Why Aboutness Matters

by Brooke Warner

A simple memoir exercise goes like this: 

My book is about ______________.

And then you try the same inquiry again. My book is about ______________.

And again. My book is about ______________.

And again. 

The purpose of this exercise is refinement. The purpose of this exercise is to get your answer down to a single, meaningful line that you can refer back to over and over again as you make your way through your book. Having this line, knowing what your book is about—the distilled version—gives you a very important barometer by which to measure your scenes. After all, if you know what your book is about, you can also ask yourself, with every single scene you write: Does this scene have anything to do with what my book is about? 

If the answer is yes, the scene can stay. If the answer is no, the scene either goes, or it needs to be reworked or finessed to fit. 

Aboutness refers to the central theme or subject matter of your book.Aboutness is the book’s focus. It’s a way to harness what you will include in your memoir. 

Figuring out what your book is about is no easy task. After all, memoir is the story of your life that you are trying to narrow down to a story from your life. Most memoirists need to work to narrow their work down to something more specific. To have a smaller lens. The exercise above will help you with that narrowing.

Aboutness also helps you to know what your themes are—super important in memoir for knowing where to point your reflections, where to focus your takeaways. (These are topics for future newsletters.) 

We know all too well how easy it is for a memoir to run away from its author. Suddenly it’s just a jumble of scenes and stories. There’s no container. No cohesive thread. No guiding principle. 

Let’s try that aboutness exercise on some of my favorite memoirs:

• Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, is about grief and the things we do to work through our grief. She walks the Pacific Crest Trail because she’s working through loss.

• Heavy, by Kiese Laymon, is about growing up Black and what it’s like to live in Kiese’s body, and what it’s like to have a domineering mother.

• Educated, by Tara Westover, is about growing up uneducated and then how becoming educated changes her life. 

• In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado, is about intimate partner abuse, and making sense of how she tolerated that relationship. 

Many memoirs tell you exactly what the book is in their subtitles: 

• Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, by Piper Kerman, is about her year in a women’s prison, as the subtitle tells you. 

• Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, by Deborah Feldman, is about how she rejected her Hasidic roots, as the subtitle tells you.

• Hiding for My Life: Being Gay in the Navy, by Karen Solt, is about being gay in the Navy, as the subtitle tells you. 

Subtitles can be an interesting way to study aboutness, though many memoirs don’t have subtitles, or simply label the book: A Memoir. 

That said, start paying attention to subtitles. Start thinking about aboutness when you read. Work on your own exercise (my book is about _______), but also see if you can practice this exercise on your most-loved or most recently read memoir. See what comes up. Hone this skill. You’ll be surprised and pleased by how it will support you to feel (and be) more in control of the book you’re writing and the story you’re trying to tell.