Anne Lamott taught an entire generation of writers that the messy stuff mattered. That the interior life mattered. That the humiliations, contradictions, addictions, grief, family wreckage, loneliness, doubt, and absurdity of being human were not only worthy of the page, but often the whole point of it.
The post was ostensibly about a new book she and her husband have just published, Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences — a reflection on writing, teaching, and the kinds of stories people choose to put on the page.
I practically memorized “Shitty First Drafts.” Bird by Bird sat on my desk for years like a trusted, slightly disheveled friend talking me off the ledge of the blank page.
Which is why I was so startled by her Substack post today, It’s Memorial Day: Want to Write a Memoir?
The opening paragraph stopped me cold:
“When I first met my husband, Neal, nine years ago, he was helping elderly clients write their memoirs…”
Elderly clients. Writing memoirs. So their grandchildren “might someday know from whence they had sprung.”
I kept waiting for the pivot. The disclaimer. The deeper point.
But it never came.
And I found myself strangely saddened by it.
I’m sure she didn’t mean to imply that memoir is a retirement hobby, a sentimental family keepsake category, or a legacy project for people nearing the end of life, tying up emotional loose ends for descendants.
Memoir is literature.
At its best, memoir is one of the most psychologically rigorous forms of writing there is. It asks the writer to interrogate memory, identity, shame, perception, family mythology, self-deception, power, grief, longing, performance, and time itself. Good memoir isn’t “here’s what happened to me.” It’s: What did it mean? And can I bear to look at it honestly enough to make it art?
That’s not a gateway drug.
That is the work.
So when Lamott later writes:
“I think of memoirs as a gateway drug to novels and screenplays, the perfect training ground.”
…I honestly don’t know what to do with that.
This from a writer whose entire body of work helped legitimize deeply personal writing as serious literary territory. A writer whose own essays and memoirs helped create legitimacy for candid, self-searching narrative nonfiction in the first place.
It felt oddly dismissive of the very form that made so much of her work resonate so deeply.
There’s already a tendency in some literary circles to treat memoir as lesser-than. As indulgent. Therapeutic. Easier than fiction. A warm-up act before the “real” writing begins.
But anyone who has actually tried to write honest memoir knows otherwise.
You are working without the protective veil of invention. You are contending with actual people, actual histories, actual consequences. You are excavating your own contradictions in public. And if you’re doing it well, you’re shaping experience into meaning with the same precision, architecture, rhythm, tension, and thematic depth demanded of any serious literary form.
Great memoirs can sometimes accomplish more truth in twenty pages than four-hundred-page novels.
And as someone who writes creative nonfiction myself, I found this particular post sad to read — not because Anne Lamott owes memoir writers validation, but because she has, and continues to, make so many of us feel that writing from the self is not small. Not embarrassing. Not secondary. Not a stepping stone to something more important.
Because despite all of this, Anne Lamott remains one of the writers who first taught me that the raw, difficult, deeply human material of our lives was not something to write around, but something worth walking straight into.
And for that, I am deeply grateful.
