Memoir vs Autobiography: Two Ways to Tell a Life Story

If you’re thinking of writing your life story, know that there are two main types. We have the memoir and the autobiography.

Memoirs and autobiographies are both creative non-fictional works, and they both pull from the writer’s real-life experiences. The major difference between them is the scope. An autobiography covers more ground about a person’s life than a memoir does.

Let's see the differences in more detail and establish which form is best for different writers.

What Does Memoir Mean?

A memoir is a personal story written about a specific time in your life. It captures a particular period, relationship, or experience that made a significant mark on the trajectory of your life. The origin of the word "memoir" is from a French word, mémoire, and it translates to "memory." That tells you a lot about what this literary genre is.

Basically, a memoir doesn't try to cover your entire life. Instead, it narrates a memory that carries emotional weight and lessons learned that the reader can connect with.

Take Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking as an example of a memoir. The book entirely covers the year following her husband's sudden death. The rest of her life just fades into the background.

A good life memoir tells you what happened, what it felt like, and what that experience meant to the writer. There is an emotional intimacy in memoirs that other types of life writing may not be able to replicate.

What Does Autobiography Mean?

The autobiography has Greek roots from the three words: auto (self), bios (life), and graphein (to write). Put together, you have "a self-written life." That's exactly what an autobiography is: a personal account of your entire life. They are typically told in chronological order, from your earliest years to the present.

An autobiography typically doesn’t have the emotional depth of memoirs. It focuses more on being a factual and historical account. The author pays more attention to dates, events, and the public record of someone's entire life.

Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom is a classic example of an autobiography. It begins from his childhood in South Africa, to his coming of age, to his time in prison, and presidency. Another example is Helen Keller's The Story of My Life, which covers her entire journey from infancy to young adulthood. These are books that provide comprehensive records of one’s entire life, and they aren't built around a specific theme.

One thing about autobiographies is that they are written with a sense of legacy. Many people write their autobiographies later in life, to look back across the years and document what they've seen, done, and lived through. They are often trying to preserve history, be it personal, cultural, or political.

Memoir vs Biography vs Autobiography: Where Does Biography Fit?

While we're on the topic, let's quickly clear what a biography is because this also gets many people confused.

A biography is a detailed account of someone's life written by someone else. The person writing the story is not the subject of the book. A biographer researches their subject, maybe by talking to them, interviewing their family members, or reading letters and documents. And then pieces together a full story based on available evidence.

So, the difference between an autobiography and a biography is who is doing the writing. For the former, the writer is telling their own story, and for the latter, the writer is telling another person’s story.

A memoir is also a writer telling their own story, but this time, a specific chapter of it instead of the full story. It picks the one story that needs to be told the most out of everything that happened in a person’s life.

What Is the Difference Between a Memoir and an Autobiography?

Now, let’s look at the key differences between a memoir and an autobiography side by side.

• Scope: An autobiography covers a person's entire life, or at least the majority of it. A memoir covers a specific period or specific experience.
• Structure: Autobiographies typically follow chronological order. They have a beginning (birth, childhood, family traditions), a middle (career, relationships, struggles), and an end (where the author's life stands today). Memoirs don't have to do that. They can start in the middle of a crisis and work outward. The storytelling style is more flexible and more literary.
• Tone: An autobiography tends to aim for completeness. A memoir goes for depth. The memoir aims for a deeper understanding of a specific theme or specific moments in the author's entire life. It's more emotionally raw than an autobiography.
• Purpose: Autobiographies are often about legacy and keeping factual and historical accounts for future readers. Memoirs are more for telling important stories or preserving family memories. They want to explore what a specific experience taught them and how they handled the lesson.

Autobiography vs Memoir: Which Comes First in Publishing?

Memoirs actually dominate the modern publishing market. Readers tend to connect more deeply with a focused story than with a broad one that cuts across decades.

This is partly because a memoir functions like a novel. It has a specific theme, rising tension, and a resolution. With a strong storytelling style, a memoir can keep readers hooked the same way good fiction does. Although an autobiography is valuable in documenting people’s stories, it is not always gripping and can sometimes feel more like reading a history book.

That said, autobiographies are still important, especially for public figures. Politicians, activists, and pioneers often write autobiographies because the full story of their lives is the story. Every chapter of their life shaped what came after, and it can inspire others to embrace their journey towards greatness.

