Why I Teach Bestselling Authors’ Books
And an invitation to get the very first one in the bestselling memoir series (Wild, by Cheryl Strayed) for free
On Tuesday, I’ll be teaching (along with Linda Joy Myers) what will be our 14th bestselling memoir class: What Made You Could Make This Place Beautiful a Bestselling Memoir. We started this series in 2016 with Wild, by Cheryl Strayed (scroll to the end to get “What Made Wild a Bestselling Memoir” for free) with the idea that our students would benefit tremendously from studying others’ work—and understanding how and what these authors did to break out and break through.
Sometimes the memoirs we choose are having a zeitgeist moment. Such was the case with Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk, and most recently with Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
By the time we started this series, Linda Joy and I had been teaching Write Your Memoir in Six Months already for four years. The series was born from our love of Wild, in truth. Hoards of readers had fallen in love with Cheryl Strayed’s memoir that was ostensibly about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but really it’s a book about losing her mother, and about grief. What had she done to make this story resonate so deeply? This was the question we set out to answer with that first class.
In many ways, this is a full-circle moment for us because the reception to You Could Make This Place Beautiful reminds me so much of Wild. It’s another memoir about a topic—divorce—that’s been written about extensively. Yet, Maggie broke through. Why? This is what we intend to explore.
As I ready for Tuesday, I’ve been thinking about why we do these classes, which of course informs our own teaching, and keeps us on our toes as the genre evolves, and falling in love with memoir over and over and over again.
So here goes:
1. Because Too Many Memoirists Still Get It Wrong
I started teaching memoir in 2012, the same year I started She Writes Press. At the time, I was just leaving Seal Press, which published so much memoir that it had become a specialty of mine, the genre of my heart. I knew what made memoirs salable, and as an acquiring editor, I was also well versed in what made memoir submissions dead on arrival. Fast forward 13 years, and the memoirists who submit to She Writes Press still make the same mistakes. Too much telling. No or not enough scenes. Stories that are “about” the writer and “what happened” and not connecting to the universalisms baked into their lived experience. In other words, no takeaway for the reader.
If you want to learn about takeaway and how we teach it, Class 4 of our Wild course is all about that. Looking back, Wild (published in 2013) may be the memoir that shaped my ideas about what takeaway means. (If you want to understand what I mean when I talk about takeaway, you can watch a video here (yes, it’s from 2016, but these concepts stand the test of time) and listen to a podcast here (much more recent!))
2. Because Reading Makes You a Better Writer
It’s shocking, I know, but people who are actually writing and/or sometimes finished with their memoirs tell me often that they don’t read the genre. I think about Francine Prose in moments like these, whose 2007 book, Reading Like a Writer, should be required reading, and Annie Dillard, whose The Writing Life extols learning through slow, attentive reading. If you’re writing memoir and you are not sure if you love the genre, it’s probable you’re not reading the right books. I also want to recommend Ronit Plank’s Substack (and podcast), Let’s Talk About Memoir, because she’ll help you fall in love with the genre. When I teach memoir, I want to support writers not only to better understand the craft of memoir (which overlaps but is unique in many ways from the craft of fiction), but also to see what goes into well-loved books for the purpose of integrating and practicing the things that resonate with readers. Importantly, to absorb as if through osmosis by reading memoirs whose authors are lighting the way for you by the act of having written and published their books.
3. Because Books That Strike a Cultural Nerve Require Our Examination
A zeitgeist book resonates with thousands upon thousands of readers, and when this happens, I always want to know why. Recently, Grant Faulkner and I did an episode on our podcast about Miranda July’s novel, All Fours, to interrogate that why. Why is it so popular? Why is everyone reading it? What cultural moment is it meeting? A curious reader is a curious writer. And memoir is an opportunity to excavate your curiosities. To move past “what happened,” you must be curious about what is underneath what happened. What sense do you make of it? This is a question we pose in our memoir classes. It’s a constant. To make sense of something brings order, clarity, and most important meaning to your lived experiences that are filtered through your mind, your interpretation, and your understanding of the world. I would love for every memoirist writing their books to have printed on a giant poster in their writing space: Why does it matter? Why it matters takes us beyond what happened, and deep into the realm of meaning, of ideas, of universalisms. Memoir begs you to be curious and expansive‚ and examining what others have done is one portal to get you there.
4. Because You Might Be Moved to Try Something New
I’d never have known there was a revolution going on if I hadn’t been paying attention to new memoirs. Revolutions stem from cumulative moments, where multiple things (in this case books, ideas, styles) emerge together to create a sea change. For me, it started with Heavy (2019), and then Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. These are books that experimented with point of view, whose narrative style employed second person, lists, lyricism, anaphora. That Maggie Smith entered into the memoir space (2023) with her foundation of poetry and her willingness to risk led me to feel that we were—and still are—in a golden age of memoir.
In her new book, Dear Writer, Maggie writes about her memoir:
“As I was writing You Could Make This Place Beautiful, taking risks with both form and content, I suspected that for every reader who attached to certain craft choices, there would be a reader who’d chafe at those same choices. The direct address, the vignettes, the meta aspect of the narration, the privacy boundaries—I knew all of these were ‘love it or loathe it’ choices.”
As for me, I’m in the “love it” camp—and if you’re wondering about these craft choices and want to dive in with us, join our class. Excited to uncover more!
5. Because Memoir Deserves to Be Celebrated
Mary Karr has called memoir a “bastard” genre, and I’ve written about why memoir is a genre we love to hate. Personally, I hate that this is true, but the ramifications run deep. Memoir still needs championing as a result. I think part of the reason people don’t read memoir is because they think it’s self-indulgent. But self-indulgence in memoir is not a given; rather, it’s a peccadillo. Self-indulgence is fertile ground for slaying darlings, and for constant self-interrogation: Why does this matter? Why does this matter? Why does this matter? For every memoir hater, there’s a posse of memoir lovers. But to fall in love with memoir, you must immerse yourself in it. You must allow yourself to be changed by it, and become better for it. I can’t imagine my life without memoir, and I am always excited—and grateful—when a new memoir bowls me over. Recent cases in point: You Could Make This Place Beautiful (which is why it’s on deck); Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds; Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game (paperback coming in May!); Lidia Yuknavitch’s Reading the Waves. (Check out every single one of these people on Write-minded podcast because that is one of my celebration and elevation tools.)
In closing, read everything you can get your hands on. I just finished Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer. I figured I would like it, but in fact, I love it. It’s extraordinary—which is why I went back to my local bookstore to pick up five more copies for friends.
Join me starting on Tuesday for “What Made You Could Make This Place Beautiful a Bestselling Memoir.”
Download my gift to you: “What Made Wild a Bestselling Memoir” for free.
I loved We Could Make This Place Beautiful and have gifted it several times. And I love that you teach bestselling memoirs! In the MFA world, "bestselling" is a dirty word. MFA candidates are almost taught to think themselves superior to the bestseller lists.
While the bestseller lists do contain some books that aren't particularly well-written, many of the great works of literature have been bestsellers in their own time. When someone has only read "the classics" and has eschewed well-received contemporary literature, it shows in their writing, which is often bloated, burdened with insignificant detail, and lacking in narrative drive. Writers need to read widely, without pretentiousness, and part of that is reading books that have resonated with a large number of readers.
I'm reading my first memoir in a while. In "Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America," Helen Thorpe has spent months with these girls and is deep inside how our immigrant laws affect young people brought here as children. The book is full of scenes, side comments, and political analysis (she was married to Denver's mayor), and I can't put it down. She has my empathy at full blast and has upped my understanding about an important issue. Totally recommend.