The Many (Optional) Options for Starting Your Memoir

Apart from your book’s cover, the first ten pages are the most crucial to hooking your readers. Many people abandon a book that doesn’t capture their interest quickly, and with the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon, those readers can be lost before they even buy the book. Horrors!

So, what kinds of beginnings work best? With memoir, the answer is murky. Memoir sits at the intersection of non-fiction and fiction. We are telling true stories but in a form that resembles fiction more than non-fiction. We use character, scene, narrative arc, suspense, etc., just like fiction.

But despite the common wisdom in fiction writing to start in the middle of the action, many memoirs begin with a preamble of sorts. I’m talking about the Preface, Introduction, Foreword, Prologue, and Author’s Note. What exactly are these? Do memoirs need them? How do you choose which one is right for your book?

Let’s start by understanding what each one means. Below I give my best definitions (knowing full well there is no hard and fast definition of any of them):

Preface: Tells how the book came into being and gives an overview of what readers can expect. They are more common in non-fiction.

Introduction: Tells why the author wrote the book and why the story was important to tell. It often provides background or context for the writing of the book and introduces the book’s main topics.

Prologue: A short scene showing readers something that happens out of the timeframe of the rest of the book, usually a suspenseful moment. They are more common in fiction and memoir.

Foreword: Written by someone other than the author about the talents and virtues of the author and the book about to be read. Often these are written by people of more prominence than the author.

Author’s Note: Explains something about the writing of the book that the author would like readers to know. In memoir, it often includes disclosing the changing of names or locations.

Now you know what they are, how do you know if you need one? Why not just start with Chapter 1? The short answer is: You may absolutely start with Chapter 1, and that will almost always be fine.

The downside to introductions, etc., is the delay they might cause in getting to the action of your story. You wouldn’t want to bore a reader with a discussion of the reasons you wrote the book before they care that you wrote it.

And it is well-gossiped-about that some readers see the word “Introduction” or “Preface” and simply skip that section entirely. If the information contained therein is essential to your story, that may be a problem.

What are other successful memoirists doing? Let’s look at some examples, in order of popularity (based on my unscientific survey of books):

Prologues

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. The Prologue is a scene in the hospital where McCurdy’s mother lies in a coma. She describes the tense moments waiting for her mother to wake. Then she tells readers that her mother never wakes and that without the ability to make her mom happy, her life has no purpose. The scene reveals a small moment that the author extrapolates into a big truth about the book. 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed. The Prologue describes a moment in the middle of Strayed’s hike when she loses a boot and then throws the other one over the edge of a cliff. She goes on to give a bird’s eye view of her journey: how she was at a low point in her life and decided to walk the Pacific Crest Trail. The Prologue works on two levels by jumping ahead to a key climactic scene and also giving us a sense of the book as a whole, as an Introduction would.  

Spare by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex. The Prologue is a scene when Harry meets with William and Charles at Frogmore before his grandfather’s funeral. It functions as a tense scene that transitions into an explanation of why Harry wrote the book. In the scene, William and Charles seem not to understand why Harry left England, and this book, Harry writes, will be his explanation. Like Wild, this is a hybrid with elements of Prologue and Introduction.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park. The Prologue describes a climactic moment in Park’s escape from North Korea. Then, after a text divider, she gives an overview of her story and why she wrote it. Another “Prologue” that includes elements of an introduction. Maybe we can call these Proluctions or Intrologues?

Author’s Notes

Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling by Amy Chozick. The Author’s Note explains how Chozick researched the book and recreated the scenes from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This is important information to establish for a journalist writing about a public figure.

The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story by David Crow. The book begins with an Author’s Note covering technicalities like changes of names and places. When an Author’s Note is this technical and short, I think of it more like part of the front matter (e.g., the copyright page), and most readers probably skip right over it. 

Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America by Amy Butcher. The author goes all out with both an Author’s Note and a Prologue. The Note, which comes first, explains that a central character in the story has died, and it gives insight into why Butcher wrote the book. The Prologue provides data on violence against women as the context for the author’s personal story of domestic abuse. This is not a typical Prologue and reads more like an Introduction.

Introductions

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance. The Introduction gives an overview of the author’s background, why he wrote the book, and the book’s major themes: race, ethnicity, poverty, geography. It includes a short anecdote. This is a classic introduction.

All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf. The Introduction explains why Woolf wrote the book and suggests that she had her husband’s blessing to write about his death. It also serves to set the tone of this memoir (i.e., Don’t expect me to be a grieving widow—at least, not a widow who is grieving her husband’s death).

[Nothing]

Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer. The book begins with Chapter 1, which tells how the author decided to enter a Mongolian horse race. (She includes an Author’s Note at the end of the book.)

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. In Chapter 1, Walls, while riding in a cab in New York City to a fancy party, sees her mother rifling through a dumpster. This chapter could easily be called a Prologue because it is a flash forward to a moment far ahead in the author’s story. In Chapter 2, Walls begins the story from the beginning.

Foreword

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. The Foreword is written by the author’s colleague and publishing mentor, Abraham Verghese, whom he entrusted with his manuscript before his death. Verghese is also a doctor and acclaimed author.  

Preface

A Promised Land by Barack Obama is the only memoir I found in my non-exhaustive search that starts with a Preface. Obama writes about what he’s been up to since he left the presidency and what was going on in the world during the time he wrote the book. He also discusses the approach he took to writing.

And Now for Something Totally Different…

Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford. Ford’s memoir begins with a letter from her father in prison. It’s not labeled with any title, and because of its brevity, it works almost like an epigraph. (An epigraph is considered front matter and is a short quote that is supposed to evoke the book’s theme.) The letter serves to arouse readers’ curiosity, like a Prologue might, as well as set the tone for what’s to come.

Takeaways

Prologues (and the hybrid Intrologues) are very much in favor these days, with Introductions and Author’s Notes close behind.

Authors can call these beginning sections whatever they like and get away with it.

You can still have a perfectly great book with no introductory chapter of any kind.  

Every beginning has pros and cons, and each author must decide what feels right for them, often in collaboration with an editor and/or early readers.

One closing word of advice from this editor and writer: Whatever you decide to put at the beginning, write it at the end. You will have a much better sense of how to begin your story once you see the full arc of it, the places it goes, and the themes it evokes. I think you’ll also find it’s much easier to write the beginning once you’ve reached the end.