If you are trying to write a memoir that actually reaches and speaks to the people you want to help, you need much more than just a good story. One thing I find with so many first-time memoirists is that they struggle to figure out what their book is about beyond, “It’s about my life.” Usually, that means we need to separate two pieces that are related but very much not the same: your memoir topic vs message.
Understanding memoir topic vs message will help you dial in the book so that it speaks to people, teaches and shares what you want to teach and share without becoming preachy, and ultimately gives you a much more cohesive and fulfilling memoir project. It will also help tremendously later when you are trying to decide what belongs in the manuscript, how to promote the book, and what larger ideas you want to keep talking about after publication.
So let’s start with what I mean by your memoir’s message, how that differs from your topic, why you need both, and three ways you can check whether the message you have now is actually going to serve your memoir as you continue writing.
Memoir Topic vs Message: Start With the Topic
The easiest way to understand your memoir’s message is to put it in conversation with your memoir’s topic. When I ask people what their memoir topic is, I find that they are almost always either stumped or they give me something that sounds much more like a message. So before we can get into the intricacy and nuance of the message itself, we need to get clear about what a topic actually is.
When I say topic in this context, I do not mean your life. A memoir should not be about your life as broadly as that. Instead, your memoir needs to be about one specific piece of your life, because that specificity is part of how your reader will connect with you.
Your topic could be starting your first job, leveling up in a career, graduating from college, beginning college, adopting a child, having a baby, or getting married. Those are relatively simple life experiences, and many of them are experiences other people share. That commonality is important because your topic is often the thing that initially tells the reader, This book might be for me.
I have talked much more about this in 3 Reasons to Define Your Memoir’s Topic and in 5 Traits of Strong Memoir Ideas. One of the reasons I keep returning to topic is that it gives the whole book boundaries before you start trying to make decisions about scenes, chapters, and structure.
Let’s say, for example, that you are writing a memoir about receiving a cancer diagnosis, going through chemotherapy, entering remission, and ultimately becoming a survivor. If you tell me the book is about “resilience through illness,” that may be true, but it is not actually the topic.
When somebody is looking for a book to reassure them, make them feel less alone, or help them navigate a difficult experience, they are probably not searching for something as general as resilience. They may be looking specifically for a memoir about cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy, remission, and survival.
That specific life experience is your topic, the topic piece in the memoir topic vs message puzzle.
The same thing happens if you tell me your memoir is about your first job. That is a topic, but we can make it more specific. If the book is about starting your first job as a nurse, we now have a somewhat different audience and a different promise to the reader. A broader first-job memoir might appeal to younger readers or work beautifully as a graduation gift, while a memoir about beginning a nursing career is going to funnel the audience much more specifically toward readers interested in nursing or healthcare.
This distinction matters for findability and searchability, but it also matters because of the promise you are making to the reader. When you define a topic, you are telling the reader that the book is going to continue developing that particular experience. If your memoir is simply “about my life,” no one really knows what is going to happen inside it because almost anything could belong.
That is also why a strong memoir outline starts with a clear understanding of the experience the book is actually covering. Without those boundaries, it becomes incredibly difficult to know what belongs and what should be saved for another project.
Your Memoir’s Message Is Something Much Broader
Your message is different from your topic because it does not necessarily have to be tied directly to the specific experience you are writing about.
Go back to our cancer memoir for a moment. The topic is the cancer diagnosis and treatment experience. Resilience might begin to point us toward the message.
I like to think about this similarly to the distinction between truth and facts that comes up so often in memoir. A fact is specific. Truth tends to be broader. I think of truth as an umbrella: when you hold out that larger truth, other people can come in out of the rain and stand underneath it with you even if they do not share the exact facts of your experience.
That same idea helps us understand memoir topic vs message. The topic is the specific piece, almost like the fact. It narrows things down enough that you can signal clearly to the reader, This is for you. This is the experience you have been looking for.
The message is the umbrella.
It tells us what you ultimately want the reader to understand, and it gives people who have not lived through your exact experience a way to connect with what you learned.
“Resilience” by itself is probably still too broad to function as a full message. We might build that idea out into something like, “When we feel at our weakest, we can find resilience in our friends and family.” Or perhaps the truth of the book is that difficult times reveal that we are much more resilient than we ever realized.
Now we have something that somebody who has never undergone chemotherapy can still recognize in their own life.
This is why we really need topic and message working together. The topic creates enough specificity that readers recognize a shared experience or identity. The message gives them something new to understand through that experience.
If you are worried about how to make that larger idea clear without turning the memoir into a lecture, I have written before about centering your memoir’s message without being preachy. The message needs to emerge through the experience, reflection, and structure of the book rather than simply being announced over and over.
Your Memoir Message Should Not Be So Broad That It Means Nothing
One place writers often get stuck is assuming that because the message is broader than the topic, it also needs to become extremely general. Something like “the resilience of the human spirit” certainly sounds broad enough for almost anyone to relate to, but it also does not tell us much.
