The Brevity BlogToo Young to Write a Memoir?
By Emma Moriarty
“Excuse me for saying this, but you’re a little young to be writing a memoir.”
I looked up from my lightly dressed Caesar salad to meet the gaze of the lady with silver hair next to me. I was at a work event, and had mentioned that I was enrolled in book inc’s Memoir Incubator, a yearlong memoir writing program. I swallowed dryly at her comment and smiled.
As a 23-year-old writer, there have certainly been times when I have doubted my place in the memoir space. I had been juggling my fear of being “too young” before enrolling in Memoir Incubator, so this comment from the silver-haired lady hit a nerve. Maybe I AM too young to write a memoir? Will people just think I am young and naive? Will readers overlook my book as soon as they flip to the back and learn how old I am?
However, over the past few months, I have learned that anyone of any age can write a memoir, and you don’t need something terrible or traumatic to happen to do so. And though younger writers may lack distance, the amount of time that must pass before it becomes appropriate to write about something has been debated for years in the world of memoir.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr states that “If the events you are writing about are less than seven or eight years past, you might find it harder than you think. Distance frees us of our former ego’s vanities and lets us see deeper into events.” Karr is implying what many other authors have shared: the further away we are from these events, the better we can understand them and write about them.
However, Melissa Febos, author of two memoirs and three essay collections, has different advice. In an interview with Juliana Ukiomogbe for Interview Magazine, Febos states that “While I understand the logic undergirding that advice, I have often written my way out of experiences. Without hindsight, I’ve been left with other tools, often more lyric modes of articulating my experience and that has yielded writing that I couldn’t have produced at any later time. Writing is my best way of thinking, of coming to insight about my experience, and mostly I prefer to do it sooner rather than later.”
Both writers bring up great points. For me, though, the things I am writing about are already pretty far back in my memory. The memories from when my mom passed away are 9 years old now, and most of my childhood memories are even further back. I think that two things can be true at once: First, there is no harm in getting these memories on the page now, since they will only get foggier. Second, it is also true that maybe, someday, I will think about these memories with a different conclusion, or with more “hindsight” as my frontal lobe continues to develop.
In The 90-Day Memoir: Tell the Story of Your Life, Alan Watt suggests that memoirists are supposed to be the “wise one on the hill”; only you are uniquely qualified to write the story of your life. There is some sort of wisdom that you are qualified to share with the reader, itching at you and pushing you to write your story.
It is hard to picture myself as the “wise one.” But at the same time, would it be the worst thing to have a young perspective in the memoir space? As we get older, we miss how certain things felt when we were younger: I miss how free and reckless I was at 17; I miss the ignorance of thinking I was old at 13. I am sure everyone misses certain aspects of their 20s. Would it be so terrible if people read my memoir and thought, I miss feeling this way?
Isn’t memoir about listening without judgment as people share their hard truths and open up to their readers? Why then should my age diminish my story and what I have been through?
At the end of the day, if you have a story to tell, tell it, no matter your age. It is true that your story may change after you write a memoir, and memories may have different meanings as we grow older. But more books can be written, and the reader wants to live alongside you as you have these experiences.
As I sit down at my desk each morning with a fresh cup of coffee, I think of the silver-haired lady, and wish I could tell her this. Maybe she didn’t have the motivation or confidence to write a memoir at 23. But I’m glad that she said what she did, because she acknowledged a fear of mine that I had only thought to myself in private. In facing this fear head on, I hope that the next time I receive a comment on my age, I can tell them what day my memoir comes out!
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Emma Moriarty is a Shrewsbury, NJ native and May 2025 Lehigh University graduate with a BS in Psychology and a Creative Writing minor. Her work appears in HerStry literary magazine and the 2023 & 2025 editions of Lehigh’s Amaranth Magazine. She received 2024 & 2025 Williams Prizes in Creative Writing Non-Fiction and 2024 & 2025 Kachel Prizes. She’s a regular columnist for the book inc Journal and a contributing writer for Project Write Now’s The Imprint.
