Advice From a Memoir Ghostwriter: Aim for Emotional Complexity
- Latham Shinder
- 22 hours ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 29 minutes ago
If you haven’t read the memoir Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, you should. Originally published in 1996 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is the best-written memoir of the past thirty years.
I can think of many reasons Angela’s Ashes deserves the blue ribbon—voice, humor, minimalist writing style—say, the lack of quotation marks, which turns the text into a fluid blend of narration and dialogue like no other book I’ve read since. (Note, novelist Cormac McCarthy used the same trick—a noticeable lack of quotation marks, and most other punctuation. The extra marks, be believed, cluttered the page, and besides, the reader doesn’t need them.)
If you’re like most budding memoirists, you don’t know where to start. Is the basis of a great memoir voice, structure, plot, character, or maybe less obvious literary tools like mythic themes and poetic cadence?
As a full-time memoir ghostwriter, I’ve read hundreds of memoirs. What makes Angela’s Ashes stand out is the emotional complexity—the tension between what a memoir writer felt in the past and how he—you—understands those feelings in the present.
McCourt’s father, Malachy, was an alcoholic who routinely left his family waiting for a father who would never come home with money for eggs and bacon; his mother was worn down but fiercely protective. McCourt didn’t simplify them into heroes or villains. Instead, he gave us scene after scene of moral ambiguity. In doing so, we readers feel for ourselves how hard it is to love and judge your parents at the same time.
In 370 pages, Angela’s Ashes is filled with standout and often emotional scenes. The one I remember most is McCourt’s father, readying to leave the family, to board a train for England, shortly after Christmas during World War II, to work in a munitions factory in Coventry. The family is on their way to the railway station when Angela stops at a shop. The shop owner knows McCourt Sr. is off to England and money will be flowing back, so she's happy to let Angela have credit for tea, milk, sugar, bread, butter, and an egg.
A single egg.
It's hard-boiled and Malachy peels off the shell. He then slices the egg five ways and hands the bits to Angela and four of their surviving seven children. Angela says, he needs the nourishment, but Malachy says, What would a man be doing with a whole egg to himself?
Angela has tears in her eyes.
The most tangible and memorable element of the scene, to me, at least, is the egg. A tiny thing, an ounce and a half, at most. Yet to a family used to suppers of bread and tea, the occasional boiled onion or potato, a hard-boiled egg is a treat worth sharing, a thing to savor. Here, McCourt’s father, malnourished with the thinning hair and collapsing teeth, he doesn’t eat the egg, but handles it with care and carves it into even portions for his family.
Malachy was a shiftless, loquacious alcoholic father. We know this because McCourt tells us so way back on page one of the memoir. He was also, however, emotionally complex. Penniless, Malachy is forced to leave his home in Ireland to work for the English—who he blames for everything that's wrong in his country—one of the saddest moments of a family with a long history of sad moments. McCourt could have written the “send off” scene without the egg. He didn’t do that because the egg, it turns out, is a kind of symbol of Malachy’s humanity, and handing over the egg is one of the few ways a shiftless, loquacious alcoholic father can show his love for his family.
It’s unlikely that your story is one of Irish poverty and death and alcoholism. That said, I’ve no doubt it’s filled with emotional complexity. Or it is if you want it to be.
Latham Shinder
Memoir Ghostwriter
If all this talk of voice and structure and mythic themes and emotional complexity sounds like more than you want to tackle, please call me now and see if working with a professional memoir ghostwriter is right for you.