Writing & Expression: Memoir & AutobiographyTruth & Memory · Selection · Writing Hard Things · Ordinary Lives
BigCat's Writing
Memoir looks private, yet every leader is already writing it — promo packets, postmortems, "tell me about yourself," founder stories. All of them are the same act: honestly choosing one meaningful story out of everything that happened. This week, four lessons from Didion, Gornick, Hemingway, and Welty that will directly improve how you write about yourself.
Principle 01
Truth & Memory: Honest Reconstruction, Not a Transcript
You owe the reader emotional truth, not perfect recall
Memoir · Truth
The Principle + The Master
What a memoir owes the reader is emotional and interpretive truth, not frame-by-frame accuracy. Memory is reconstruction by nature — you may not invent what you know to be false, but you must own the limits of what you remember.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
— Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)
Didion meant this as a warning as much as a comfort: the story we impose to survive is often a soothing fiction.
Why It Works
The brain stores no recording — it stores a version that gets rewritten with every recall. That's not a defect; it's the mechanism. The danger: we are far too good at tidying a messy past into a clean, causal story in which we come off wise. Didion's famous line carries that suspicion — we tell stories "in order to live," but what we tell is often a comforting invention. Engineers fall into this exact trap in postmortems and promo packets: turning luck into foresight, chaos into a plan. Truth isn't remembering accurately; it's not lying to yourself.
Before & After
I saw the architecture problem coming, so I refactored ahead of time and ultimately prevented the outage.I didn't see the risk at the time; I refactored purely to unblock another deadline. It happened to spare us the outage three months later — that was luck. And that near-miss is what prompted me to add the monitoring.
I always knew the migration was the right call, and the results proved me right.I pushed the migration mostly to unblock a deadline. I didn't foresee the outage it later prevented — luck, not foresight. But it taught me to instrument first.
When to Use + Common Mistakes
✓ Postmortems, retros, promo packets, "tell me about yourself," founder stories
✓ Any backward-looking narrative — hindsight always tempts you to prettify cause and effect
✗ Not for: live incident logs, compliance records that need forensic precision (facts only)
✗ Mistakes: writing luck as foresight; back-dating judgments with hindsight; cutting every detail that doesn't flatter you; pretending to recall the exact words of a hazy conversation
This Week's Exercise + Question
Write 150 words about "a decision I made" — but deliberately mark which parts you actually remember and which are causal chains you stitched together afterward.
Question: When the honest version makes you look less brilliant, will you still write it? Who trusts you more because of that honesty?
Principle 02
Selection: Find the Story Inside the Situation
Most of the craft is deciding what NOT to write
Memoir · Selection
The Principle + The Master
All backward-looking writing is subtraction. Gornick separates two layers: the situation (everything that happened) and the story (the one thing you've actually come to say). Most of the craft lives in what you leave out.
"The situation is the context or circumstance; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer — the thing one has come to say."
— Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story (2001)
Situation is the raw material. Story is the single line of meaning you draw out of it.
Why It Works
No one can — or wants to — read all of your experience. The situation is the warehouse; the story is the one thread of meaning you pull from it. Decide the story first, and every detail in the situation finally has a test: keep what serves the line, cut what doesn't — even if it's true and interesting. As Annie Dillard warned, don't hang on the reader's arm like a drunk saying "and then I did this, and it was so interesting." Forty bullet points in a promo packet = no story. Three items pointing at one arc of growth = a story.
SITUATION · everything that happened this year
▼ filter through a one-line story
keep details that serve the line
▼
STORY · the one thing you mean to say
Fix the story first, then re-filter the situation — never the reverse
Before & After
Year-end review: I did A, B, C, D, E, F, G… (twenty items, no thread)This year I want to make one point: I went from "the person who fights fires" to "the person who keeps fires from starting." Three proofs — I built the alerting, drove the review standard, and ramped two engineers to on-call independently. The rest was routine; I'll spare you.
This year I shipped feature X, fixed bugs, mentored, did on-call, wrote docs...One throughline this year: I moved from doer to multiplier. Three proofs — the on-call runbook the team now lives by, two engineers I ramped to lead, the design review I started. The rest was table stakes.
✓ Any case where you have far more material than space
✗ Not for: exhaustive lists (changelogs, audit ledgers)
✗ Mistakes: listing everything for fear of omission, drowning the thread; writing before fixing the story; refusing to cut true-but-off-topic gems; cramming several threads into one piece
This Week's Exercise + Question
Take a recent year-end review. First write its single story in one sentence; then delete every item that doesn't serve that sentence. Notice how much went.
Question: If only three things could represent your year, which three? Did the ones you cut really define you?
