The best memoirs with an unconventional structure

Kingston’s classic opens with one of the best first lines of all time: “You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.” When I teach this book in my memoir writing classes, my students and I spend a long time discussing the implication of this first sentence—what it means for Kingston’s work, but also what it means for us, as memoirists, to tell stories we’ve been forbidden, in some way, to tell. The beating heart of this memoir is the idea that making art—literary or otherwise—is the process of saving your own life.     

Because my first introduction to bell hooks was through her scholarly writing, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this memoir. A few pages in, I was already dazzled, challenged, and addicted to her storytelling genius—I read it in one sitting and immediately began reading it again. The perfect memoir for those who are looking for unconventional storytelling, hooks uses techniques like point-of-view shifts to paint a realer-than-real-life portrait of her childhood in rural Kentucky.  

This memoir is so important to me that I included a scene of me reading it in my own memoir! To this day, when I find myself doubting the power of writing and literature, I return to this book; reading it is akin to sitting in the world’s most interesting and urgent literature class. Set in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution, this memoir is organized by the banned works of classic Western Literature Professor Nafisi discusses with a clandestine, all-women’s book group. The women in the group come from drastically different religious and socio-economic backgrounds, but through the reading and discussion of these books they are better able to understand one another, and navigate their own chaotic time and place.

As someone who teaches memoir writing for a living, I’ve read a lot of memoirs. Safekeeping is my all-time favorite. Each semester I assign it to my students, thinking this time I will finally grow tired of it. But I never do. To me, this book is the pinnacle of the memoir genre and I think it should get more attention as a masterpiece. While it has an unconventional, non-linear structure with multiple points of view (sometimes written in first person, sometimes in third, sometimes as an epistolary address to Thomas’s deceased second husband, sometimes as a meta-conversation about the book itself via the author’s conversations with her sister) its brilliance lies in its simplicity. Chapters are extremely short, sometimes no longer than a sentence. And yet they contain everything. 

The best memoirs, to me, are not only records of past events. They are also the record of a writer grappling with how best to tell the story. Jeannie Vanasco takes this idea to an entirely new level in this brilliant meta-memoir that not only chronicles a sexual assault she experienced in college, but also her present-day investigation into her rapist’s memories of the event, his motives, and his present-day thoughts about what happened. This book challenged me to think in new ways—not only about sexual assault, but also about the ways we remember it and write about it.