Memoir Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

Your life contains other people. They did not agree to be in a book, they remember it differently, and some of them will read it. This is the problem at the centre of memoir, and it cannot be solved by leaving them out — a memoir with the difficult people removed is a memoir with nothing in it. What can be done is to write about them in a way you can defend to yourself in ten years.

We work on what memoirists write — full manuscripts and chapters, essays and standalone pieces, proposals and sample material for agents and publishers, structural plans for a life that did not happen in a useful order, passages about family members and former partners, material involving illness, death, addiction or abuse, drafts you are not sure you can publish, and the author's note that frames how the book was written. Our editors work on the pages with other people in them.

Writing about the people who did not consent is the craft problem underneath the ethical one, and the solution is nearly always precision rather than omission. A brother described generously in vague terms is more damaging than one described exactly, because vagueness lets the reader fill the space with something worse. We work through these so each person is on the page for a reason the book needs rather than because they were there; so what is reported is what you saw and heard rather than what you concluded about their character, since "he did not come to the hospital" is a fact you own and "he was selfish" is a verdict you are asking the reader to enforce; so your own position in the scene is visible, because a memoir in which the narrator is only ever acted upon is one a reader stops trusting around chapter four; so uncertainty about your own memory is admitted where it exists, given that this costs almost nothing and buys credibility for the passages you are sure of; so anything included primarily because it settles a score is identified — you may keep it, but you should know that is what it is doing; and so the people who are simply private are given the smallest true version of themselves. Memoirs written this way are the ones the family survives.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, private material and drafts you have shown nobody. We are editors rather than lawyers, therapists or publishers, and we offer no view on what is safe to publish or on your account of events. What we can do is help the difficult pages be exact.