Memoirs do not fail to resonate because the life was uninteresting.
They fail to resonate because readers aren’t invited to embrace a hero.
That may sound harsh, but it is also instructive. Just know this. You are a well-qualified protagonist. Your life isn’t the problem. The problem is craft. We can fix this.
Matt Bird, in his insanely readable and generous book The Secrets of Character: Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love, makes an assertion that deserves a permanent place on every memorist’s desk. He says that in the first ten pages, readers want to:
- Believe in the reality of the hero
- Care about the hero’s circumstances
- Invest their hopes in the hero to solve a problem
Just glancing at the title of Bird’s book, you might think the task at hand applies strictly to fiction writing. But memoir writers ignore him at their peril. Whether it’s a novel or a life story, readers bring the same expectations, the same instincts, the same questions.
Is this guy or gal real?
Why should I care?
Where is this going—and why should I follow?
What follows is part examination and part practical guide you can apply directly to your own memoir. Think of this article like a conversation we are having at a coffee shop—about craft, memory, and the delicate act of writing a hero anyone will love.
The First Ten Pages
In chapter one of his book, Bird asks the reader to imagine that a publisher has just asked you to send over your first ten pages. Whohoo! You got a bite. Then you hear: “I’ll have you send me the rest if I’m still interested.”
Why just the first ten? Those first pages are going to answer the publisher’s most important question: Is there a hero here I can love?
Your first ten pages must establish the gravitational pull of a character worth rooting for—and make it feel like a huge mistake to walk away.
What is the tug you are going to construct layer upon layer? A character your readers can connect with emotionally. Let’s not worry about advancing the plot in the opening pages. That will unfold at its own pace. Your initial character hook is what’s crucial for surviving the first “swing of the axe” from readers.
More than anything, your readers want a hero they can fall in love with. Once your readers love you, I guarantee they will follow you anywhere. Bird says it doesn’t matter if your story is any good. That sounds outrageous until you realize what he’s really saying: connection is paramount. We don’t fall in love with stories—we fall in love with an irresistible hero.
If readers sense, early on, that you’re self-aware and not secretly auditioning for sainthood, they’ll stick around. They’ll forgive a digression or two. They’ll tolerate the occasional stumble. They’ll even follow you through a chapter where “nothing much happens,” because you are happening, and they believe you will make it worth their while.
That trust is fragile, though. Lose it, and the reader is gone—off to walk the dog, take out the trash, or start a book by someone whose hero is more irresistible. Establish the connection, and you’ve bought yourself an extraordinary freedom. You can slow down. You can linger. You can take the long way around a memory and still be welcomed back.
So don’t waste your opening pages trying to prove your life was important. Prove instead that you’re human. Clumsy. Worried. Disrespected. Self-conscious. Insulted. Afraid. Something. You get the idea.
Let’s take Bird’s three reader desires one at a time and translate them into memoir terms.
1. Believe in the Reality of the Hero
Here’s the unique burden of writing a memoir: you are not inventing a character, yet you must still convince the reader that you exist.
This feels unfair. After all, you were there. You remember the blackeye. You paid the bills. You can show us the battle scars. Why should reality need help?
Because readers don’t respond to dry facts. They respond to color in a full fleshed-out world. The danger in memoir is vagueness. A real life, rendered too general, begins to feel, well, unreal.
Believability comes from a careful blending of two kinds of detail.
First, the universal: the small human experiences that readers instantly recognize. Waiting for a phone call that doesn’t come. Avoiding an envelope you don’t want to open. Rehearsing a conversation in your head that never happens as planned. A job that irritates you. A habit you don’t admire. A private contradiction you haven’t resolved yet. These details act as handrails. They tell the reader, I’ve been here too.
Second, the oddly specific: details so odd or specific that there’s no question that they come from real life.
Take, for example, the dialogue in Donnie Brasco, a film in which undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone, played by Johnny Depp, infiltrates a New York Mafia family and is asked to explain a certain word to one of the guys transcribing his tapes.
Technician: “Hey, can I ask you something? What’s ‘fugettaboutit’? What is that?”
Pistone: “Fugettaboutit is like, uh, if you agree with someone, y’know? Like ‘Raquel Welch is one great piece of ass, fugettaboutit.’ But then, if you disagree, like a Lincoln is better than a Cadillac? Fugettaboutit! Y’know? But then, it’s also like if something is the greatest thing in the world, like, ‘Minghia!, Those peppers, fugettaboutit.’ Y’know? It’s also like saying ‘Go to hell,’ too, like, y’know, like, uh, ‘Hey Paulie, you got a one-inch pecker,’ and Paulie says ‘Fugettaboutit!”
