How old is old enough to write a memoir?

This book would likely have been a lot different if it’d been published in my 20s.

Many of the fledgling memoirists who sign up for my 90-minute Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers Institute on July 30 will be younger than the seniors in the memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago. When I address groups like this, I can count on one of the writers asking what age you should be before writing a memoir. Can a writer reflect on life experiences without putting some distance on them first?

I don’t know.

With that question in mind, though, an essay in the July 6, 2015 New York Times Sunday Book Review caught my eye. Or, okay, my ear. The woman who wrote the essay had a memoir published when she was 29 years old. She says that in her twenties she was convinced that any event in her life that seemed taboo or inappropriate absolutely must be included in her memoir:

So I shared how, at the age of 9, I made out with a neighborhood companion. How at 15, I implored my boyfriend to have sex. How I stole my mother’s lingerie, and wore it while humping a door frame.

Now, thirteen years after her memoir Dress Codes was published, the author says the tell-all nature of her first book is complicating her life as a parent. “For example, if my middle-school-age daughter ever asks me when I lost my virginity, I have to tell her the truth,” she writes.  “After all, it’s searchable on Google Books.”

The essayist concedes that by definition, younger memoirists do lack perspective, but that whatever they lack in perspective, they “make up in urgency, the sense that here is a story that must be told.” More from her Sunday Book Review essay:

If I’d waited to sprout gray hairs before writing my book, I might have eliminated a handful of excruciating details from my text, to the delight of my parents, ex-boyfriends and a few commenters on Goodreads.com. But I might also have skirted unpleasant truths in other ways too. Being honest about something troubling or taboo is easier when you have little to lose.

Hmmmmm.

I’m a huge proponent of memoir-writing. I know first-hand that getting life stories down on paper can be therapeutic. I was in my twenties and losing my sight when a social worker suggested I get my thoughts down on paper. Writing proved to be cheap therapy for me at the time. The journal pieces I wrote were a priceless resource years later, when I started composing a memoir.

Long Time, No See, was published when I was in my forties, and reviewers commented on how frank and honest my writing was. The book definitely benefitted from perspective — and lots of editing.

So gee, maybe the answer is sure, go ahead and start a memoir when you’re in your 20s. Just don’t publish it until you’re older.