Who Usually Writes a Memoir?

Anyone can write a memoir, as long as they have a story to tell.

Yes, big names publish memoirs all the time. Michelle Obama with Becoming, Tara Westover with Educated, and Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors. These are best-selling memoirs from popular people. But ordinary people write powerful memoirs too, about surviving illness, rebuilding after divorce, raising a child with special needs, or immigrating as a family.

It is the honesty and emotional rawness with which a memoir is written that makes it worth reading. A memoir works when the author shares something true and relatable enough to feel universal. When someone's life opens a window into shared human experience of grief, love, failure, and resilience, it resonates with a wide target audience.

In fact, that’s a characteristic of good memoir writing. To say this happened to me, and through that, help the reader understand something about themselves.

Who Usually Writes an Autobiography?

Autobiographies have traditionally been written by people with public stories to tell. People whose lives have made a mark on history, like heads of state, civil rights leaders, groundbreaking athletes, and more.

Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, Maya Angelou, and Benjamin Franklin all wrote autobiographies because the full arc of their lives carried public weight.

But there is no law saying the genre is exclusively for famous people. Anyone who has lived through something historically significant, built something from nothing, or spent decades in a career field worth documenting can write an autobiography. As long as there’s enough material across the person's entire life to sustain a book-length factual and historical account.

The Difference in Storytelling Style

Autobiographies tend to be more organized, comprehensive, and careful. They often give equal weight to each chapter of the writer's life. Public figures use this form to keep the record straight, share their side of events, and leave something behind for family members and future readers.

Memoirs have more room to experiment. A memoirist can open with a scene from the middle of their life and circle back to childhood later. They can dwell on a single afternoon for twenty pages because that afternoon changed everything. They can skip over years without explanation.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking does this brilliantly. It doesn't cover her entire life or even her full relationship with her husband. It captures one year of grief in extraordinary detail, and through that specific time period, shows grief in a way readers would relate to.

Do Memoirs and Autobiographies Have to Include Real People and Events?

Yes. Memoirs and autobiographies are nonfiction by definition. Every event comes from the author's life as they actually lived it. Every character is a real person. The entire book rests on the reader's trust that what they're reading happened.

That said, memory isn't a perfect record, so writers improvise sometimes. They may reconstruct dialogues or compress timelines. They also look at past events through the lens of the present, so emotions may be interpreted differently than they occurred.

Memoirs and autobiographies don't claim to be court transcripts. The author shares what they remember, how they felt, and what they understood at the time. That's the standard they are held to.

Memoir vs Autobiography: A Quick Summary

If you're still wondering which one fits your story, here's a summary for you.

If you want to document your entire life, from childhood to now, with all the major events in their proper order, that's an autobiography. You want your life story told straight.

If you want to write about a specific experience, a specific period, a relationship, a struggle, a transformation, that's a memoir. You want to offer readers a deep understanding of a time in your life.

Both forms can be invaluable when written in honesty and without bias. The reader should feel engrossed in your story and be able to relate to the lessons you learned along the way.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a memoir?

A memoir is a nonfiction narrative written in first person about a specific theme, specific experience, or specific period from the author's life. The word comes from the French word “mémoire”, meaning memory. It focuses on what that specific time period meant and what lessons learned can be passed on to the reader. A popular example of a memoir is Becoming by Michelle Obama.

What is an autobiography?

An autobiography is a nonfiction account of someone's entire life, written by that person. It is a complete record, from birth and childhood through to the present day. It typically follows chronological order and functions as a factual and historical account of a person's life. Famous examples include Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and Helen Keller's The Story of My Life.

Who usually writes a memoir?

Anyone can write a memoir. While celebrities, politicians, and public figures publish them often, the literary genre is open to anyone with a meaningful experience to share. The best memoirs come from people willing to be honest about a specific period of their lives, including the uncomfortable parts. The depth of what the author shares is what draws the readers in.

Do memoirs have to be true?

Yes. Every event described in a memoir comes from the author's life as it actually happened. Human memory can be limited, so dialogue and details may be reconstructed as accurately as possible. But the events themselves must be real. Readers automatically trust a memoirist to honestly represent things as they happened. Fabricating events in a memoir is a breach of that trust between writer and reader.