Grammar Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty, and today I'm here with Wendy Dale, author of the Memoir Engineering System, a fabulous book about writing your memoir. Wendy, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thank you so much for having me, Minion. I'm so happy to be here.

Yeah, well, I really enjoyed your book.

I found it interesting and inspiring.

Do you have to have an especially interesting life to write a memoir?

I'm wondering, who writes memoirs?

Well, I would say that there's a difference for you're memoir and autobiography.

So to write an autobiography, you really do have to have an

interesting life. In fact, it helps if you're famous. Most autobiographies are written by famous people.

However, memoirs are written by normal people who want to recount an interesting period in their life.

And they really are, they don't have to be

incredibly exciting. The plot doesn't have to be out of this world, but the key is that they

have to have plot. The big difference between memoir and autobiography is an autobiography really is

a lot of things that a famous person lived through. But if you try that with your memoir,

if you try and recount a bunch of things that you lived through, you will lose your reader.

So besides being written by famous people, I would say the biggest difference between

autobiography and memoir really is having plot. Hmm. And so in that way, is a memoir more like a novel? Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, the end

result should feel much like a novel. But getting there is a very different process, because

when you're writing fiction, you make stuff up. And when you're writing memoirs, you have your whole life to draw on. I tell my

students that fiction is a lot like oil painting. You start with this blank canvas and you just

create what you need. And memoir is like sculpting. You have it all there. You have this big chunk of

marble and you have to scrape

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