Invariably, when I speak to groups about memoir-writing, a question arises that goes something like this: “What about the parts that are too difficult to tell?”

Early in my career of helping people to write their memoirs, I had a simple answer for this. “It’s your story, the way you choose to tell it,” I’d say. “I’m not a biographer or a historian. I’m not fact-checking your account. You include what you want to have as part of your story; you leave out what you don’t want included. It’s your choice.”

And for a long time, that straightforward answer seemed conclusive to me. Many of my memoir clients are strangers to me until we start working together: with no prior knowledge about their lives, I have no way of knowing what they are choosing not to tell me. I seldom even wondered if there were parts they were omitting, and was sometimes surprised to stumble upon evidence that something significant had gone unsaid, such as when a client told me all about his first wife, Karen, and his current wife, Kathy; only when a mutual acquaintance referred to Kathy as the man’s fourth wife did I realize that there were a few unaccounted-for characters missing from his narrative. And I never asked him about them, because I’m happy to let my clients decide for themselves what will and won’t be commemorated in their memoir.

But recently I’ve begun to think about this question a little differently. Now, when anyone asks me what to do about the memories they don’t want to include, I wonder to myself: Why don’t you want to include them?

This is because over the past few years, with a few dozen personal memoirs now in my portfolio, I’ve heard such a wide range of stories. Clients have told me about their first sexual experiences, substance abuse, abortions, family rifts, the suicide of a parent or spouse, lies they told, hurts they inflicted, extramarital affairs, seductions. Each story they choose to tell enhances their narrative and fleshes out their personal history.

Not everyone has the same comfort level with confessions, of course, and in some cases, the reason people find stories difficult to tell is that what happened is too sad or hurtful to relive, not because they feel guilty or morally ambivalent about what happened.

Still, I wonder how many of the people who ask me this would find that once they got started telling the easier parts of their stories, the harder parts would come more naturally. I have in fact had more than one client who led me to believe that they’d told me everything they wanted to include in their memoir, only to decide after a first draft was done that they now felt comfortable enough to tell me the parts they’d left out. So we do a second version, and that’s the one they end up presenting to their family members and friends – unless they think of still more, and then there’s a third version.

The point is, don’t let your reticence about telling some stories keep you from telling any stories. If there are parts you don’t want to include, then plan not to include them. What I have always said in answer to this question still holds true: It’s your story, the way you want to tell it. But also, don’t be surprised if your parameters shift during the telling of your memoir. As you become comfortable with the process, you might come to see that in fact every part of your past makes up who you are now, and it is that person – the cumulative character made up off all the good and bad, right and wrong, prides and embarrassments of the past – who has a story to tell.

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The story-telling radio show “The Moth,” along with its inspiration, “This American Life,” purports to unite several stories around a common theme each week. Often the connection seems to me to be specious at best, but themes are still an interesting way to construct stories about our lives, even if the theme is only a jumping-off point for a story that develops into something far from the original point.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the theme of unforeseen consequences, something my teenage daughter and I talked about over the weekend. She has an excellent mentor at her part-time job. This mentor has influenced my daughter so significantly that my daughter’s goals for the future and even her driving passions have changed as a result. But what my daughter does not know is that numerous people were greatly disappointed when the mentor left her previous role, believing she had been released without just cause. They felt sympathy and frustration over the situation, seeing it as entirely a negative thing. The unforeseen consequence that the story of her dismissal has for me, though, is new and promising directions for my daughter’s future. I can’t help musing over the wisdom of that old maxim about how when a window closes, a door opens.

An acquaintance told me an even more remarkable story about unforeseen consequences. After fifteen years of marriage, her husband shocked her by literally walking out the door and leaving their marriage one Saturday morning. “When he said he was leaving, I thought he meant he was going to Home Depot,” she told me. Bereft, my acquaintance flew overseas to visit her oldest friend, something that hadn’t been in her plans that year at all. The two women spent two weeks together and grew closer than they’d been since they were girls.

A year later, my acquaintance’s long-distance friend died. It was tragic, but there was some comfort for my acquaintance in knowing that she and her friend had spent so much quality time together with no foreknowledge at all that it would be the last time they ever saw each other. And what drove them together was the husband’s betrayal – something she couldn’t have possibly imagined as a positive thing at the time.

Her story continued. A few months later, my acquaintance met a new man, fell in love and married. She’s sure the new husband was a gift that her deceased friend sent her from heaven. Happy memories in the face of grief, and new love, resulted from one very disruptive deed that at the time seemed entirely without possible benefits.

Some of my memoir clients take this approach instinctively. Often they have a particular word that they want to use in their memoir title because it reflects a guiding theme throughout their life. Keeping their focus on this one word helps them to shape the anecdotes they tell. For one client, it was “resilience.” She wanted to be sure that all the chapters of her memoir related in some way to that word and that concept. For another it was “detective.” She believed that in different ways, she had sought clues throughout her life, and wanted to represent her narrative as an ongoing piece of detective work.

If you’re stalling out in telling the story of your life, think about working with a theme rather than a straightforward chronology. What unforeseen consequences have dictated your fate? What coincidences have changed the path of your life? What chance meetings opened up a new chapter for you?

The themes you could choose are countless. And the stories they generate may at first seem disparate and disconnected. But after a while, they may start to coalesce into a comprehensive narrative. You might be surprised to find out that your life story too has governing themes that go well beyond a simple linear list of dates and places.

Need help getting started – or getting finished – with your memoir? Please be in touch any time to discuss!