So, what’s your book about? This feels like it should be a relatively easy question to answer…until you are actually confronted with it. The answer might seem obvious, because all memoirs are about a person’s life experience. But you can’t actually fit all of a person’s life experience with a single book in any way that’s meaningful and enjoyable to read. It’s tempting then to list all the major events or topics that will be included in your memoir, but that doesn’t quite answer the central question. Choosing a single central topic for your memoir is not limiting or selling the complexity of your life short. In fact, setting a primary topic gives you clarity and the free momentum that comes with it. Today, we’re discussing three reasons why you need to concretely define your memoir’s topic early in the process.
Before we get into today’s post, we wanted to ask—do you have a plan for actually finishing your memoir? If not, we know you aren’t making the progress you hoped for. That’s why we developed The Memoir Method Checklist. This free guide (and video training!) will take you through every single step you need from idea to published marketable book. Grab it now at https://pageandpodium.com/checklist
Message versus topic
The concept of “memoir topic” is often misunderstood and conflated with other aspects, so let’s start with what it isn’t. Your topic is not your theme or your message. You still need those, too, and your message is of course the deeper meaning you hope readers take away. Those elements matter, but they are the abstract qualities of your book’s focus. Your topic needs to be concrete: a specific, definable slice of your life.
Writers often confuse “topic” with “message” because it might feel like they are interchangeable, but they are not. The message is part of the heart of the book, and if often the driving force compelling you to write it in the first place. But your topic is the container that holds the story. It’s the period of life you’re focusing on—it might be founding your business, going through cancer treatment, adopting a child, surviving a specific trauma, or even navigating a certain industry or social barrier.
Sometimes writers get caught up in trying to make the story “exciting enough.” Instead of defining a central topic and going from there, they start listing every dramatic event that’s happened to them—all the stories that have gotten the most reactions when shared with friends. But drama isn’t the criteria you should be using to decide what is included in your memoir. A long-form story with all the different drama from your experience isn’t actually exciting, but confusing to your reader because it jumps around rather than having a clear aim.
That is not to say you can’t include material outside your main topic. Childhood memories, contextual backstory, and especially secondary complications all make a memoir complex and interesting, but only if it serves the topic rather than distracts from it. Defining the central topic gives a clear guideline to whether secondary material belongs and how it should come into play because it is acting in support of your central topic.
The choice of your central topic might not be obvious. In fact, most people could chose several topics that could sustain a full-length memoir based on their experiences. You may even have several closely-related and intricately intertwined topics, and it’s a challenge to comb through them to find the golden strand you want to choose to hold your book together. However, doing so will make every other choice after that easier and more effective.
Choosing one of focus topic doesn’t mean abandoning complexity
Writers might resist defining that focus topic, and I absolutely get it. A book is layered, complex, living and meaning unfolds throughout the narrative. How can we expect a writer to shove all that into a single “topic” sentence like some kind of freshman term paper?
Thankfully, choosing your topic doesn’t mean flattening the complexity of your story or cutting all those layers away.
Recently we consulted with a client who is writing about adopting her first child—a strong, specific topic. But as we talked, she also shared her long struggle with infertility, her childhood dreams of motherhood, and the longing she felt watching others build families. All of that belongs in the book, but it isn’t the topic. Infertility and adoption overlap, yet they are different stories. Choosing adoption as the topic gave her a clear narrative container; everything else became supporting context rather than competing threads. As she continues her project, having made that choice will help her weight hundreds of other smaller ones. To be clear, she could have easily decided to focus infertility instead—but that would end up being a different book in hundreds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. There is not right or wrong choice there, but it’s still a choice writers need to make.
When we explored her message, it became clear she was writing about love—how adoption stretched her understanding of it, challenged it, and expanded it. That message will shape the emotional lens of the book, but it can’t function as the topic. The abstract message of “expanding our capacity to love” can’t tell you what concrete scenes belong in the memoir. The message tells you why the story matters.
A powerful memoir is anchored by a focused topic. Once you know the slice of life you’re writing about, you can confidently decide what belongs in the story and what’s just noise. Your message will emerge naturally from that clarity.
There are three essential benefits to understanding the difference between your message and topic and defining that focused, concrete topic early that will help you at every single stage of your project—from development, to drafting, and even to publication and promotion.