Together, the universal and the specific work magic. They convince the reader that a living person is on the page. Appear flat, and the reader will yawn themselves into a long nap. If you appear as a human being—distracted, occasionally wrong, still in progress—the reader relates.
2. Care About the Hero’s Circumstances
Readers do not care simply because something bad happened to you. What draws the reader closer is when your suffering mirrors their own experiences (even just a little)—and then edges past it, just enough to make them pause.
One way empathy arises is when the reader sees that you are lacking something essential.
Sometimes that lack shows up in absences.
Like me, you may have grown up with only one parent. A fact that shaped the structure of your days. One adult voice instead of two. One person to juggle everything. One person to disappoint, or protect, or rely on too heavily. What’s missing is backup.
No second parent to soften a rule, to counter an opinion, to notice what the first one missed. No one to say, I’ve got this, when the other was exhausted. No quiet huddle in the next room where decisions were discussed before they landed on you. Life arrived unbuffered.
The power here lies in showing how this absence operated socially. Who picked you up when you were sick? Who sat in the audience? Who didn’t come? Who you learned not to ask. These are not grand tragedies. They are small, repeated negotiations with reality.
Handled this way, your single-parent household was a condition—one that subtly altered how you managed worry, independence, loyalty, and self-reliance long before you had names for any of it.
Readers will have empathy, even if their own childhood looked different. They remember moments when support thinned.
The reader’s empathy grows not from pity, but from recognition. They see a younger version of themselves navigating a world with less cushioning. And they stay with you—not because your life was harder, but because it demanded something earlier than most.
You, of course, have a full menu of ways to show the reader how unkind the world has been to you. The list is long and familiar to the human race and, in capable hands, effective: a death in the family, abuse, financial strain, illness, a long season of embarrassment, a private worry that didn’t loosen its grip. None of these is off-limits. All of them belong to life.
Restraint matters, though. One well-chosen hurt will do more work than a catalog of wounds. The reader doesn’t need undeniable proof that life was hard. They already know this. Instead, they want to feel what it costs for you to move through it.
Too much suffering, too insistently displayed, has the opposite effect. The reader grows numb and fatigued. Balance is key. It allows empathy to rise naturally. When you choose thoughtfully, the reader’s heart goes out to you—and stays there.
3. Invest Their Hopes in the Hero to Solve a Problem
Readers want a narrator who possesses qualities that suggest capability. Not brilliance. Not perfection. Not charm. Capability.
This can be as modest as persistence, curiosity, or paying attention to details. It may show up as a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions or the ability to stay in the room when the heat is turned up. The reader is not looking for a savior. They are looking for someone who can manage their world.
Capability can be revealed by how you respond to setbacks. Through the small choices you make when no one is watching. Through a moment of restraint when indulgence would be more entertaining. These details reassure the reader that, even if the outcome is uncertain, the journey is navigable.
Hope takes root when you show great strength, are eager, brave hardship with good spirits, stay confident, stand up to bullies, put yourself in harm’s way, dominate a room, keep your mouth shut, stand up to the boss, quit a job, pursue a dream, even foolishly, strategize, be cool under pressure, or flash your wit. Along the way, the reader senses that the problem will not be solved easily, but that you will make it through to the other side somehow, someway.
What makes a hero irresistible?
To write The Secrets of Character, Bird spent five years returning to the stories that had stuck with him over the years. He reread the first ten pages of his favorite novels and memoirs. He rewatched the opening fifteen minutes of films and television pilots that had endured. Then he put each one through his Believe, Care, Invest test—asking whether the opening makes us believe in the hero’s reality, care about their circumstances, and invest our hopes in their ability to solve a problem.
The result of his meticulous research is a body of evidence: again and again, the stories that resonate do the same work early. They quickly give us someone we recognize that has flesh and bone, someone we care about, and someone we want to follow.
Bird’s bag of tricks is there for your taking. Hundreds of them to pick and choose from. I will give you the same warning Bird does: Please use the suggestions à la carte. Remember, you don’t have to check every box. In fact, don’t.
The Secrets of Character has become one of my favorite writing guides. The advice is both precise and actionable. What I love about it is the genre-spanning patterns of memorable and resonant characters. It’s in an easy-to-access reference format that makes for both fun reading and a great tool to keep on my desk for easy thumb-through inspiration.
Believe, Care, Invest will help you shape your first ten pages into an opening that invites readers to stay with your memoir to the last page.
What about the remaining 95% of your memoir? Easy: You keep reading my blog. It’ll provide more guidance on writing the whole thing.
