One of the common questions we get from our coaching clients and Memoir Method group is how to decide where your memoir ends. After all, in many ways, you’re still living the story. You’re not done learning yet, you have more epiphanies and character growth yet to go. You are still seeing examples of the lesson you learned that inspired you to write a memoir every day and all around you. Some days you may not even live up to the lesson in the way you really want to. So how do you decide where to cut the book off? Where does your memoir end, when you keep going?
In today’s video and post, we will review four steps to choosing where and your memoir ends, using Victor James Hill’s amazing memoir The Ignorant Man’s Son as an illustrative example.
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Vicotor Hill’s Ignorant Man’s Son
To illustrate the process, we’ll be using Ignorant Man’s Son as an example, so we’ll start by giving an introduction to this great book for the uninitiated. If you haven’t read this touching memoir, we really recommend picking it up. It’s an inspiring story and a great example of a contemporary, heart-to-heart memoir. Victor James Hill grew up outside Detroit. While he knew his father and had contact with him, his father wasn’t in the home and Victor felt the absence of mentorship and support that he desperately needed. As he entered adulthood, he became involved in illegal activities and witnessed rampant violence. A traffic accident altered the course of his life. After emerging unscathed from his violently overturned vehicle, he felt a sense of purpose in his survival.
He decided to start a basketball league as a way to provide a safe, productive and supportive place for community kids to go. His league was an amazing success and as he grew to know the kids he was helping in his community, he learned that even though his own father was not there for him in the way he needed him to be, he could heal that hurt in his heart by being a father figure for others.
How your key message determines your memoir’s ending
As we’ve talked about in this blog many time before, you need to have a very clear idea of your core topic and key message for your memoir. In the case of Ignorant Man’s Son, the core topic is how he was able to successfully start and build up his basketball league. That’s the concrete part of the story: the part that everyone else could see too. The key message is the abstract meaning behind the core topic: when we feel unsupported, when we feel unloved, the best way to reclaim that thing that we feel like we’re missing is to offer it to others.
This is a great example of how to universalize your key message for an inspiring memoir as we’ve discussed before. Even if you could never imagine yourself starting a basketball league, the key message could apply to whatever context that would mean for you. That big-picture truth is what draws people to read memoir and is the keystone guidance for your the big craft decisions for your book, including how your memoir ends.
Finding the epiphany
The universal message you want to share with your book is usually something that takes a life long journey to really feel and embody fully. When you consider the structure of your book, consider when you really understood that message in your bones. When did it strike you, not just in you head as a concept, but in your whole self. That moment is your epiphany moment. Now, with the big life lessons that we learn, we might not ever have it completely down all of a moment and never forget or mess things up again. We are not looking for the moment when you became perfect, because that moment doesn’t exist for any of us. What we’re looking for is when the pieces came together for us in a way that we could understand the message all the way down.
For Victor, that epiphany moment came when mentor one of the young boys in his league about having sex. Earlier in his life, sex and women were always one of the subjects Victor wished he had more guidance on for himself. When he was able to give this kid the guidance that he hadn’t gotten in his own childhood, he felt that connection and relationship he had been missing. Even though he wasn’t the kids father and hadn’t had the relationship with his father he had wanted and deserved, he could still form that bond of mentorship with the next generation.
As you can see from Victor’s example, the epiphany might not be a big, obvious moment. It can be from the outside quiet and not particularly dramatic, but internally it’s how all the pieces come together. In structuring your memoir, you want that epiphany moment to come about 75% through the narrative, so about 50-60 pages from where you memoir ends. Everything is building up to that moment for the majority of the story and then the remaining story shows how you are putting that lesson to use.
Finding the Climax
Most of our lives are not action movies. When we think “climatic,” we might picture Tom Cruise leaping from a speeding train just in time. While your memoir needs a climax, it will probably not be all that dramatic or big. The climax is not really just the “most exciting” part towards where the memoir ends, but rather a situation that challenges you to live out your newfound understanding. It’s a moment where you will get to use what you’ve learned in your epiphany in a way that is hard and where you could potentially fail to live up to the lesson you learned.
In The Ignorant Man’s Son, Victor James Hill faces his climax when he must step in and provide emotional support to one of the boys he mentors as the boy’s mother passes away. This scene is charged with emotion, not only because it is always painful when a young person loses a parent, but because Victor had also lost his mother and he had not had support in that terribly hard time. He had to practice what he had been preaching and step up for the kid, even though no one had stepped up for him. He had the chance to take the lesson he had learned and use it, even though it would be hard.
Your memoir’s climax should similarly serve as the ultimate test of the lesson you’ve learned, showing how it plays out in a real, tangible way.
Finding where the memoir ends
The final step in your memoir is crafting the resolution—a brief but impactful conclusion that wraps up your story and leaves your readers with a lasting impression. The resolution should follow shortly after the climax, providing a sense of closure without dragging on. It might not be what happened the next day or immediately after the moment of the climax, but something that provided emotional closure and rounds out that climatic moment and shows how the epiphany carried through to the end.
In The Ignorant Man’s Son, the resolution is delivered through an epilogue where Victor and the boy he mentored share a quiet moment at a basketball game, reminiscing about the boy’s mother. This scene serves as a poignant reminder of the deep connections formed throughout the story and reinforces the key message of finding fulfillment by offering what we ourselves have lacked. Your memoir’s resolution should similarly bring your story full circle, offering a glimpse of how life continues and how the lessons learned will shape your future.
