This Memoir Could Have Been an Email: Telling Your Story With Different Forms of Communication

Today’s post is by writer, editor, and book coach Jennifer Landau.

There are 15 pages of tweets in Jenny Lawson’s memoir-in-essays Broken (in the best possible way). The thread starts with Lawson tweeting:

Airport cashier: “Have a safe flight.”

Me: “You too!”

I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN!

What follows are a barrage of tweets from some of her 400,000+ followers offering up their own embarrassing exchanges.

Lawson, who started her career in the early days of blogging, is a profound and silly and profoundly silly writer with a deep connection to her readers. They come to her book for her bizarro email exchanges with scammers called “the Vampire Brotherhood,” and her very NSFW text exchanges with her sister about, among other things, the scent of bearcat urine.

But readers also crave her candor about her physical and mental health struggles. Lawson has multiple autoimmune disorders and depression and anxiety that puts her at risk of suicide. As Lawson phrases it, “It’s hard to live with a brain that wants to kill you.”

Her chapter titled “Things We Do to Quiet the Monster,” includes a detailed diary of her experience with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment designed to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. She even shares a picture of herself mid-treatment as well as this message to her readers: “I will get better. So will you. Each day more and more people understand the struggle and more treatments become available. One day there will be a cure. And I’ll be here for it.”

Lawson can get away with a lot because she’s a multiple #1 New York Times best-selling author. She can have her fifteen pages of tweets and a wacky list of Shark Tank pitches for products like Pogo Stilts with the tagline “Pogo Stilts: Someone’s Breaking a Leg.”

Her every-type-of communication-short-of-carrier-pigeon approach works because she knows her gifts and her audience. The comic absurdities offer a balm to her reader. The scathing open letter to her health insurance company offers raw honesty that many who fight to get their services covered can relate to. It begins: “Sometimes I think you want me dead.”

Lawson doesn’t just slap together the tweets and emails and texts and call it a day, either. She has passages of deep reflection and a rallying cry that pulses through the memoir. She posits that many of us struggle to treat ourselves with the care that we would show a dog. Dogs need “walks and healthy choices and water and play and sleep and naps and bacon and more naps. And love. I need that, too. And so do you. It’s not just a gift we give ourselves…it’s a duty. I’ll remind you if you remind me.” Lawson may not be all things to all people. But she is everything to her people.

In her memoir Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bess Kalb refers to her book as an oral history. Kalb’s beloved grandmother Bobby is both the primary subject of the memoir and its narrator. She is also dead as the book opens. Bobby lets us know that it’s terrible to be dead because there’s nothing to read and no one to talk to. She complains about her funeral; especially the Jewish tradition of shoveling dirt onto the coffin, which she finds degrading. “What’s next?” she asks. “They make the kids push the embalming fluid into my veins?”

While Kalb’s memoir certainly puts the creative in creative nonfiction, readers who buy into the conceit do so because they have come to know Bobby’s idiosyncratic voice and worldview through the more than thirty phone calls, voicemails, and in-person conversations that Kalb includes in the book. These real-life communications add an air of authenticity that grounds the book and highlights the deep love these two women have for each other. It’s a high-wire act, for sure, but one that had this reader tearing up at a final image of Bobby: young, healthy, and waving from the bow of a boat.

Want to use email, voicemail, and the like in your memoir? Here are a few guidelines.

Tap into the universal

No matter how you bolster your memoir with different forms of communication, you need to tap into something universal to keep your readers engaged.

Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project, offers an algorithm to keep writers focused on issues that transcend their own experience:

Memoir is about X (something universal) as illustrated by Y (something deeply personal) to be told in a Z (a certain format such as a long-form essay, op-ed, or book).

For example: Nobody Will Tell You This But Me is about:

• X: The struggle to accept the loss of a loved one
• Y: As illustrated by Kalb’s desire to remain in conversation with her grandmother even after her death.
• Z: In the form of a memoir.

Accept the anachronistic

When Lawson published her book tweets were still tweets, not X’s or posts or whatever they are called now. A year from now Bluesky’s skeets may dominate. Or TikTok might be banned—and then unbanned—again. All you can do is be clear about what form of communication you are using—and why.

Don’t use those voicemails or texts as a crutch …

If you can’t figure out how to explain an event or a choice you made, avoid tossing in some voicemail transcript instead. It will come off as a cheat and undermine your credibility going forward.

… or as a cudgel

I’ll start with a caveat: If you are writing about an abusive relationship, the legal, ethical, and safety concerns are beyond the scope of what I’m discussing. I’m talking about including a fistful of emails that show your crummy ex-boyfriend behaving in depressingly similar crummy ways (although there might be legal concerns there, too). Not only will your readers get bored, but they will also be looking for your part in things. It takes two to untangle as they say, and your audience wants a warts-and-all narrator they can relate to and trust.

Have fun!

Did you come across a Post-It note from a former neighbor you’ve lost touch with? A nearly illegible family tree your brother sketched during his genealogy phase? A Build-A-Bear bear that plays your now adult son saying, “I love you, Mommy,” in his very prepubescent voice? As long as these things are a natural fit and not simply shoehorned into your memoir because they’re cool, have at it!