A memoir is not everything that happened to you. It is one thread pulled through a life, told well enough that a stranger recognises something of their own in it.
If you believe your life is a particular collection of events, a memoir is how it becomes readable. Not because your experience is more remarkable than anyone's, but because most people never write theirs down, and the ones that do get written are the ones that end up helping somebody.
The work is in the telling rather than the remembering. Storytelling is what makes a life stay with a reader instead of passing through them, and a memoir written as a chronology, however honest, does not do that. What we do is find the thread, and then write it in a voice that is recognisably yours.
Mostly these differ in who is meant to read the book, which changes what belongs in it. Tell us the story and we will tell you which of these it is.
- 01
Personal memoir
Written for a wide readership, in the first person: your real experiences retold as narrative, so a reader who has never met you can relate to them.
- 02
Legacy memoir
Written for a small and specific audience, your family and the generations after them. What you achieved, what you learned the hard way, and what you want them to know.
- 03
Confessional memoir
An account of something you did and have carried since. Written to let a reader understand why, rather than to be forgiven by them, which is what makes the form work when it works.
- 04
Portrait memoir
Someone else's life, written by you or on your behalf, often from a diary or the record they left behind. A memoir about a person rather than by them.
- 05
Professional memoir
A working life: the career, the turning points, and what the public account left out. For anyone whose professional story is the one worth telling.
Four things that matter when the material is your own life.
- 01
Your voice is the point
A memoir that sounds like a professional writer has failed, however well written it is. The whole craft is disappearing into somebody else's way of speaking.
- 02
The interview is the work
Most of a memoir is produced in conversation, not at a keyboard. Writers here are practised at asking the question that gets the real answer rather than the rehearsed one.
- 03
Handled with discretion
Memoir material is often the most private thing an author owns, and some of it will concern people who have not consented to be in a book. That is discussed openly, and the NDA is signed before anything is sent.
- 04
You approve as it goes
Chapter by chapter, not at the end. Nobody should read three hundred pages about their own life for the first time when it is too late to change them.
Eight steps, and the second one is where most of the book is actually decided.
Order details
A first conversation about the life and the book: what happened, who it is for, and what you want a reader to take from it.
Research and outline
Your material gathered and checked, and a chapter-by-chapter outline built. This is where the thread through the life is chosen, which is the decision that makes a memoir rather than a record.
Chapter approval
The first chapter written and sent for your approval (the one that establishes the voice) and then every chapter after it, the same way.
Editing and proofreading
The finished manuscript edited and proofread for clarity, by people who did not write it and will notice what the writer stopped seeing.
Formatting
The interior set with consistent headings, paragraph breaks and line spacing, so the book reads as a book.
Design
A cover designed for the memoir, which usually means restraint, because the form rarely benefits from being sold as something louder than it is.
Publishing
The book produced and listed in print and digital, so the people it was written for can get it.
Marketing
Promotion where its readers are, if you want it. For a legacy memoir intended for a family, this step is often correctly skipped.
A few of the people the house has worked with, in their own words.
I had eleven years of notes and no book. What I got back read like me on a good day, my turns of phrase, my arguments, and none of the padding I would have added myself. The first chapter arrived and I stopped worrying.
Marianne ElleryIndependent author The structural edit was not comfortable reading. It told me the second half started in the wrong place, which I had suspected for a year and nobody had said out loud. Moving three chapters fixed a problem I had been trying to solve with better sentences.
Devon AlukoIndependent author What sold me was being told I did not need half of what I had asked for. I came in wanting the full package and left with a cover, a proofread and an honest explanation of why the rest would not have helped yet.
Priya RaghunathanIndependent author Three cover directions, all of them plausible, none of them the thing I had described. The one I picked worked at the size that actually matters, I could recognise it in a list of forty other books, which is more than I can say for my first attempt.
Tobias HearnIndependent author I own the book outright and that was written down before I paid anything. After two years of being quoted percentages by people who would not put them in writing, that was the whole reason I stayed.
Cecile MarchandIndependent author The audiobook took longer than I expected and they told me why each time rather than going quiet. The narrator they cast got my grandmother's accent right, which I had assumed would be the thing I had to let go of.
Nathan BoakyeIndependent author
What people ask before writing their life down.
Start by choosing a central theme rather than a starting date, a thread that runs through the life and gives the book direction. Reflect on the moments, emotions and lessons that actually shaped you, and be willing to leave out true things that do not serve that thread. Authenticity matters more than polish: readers forgive rough prose and never forgive a memoir that feels guarded. Then revise, and get feedback from someone who will be honest with you.
Yes. If you have the story but not the months of writing it would take, a ghostwriter works from interviews and your material to produce the manuscript in your voice. Your name is on the cover and the writer's is not, unless you choose otherwise.
It almost always does, and it is worth thinking about early. We will talk through what is safe to include, where names or details might be changed, and where you may want someone's consent. This is a real consideration in memoir rather than a formality, and it is better raised in the first conversation than after the manuscript exists.
Practice in the form specifically, memoir is closer to interviewing than to any other kind of writing, and a strong novelist is not automatically a strong memoirist. What you should ask any memoir writer for is a sample where the voice is clearly not the writer's own.
Get in touch and talk it through. The first conversation is about your story and what you want the book to be, the themes, the focus, and who is meant to read it. Nothing is committed at that stage, and you will get an honest view of whether the book you are describing is one worth writing.
You do, completely. The author holds 100% of the rights to their work, in every format, for its whole life. The house is paid for the work it does, not with a share of the book. That is the arrangement the house reopened in 2008 to offer, and it does not change with the tier, the price or the point at which you come to us.
Yes. Your name is on the cover and in the record. Everyone who works on the book (writer, editor, designer) works on your book, and none of them is credited on it unless you ask for them to be.
Yes. Your story is yours, and nothing about the project leaves the house. We will sign your NDA before you send anything, or supply ours if you would rather use one.
No. Six disciplines are available and you take the ones you need. Authors arrive here at every stage (with an idea, a half-draft, or a finished manuscript that only needs a cover and a shelf) and the work starts where you actually are.
It depends on the work: length, how much research is involved, how much of the book already exists, and which disciplines you need. There is no list price for a book, and any firm who gives you one before reading your material is quoting something other than your book. Tell us where you are and we will price the actual job.
Move the marker. You do not need to know what to call it: you only need to know where you are.
Tell us where your manuscript is, where you want it to go, and we'll show you what's possible.