Should I Write My Memoir in First Person or Third Person?

Write your memoir in first person. That's the short answer — and for almost every memoir writer, it's the right one. First person ("I walked into the room," "I was seventeen and terrified") is how memoir works. It's how the reader gets inside your experience, feels what you felt, and makes the journey with you.

Third person ("She walked into the room," "He was seventeen and terrified") creates distance. In memoir, distance is almost always the enemy. The whole point is intimacy — a reader sitting across from you while you tell them the truest version of what happened.

That said, point of view in memoir is more nuanced than a simple rule. There are reasons — rare but real — why writers experiment with second person, third person, or layered perspectives. And there's a version of "first person" that most people get wrong, which is why so many memoir drafts feel flat even when the story is rich.

Why Almost Every Memoir Is First Person

Pick up any memoir from the last fifty years — The Glass Castle, Educated, When Breath Becomes Air, The Liars' Club, Born a Crime — and you'll find first person. Every single one. This isn't convention for its own sake. There's a structural reason.

Memoir makes a specific promise to the reader: this happened to me, and I'm going to tell you what it was like from the inside. That promise requires direct access to the narrator's consciousness. Not a report on it. Not a description of it from outside. Access.

First person gives you that. When you write "I remember the smell of that kitchen — burnt coffee and something else, something metallic I couldn't name at eight years old but understand now" — the reader is in that kitchen with you. They're not reading a description of someone who was in a kitchen. They're there.

Third person pulls you back to the curb. You can still describe the kitchen. But now you're describing it, not inhabiting it. The reader watches. They don't enter.

For memoir, that's almost always the wrong trade.

What You Actually Lose in Third Person

Writers sometimes gravitate toward third person because it feels safer. When you write "she" instead of "I," there's a psychological buffer between you and the material. If the story involves shame, trauma, grief, or failure, that buffer can feel protective.

The problem is it's protective for the writer and distancing for the reader — and what the reader needs is exactly the opposite of distance.

Here's what you lose in third person:

• Interior access. Thoughts, doubts, half-formed realizations, the thing you almost said but didn't — all of this is natural in first person and awkward in third. "She wondered if she should have stayed" doesn't land the same way as "I wondered if I should have stayed." One is a report. The other is a confession.
• Voice. Memoir voice lives in the gap between who you were then and who you are now, looking back. That gap — the older, wiser narrator commenting on the younger self — is one of the most powerful tools in the genre. It requires first person to work. Finding your memoir voice is much harder when you're writing about "her."
• Trust. Readers trust first-person narrators in memoir because they sense the vulnerability it takes to say "I." Third person signals performance. First person signals honesty.

The Two "I"s: Getting First Person Right

Here's the version of first person most writers get wrong, and it's the reason many memoir drafts feel flat despite good material: they only use one "I."

In memoir, you're actually writing from two perspectives simultaneously:

1. The "I" who lived it — the younger self inside the scene, experiencing events as they unfold, without the knowledge of what comes next.
2. The "I" who's telling it — the older, present-day narrator who has lived through what happened and is now shaping the story with the perspective time provides.

The best memoir writers weave both together. One sentence can be fully inside the past: "I thought if I just held still, he wouldn't notice me." The next can pull to the present: "What I didn't understand then — what took me another decade to understand — is that invisibility isn't the same as safety."

This dual perspective is what separates memoir from journalism, therapy notes, or autobiography. It's where the genre's real power lives. And it's only possible in first person.

If your first-person draft feels flat, this is usually why: you're only using the past-tense "I" who experienced things, without the present-tense narrator who understands them. The fix isn't to switch to third person. The fix is to bring the second "I" into the room. For more on what separates flat memoirs from great ones, this dual perspective is near the top of the list.

When Does Third Person Actually Work?

There are memoir writers who've used third person successfully. The most prominent example is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein — though even that is famously a literary stunt that uses third person to write about herself through the voice of her partner.

More contemporary examples include writers who use third person for specific chapters or sections — usually to render childhood scenes where the emotional distance of "she" mirrors the dissociation or confusion the child actually felt. If you experienced trauma as a child and genuinely remember it from a dissociated third-person perspective, writing those scenes in third person can be an honest craft choice, not an evasion.

Some writers also use third person to write about a version of themselves that feels genuinely foreign — a past self so different from the present narrator that calling them "I" feels dishonest. If that psychological distance is real, the literary distance can match it.

But notice the pattern: in every legitimate case, third person is used for a specific reason rooted in the emotional truth of the material. It's not chosen because it feels easier or safer. It's chosen because the distance itself is the point.

If you're reaching for third person because first person feels too exposed — that's a sign you should probably stay in first person and do the harder work of finding out what you're actually afraid to say. That fear is usually where the real memoir lives. The craft of writing powerful memoir scenes requires you to go toward the discomfort, not away from it.

What About Second Person?

Second person — "You walked into the kitchen. You were seventeen and terrified" — is rare in memoir, and for good reason. It can work for a short essay or a single charged chapter. Over a full-length memoir, it becomes exhausting to read and difficult to sustain.

The exception: some writers use second person to recreate the experience of giving yourself instructions in a crisis, or to put the reader directly into a moment that defies ordinary narration. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion occasionally brushes against second person for this effect — though it's rooted in first person throughout.

If you're writing a full memoir, second person isn't your point of view. It might occasionally be a tool inside a scene. That's different.

Making the Decision for Your Memoir

Here's how to think about it clearly:

Default to first person. It's the right choice for memoir 95% of the time. It keeps the intimacy intact, enables voice, and lets you use the two-narrator technique that makes the genre powerful.

Consider third person only if: The distance is emotionally honest — meaning your memory of the event genuinely has a third-person quality, usually because of dissociation, trauma, or extreme psychological distance from who you were. Even then, consider using it selectively for specific scenes rather than the whole book.

If you're switching to avoid discomfort, stop. The discomfort you're trying to escape is usually the material worth writing about. First person is how you access it.

Point of view isn't decoration. It's the fundamental relationship between you, your story, and your reader. Get it right, and everything else in the memoir becomes easier — because you've established the right kind of intimacy from the first sentence.

Most memoir writers who struggle with first person aren't struggling with grammar. They're struggling with permission — permission to say "I," to claim their own story, to trust that their experience is worth a reader's time. That's not a craft problem. That's a belief problem. And the only way through it is to write anyway, in the first person, until the "I" stops feeling presumptuous and starts feeling true. Wondering what else separates published memoirs from the ones that stall out? Voice and point of view are two of the five things that define the difference.

Want to work through this with a group? We're launching live memoir writing workshops soon — get on the list.