Finding the Real Story Hidden Inside Your Life

Have you ever thought about writing a memoir but wondered, “Is my story really interesting enough?”

You’re not alone.

Many aspiring memoir writers don’t struggle because they lack stories. They struggle because they haven’t yet discovered the deeper story hiding beneath their memories.

In this episode of Making Memoir Magic, Kerry Kriseman explores why finding the heart of your memoir is the first—and often most important—step in transforming your life experiences into a meaningful book.

Drawing from her own journey writing Accidental First Lady: On the Front Lines (and Behind the Scenes) of Local Politics, Kerry shares how she discovered that her memoir wasn’t truly about politics. It was about identity, resilience, and finding her own voice.

She also explains why so many writers get stuck trying to capture every memory instead of uncovering the meaning behind those moments.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why your memoir is not simply a collection of memories
• The difference between the events of your life and the deeper story beneath them
• Why many aspiring authors believe their stories aren’t “important enough”
• How to identify the themes, questions, and transformations that can shape your memoir
• The questions you can ask yourself to begin uncovering your own story
• Why clarity comes before writing—and how finding your story makes the writing process easier

If you've been carrying a story inside you but don't know where to begin, this episode will help you see your memories differently.

Your life is filled with moments.

Your memoir begins when you discover what those moments mean.

Ready to uncover the story hidden inside your life?

Learn more about Make Memoir Magic, Kerry’s step-by-step memoir writing course, at:

www.kerrykriseman.com

About Kerry Kriseman

Kerry Kriseman is an author, memoir instructor, speaker, and storytelling advocate who helps aspiring authors transform their life experiences into meaningful memoirs.

She is the author of Accidental First Lady: On the Front Lines (and Behind the Scenes) of Local Politics, a memoir about public life, identity, resilience, family, and finding your own voice.

With more than 30 years of writing and communications experience, including a career as a journalist and communications professional, Kerry teaches writers how to uncover their unique stories, structure compelling memoirs, and share their experiences with honesty and heart.

Through her online course Make Memoir Magic, workshops, and coaching programs, Kerry guides writers from “I have a story, but I don’t know where to begin” to confidently creating a memoir they’re proud to share.

Learn more at:

www.kerrykriseman.com

Thank you for listening to this episode of Making Memoir Magic. To learn more about my course, Make Memoir Magic, click here. 

Join my free Facebook Group, Memoir Magic for Aspiring Authors, where we honor your story, provide tips, create community, and help you write the story you were meant to tell. Join here!

