Personal essays, often in the form of memoirs, focus on a significant event in the writer’s life, a meaningful relationship, an important object or place, or some pattern, thread, or theme that weaves through his or her life. This is a type of writing that I often use at he beginning of the semester because the subject (the writer’s life) is one very familiar for the writer, which can make it an easy stsrt for many students, and at the same time the student is warming up skills of collecting up ideas, deciding on a main point, and composing sentences and paragraphs. By doing this you will be practicing one of the essential skills of the writer: namely, to connect the specific to the general, in this case the details of your own lived experience with some more universal theme that will connect (at least potentially) to your readers’ own lives. For this particular memoir you will be writing about a partiuclar food, in a way that allows you to say something more general about the role of food in people’s lives (or some other more general point).
Successful personal writing is vivid, so that the reader feels as if they’re sitting on your shoulder, watching your life happen. You create this sense of immediacy by using specific details: descriptions of people, places, actions, dialogue that make the essay much like fiction, or a film translated into words.
Watch this short video by a writing teacher named Bruce Ballenger, author of many textbooks such as The Curious Writer and The Curious Researcher. He explains why he believes personal writing is important even for a college writer.
Many students have difficulty understanding how a memoir works. Here’s an excerpt from an email I wrote to a student that may help a little:
I’d say a food memoir should be more than memories of food—you want to find some meaning or significance. Maybe I can explain it easier if you think about sports memoirs. Sports memoirs are not just the details of a Big Game, going inning by inning and pitch by pitch (for baseball, say). The best sports memoirs have some deeper lesson or meaning, about learning to cope with failure or about what it means to be part of a team or about the persistence to overcome an injury. things that readers who don’t play the sport can still connect to. Just because you remember something is not enough of a reason to include a detail or an incident in a memoir. Does that make sense? (If you’re writing for yourself, yes, by all means you can throw in everything you can remember, but a memoir should be more selective and shaped.)