Your summer publishing questions answered

Round 1 of...many! We've got a lot of questions in the house.

Welcome to Friday Office Hours, coming at you on a Wednesday, because I got so many responses to my Monday call for questions.

Some of your publishing questions, I’ll answer here succinctly, others (like whether one should hire an independent publicist) need extra runway, so I’ll break them into individual posts. With the exception of questions that have some kind of time stamp, I’m going to start answering these in the order they came in from paid subscribers. Without further ado:

Fran is right that the correct course of action is to read other books that either manage to stay inside the child’s voice for the whole memoir, or that swing from a childhood POV to an adulthood one well.

I’m not convinced that there’s a memoir out there that uses a child’s voice effectively for the duration of the book: all the memoirs I’ve read that tackle childhood eventually use a narrative pivot (gained insight, flashes forward or flashes backward, humor or sarcasm) to make it clear that an adult is writing about the child that they were.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t have vivid portions of prose that feel firmly set in childhood in both setting and tonality. A book that does this well is Jeannette McCurdy’s “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” The beginning of that memoir started off with such a simplistic voice, I thought the writing sucked. And then I thought, no, wait, is this YA? Finally, I understood the author was writing as the young child that she was. Pretty quickly (like ten pages in, I’d say) McCurdy starts to shift toward a more mature voice, and it’s a wry one. The author uses humor cuttingly to showcase how naive and hopeful she was throughout her youth, while not necessarily writing the childhood scenes in a naive way.

Another way to more seamlessly switch between a childhood voice and adult reflections is to use outside research or anecdotes that support whatever theme or sentiment you’re trying to get across in a given chapter. This is something I relied on heavily while writing my own memoir, THE YEAR OF THE HORSES, which swings between my life as a nine year-old to my reflections as a forty year-old throughout the book. But in order to make those pivots smooth instead of jarring, I made it obvious for the reader when I was switching codes. For example, I might show my child self watching the movie “Neverending Story” and then in the next paragraph, I’d do something like “Later, when I watched that movie with my own daughter, I realized that….”

Flashes forward (and backwards!) often work best in memoir when we make them obvious. Really the best thing you can do here is to read memoirs with a highlighter and pay attention to time shifts, and to how the author manages them.

Stanley followed up with me to say he let the agent(s) know in his query letter that his book is “maximalist” (by which I’m guessing he means over 120K words) and that he understands that long books aren’t necessarily on trend. But that’s neither the question nor the issue here.