Tips for Incorporating Research Into a Memoir

1) Use an epigraph: In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, etc. that is set at the beginning of a document or composition. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, as a suggestion of a theme, etc. to your memoir, and can do a lot of legwork for you the same way a newspaper headline helps you understand what the article that follows is about.

Here’s an example of an essay opened by an epigraph, which I’ve excerpted from part of my master’s thesis:

A love of organs can be compared to any other handicap, physical or mental: it is only a question of how to get along in spite of it. - Charles Brenton Fisk in a letter to a prospective young organ builder 

*

It impossible to speak of my father—his name is John—to explain his ways, without speaking of pipe organs.  It is likewise impossible to consider the subject of organ building without addressing the person of Charles Brenton Fisk, a prominent American organ builder who built and wrote prolifically, and whose life parallels uncannily with my father’s.  My dad is a pipe organ builder.  His profession is one whose intricacies are often likened to those of neurosurgery.  Organ building even looks like neurosurgery.  At 65, he continues to design, maintain, and renovate organs despite the fact that in 1995 he suffered blitzkrieg on the brain in the form of an aneurysm—a type of explosion that usually segues into a stroke that in turn renders the patient paralyzed or mute.

2) Isolate an element of your memoir that can be researched; things like cultural cuisine, a particular food item, a certain food habit, recipes, etc. are all great—think of NOUNS; that’ll help a lot. Create a brainstorm, or peruse the table of contents from the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture for a list of ideas if you don’t know where to start.

3) Bear in mind as you write that expanding the context of your memoir by including some hard facts, some historical background, or something instructive, will engage your reader more than just a personal story will.

[See “A Fig by Any Other Name” (handout from Tuesday) as examples for Tips 2 & 3]

P.S. Don’t forget that not everyone can relate to your life, but everyone can relate to the significance of food in all facets and phases of life; so when telling a story culled from personal experiences and memory, use food as a way to ‘open up’ the narrative and make it more universal.