Transcript

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Welcome to Making Memoir Magic, the podcast where we unlock the power of your story and guide you through the magical process of turning life experiences into memoirs that inspire and impact. I'm your host, Carrie Kreissman, a memoir mentor and storytelling champion. And I'm here to help you find the courage to embrace your unique story and share it with the world. Whether you're just starting out or refining your final draft, this is the place to be for practical tips, inspiration, and the encouragement you need to write the memoir only you can tell. Ready to make some magic? Let's dive in. Hello, friends, and welcome to the Making Memoir Magic Podcast, the podcast where we transform memories into meaningful memoirs. I'm Carrie Chrysman, author of the memoir Accidental First Lady. I'm a memoir instructor and someone who has spent years helping aspiring authors discover that the story that they think they're writing is often not the story they're truly meant to tell. Today I'd like to begin with a confession. Almost every memoir writer who comes to me starts by telling me the wrong story. Not because they're dishonest and not because they don't remember their lives accurately, but it's because they're looking at their lives through the lens of events instead of meaning. They tell me my memoir is about growing up on a farm. Or my memoir is about surviving cancer. Or it's about being married to a politician, or about raising four children. And I always smile because I know something that they don't know yet. Those are the settings, those are the circumstances, those are the chapters, but they are rarely the story. The story is almost always hiding underneath. And until we find it, writing can feel frustrating. You don't know where to begin it, you don't know what belongs, you don't know what to leave out. You keep writing pages that feel like memories instead of memoir. So this week I read an article that made me think about this in a completely different way. A major literary festival in Chicago is scheduling their event during Rosh Hashanah, which is one of the holiest days in the Jewish faith. And for many Jewish writers, readers, and publishers, attending this event will not be possible. Now, I'm not Jewish, but my husband is, and we've been married almost 34 years. Our children are Jewish. So for more than three decades, Judaism has been woven into the fabric of our family's life. So as I reflected on the article, one thought stayed with me. And it wasn't just the carelessness in the scheduling of this event, but it was that everyone, whether you're Jewish, Catholic, or whatever you happen to be, everyone wants to know that they were considered in part of the overall bigger story. They don't want to be remembered after someone points out an oversight. They want to be considered from the beginning. And hang with me because I'm going to tell you how this relates to memoir. It really made me realize something when I when I read this and why it stayed with me. I wondered, why am I still thinking about this? What is it beyond the obvious story? Why is it it's it's sitting with me for so long? So, as memoir writers, we often do the very same thing to ourselves. We overlook our own stories, and it's not because they weren't meaningful, it's because we're too close to them. We assume that our lives were ordinary because we lived them. We forget that what feels ordinary to us has never been experienced by anyone else in exactly the same way. And that's why so many aspiring memoirs stay stuck. They think about writing, they know deep down that they want to write something, but they never start. Or maybe they start and write a few chapters and then they stop because they either have imposter syndrome and think, why am I doing this? Who cares? Why would anybody read my story? Or maybe they just don't know the next steps and they don't know how to get through the curvy path that writing a book, any book, but especially memoir, is it's not linear, and you're going to have uh moments where you can get stuck and stay stuck. And what I love helping aspiring authors do the most is get unstuck. And we do that in a variety of ways. Um, maybe this podcast helps you get unstuck. I work one-on-one with authors. I have my course make memoir magic, which um lays out the whole framework of writing and publishing. And, you know, let's say you're stuck on, you know, interviewing family members because you know you have to write about them, but it's a delicate subject, or maybe you haven't talked to them in years. I have a guide in that, that um in that particular lesson that helps you get unstuck. But let's get back to what I'm really here on this episode to talk to you about today, and that is they um that aspiring authors also often believe they have a problem in that they don't know how to write, and that is rarely the case. It takes skill, it takes practice, it takes discipline, but it doesn't take a degree in creative writing or a master in uh fine arts in narrative um nonfiction. So after teaching memoir for years, I know that the problem that nine out of ten aspiring authors are going to say, or maybe not say, but what I see, and they tell me through their words, is their problem is clarity. Their problem is that they can't see the story that's been quietly unfolding beneath the decades of memories that they are sifting through. So when I began writing my memoir, Accidental First Lady, I thought I knew exactly what my book was going to be about. It's gonna be about politics. Of course it was, right? Well, not exactly. That was the setting, like I talked about earlier in this episode. That was the setting, that 22 years of politics that was part of my life. Um, but I had all these stories, like stories from campaigns, city hall, public events, behind-the-scene moments that people never see. I had lists, I had thoughts that I had jotted down, I had photographs, I could access newspaper stories online. Um, I had more material that could ever fit into one book. And I assumed my biggest challenge would be deciding what to include. But instead, my biggest challenge was realizing that politics wasn't actually the story. The more I wrote, the more another theme kept emerging, and that was identity. Who was I alongside this very public person and inside this public life that we live? Who was I outside of my husband's title? So, and the question that I needed to answer was how do you build your own life while standing beside someone whose career is so public? How do you remain yourself when everyone knows your role before they know your name? Then, while I was writing, life