You can go another step.
Maybe your message is about finding resilience through friends and family. Maybe it is about discovering resilience in yourself through hard times. Those are still broad enough to invite readers in, but they tell us much more about what the book actually has to say.
This becomes especially important if you have expertise that goes beyond the experience itself. That expertise might come from an advanced degree or formal scholarship, from your profession, or from the work you did after the experience that allowed you to understand it at a much deeper level.
Suppose the person writing our cancer memoir is also a psychologist. The message might have much less to do with resilience and much more to do with how trauma is processed in the body or how medical intervention can affect psychological recovery. On the surface, that sounds more specific than our broad umbrella of “resilience,” but for somebody interested in trauma healing, the relationship between the body and mental health, or the psychological experience of medical care, that could make the memoir much more compelling.
I often find that people with advanced knowledge are hesitant to allow that expertise to shape the message because they worry it will make the memoir too narrow. I would encourage you to try it. If the expertise is part of what you genuinely know and part of what you want to teach, it may be exactly what gives the memoir its intellectual richness.
That is also closely related to the question I address in What Makes a Memoir Good? and 5 Must-Haves for a Successful Memoir. A strong memoir gives the reader more than a sequence of interesting events. There needs to be some larger understanding developing alongside the story.
Why You Need a Memoir Message
If you want your memoir to be publishable and marketable, I think you absolutely need a message. Not every person writing a memoir is trying to publish or sell it, of course, but if you are, there are three major reasons the message matters.
The first is probably the most obvious: your message helps you filter what belongs in the book versus what should get cut.
Your topic does this too. When you combine topic and message (because while we think of it as memoir topic vs message, they actually work together!), you get a very useful rubric for deciding whether a scene, memory, reflection, or piece of information belongs in this particular manuscript. Material that does not serve either one may still be interesting or important, but it might belong in another book, an essay, a podcast episode, or some other kind of content.
This becomes extremely useful once you start outlining. In 7 Steps for Outlining a Memoir and Four Ways to Outline and Structure Your Memoir, I talk more about building the narrative arc and deciding which material earns space in the finished book. Topic and message are part of what make those structural decisions possible.
They become just as useful in revision. When you finish the draft and start taking that 10,000-foot view, you need some standard beyond “I like this scene” for deciding what stays. The post on how to revise a memoir after the first draft gets into that top-down process in more detail.
Your Message Also Defines Your Platform
The second reason I think your message matters so much becomes especially clear as you move through publishing and promotion. When you define your message, you are also beginning to define your platform.
Usually, when we talk about an author platform, we mean visibility: your ability to reach your audience, connect with them, engage them, and generally speak in the social sphere and have people listen.
I like to divide the idea of platform into two branches. One is that visibility and reach. The other is the actual message you are trying to get across.
Here I am borrowing from politics. When we talk about a politician’s platform, we are talking about what they stand for, how they approach particular issues, and the worldview they bring into the conversation. For an author, the message can function in a similar way.
This becomes particularly important for memoirists because almost everyone struggles at some point with the question of how to promote the book. Part of that is ordinary imposter syndrome, but memoir creates another problem too: if you never developed a message, your only foundation for promotion is the story itself.
You already told the story in the book.
That leaves you circling back to the same material every time you try to create content or talk publicly about your work. If, instead, you developed the topic and message together, the message gives you room to expand.
You can build a podcast that holds 100, 200, or 500 episodes. Make reels that explore the idea from different directions and see what resonates with your audience. Give keynote speeches, workshops, and other talks that grow out of the larger message rather than simply retelling the events of your memoir.
The topic, in our memoir topic vs message pair, has natural limits because it covers one specific experience. The message is much more expandable, which gives you a huge advantage as you begin thinking about your author platform and long-term promotion.
That is one reason I talk so often about books as part of a larger body of work. If you are interested in that side of things, The Book That Will Grow Your Business explores how the ideas in a book can become part of a broader platform rather than existing as one isolated product.
Your Message Is Allowed to Evolve
There is one mistake I do not want you to make here: do not define a message, write the book around it, and then panic when your thinking keeps developing after publication.
Your message is going to evolve because ideas evolve.
Writing a book is essentially putting a flag in the ground at the point when you wrote it. The book captures the way you understood that message at that moment. After the book is finished, your brain keeps going. You learn more, people respond to the book, new examples emerge, and you begin making connections you had not made before.
The book does not need to be pulled and rewritten every time that happens. It is holding that version of your thinking still while the larger idea continues to evolve.
That evolution can give you a natural runway for your next book, your speaking, your podcast, or any other work you want to develop afterward. The message you publish today does not need to be the final thing you ever believe about the subject.
This matters during the writing process too. If you are working on a memoir whose ending or larger meaning is still unfolding, How to Start Your Memoir When the End Is Still Unfolding may help you think about how much certainty you actually need before you begin.
