It’s not just what happened, but how it felt

“Please tell me a little about your wife and how she influenced your career.”

“I met her. We fell in love. She was with me every step of the way. What else can I say?”

That was my client’s answer. He was, thankfully, pulling my leg—but not entirely. I’ve heard countless variations of that same shrug in sentence form, especially in early memoir conversations. These are accomplished people—founders, leaders, the kind who’ve made bold decisions and lived to tell the tale. But ask them about the people who made it all possible? The turning points that broke them open and remade them? You get something that sounds like a closing argument delivered by a man on his fourth bourbon.

It’s not that they lack feeling or reflection. It’s just that most of us aren’t used to talking about our lives in emotionally intimate terms. Not in the day-to-day grind of business. Not at cocktail parties. Certainly not on the record.

But something happens in the process of writing a memoir. After a few sessions, clients start to go deeper. Not because I prod or pry (although I do ask the occasional impertinent question), but because they realize how good it feels. Writing a memoir, at its best, is less like filing a report and more like revisiting your life from the inside. The texture of it. The stakes. You begin to remember what it felt like—not just what happened.

Which brings us to detail.

The best novelists and filmmakers live by the old credo: show, don’t tell. A good memoir is no different. Don’t tell us your father was intimidating—show us his knuckles drumming the kitchen table at breakfast. Don’t say you were terrified—let us feel the weight of the phone in your hand as you waited for the oncologist to call.

You’re not writing a Wikipedia entry. You’re inviting readers to walk the journey with you. To feel the uncertainty, the exhilaration, the heartbreak, the wonder. The more vividly you can summon it—the more precisely you can describe the light in the room, the lump in your throat—the more powerful your story becomes.

A great memoir isn’t about what happened. It’s about what it meant. And meaning, inconveniently enough, lives in the details.