Memoir Ideas: 40 Topics to Write About, by Theme

Many people know they want to write a memoir before they know what it’s about. A memoir isn’t your whole life. It’s one part of it, told for what it meant, so the idea you need is a stretch of time and a question. Use the ideas below as starting points and change the details until one sounds like yours. If you’d rather tell your story and have it written, a memoir ghostwriter can write it in your voice.

Three places memoir ideas start

Strong memoir ideas usually start in one of three places:

• A change. You were one person before and a different one after. The memoir covers the stretch in between.
• A question you still can’t answer. Why did my father leave? Why did I stay? The book is your attempt to answer it.
• A story you keep coming back to. If it’s the one you tell when people ask what your life was like, there may be a book behind it.

The ideas below are written as whole books, not single scenes. For short prompts to jog your memory, see the life story template and prompts in our life story guide.

Memoir ideas about family

Family memoirs ask how the people who raised you, or the people you raised, made you who you are. Model: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

1. Caring for a parent through their last years, and what you learned about them that you never knew.
2. Growing up as the eldest child who raised your younger siblings.
3. Finding out a family secret as an adult, and deciding what to do with it.
4. Rebuilding a relationship with a parent or a grown child after years of silence.
5. Becoming a parent in a way you didn’t plan: through adoption, fostering or step-parenting.

Memoir ideas about growing up

Coming-of-age memoirs ask how the child became the adult. Model: This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff.

6. The year everything changed when you were young: a move, a divorce, a new school.
7. Growing up between two languages or two cultures.
8. Being the kid who didn’t fit, in a town, a church or a school.
9. Growing up in a family business, on a farm or above a shop.
10. The teacher, coach or neighbor who changed your direction, and the years around them.

Memoir ideas about love and relationships

These ask what one relationship gave you, and what it cost. Model: Just Kids by Patti Smith.

11. A marriage, from the first meeting to the divorce.
12. Falling in love late in life.
13. A friendship that has lasted decades, and everything it survived.
14. Coming out, and how the people around you changed, or didn’t.
15. Years of loving someone across a distance: letters, calls and long flights.

Memoir ideas about loss, illness and recovery

These ask how you lived through something that could have broken you. Models: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

16. Learning to live alone after losing a partner.
17. Living with a chronic illness or disability, and the life you built around it.
18. Getting sober, and the first years after.
19. Surviving a serious accident and learning to live in a changed body.
20. Losing a pregnancy or a child, and the long way back.

Memoir ideas about work, money and calling

These look at a working life from the inside. Model: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

21. Your years in a job outsiders rarely see from the inside, such as nursing, policing, a restaurant kitchen or a newsroom.
22. Building a business from nothing, and what it cost you.
23. Losing everything financially and starting over.
24. Leaving a safe career for the one you’d always wanted.
25. Serving in the military, and coming home.

Memoir ideas about places, moves and travel

These ask how a place changed you. Model: Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

26. Emigrating to a new country as an adult.
27. Restoring a house, or a piece of land, over many years.
28. A long walk, ride or sail you planned for years.
29. One year living abroad, and what it changed when you came home.
30. Going back to the town you left, decades later.

Memoir ideas about identity, faith and belonging

These ask who you are, and where you belong. Model: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

31. Losing your faith, or finding one.
32. Tracing your family’s origins through old records, letters or a trip to the place they came from.
33. Living through a historic event as an ordinary person: a war, a revolution or a pandemic.
34. Changing your name or your community, and what you kept.
35. Joining or leaving a close-knit group, such as a commune, a cult or a team.

Memoir ideas about risk, failure and second chances

These ask what happened when things went wrong, and what came next. Model: Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, about years of slow progress on stage, huge success, and the risk of walking away from it.

36. Prison, and the life after release.
37. A public failure, and how you came back from it.
38. Going back to school as an adult.
39. Quitting something you’d spent your life on: a sport, an instrument, a dance career.
40. Taking a big risk at 60 or later.

For 20 real memoirs grouped by type, see our memoir examples by type.

Memoir, essay or family book?

Not every idea needs a whole book. How much time it covers, and who it’s for, usually decides the form.

Still unsure whether an idea is strong enough? Our six-question idea scorecard gives you a quick answer.

Writing about hard topics

Many of the strongest ideas on this list involve illness, addiction, grief or family secrets. Three things help:

• Write it first, decide later. Get the story down in a private draft. What to publish is a separate decision.
• Wait to shape it until you can look back. A memoir needs some distance from the events, so you can reflect on them as well as feel them.
• Check before you publish. Writing about real people carries legal and personal risks, even when every word is true. See our guide to writing about people who are still alive.

If writing brings up more than you can handle on your own, consider talking with a counselor or someone you trust along the way.

Turning idea 1 into the start of a book

Here’s how idea 1, caring for a parent, becomes a plan:

1. Theme in one sentence: “This is the story of how I cared for my father through his last three years, and what it taught me about who he was.” Our memoir guide shows how to write your theme in one sentence.
2. Time frame and turning point: three years, from the first phone call to the funeral, turning on the day he no longer knew my name. Here’s how to pick the time frame and the turning point.
3. First scene: the phone call, and where you were standing when it came. See this same story opened ten different ways.

From there, the memoir guide takes you through outlining, drafting and revising.

Help turning your idea into a book

An idea is the easy part to start and the hard part to finish. If you want support:

• Write it yourself, with a deadline. A book coach reads your new pages every two weeks and tells you what’s working. One of our coaches works with memoir writers. Book coaching starts at $849, and a single trial session is $399.
• Talk it, and have it written. A memoir ghostwriter records your story in interviews and writes it in your voice. Memoir ghostwriting starts at $13,600, with every word by a human writer.

Questions about memoir ideas

How do I choose a memoir topic?

Pick the stretch of your life you think about most, the one that changed you and still raises a question. Then test it: can you say in one sentence what happened and what it meant? Can you name the day things changed? If both answers come easily, you probably have your topic. If two ideas pull in different directions, keep the one you’d still want to write about in five years.

Can I write a memoir if nothing dramatic happened to me?

Yes. Many memoirs are built on quiet events: a move, a job, a long friendship, a parent growing old. The drama comes from what changed inside you, not from what happened outside. Choose an idea from the list that matches your life, and look for the moment your thinking shifted. That shift is your story.

Should I write my memoir idea as a novel instead?

Consider it if you want to change events, combine people or protect someone’s identity more than changed names allow. A novel lets you invent; a memoir has to stay true to what happened. Some writers choose fiction for painful material for that reason. Fiction doesn’t remove legal risk if real people are recognizable, so the same checks apply. If the truth of it is the point, and you can tell it honestly, write the memoir.

How many ideas can one memoir hold?

Usually one main idea, with a few smaller threads that serve it. A memoir about leaving a career might also touch on a marriage or a move, as long as each thread helps answer the book’s central question. If a second idea starts pulling the book in a different direction, save it for another memoir or an essay.