Emotional Realism and Memoir

Although emotional realism is more often thought of as relevant to film and literary works of fiction, it is a critical approach to the writing of memoir. Memoirs tell personal stories that involve the narrator as a character, and, by necessity, involve family, friends, co-workers, and other people in the memoirists’ lives.  A memoir proposes to take the reader on an emotional journey through a specific period of the narrator’s life or a series of events that have challenged them, and have ultimately been transformative. In that sense, memoir should easily be “true to life” since it’s written directly from personal experience.

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