If You Write About Your Life, You’ll Probably Never Run Out of Things to Say

How to find new material when writing personal essays and memoir

When I first got word that my debut book, Thank You, John, had been accepted for publication, I felt a strange mix of excitement and panic. Excitement because, well, it was actually getting published. Panic because after seven years of writing and editing the same document, all in the hopes of getting a publisher—a feat that had consumed my life for all those years!—I couldn’t help but ask myself, Wait, did I just finish the one meaningful story I’ll ever have?

It felt dramatic, but also true. Thank You, John, my memoir of the years I spent sugar babying to get out of poverty and student loan debt, held every secret I’d ever carried, every memory I thought mattered, everything I believed made me interesting to readers. I told myself I had nothing of importance left to say. Nothing else worth sharing. There was nothing else I could write that would justify taking up space on the page again. The curtain had closed!

Lucky for me, life intervened with new material.

One afternoon, my brother-in-law, Luis, called me in a panic. A Craigslist car sale had gone sideways. Long story short: a car Luis sold to a stranger promptly broke down. The man wanted a return and refund, but Luis had already spent the money he’d been paid in order to pay off debts elsewhere. Luis called me because needed the money ASAP. “Or else,” the Craigslist man allegedly said, “I’m going to kick your ass.”

Ah, money. Always mine and my family’s Achilles heel.

At the time, I was working three jobs, including adjuncting at a university where most of my students were wealthy, white, and blissfully apolitical. I was grading essays about Lake Tahoe vacations and study-abroad trips while trying to figure out how to scrounge together $3,000 to bail out my brother-in-law.

Meanwhile, my nephew, who was 15, started talking about going to college, specifically mentioning the school where I taught. I couldn’t quite picture him there. A Mexican-American kid who loves Frank Sinatra and the Raiders? The campus was, for lack of a better word, homogenous. Plus, I knew tuition cost nearly $30,000 a year!! I couldn’t help but think of all the debt he’d have to take on. I kept circling the same question in my head: Was college worth it if you have to go into serious debt for it? My entire memoir was about sleeping with a john to climb out of debt, a compromised and yet privileged job.

With all of this going on in my life, without even meaning to, I started writing again. Little scraps at first. Notes typed into my phone. Thoughts jotted down during Zoom meetings. I didn’t know the shape yet. Was this about higher education? Generational mobility? The Craigslist disaster? My nephew? All of it?

I wrote badly and without a clear direction for months. But eventually (after several false starts and eight long months), I found the real story. My essay “Plans for Future Disasters” was published in The Offing, and it felt wholly new. I’d written about my nephew’s father, a man who didn’t appear in my memoir, and his experiences being an immigrant in the U.S., generational dreams, and the familiar tension around money that haunted us all.

But when that essay came out, the panic returned just as forcefully: Okay. Now what? Now I really have nothing to say.