The Power of Beginnings: How to Choose Where Your Memoir Starts
When it comes to memoir, where you begin is everything — and it’s almost never the beginning.
Every story has a before. However, memoir rarely starts there. The opening page of a memoir is not a birth announcement or a timeline of events. It’s a doorway your reader steps into, the pulse of your story.
Most aspiring memoirists make the mistake of beginning too soon. They try to explain their way into the story. They want us to understand the whole setup: the family tree, the backstory, the heartbreaks and haircuts that came before the main event. But if you start your memoir that way, you risk losing your reader before they ever reach the good part.
Why “Once Upon a Time” Doesn’t Work in Memoir
Unlike novels, memoirs aren’t about what happens next. They’re about what it all meant. Readers don’t come to your story for chronology; they come for transformation.
If you start with your childhood or a long lead-up, you bury the moment when change truly began. You deny the reader of experiencing the moment your worldview cracked open and something inside you demanded to be seen.
That’s where your story starts.
The Moment of No Return
Think of the first page as a flash of lightning that illuminates everything that follows. It doesn’t have to explain the storm. It just needs to show us that it’s coming.
When you choose a powerful beginning, you drop your reader right into the jolt of the “before” and “after” moment when life tilted on its axis. Maybe you discovered a secret that shattered your family. Maybe you packed a suitcase and didn’t look back. Maybe you heard the word cancer or divorce or guilty or no heartbeat.
Those are your openings. Those are your thresholds.
When you start there, you invite your reader to take your hand and walk with you into what comes next.
What Great Memoirists Know About Beginnings
Let’s look at how some well-known memoirists have done it. Notice how each one drops you right into the center of change.
1. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Walls begins not in her childhood of desert wanderings and chaos, but with a scene years later. She’s in a taxi on her way to a fancy event in New York City when she spots her homeless mother rummaging through a dumpster.
That’s the story’s true ignition point. We’re immediately shown the collision between then and now, between who she once was and who she’s become. Walls could have started in the desert, but she chose the dumpster. And in doing so, she gave her reader a reason to care about everything that led to that haunting image.
2. Educated by Tara Westover
Westover could have opened with her unconventional upbringing in rural Idaho, detailing her father’s distrust of schools and doctors. Instead, she begins with a jarring moment: she’s 17, driving to the mountains to help her father salvage metal, knowing she’s never set foot in a classroom. From the first page, we sense her isolation, her longing, and the quiet tension between loyalty and freedom.
That’s where transformation begins, not when she first learns to read, but when she realizes that the life she’s been told to live is too small for her spirit.
3. Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Strayed could have started her memoir with her mother’s death or her marriage falling apart. But she opens with a scene of herself alone on a mountain, one boot tumbling off a cliff. It’s visceral and symbolic. The physical loss mirrors the internal one.
From that one image, we understand her journey before she even takes a step on the Pacific Crest Trail.
These authors didn’t start at the start. They started where it hurt, where it changed, where the stakes were real.
The Rule of the “Transformative Scene”
When you’re deciding where to begin, ask yourself:
What was the moment when everything changed?
What did I want then, and how was that desire about to be challenged?
What did I have to gain or lose by crossing that invisible line?
The first scene in your memoir should answer those questions, even if you circle back later to fill in the backstory.
Think of your life as a tapestry. You don’t have to show every thread. Just pull the one that unravels the whole pattern.
Don’t Worry About Explaining—Yet
One of the hardest habits to break is the instinct to explain your life before the story begins. “I just need to tell them about my childhood first,” you’ll say. Or, “They need to understand my marriage to understand why I left.”
No, they don’t. Not yet.
Trust your reader. Trust your story. The right beginning will naturally make your reader curious about the why. Then, you can weave in flashbacks, reflection, and backstory at the moments they matter most.
Resist the urge to think of memoir as a straight line, a point A to point B, or a linear start to finish. Think of it as a spiral. We move forward, circle back, dive deeper, rise again. Start where the ground shook. Then let the echoes guide your structure.
An Exercise to Find Your Beginning
If you’re not sure where to begin, try this:
List five defining moments in your life, when everything shifted.
For each one, write a few sentences about what happened before, during, and after.
Circle the moment that still makes your chest tighten or your pulse race. That’s your opening.
Write a single scene from that moment. Where were you? What did you see? What did you feel? What decision was hovering in the air?
That’s your lightning bolt. That’s your beginning.
The Emotional Contract
When readers open your memoir, they’re entering an emotional contract. You’re promising to take them somewhere worth going. You’re promising to offer not just your story, but your truth.
A strong beginning seals that promise. It says, Come with me. This is where everything started to change.
And as you write, you’ll find that starting in the middle of transformation doesn’t just captivate your reader, it energizes you. It pulls you out of the fog of “too much story” and drops you into the heartbeat of what matters.
Remember: You’re Not Writing a Timeline. You’re Writing a Transformation.
When you stop worrying about where your story starts in time and instead focus on where it starts to matter, everything shifts.
That’s the moment where your voice cracks open. Where your reader leans in. Where your life stops being a series of events and becomes a story worth telling.
So don’t waste time arranging your past in order. Find the crack in your world—and begin there.
That’s where the magic happens.
Ready to find your own starting point?
Download my free Memoir Blueprint Outline - a step-by-step guide to outlining your memoir from your defining moment forward. It will help you organize your story with purpose, structure, and emotional clarity. You’ll finally begin writing the memoir only you can tell.