What Is a Memoir’s Essential Question and Why Do You Need One?

Today’s post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison.

It’s 9 a.m. and my office is a mess.

Sticky notes sprawl across my closet door like a mural. Books litter the floor. A swirl of papers spreads across my desk.

Three weeks ago, I finished the first draft of my latest project. But now, as I sit in this creative swamp, the elation I felt when I wrote those final words has been replaced by a flurry of questions: What am I doing? Where is this book headed? Did I lose the thread somewhere between draft one and now?

Welcome to the messy middle of the memoir-writing process.

For many writers, this is where our projects stall. We moan about how hard writing is and wonder if we’ve lost our plot and purpose. However, this uncomfortable place is also where strong books begin to take shape. Years of writing and coaching have taught me that:

• This lost feeling is not just normal; it’s necessary.
• There’s a way to rebuild your faith in your project and your creative confidence.

How do you do this?

Enter your memoir’s essential question.

All books are answers to questions the writer has posed

For memoirists, the first question is some version of “What happened to me?” Variations include “How did this happen?” “Why did this happen?” and “How did I survive?” Starting with these questions allows us to identify the important moments in our stories and work through the emotions connected with the most challenging events in our books.

While this process can be extremely satisfying for the writer, here’s the rub: readers don’t care about what you’ve gone through. It’s not that they’re callous. Reading requires a substantial commitment of their time, attention, and emotional energy. They need to know what’s in it for them.

I’ve said for years that a great memoir is a mirror for the reader’s soul. It does so by sharing something so specific that it taps into an aspect of the human condition that transcends your journey. Your essential question serves as the bridge between your personal history and a yearning inside your reader.

What essential questions look like

A great essential question bridges this gap by addressing something your readers care about, even if they’ve never had your experience. For example, I’ve never had leukemia, but I’ve straddled the worlds of illness and health, something Suleika Jaouad explores in her memoir Between Two Kingdoms. Her book responds to the question: How do you rebuild your identity when you’re no longer defined by illness, but haven’t yet found your place in the healthy world?

Lara Lillibridge’s The Truth About Unringing Phones wrestles with a question that resonates with people navigating estrangement, those trying to set boundaries with complicated family members, and the no-contact curious: What do we owe our ailing and aging parents when they weren’t there for us?

If you’re wondering what complex PTSD is or how to treat it, reading What My Bones Know could help you feel more understood as you learn about the treatments that Stephanie Foo discovers. She reveals her simple, straightforward question in her prologue: What is complex PTSD, and how do I heal from it?

Identifying your book’s essential question can aid your revision process by helping you determine what belongs and what can be cut. As you repeatedly ask yourself, “How does this scene answer my memoir’s essential question?” you’ll begin to not just share what happened, but pinpoint the exact moments and details in your life that matter most to this story. You can use this information to slant the scenes you intuitively know belong in your book, even if they seem unrelated to the rest of your content.

A recent client experienced this firsthand. For months, her memoir felt like two distinct stories—one about a lesson she learned and another about a trip she took. At times, I wondered aloud if these elements were truly connected, but the writer had a gut feeling they belonged. So, we let the content marinate, knowing she’d eventually discover the throughline or cleave the content in two. Once she understood her essential question, she realized how the two parts were related and which moments along both journeys worked together to create a powerful story.

Another client had a harrowing journey of survival that clearly mattered to a niche audience. To broaden its appeal, I kept asking this question: As someone who’s not part of your niche, why should I care about your story? I know that probably sounds harsh, but that tough love helped frame her book proposal’s overview so that I understood exactly why I should read her book. The clarity of that marketing angle led to a quick deal.

Stepping back to identify my memoir’s central question has given me similar clarity around how to shape the pieces I’ve written—something I’m currently doing by crafting a chapter outline for this book, another essential component of a book proposal. Once the outline is set, I’ll slant everything so that it creates a clear cause-and-effect chain that fully answers the question serving as my book’s internal compass without explicitly stating it in the material.

But the power of the essential question transcends the page. Authors who share their book’s essential question at the beginning of a podcast or written interview don’t just sound like professionals; they help hosts like me shape the conversation so that we’re not just talking about what I found interesting. Rather we’re catering to the readers in the audience. Sharing your memoir’s central question with agents and editors, rather than focusing solely on your book’s plot, communicates that your memoir contains a cohesive story that’s uniquely positioned in the market.

But how do you get there?

Try this approach:

• Brainstorm a list of questions about your topic. Augment that list by reading social media posts by others who also write about this topic. Pay attention to posts with a lot of likes. That signals this content matters to readers.
• Identify the questions your book potentially addresses. Be sure to include questions related to the social media posts you researched.
• Once your list is complete, explore the books published in your subgenre to see which of these questions have already been addressed.
• Field test what’s left with your readers. Once you’ve found a winner, use it to revise your story and craft your book proposal and query letter.

My memoir-in-progress is about near-death experiences and their connection to a family legacy around breathing. The closet mural in my office holds the questions I know readers have about this experience. While it might look messy, it allows me to engage with them and add new ones as they arise. The books at my feet answer some of those questions. The rest of the mess includes chapter summary drafts that are still marinating and the general creative clutter that shows I’m “in process” and on my way to finishing this book.

Lisa Cooper Ellison

Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, trauma-informed writing coach, and host of the Writing Your Resilience podcast. She works and writes at the intersection of storytelling and healing, and uses both her personal experiences and clinical training to help writers turn tough experiences into art. Lisa’s essays and stories have appeared on Risk! and in The New York Times, HuffPost, Hippocampus Literary Magazine, and Kenyon Review Online, among others.