A memoir focuses on a part of an individual’s life, unlike an autobiography, which recounts the entirety of someone’s lifetime. 

As I recall my own childhood, spent on a cotton farm in the Southwestern United States, I imagine sharing it with younger generations, or even city dwellers who have no idea what it was like to start working and learning to drive at seven years of age.  An almost never-ending routine of milking cows, feeding pigs, chickens, and rabbits, and working in fields filled much of my childhood until the age of twelve. 

Fortunately, there was the magic of children’s imagination, magic that helped lessen the long days of monotonous chores.  We made frequent excursions to other lands and other planets when we were not working. We were pirates, space travelers, cowboys, and even vampires. Our older sister read books to us, including the original Oz books and Tom Sawyer, and our mother and aunts and grandmother shared stories from their childhoods and tales about the Old West. The typical family vacation was a yearly camping trip to distant pine-covered mountains, where ghost stories were told around the campfire!

Sadly, after seven years, my father had to sell our beloved farm when a devastating hailstorm destroyed our crops. Life changed within a few short months. There were no longer constant chores, but the memories of our life on the farm hung thickly around me, as comforting as a blanket on a chilly night. My brother and I continued to work on other farms, but the magic was gone.

As decades passed, sharing innocence, magic, and children’s experiences on the farm became my obsession. A few years ago, I impulsively wrote a story that became an experiment in writing a memoir as fiction. It was about a brother and sister duo I knew in first grade. They were probably twins whom I only remember through poignant yet foggy memories. They moved away very suddenly, and I never knew why, so I invented a reason which is explained through a series of fantastical stories rooted in real-life and told by the sister, Rosie. Interspersed throughout the stories and tying in with Rosie’s stories are brief yet genuine vignettes from my relationship with my older brother and other family members.

This experiment led me to begin writing a sequel, more or less. I decided to mix in fantastical elements and change the sequence of important events and embellish them while maintaining their basic details and lessons. In short, I would fictionalize them; I would still be the narrator, but I would be telling them from my very imaginative ten to twelve-year-old point-of-view. I also decided to intermix them with short poems or poetic fragments that I had written to emphasize or illustrate the urgency or poignancy of those years. It is still a work in progress.

No, I did not invent the idea of telling true events as fiction. Writers have used this same strategy virtually since time immemorial.  What would many television series and movies be like without this inventive writing device? So, if you are considering writing a memoir, writing it as fiction may appeal to you as well, making it more readable and entertaining.