What Is ‘Memoir Plus’ and Why Is It So Hot Right Now?
UNPACKING THE INDUSTRY TERM ‘MEMOIR PLUS’ AND OTHER ANXIETIES AROUND SELLING MEMOIRS IN TODAY’S MARKET
You might have seen the term "memoir plus" on some manuscript wishlists, at writing conferences, or floating around writing circles recently. If you’ve asked yourself “what on earth is memoir plus?”, then you’re in the right place.
Memoir plus is an industry term* often used in publishing by agents and editors to categorize memoirs that offer something extra with the author’s personal narrative. That something extra can be additional research, history, science, criticism, or educational content of some kind. These books go beyond the personal narrative to make their point, or to tell a deeper, more propulsive story.
I won’t lie to you, sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between traditional memoir and memoir plus. The line can be thin. It’s not an exact science. But some books can very clearly fall into one category over the other. For example, Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me is undoubtedly strictly a memoir, or what I’ll be calling a traditional memoir in this post for clarity’s sake. Most celebrity books are traditional memoirs: they are the personal narratives of the people telling them. Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger, on the other hand, is very much memoir plus. It blends the personal narrative of her experience with her digital doppelganger with her research, reporting, and critique of today’s culture and structural systems.
Other books that fall into the memoir plus category:
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
This Boy We’ve Made by Taylor Harris
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Superfan by Jen Sookfung Lee
Body Work by Melissa Febos
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
SELLING MEMOIR
Memoirs are generally hard to sell. In today’s market, one of the many challenges to selling any book is the abundance of content out there. Publishers are competing for the attention of readers not only with other publishers, but also with streaming services, social media, podcasts, and pretty much all forms of media. As Jessi Rita Hoffman wrote on Jane Friedman’s blog in 2019, “Publishers are interested in buying unique memoirs only, because that is what the public wants to buy.” As a memoirist, the key is getting a reader to invest in an experience that is relatable enough for them to identify with (or at least sympathize with), and yet still unique in the sense that they could only hear about it from you. That experience needs to be worthy of the price that readers will pay for the book.
So with that in mind, let’s consider some of the reasons why a reader would choose to spend USD $27 or more on your memoir, be it traditional or plus:
1) You are a public personality, a celebrity, or someone with a following of people who already want to know your story.
See Jennette McCurdy’s I'm Glad My Mom Died, Abby Wambach’s Forward, or Tarana Burke’s Unbound.
2) Your story is remarkable, unique, or incredibly special.
Think Tara Westover’s Educated, or Ashley C. Ford’s Somebody’s Daughter.
3) Your story offers a portal into something bigger than your personal narrative that is new, timely, and/or worthy of discussion. In this case, there is an emphasis on the particular framing of your experience(s).
Examples of this include the above list of memoir plus books and also books like Know My Name by Chanel Miller or In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.
Memoirs of any kind could satisfy more than one of these reasons. For example, readers could pick up Know My Name both because they already know and remember Miller’s story (reason 1) and also because the book offers insight into the culture and systems that protect abusers (reason 3).
That being said, part of what makes memoir plus so special as a category is that it directly satisfies the third reason. In memoir plus, the author is the only person who could frame their experience through this particular perspective. They’ve done the research or are particularly knowledgeable on the subject.
Let’s take The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson as an example. The Argonauts Nelson’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. It’s a personal narrative where she reflects on love, motherhood and queer family-making. Nelson could have written her memoir as just a personal narrative, but what makes The Argonauts so interesting and electrifying is Nelson’s interactions with criticism and philosophy. She uses these disciplines to illustrate something larger than her own personal narrative: a map of meaning-making. Nelson’s personal experience is braided with what other theorists and philosophers have said about gender, sexuality, family-making, and identity over the years. You’ll see this book described in reviews and blurbs as a genre-bending memoir or, as The Guardian put it, a memoir that “defies easy definition.” Nelson could have written a memoir centered on just her relationship and her family, but what elevates her memoir to the memoir plus category is how she plays with autotheory.
In a similar vein, Cathy Park Hong wrote the only book at the time of its publication that frames her racial experience as part of a larger narrative. In her memoir-in-essays Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Hong uses reportage and analysis to write the reality of systemic racism against Asian Americans in America. She collages her personal narrative with the experiences of other Asian Americans and— through historical accounts, pop culture references, and cultural criticism— she creates a mosaic of the personal and the political.
DOES MY MEMOIR HAVE TO BE MEMOIR PLUS TO COMPETE IN THE MARKET?
No! There are plenty of ways to approach storytelling. Writing a memoir plus book is just one of the ways you can frame your story. It’s only one of the paths you can take to make your story larger and offer an anchor for readers to hold onto—both of which are essential to memoir writing. Courtney Maum actually has a great post on her Substack about how every memoir should be offering readers the benefits of memoir plus, regardless of whether it’s categorized as such.
Memoir plus is quite a fluid category, and there’s a reason it’s an industry term. Its boundaries defy limitations. The more I think about what constitutes memoir plus and what makes it so hot right now, the more I return to the question that anyone in the industry asks whenever we receive a pitch for a memoir: What type of value is this particular person’s story going to add to a reader’s life that they cannot get from anywhere else?
But at least now you know what all agents and editors are referring to when we say we’re seeking memoir plus!
More resources
Carly Watters has a great infographic that she recently posted on her Instagram on why memoir is “so hard” to sell.
Jane Friedman also has a wonderful breakdown of reasons why memoirs are difficult to sell, which reads like tough love and also teaches you what the market is not looking for in the memoir category.
*Note: The term ‘memoir plus’ was first coined by author and critic Leigh Stein, who offers a fantastic class on this topic.
