Here's a note I'll send students:
Unless you're a celebrity or have lived through some wild and overt (not interior) drama, nobody except maybe friends and family wants to read about you. At least when picking up a memoir, they want to read about themselves or people they know and are puzzled about.
So, to find more than ten readers for you memoir, you need to: 1. become such a stunning prose stylist that the one out of a hundred or so potential readers who appreciate fine writing will keep reading for that alone, or 2. focus your story on an element of your life or the overcoming of a problem that everybody, most everybody, or lots of people can relate to on account of their own experience.
The best example that comes to mind, I had the honor of teaching a class Philip Yancey attended. He's a masterful writer of non-fiction, but he hadn't yet tackled a memoir, and he was preparing to write one. We talked afterward and he said that during the class he had recognized the focus of his memoir. The story would be overcoming a childhood spent around a toxic kind of religion.
I'd bet a few hundred million of us can relate to that.
