Your Story Isn’t About What You Think It’s About

How to discover the real through line of your memoir or personal essay

When I first read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, like a lot of people, I thought it was about pizza.

Well, I thought it was about pizza and the agony of uncertainty.

Most people remember Gilbert on the floor of the bathroom asking God what she should do next. Or they remember her describing pizza as “sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella,” and then booking the next flight to Naples.

But I was wrong. Eat, Pray, Love isn’t about pizza or the agony of uncertainty. It’s about a woman who wants to be celibate for a year.

Similarly, I thought Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, was about grief or an attempt at escape from grief.

Again, I was wrong. It’s about a woman who is trapped on the Pacific Crest Trail without shoes. The loss of Strayed’s mother, her divorce and addiction, are all incidental to that story.

I don’t feel entirely bad about “misreading” those books because when I have asked groups of memoir writers what they think those two books are about, they largely throw out similar ideas.

Those themes for Strayed and Gilbert, uncertainty, grief…pizza, are what you might call their “ships hitting icebergs and sinking.”

Let me back up. If you’ve met me, I have probably asked you the following question: What is the movie Titanic about?

You probably answered, “It’s a love story!” or “It’s a story about a ship hitting an iceberg and sinking!” or “It’s the story of a person losing their mind and tossing a priceless blue diamond into the Atlantic for no reason!”

And then I’d go (in a Yoda-voice): “No. Incorrect, you are. It’s the story of a young woman who wants to leave her social class.”

Let me explain. When we think about narrative, some of the greatest ones take one single idea, say, the story of a young woman who wants to leave her social class, and then every narrative beat works in support of that desire.

As follows are some beats from Titanic’s narrative:

STRUCTURAL FIRST BEAT: A group of treasure hunters is trying to locate a shmancy diamond necklace that went down with the Titanic and brings onboard their ship the last woman to have seen it.

ESTABLISHING A NARRATIVE DESIRE: The woman reflects on her Titanic journey starting with the moment she sees the ship for the first time. When her mother admonishes her for trying to pick up her suitcases, saying, “Honey, we have people for that,” the young woman chafes visibly under the confines of her social class. There are rules and you have to obey them. Cue, a perfect Kate Winslet eye-roll.

CREATING TWO OPPOSING SYMBOLS OF THOSE SOCIAL CLASSES FOR TENSION: #1: The cool, handsome starving artist and #2: The rich, asshole, financier fiancé. Each love interest represents his social class. Are there assholes in steerage? Yes. Is Leonardo DiCaprio one of them? Absolutely not. If we switched and made the financier cool, it wouldn’t support a narrative about a young woman who wants to leave her social class.

Incidentally, a ship hits an iceberg and sinks. This beat also supports the narrative. It opens up a possible way for the young woman to leave her social class.

TO END: The young woman lives a life of freedom, outside of the confines of her social class.

BUT THE STORY ISN’T OVER. There’s still the necklace. It’s in her pocket which means the young woman, now an elderly woman, hasn’t really left her social class. The necklace, symbolically, is the social class from which the narrative is trying to emancipate the woman.

So what has to happen to support narrative? The woman must throw the necklace into the ocean, thereby officially leaving her social class.

Narrative desire is what Gilbert also employs in Eat, Pray, Love. Remember? The book about a woman who doesn’t want to have sex for a year? If you open that book to page one you discover Gilbert being dropped off outside her apartment by a handsome Italian teacher and really—and I mean really—struggling not to make out with him. The first line of the book? “I wish Giovanni would kiss me.” Followed by an inner struggle which I am paraphrasing: I must not kiss this person! I want to be celibate for a year!

The subsequent beats of that book similarly support this narrative. When Gilbert eats that pizza, she doesn’t concern herself with packing on the calories because she will not be getting naked with anyone, say it with me, for a year! When she arrives at the ashram in India, she takes inventory: Who might she accidentally fall into bed with? And so on.

Like in Titanic, Gilbert’s divorce, the subsequent uncertainty, those are incidental to the central desire of the book’s protagonist.

Strayed uses a narrative obstacle instead of a desire. She takes a young woman who is not a professional hiker, places her in the middle of the PCT, and immediately has her losing one boot and tossing the other. Her reflections on grief and loss are incidental to the narrative in that they serve to explain why she’s on that trail. But the journey the reader is on is to see how Strayed gets herself out of danger.

