.

But here’s the deal:

There is a slight difference between writing a memoir and writing an autobiography, and it is important to truly understand it in order to benefit most from reading an example of memoir.

Let’s have a look at this difference!

Memoir Versus Autobiography

Autobiography	Memoir
Focuses on the author’s entire life	Describes just a certain part of the author’s life
Tells about famous people's lives	Can tell anyone’s story
Is structured chronologically, covering the author’s life from birth to death	Can be focused on one or several periods and do not have a strict chronological order
Focus on pure fact	Carry the emotional side of life

Writing your memoirs is an excellent exercise and a good start for a beginning author.

You can learn from it different approaches to captivating readers, develop a skill to express emotions in the right way, and train your writing style.

And what is more pleasant:

After practicing this assignment for some time, you can know how to write a memoir book.

If you want to read about other types of assignments, read Overnight Essay blog. We can also help you to write your paper of any complexity.

💡 Memoir Tips

A person who writes a memoir is a memoirist or… simply a student who has been assigned this task. No matter to which category you belong, the following memoir writing tips will help you write a killer memoir sample:

• choose an intriguing title (something like The Other Side of Me or A Day to Remember); it can help you a lot to interest the audience;
• express your personal opinions and impressions (use for instance: to my mind, in my opinion, it seems, it turned out that, etc.);
• add a lot of sensory details (for example, instead of simply stating that a girl had an angry look on her face, you can specify that her face reddened and her teeth were clenched – these are valuable observations, which can make your description more vivid);
• write about memories that are important for you – it's impossible to write a good memoir without feeling a deep connection between yourself and the situation which you describe;
• be yourself when writing a memoir – you can hide your point of view in many academic writings, but this type of work requires you to be honest and show your personal traits;
• choose a proper tone and try to maintain it throughout your memoir essay – it’s an excellent exercise to develop your writing style;
• do research, even if you remember the situation, try to collect as much information as you could, including your friends' commentaries, photos, blog posts – everything that can reveal more details;
• take care about your memoir idea – whether your writing is funny, well-structured, or creative and unusual, it means nothing if you don't put a message in it.

The most famous memoir books are based on the principles listed above. Keeping to them, you can create a masterpiece or, at least, get an A at your college.

But that isn’t all we can offer you:

You can find even more truly good ideas for your memoir in this list of informative speech topics for college students.

🖊️ Memoir Examples to Your Attention

Finally, you can observe these memoir writing examples to know how to write one yourself.

Of course, you can use these memoir ideas, but reading these samples can also give you enough inspiration to develop your own paper from the very beginning.

Let’s begin.

My Pursuit of Happiness

Actually, I started my pursuit of happiness as soon as I came into this world. My Mom says that I was an extremely capricious baby – I could cry out loud for a rather long period of time until all my demands were satisfied. A little terrorist, with large rainy eyes and a loud voice, I was! Later on, as I grew up, I preserved my willingness to do everything to get what I wanted, but I learned some new and more effective methods of achieving my goals.

I remember that, when I was 4 years old, I wanted to have a dog. Absolutely nothing, even my allergy to dogs, could prevent me from making my dream come true…

Comment: Thetitle is captivating – it sets the tone, but it does not reveal all the secrets. This example of a memoir contains some self-criticism. The author sounds truly sincere when s/he calls himself (herself) a terrorist.

A Revolution at School

The events of that sunny spring day turned out to change the course of history at our school. I am proud of being one of the revolutionaries who drove the change.

The problem was our school uniform, which was more or less bearable in winter but became a cause of students' torture in spring because it was too hot.

This is why the girls from our class agreed to wear jeans instead of the uniform one day, to show our protest against the silly school rule of wearing the uniform even when it was too hot for it. We felt a bit scared before the beginning of the first lesson. Mrs. Stone, our Geography teacher, had to be the first to see our silent protest…

Comment: The authorexpresses his/her feelings and emotions about an important event at school. Note that this sample memoir focuses more on the event than on the author's personality.

📎 Memoir about Yourself

A memoir about yourself or a personal memoir differs from just a personal essay. A memoir about yourself is a piece of writing in which a person reflects on important personal events. It is a place where the author analyzes and describes why certain events were so crucial.

But you might fairly ask: “What is the difference between a personal memoir and a personal essay?” Here is the answer!

To some extent, the personal memoir and the personal essay are pretty similar. However, there is one important difference! The essay can be a reflection on any events or just a description of anything personal. The memoir focuses on past and life-changing experiences.

In short, the personal memoir aims at answering the three questions:

1. What event or events were important in the author’s life?
2. Why were they so crucial?
3. How they affected the author’s life?

📜 Example of Memoir About Yourself

We’ve created a great example of a personal memoir for you. Here you can see how you can structure your story and what it can be about. Let’s dive in!

The Life-Changing Morning

That morning the sky was especially grey, and the whole atmosphere did not dispose of something good. I woke up alone in my tiny flat in the middle of nowhere. It did not felt like something bad is happening or even is going to happen shortly. However, the way I felt was hard to describe. I took my morning coffee and then heard a knock on the door. It was a postman with an envelope in his hand. I opened the letter and read it out loud. It said that I was invited to the University of Oxford to study journalism. My dream came true! I was filled with happiness, motivation, and thirst to start my studies as soon as possible. I can still remember this special and life-changing moment.

