Notes from an Author and Agent Q&A with Curtis Brown Creative
Here are my reflections on a Q&A I did on Monday night about writing and publishing memoir and the industry
This week I was invited to do a Q&A with agent Jess Molloy of Curtis Brown. It was for the memoir students of a three-month memoir course at Curtis Brown Creative. They invited me to talk about my experience of writing and publishing my memoir, Sins of My Father, and how I had landed my agent, Cathryn Summerhayes (who Jess assisted until she set up her own list in 2022).
It was interesting that both me and Jess really stressed the particulars of publishing memoir as opposed to fiction, and I thought I would collect some of those thoughts here for my subscribers. Of course, there will be crossover with fiction in what I say, but I want to attempt to differentiate the genres to share my thoughts here and also as prep for an article I am writing for Author Magazine (Society of Authors) on mental health and publishing and what responsibility agents and publishers have for ‘author care’ – to ensure that authors are looked after throughout the writing and publishing process.
The first point I want to make is that one of the reasons my first agent dropped me was because she said she preferred to represent fiction over memoir – memoir wasn’t her thing (she had taken me on some years previously for my first novel). This might be a personal preference, but I suspect it’s also that memoir is a more challenging market. Despite many memoirs reading like novels, many readers still haven’t made the leap from fiction to memoir, and so generally literary memoir has a smaller readership. This in turn will mean it will be harder to get an agent for a literary memoir, and so it’s really worth sniffing out the agents who do represent it. On the search for a new agent, I only had to glance at Cathryn Summerhayes list of clients to know I would be in good hands. Finding an agent who represents memoir also means they will be aware of the particular challenges involved in its evolution.
Another factor is that memoir is often sold on proposal, while a novel is sold in its entirety with a one- or two-page synopsis. A proposal, I explained to the students, is usually a 50-page document that includes an outline (synopsis), a chapter breakdown, a market profile and a biography of the author; and sample chapters – usually three. It is basically a pitching document, and it must be succinct and to the point, but also compelling. Jess added that it’s helpful to ask yourself, Why This? Why Me? Why Now? – why is this book important? Why am I the right person to write it? And why must it be written now? What is its relevance to this time and place? If nothing else, writing a proposal helps you really get to grips with your USP – the unique selling point of your memoir. This can feel odd when you are embarking on such a personal project, but at some point in that process you will have to look outside of yourself and imagine your readership, and ask yourself the most difficult question: Why would anyone care about your book beyond myself?
I would add a caveat (or is it a health warning??) to say that proposals probably shouldn’t be written until you’ve completed a first draft, when you’ve really got to grips with the story you want to tell, and have some degree of distance from your material to be able to see it in the round, and begin to imagine it in a reader’s hands. I know there are exceptions – some people do sell memoirs on proposal alone (ie not having written a first draft), but these tend to be experienced writers or they have a brilliantly topical angle. And in these cases a proposal might take years to develop and finesse.
Jess said something interesting about the sample chapters. That it doesn’t need to be the first three chapters. It could be the first chapter, and then a selection of writing from elsewhere in the book – ie, the writing you are most proud of, or a section that really captures the mood and tone. I thought that was interesting.
One of the participants asked me a question: what did I find the most challenging aspect of writing memoir? When I looked at this question on paper I thought – now, that is a broad question… but when it came to answering it, I was able to really pin down the two biggest challenges I’d had – one was ‘finding my voice’ – this is something that comes up so much in the courses I teach. Finding your voice is what memoirist, Marina Benjamin calls ‘leaning into the narrative’, ie, you as writer, as personality, as character, coming through on the page – your opinion on things, the inner workings of your mind as you battle with the subject in hand, how you guide the reader through the story.