handed me another unexpected chapter. I was diagnosed with cancer. So, again, not rare, unfortunately. It is just terrible how many people are diagnosed with cancer, and I was one of them. The difference? I had to live it in the public eye through that lens. I had to make an announcement about my diagnosis instead of just living it quietly or how I wanted to and dispensing information as I saw fit. So suddenly the book deepened again. It became about resilience, about uncertainty, about discovering strengths that I didn't know that I possessed. So politics had become the backdrop, but identity became the story. And that's what memoir does. It asks us to move beneath the events and discover their meaning. And that's the work I love the most. One of my favorite moments as a memoir instructor happens to be when a student stops talking about memories and starts talking about the transformation. So I'll never forget a student who arrived, convinced. Um she was at our one-on-one together, we had four sessions. She was convinced she was writing a family history. She had decades of photographs, letters, recipes, and stories, and she thought the challenge was organizing them. But as we worked together, she realized something surprising. Her memoir wasn't about preserving family history, it was about forgiveness. And every chapter suddenly had a purpose. Every memory suddenly belonged somewhere, and her writing became clearer because she finally understood what the book was truly about. So I see this happen again and again, and a lot of times it takes that talking with someone, working with someone, talking it through, laying it all out on a proverbial table, even if you're not sitting right across from each other, but maybe you're on a Zoom together, or that's how, you know, maybe I was with this author, but I could tell from what she told me what she was working with. So, you know, sometimes somebody might think they're writing about divorced, but they're really writing about learning how to trust again. Or maybe they're writing about moving across the country. But what they're really writing about is finding home and all the things that home can mean and the metaphor that home can be for so many things. Someone might think they're writing about caregiving for an aging parent, but what they're really writing about is becoming the person that their parent raised them to be. So the events matter, but the meaning is what your readers remember. So, how do you begin finding the real story hidden inside your life? You start by asking yourself different questions. So instead of asking what happened to me, ask what changed me. Instead of asking, what should I include, ask what do I want my readers to understand? And instead of asking, what was the hardest chapter of my life, ask what lesson keeps appearing throughout my life? You will find that when you list significant events in your life, um, and I'm not talking like the big ones like marriage, I'm talking about the moments that stay with you. You will see a pattern, a thread that connects them all throughout the overall story you're trying to tell. So those questions and the answers you give help you move away from chronology, simply chronology. Chronology is important, but it helps you move forward to your story. So here is an exercise that I would like for you to try. Imagine someone finishes reading your memoir, they close the book, they sit quietly for a moment, and they say, I will never think about the book. You fill in the blank the same way again. Who fills or what goes in that blank? Does it marriage, grief, friendship, faith, motherhood, belonging, second chances, identity, something else? The answer may be closer to your memoir's heart than any timeline you've ever created. And that is why I created my course, Make Memoir Magic, because discovering your memoir isn't something you have to figure out alone. Inside the course, we begin with the foundation that every great memoir needs. And it's not what you think, it's not just the beautiful sentences or publishing strategies, but clarity. We uncover the central theme that gives your story direction. Then we build that, and you write it, and you inject dialogue and scene writing, all of that is included in the course, and I show you how to do all of that. Um, and we I help you identify the moments that matter the most, and you learn how to shape your memories into scenes that invite readers to feel and not just observe. Then you build the book. Because once you know what your memoir is really about, writing becomes infinitely easier. So if you've been carrying your story for years, if you've filled journals, notebooks, or computer files with memories, and if you've started writing but stopped because you feel overwhelmed, I want you to know this. You are probably not stuck because you're not a writer. Okay, you're probably stuck because no one has shown you how to find the story inside your life, and that's something that you can learn. So before I go, I'd like to leave you with one final thought. Your memoir is not hiding in the biggest moments of your life, it's in the meaning you've made of those moments. Your memories are the ingredients, your perspective is the secret ingredient, and story is what happens when those agree ingredients come together with intention. So until next time, keep believing that your story matters because somewhere, someone is waiting to recognize a piece of their own life inside of yours. And thank you as always for listening to the Making Memoir Magic podcast. I want you to know that I believe in the value of your story. I believe that you are the best person to tell it, and that your readers are waiting. So, my question for you is what are you waiting for? And if you are ready to make memoir magic, reach out to me. Um check the show notes for how you can get in touch with me, how you can join my community, uh, my free Facebook group. And until then, happy writing and keep telling your story and believing in the power of your words. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Making Memoir Magic. I hope today's conversation inspired you to take the next step toward telling your unique story through memoir. Remember, your story matters and someone out there is waiting to read it. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. It helps others find the show. You can also connect with me on my website at CarrieCreisman.com, on Instagram at Carrie. And each Wednesday, I host a memoir magic writing where you get to join other writers to accomplish the often arduous task of getting words on the page. Until next time, keep writing, keep sharing, and keep making memoir magic.