Comment: First of all, the author chose the right, captivating title, which invites a reader to discover what had happened that morning. Secondly, the personal memoir focuses on the important event that had changed a young person's life. Thirdly, he reflects on how he felt when it happened.

📋 One-Page Memoir: What Is It About?

A memoir doesn’t have to be a thick book. It can be of any length and cover any important life events. Making your memoir relatively short means that you should focus on one particular event.

Besides, this event should be captivating and life-changing. It would be best to tell about the emotions you experienced and what they brought to your life. The text can be concise, for instance, only 1 page. However, it should be interesting enough to evoke a reader's emotions in such a short time.

So, here is a few recommendations for your one-page memoir:

• Cover one event only.
• Choose the most captivating and life-changing event.
• Don't forget to express your emotions.
• Mention why this event was crucial for your future life.

📚 Memoir Essay Structure

If your task is to create a memoir essay, you may be surprised because itdoesn’t have any typical structure.

You see:

The way you do your memoir writing depends only on your style and preferences.

If you want to combine two different stories into one and underline the message by inferring it from both of them – do it.

If you want to tell a situation when you feel fear or anxiety, there is a nice place to put a flashback to make readers understand you better – then, do it as well.

Memoir writing structure is a field where you can apply creativity and originality.

What you must include are:

• the details of your memoir
• the message
• why this story matters to you

Other elements are free for you to add to your paper. Let your inner writer choose which of them do you need to make a memoir writing breath-taking.

Personal Autobiography Examples

So, after looking through these examples of memoirs, you have a pretty good idea of how to write your own papers in this genre. Good luck with your memoirs! We are certain that you will make them unforgettable!

🔗 References

People embrace stories based on the titles that they see. A great title encourages curiosity, which causes a potential reader to pick up a memoir to examine it some more. A poor title will create the opposite effect.

The only problem is that it can sometimes be difficult to find the perfect title for your memoir. These memoir title ideas will help you begin to develop the best one to use in no time at all.

A Good Title Represents the Journey

When someone picks up a memoir to read, what they are actually doing is agreeing to the unspoken contract that the writer has offered to them. This contract is dictated by the title that was chosen for the memoir in the first place. Everything must come back to the few words that have been given to it because the title invokes a specific image in the reader’s mind.

If the value of the story doesn’t match up to the value of the unspoken contract, then the memoir will never be finished.

So think of the memoir title as a name. When someone says the name “Orion’s Belt,” many will picture the constellation in the sky. What should people picture about your memoir? And what will help to draw them back into your story if they need to set it down for some reason?

Here are some titles of existing memoirs that have represented their journey very effectively.

• The Man Who Couldn’t Eat by Jon Reiner
• Queen of the Road by Doreen Orion
• All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
• Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

A Memoir Title Must Also Be About Marketing

The title of a memoir is going to become a direct reflection of the writer’s personality. For that reason, it should be a title that is reflective of something that is extremely important to the author. If a writer has a great sense of humor, then the memoir title should be humorous. If the writer made a living as a critic, then the title should be critical in some way.

This is how the title of a memoir initially ties the reader to the author. It is also how the author and perhaps their publisher is going to market the memoir to potential readers.

Yet a memoir title must also make an attempt to understand the reader before it is finalized. A great example of this is the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Anyone who is familiar with the story Lolita, which was initially written by Vladimir Nabokov and turned into a very dark Stanley Kubrick movie in 1962, is going to picture this story when they see the Nafisi memoir.

This doesn’t mean Nafisi’s memoir isn’t fantastic. It’s a wonderful read. But the title forces many readers to get past their initial perception of the memoir because of the title – a title which, for many, is a disturbing tale they don’t wish to relive.

A Memoir Title Must Also Have a Life of Its Own

The contract that a memoir title offers between reader and writer doesn’t expire when the story has been finished. It continues on in association for as long as the story is remembered. Ask the average person if they know Frank McCourt and you’ll likely receive a blank stare as an answer. Yet many have read his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes.

Readers remember titles before they remember authors. The titles are reflective of the story, so if the title is remembered, then the story is also remembered.

Now many will say that the goal of a title, in having a life of its own, is that it should offer an opportunity for a natural recommendation when the reader is asked about a good book. What it should really do, however, is offer a vivid image to anyone when the title is spoken.

Here are some fantastic examples of memoir titles that do just that.

• Freeways to Flipflops by Sonia Marsh
• Bohemian Love Diaries by Slash Coleman
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Ultimately a Memoir Title Is About You

How To Write A Memoir Examples

If you’re writing a memoir, then the title must be about you. It should be something that friends or family would immediately associate with you. In a sense, this title is who you are, but summed up in just a few words. When you can find those words, you’ll be able to find the memoir title ideas that communicate the precise meaning to a reader that is needed for them to pick up your story.