Breakout Session #3 - So, You Want to Write a Memoir! With Ruth Chan

Ruth Chan is an award-winning author and illustrator of comics and children’s books, including her graphic memoir Uprooted which won the SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Illustrated Book/Graphic Novel for Older Readers, and was named one of NPR's best books of 2024. Prior to illustrating full time, she spent her teens in China and a decade working with youth and families in underserved communities. She is a proud Canadian who now lives and works in NYC.

Ruth acknowledges that writing a memoir can be an intimidating and intense experience compared to writing fiction, but it can also be fun and bring about unexpected beauty and some pretty good laughs. Ruth helps attendees explore different approaches to getting started in memoir writing, and the ins and outs of what it means to share yourself with children and others.

Memoir is pretty simple to spot, it is a non-fiction, first-person narrative that focuses on one specific time or event—it is NOT an autobiography encompassing a whole lifetime. Memoirs that stand the test of time focus more on exploring thoughts and feelings than they are focused on exploring facts. 

How do you figure out your memoir inspiration? Ruth shares a brainstorming exercise with attendees on how to find the values and themes important to their own life story and gives a great exercise for figuring out how to determine the most effective tone for your memoir.

What keeps your memoir feeling authentic to readers is to maintain authenticity in your personal story even when it might be unflattering or painful, and sharing it in a way that readers can say, "This is so me". Ruth lists some common themes children's memoirs often share, a very strong theme you can center your story around makes for a very compelling memoir that is not bogged down by sidestories that often bulk out an autobiography.

Ruth shares a number of exercises attendees can use to help focus their memoir theme as well as generate rich sensory details imperative to making a memoir stand out as unique. 

Prior to writing, Ruth recommends reading published memoirs for the age range you hope to target as well as reading adult memoir that resonates with your core themes. But she recommends NOT reading others memoirs once you've started drafting your own memoir to give your own memories room to breathe and get figured out on the page without being influenced by others.

And of course scour any of your OWN primary source materials, like journals you've kept, family and friend interviews, and photo albums to build your memoir around. 

As a fellow spreadsheet lover, this was my favorite nugget from the session: 

As Ruth started to build out her UPROOTED memoir draft in chronological order, she used Excel to build a spreadsheet for the timeline, not just for documenting the events in order, but to note how her theme of belonging was or was not present in each scene.

Check out the forthcoming conference session replays (which will be available until September 15, 2025) and hear how Ruth handled the emotional aspects of memoir-writing, both for herself and those mentioned in her memoir, as well as the unexpected gems that come from writing vulnerably about your real life and the many unexpected connections that can come from sharing your personal stories.