Just as Eat, Pray, Love starts with a woman trying really hard not to have sex with Giovanni and ends with her, after a year, having sex with a guy in Bali, Wild starts with a woman stuck in the middle of the PCT without shoes and ends with her walking off the trail.

Titanic starts with a woman wanting to escape the confines of her social class and ends with her leaving her social class.

We are attracted to the narrative equivalent-stories of “ships hitting icebergs and sinking” in our own lives because those are the big stories. The big moments. But often a story about loss or grief or whatever enormous inciting action complicated our own lives doesn’t work as well as the central narrative of our stories, because even if you frame them at the center of the narrative, that probably won’t be the story that would compel your reader.

Narrative desires, narrative quests, and narrative obstacles have another name. They are called a premise. They are the containers for your story.

Let me break it down this way. Say you want to write about the loss of your biological mother. You'll have to start with an inciting incidient. We all know that story. It’s a birth to her death story. There is no structure within that narrative. If you shift the premise to a different container, maybe you are six years old and you are at the playground one day when you can’t find your mother. And you want her, you really really want her.

1. You flash forward to the beats of your life where you pushed your mother away.

2. You literally write an entire book about not needing your mother.

3. Now you flash back to the playground. You have tripped while running around and now you are bleeding, elevating the stakes. Now you need your mother.

4. You jump to your mother getting sick.

5. Now we’re back on the playground. Someone else’s mother is talking to you but she’s not your mother and you describe how and why this other mother is lacking.

6. You flash forward to the experience of your own mother’s death.

7. But you end in a flashback to yourself on the playground, finding your mother.

That’s narrative. You want your mother. You find your mother. The death of your mother is incidental to the story premise.

My memoir, The Family Gene (Ecco/HarperCollins), came with its own narrative package. It’s a medical mystery. But for me, it’s the story of my dad’s death, it’s a story of my family gene, and even a story about the history of medical genetics described in Seventeen magazine language, like I call DNA base pairs, Brangelina and Beyonjay.

And although every single one of those things are in the story, they are my ship hitting an iceberg and sinking.

But my premise is a narrative quest for answers. We didn’t have a cure at the time for the people living with the gene in question, one that only impacted 14 members of my family, including my father, sister, and I, but we did have a plan.

So the story sets up our plan with one question about our gene: Can we stop it?

A story about social class makes for a smart premise for a film called Titanic. James Cameron’s Titanic was a ship that, it could be argued, was a metaphoric floating class system: Upper, where people wear uncomfortable shoes and say boring things in an English accent like, “Did you hear? The Earl of Sandwich put meat between two slices of bread and is calling it a sandwich!”; middle, where the porridge is too cold; and steerage, where people drink beer and dance 24/7.

But he could have just as easily written a story about a young woman who wants to escape steerage and make it to the upper class. In fiction, finding premise can be easier because you get to make it up.

But you can also do it in nonfiction.

In Wild, we have a sense that Strayed was feeling lost, so she got herself lost.

In Eat, Pray, Love, it’s established that Gilbert’s sex/romantic life has left her emotionally hungry, so she searches for nourishment in new ways.

Our infinite lives are filled with metaphoric ships hitting metaphoric icebergs and metaphorically sinking. And as writers, it is our job to figure out how to tell those stories in a way that compels our reader to turn the page, not as victims, but as active players who do our level best to avoid hot Italian men, eat pizza, and safely hike from one end of a trail to the other.

Which begs the question: Not, what is your Titanic, but what is your Titanic about? Whether you’re working on an essay or memoir, figuring out that answer before you start drafting will help guide you through the writing process.

Joselin Linder is the author of the memoir The Family Gene: A Mission to Turn My Deadly Inheritance into a Hopeful Future and the founder of Prose Playground, a community of six hundred writers who have come together in support of other writers. This summer Prose Playground is hosting a three-month program called Launch Your Book to teach authors how to work with leading book publicists and media trainers; start a newsletter; write companion pieces; reach out to podcasts, book awards, grants, and TV shows; learn how to sell film/TV rights; and so much more.