After Life by Joan Didion - In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Didion meditates on the fragility of life

A memoir can be a series of short vignettes, poems, a long narrative, or even poems strung together thematically. Or you can mix all of the above. As long as it makes sense and adds to what you’re trying to get across, feel free to experiment. A memoir is a personal, historical account of an event or time period. Students get to know this nonfiction genre, different from an autobiography, through a series of excerpts from the memoirs of Gertrude Stein, Winston Churchill, and Henry David Thoreau. After reading each passage, students describe what makes it a memoir.

Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes by David Foster Wallace - I grew up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids - and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force

Three by David Sedaris - A trio of the best Sedaris stories including The Youth in Asia, Jesus Shaves and Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities

Peculiar Benefits by Roxane Gay - Until visiting Haiti, I had no idea what poverty really was or the difference between relative and absolute poverty

Mirrorings by Lucy Grealy - An outstanding essay that describes the author’s changing self image as she went through years of reconstructive facial surgery

Scars by David Owen - A life in injuries

Short Memoir Contest

The Kingdom of Snow and Ghosts by Michael Chabon - There may never again be a tedium so wretched and marvelous as that produced by television in the heyday of the aerial

Short Memoirs Examples

Dead Man Laughing by Zadie Smith - “My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy.”

Patient by Rachel Riederer - Two of the tires are sitting on my left leg, and my right leg is wedged into the little crevice between the pairs

Short Memoirs For Teens

Mistakes Were Made, Errors Happened by Karl Taro Greenfeld - I was looking for a soft future and didn’t see any reason why a kid like me wouldn’t find his way in the Tokyo summer