American literary critic Leslie Fiedler once wrote: “Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.”
If you’re a novelist considering writing a memoir, or a memoirist writing a novel, you’ll probably discover there are some strong likenesses between the two. In a memoir, just as you don’t tell your entire life story, in a novel, you don’t try to tell everything you could possibly tell about your protagonist. In both cases, you focus on the story you’re trying to tell. Readers don’t want to know everything – they only want the things that count, that matter most.
If you’ve read very many memoirs, you also see that they, like novels, are rich with…
