The document provides examples of memoir writing techniques from the work of author Jeannette Walls on page 1 of her book. It demonstrates summarizing key details about feelings, thoughts, sensory details, relationships, memories, and focusing on the author's experiences and reactions rather than just events. Specifically, it shows revealing panic at seeing her mother rooting through a dumpster, asking the driver to leave due to discomfort, recalling familiar memories of her mother's gestures and actions from childhood, and hating her own possessions and home after hiding from her mother in the taxi.

1. Memoir Features
and mentor sentences

2. Reveal your feelings and thinking
“I was overcome with panic that
she’d see me and call out my
name…” (Walls 1).
Tell what you are feeling

3. Reveal your feelings and thinking
“I slid down in the seat and asked the
driver to turn around and take me
home to Park Avenue…” (Walls 1).
Show how you are
feeling through actions

4. Reveal your feelings and thinking
“What could I do? I’d tried to help
them countless times…” (Walls 1).
Ask a question

5. Make the subject come alive
“…the apartment was silent except
for the click of my heels on the
polished wood floor…” (Walls 1).
What do you hear?

6. Make the subject come alive
“There were the Georgian maps I’d
framed, the Persian rugs, and the
overstuffed leather armchair I liked
to sink into at the end of the day”
(Walls 1).
What do you see?

7. Make the subject come alive
“Her long hair was streaked with
gray, tangled and matted, and her
eyes had sunk deep into their
sockets…” (Walls 1).
What do you see?

8. Bring out the relationship
“I was still rattled…the sight of her
rooting happily through the
Dumpster. I put some Vivaldi on…”
(Walls 1).
Show a contrast

9. Bring out the relationship
“It had been months since I laid eyes
on Mom, and when she looked up, I
was overcome with panic…”
(Walls 1).
Time and Feelings

10. Recall a memory
“Mom’s gestures were all familiar—
the way she tilted her head and
thrust out her lower lip…the way
her eyes widened in childish
glee…” (Walls 1).
Physical attributes

11. Recall a memory
“…she reminded me of the mom
she’d been when I was a kid, swan-
diving off cliffs and paining in the
desert and reading Shakespeare
aloud” (Walls 1).
Actions

12. Focus on author’s experience …not
the event itself.
“After ducking down in the taxi so Mom
wouldn’t see me, I hated myself—
hated my antiques, my clothes, and
my apartment” (Walls 1).
Consider the effect the
event has on the author

13. Focus on author’s experience …not
the event itself.
“I felt my shoulders tightening up, the
way they invariably did during these
conversations…” (Walls 1).
Show the effect
through an action