Why do people write memoirs? What power is there in telling our own stories?

Whether it's for expression, acknowledgment, understanding, and just for sharing, I think there are many reasons for people to write memoirs. Expressing your feelings can be a very relieving thing, and one way of doing this is through memoirs. When writing a memoir, especially the first draft, one tends to write EVERYTHING they remember feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing, and even tasting. By expressing these senses and your feelings toward them you can let go of bad events, relish is the good ones, and accept everything in between. Another reason many people write memoirs is to gain acknowledgement from others. If someone has experienced or witnessed an important or even devastation event, by writing a memoir others may realize a problem or achievement and even help out with it. Understanding is yet another reason to write memoirs. If someone has just experienced something life changing, by writing and reflecting back on it you can gain a lot of closure and comprehension of that event and its effects. Finally, a lot of people just write memoirs to share their life’s story with others. By sharing and communication we can find many similarities between our lives and the lives of others, and that is a really neat thing to achieve, just by writing a story.

The power of each and everyone’s story is quite great. When written well, a memoir can change someone’s opinion, stir up feeling, and even bring some one to tears. Sometime even more important than the story itself is the descriptions and word choice we can inject into our writing. These words can help the read truly visualize the setting of the story and then they can understand the writer’s point of view and what they are feeling. Memoirs can be harshly realistic, but that’s what really makes them a powerful way of writing. They are real stories from real people, and when read similarities and connections to the story and its characters are inevitable.