Why Do We Read Memoirs?

Are we hoping for tragedy or triumph?

Humans love stories; it’s how we share our lives and often how we try to make sense of the world.

As an aspiring memoir writer, I need to know what makes readers want to delve deeper into other people’s experiences. So this year, I kept asking memoir readers Why do you read these true stories? What are you hoping to find in the book you choose?

For most of human history, storytelling was an oral tradition, though people were already adding to stories with cave paintings 45,000 years ago. The earliest sentence is thought to be one composed of hieroglyphics in an Egyptian tomb. Papyrus scrolls and rolls were not uncommon in ancient Greece and Rome, but most education was nearly all done in lecture form.

Imagine pre-Gutenberg, back in the years before 1436 when people learned directly from another person. Books were laboriously copied by hand and so expensive, few could afford to own them.

The history of an entire culture was transmitted for generations by word of mouth, often in songs, chants, and ballads. Epic poems were recited and repeated, only later recorded in writing, like The Iliad and The Tale of Gilgamesh.

All over the world, our lives are repeated as stories, either by voice, image, or written text.