Reins you in
Define your memoir’s topic early reins you in. Without it, you’ll be tempted to throw everything in the kitchen sink. And if your kitchen sink has an interesting backstory, you might try to wedge that in too. A clear topic acts as a promise to your reader about what your book will be about. It gives you a center of gravity.
Considering our client example, knowing that adoption is the topic helps her understand what deserves primary focus and what belongs as supporting context. Her infertility journey matters, but it isn’t the star of the show. The topic helps her assign weight, hierarchy, and purpose to each part of her story.
Amanda also experienced this outlining her own memoir about leaving academia to start Page and Podium. On our writing retreat last year, Amanda realized that her focus kept drifting into the story of an abusive relationship she was navigating at the same time. From the perspective of her lived experience, it’s hard to untangle the two elements that very much consumed her life during that era. However, bringing in that element required a great deal on context to be clear, and soon would take so much weight away from the central topic as to be a long detour. That the relationship belongs in a different memoir altogether. Defining you topic makes boundaries visible, and counterintuitively gives you the freedom to include and exclude material that doesn’t help.
That’s the power of a well‑chosen topic: it reins you in. It helps you see what belongs, what supports the story, and what needs to be cut or saved for another book. With a defined topic, editing becomes clearer, outlining becomes easier, and your memoir becomes far more focused and compelling.
Defines your audience
Defining your topic also defines your audience. Every topic naturally attracts certain readers—not exclusively, but predictably. An adoption memoir will draw people curious about the adoption process; some may have experienced infertility, and some may not. A cancer memoir will attract readers seeking stories of illness and resilience. A business‑building memoir will appeal to entrepreneurs and career‑changers. These aren’t rigid categories, but they do reflect real reader expectations. That isn’t to say that audiences are narrow and distinct without overlap. However, having that clear topic will not only help you make choices as you develop, draft and edit your book, it will also help you find that audience because you will be able to clearly and simply communicate the central subject of your book, and that is absolutely crucial to both publication and promotion later on.
Once you make a promise about your topic, readers expect you to deliver on it. Nothing loses an audience faster than a memoir that wanders aimlessly, dipping into every corner of the writer’s life without a clear sense of direction. When you define your topic, you define the path, and the people who will want to walk it with you.
As we’ve said before, write for yourself, edit for your audience. That doesn’t mean contorting your story to fit a niche. It means that once you move into the development stage—outlining, shaping, structuring—you need to know who the book is ultimately serving. Not to limit your writing, but to give you a destination. A memoir is a long, complex project, and nothing is more grounding than knowing where you’re headed.
If you don’t know your topic, you usually don’t know your audience either. But once your topic is clear, your audience becomes clear too—and that clarity makes every writing. decision easier
Gives you a clear starting point
A clearly defined topic also tells you exactly where your memoir should begin. Choosing when to begin is a subtly difficult task that can sometimes even prevent writers from getting started. When writers haven’t nailed down their topic, they often default to starting in childhood. And it makes sense—if you don’t know the slice of life you’re focusing on, chronological order feels like the safest option.
But once you know your topic, you’re no longer trapped in the “start at the beginning” mindset. You’re free to open your memoir at the moment that’s actually relevant to the story you’re telling. You may still need earlier memories for context, most memoirs do, but those become strategic flashbacks, not the preamble. This helps your book get to the meat of the matter immediately rather than dragging your readers through tons of build up.
If your topic is the year you launched your business, the story shouldn’t take 100 pages to get there. If your topic is adopting your first child, readers shouldn’t still be waiting for the adoption process to begin halfway through the book. Defining your topic lets you start where the story truly starts.
Without a topic, it’s so difficult to know how to place your opening scene. If you don’t know what you’re trying to say or where the story is headed, how could you know where to begin? But once your topic is clear, you can bracket both the start and the end of your memoir with confidence. You know what you’re trying to accomplish—and that clarity shapes everything that follows.
Reading is essential to improving your writing skills, and reading like a writer means seeing past the glossy end-result into a book’s structure and the author’s choices about how the story is told. Learning to read like a writer doesn’t mean learning how to merely imitate but learning the craft by example. We’re excited to announce the launch of our Memoir Method Book Club! Your first session is free, so sign up to save your seat here.