Your Message Gives You a Reason to Keep Writing
The third reason I want you to have a message is that, in my experience, the message is very often the thing that holds on when everything else gets difficult.
You are going to get tired while writing a book. You are going to get discouraged, frustrated, and probably sick of the manuscript at some point. Having a message gives you a kind of why that you can hang your hat on.
If the message represents the thing you are trying to teach or share with the reader, it can become a much more powerful motivator than a Pomodoro timer or whatever other trick you are trying to use to force yourself through another writing session. It reminds you why you cared enough about this project to begin it.
I talk more about that kind of motivation in Is Your Memoir Worth Writing? because writers often begin questioning the value of the whole project when the work becomes difficult. Returning to the larger reason you wanted to tell the story can help separate a temporary loss of confidence from the actual value of the book.
Once you have a possible message, though, I want you to check it against three things.
Check #1: Is Your Message Actually One Thing?
The first check requires some self-honesty: your message should be one thing.
That does not mean it has to be a short sentence or a simple sentence. It means it should not be a list of ideas that are not inherently linked.
First-time memoirists very often have four or five memoirs they want to write, and the temptation is to jam all of that material into the first book. You can see this at the topic level when someone tells me the book is about finishing college, starting a first job, and getting married. Those are three things. Depending on the larger story, perhaps two can belong together, but we have not yet identified one clear topic.
The same kind of bloat can happen in the message, although it is sometimes harder to recognize because abstract ideas can sound like they belong together. Ask yourself whether you are really saying one thing. Is there a single takeaway you want the reader to understand that can remain meaningful throughout the whole book?
If the answer is no, you may still be trying to fit several memoirs into one.
This is also one reason I recommend defining the message before you get too deep into the manuscript. The Memoir Method 7-Step Structure Sequence walks through message development, topic development, narrative arc, and outlining in order so that you have those boundaries before you begin making thousands of smaller decisions.
Check #2: Is Your Message Big Enough and Small Enough?
The second check is whether your message is broad enough to invite readers in but small enough to remain honest.
Most people I work with err on the side of making the message too general. They end up with something like resilience, hope, perseverance, or the resilience of the human spirit. Those ideas may be part of the message, but they do not yet tell us enough.
Other writers go in the opposite direction and start claiming too much.
Sometimes this happens because midway through the process they start questioning whether the book is important enough. They wonder who will want to read it, whether the experience is significant enough, and whether the book is really going to matter. In response to that insecurity, the message can inflate until suddenly the memoir is promising to teach people how to save the world.
If you can genuinely explain how to save the world in a single memoir, I suspect plenty of people will buy it. The more likely problem is that the finished book cannot fulfill that promise.
Your message needs to be broad enough that readers recognize themselves and have something new to learn, but it also needs to reflect what you actually know, what you actually learned, and what this particular story can honestly demonstrate.
I sometimes tell writers that the topic and message need to be checks the finished book can cash. Planning an ambitious book is easy. Eventually, you have to release it and fulfill the promise you made.
Check #3: Has Your Message Evolved While You Were Writing?
The third check is especially important if you already have a draft: look at whether your message has changed during the writing and revision process.
I am working with a coaching client right now who is doing a substantial rewrite of an already strong manuscript. One of the things we have talked about repeatedly is her uncertainty about whether her message is strong enough and, most importantly, whether it is still accurate.
That makes complete sense.
She has spent an enormous amount of time thinking about the experience, writing about it, reading what she wrote, and now revising it. Of course her understanding has evolved.
Writing is a process of thinking.
The message you identify at the beginning gives you something to write toward, but you may reach the end with a more nuanced understanding of what the book actually taught you. Revision is often where those pieces finally come into alignment.
If you already have a complete manuscript and are unsure whether the topic, message, and structure are doing what you intended, our Manuscript Review is designed specifically to give you that 10,000-foot view. We look at what is working, what needs attention, how the manuscript fits within its market, and what revisions will have the biggest impact.
Memoir Topic vs Message: You Need Both
When people first start talking to me about writing a memoir, they naturally want to talk about the story. That is usually the part they have been carrying around for years, so it makes complete sense that the story feels like the book.
But if you want the memoir to reach people, help them, teach something, and feel like a cohesive finished project, you also need to know what that story is doing.
Your topic identifies the specific piece of your life the reader is going to follow, while your message identifies the broader truth, idea, or understanding you want them to carry away. Those two pieces work together to help you choose what belongs in the manuscript, shape the structure, identify the audience, develop your platform, promote the book, and keep going when the writing itself becomes difficult.
That is why I want you thinking carefully about memoir topic vs message before you get too deep into the manuscript. You do not need to identify a perfect sentence on day one and carve it in stone. The message can and should become more precise as you write.
But you do need some sense of what you want the reader to understand when they reach the last page. Once you have that, the whole project becomes much easier to dial in.