Principle 03
Writing Hard Things: Restraint, and the Iceberg
Let the unsaid carry the weight
Memoir · Restraint
The Principle + The Master
When writing about pain, failure, or conflict, the more restraint the more force. State the emotion outright and the reader feels nothing; give concrete facts and scenes, and let what you leave unsaid carry the weight.
"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things… and the reader will feel those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Omit what you know deeply, and the reader still feels it. The iceberg moves with dignity because only one-eighth shows.
Why It Works
Forcing the emotion ("I was devastated, in unbearable pain") packages the feeling for the reader — which means he never gets to feel it himself. Restraint does the opposite: state the facts, leave the gap, and the reader supplies the emotion — now it's his, and it's real. Mary Karr says a memoir lives or dies on voice, and one mark of a mature voice is that it refuses to wallow. Same in tech: incident retros, failed projects, layoff comms — the harder you push for drama or blame, the cheaper it reads. Restrained facts carry the most weight.
The less you state, the more weight the reader feels below
Before & After
That outage plunged the whole team into despair; I was under enormous pressure, an indescribable ordeal that still haunts me.The outage ran six hours. At three a.m., only two of us were still replying in the channel. We didn't talk; we just watched the same line that wouldn't come down.
The layoff was devastating and I felt an indescribable sense of loss and betrayal.I packed my desk in nine minutes. Out of habit, I tapped my badge at the door on the way out. It still worked. It didn't on Monday.
When to Use + Common Mistakes
✓ Incident / failure retros, layoffs and bad-news comms, personal essays on setbacks, talking about failure in interviews
✓ Any case where the emotion is already strong and needs no amplification from you
✗ Not for: situations that genuinely need an explicit, empathetic stance (but still avoid hollow adjectives)
✗ Mistakes: big words for feelings ("despair," "breakdown," "enormous pressure"); self-pity or blame-shifting; swapping scene for lyricism; giving a conclusion where a detail belongs
This Week's Exercise + Question
Write about a painful work experience under one rule: no emotion adjectives at all — only facts and actions a camera could capture. Read it back; check whether the weight is still there.
Question: Which pains belong in public writing and which don't? Is restraint only for the reader, or also a form of self-protection for the writer?
Principle 04
Ordinary Lives: The Universal Hides in the Particular
The more specific, the more universal
Memoir · The Universal
The Principle + The Master
You don't need a legendary life to be worth writing. What moves people is never how rare your experience was, but how concrete the detail and how thorough the honesty — the more specific, the more universal.
"A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."
— Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (1984)
A quiet, ordinary life can be a brave one; all real daring begins inside.
Why It Works
Beginners assume "I have nothing to write — I'm not a CEO, I never sold a startup." Wrong. The reader sees his own universal inside your particular. He doesn't care how much you raised; he cares about the small hesitation you felt at 1 a.m. editing your résumé — because he's felt it too. The abstract "I'm passionate about tech" anyone can say, so it says nothing; "the first time I got a thousand machines to respond at once, I sat at my desk grinning for a while" only you can say — and so everyone gets it. The specific is the only narrow gate to the universal.
Before & After
I'm a passionate, excellence-driven senior engineer who loves to learn.The first system I owned is still running. Every time it survives a peak-traffic sale, I go look at one line — an ugly retry I wrote eight years ago that has never once failed.
I'm a passionate, results-driven leader who loves solving hard problems.I still remember the first time I deleted code instead of adding it, and the service got faster. That's the day I understood what my job actually was.
✓ Any case where someone needs to remember who you are
✗ Not for: pure-credential CV fields (though the summary line still applies)
✗ Mistakes: stacking vague adjectives for a persona ("passionate," "excellent," "craftsmanlike"); thinking ordinary = not worth writing; using grand narrative to mask the lack of detail; filling in a generic template anyone could
This Week's Exercise + Question
Write a 100-word self-intro with no adjectives at all — only one moment so specific it could only be yours. Have a stranger read it, then ask what they remember.
Question: What is the one moment in your career that "only you would tell this way"? Why have you always assumed it wasn't worth telling?
Going Deeper
Memoir prizes honest reconstruction, but a promo packet exists to sell yourself. Don't they conflict?
No — the opposite. The most persuasive self-promotion is usually the honest kind: admit the luck, name what you learned from a failure, and you build credibility (ethos). Reviewers and readers can smell a polish job — an account where you're flawless and wise throughout reads like an ad, not a person. Honesty isn't self-deprecation; it's precision: state your real contribution, neither inflated nor shrunk. Being credible is itself the strongest persuasion.
How does writing personal narrative differ between Chinese and English?
English tradition encourages direct first-person narration and emotional disclosure; the self-promotion culture is more overt, and an "I" claim reads as confidence. Chinese tradition leans understated — overt self-assertion easily reads as ego — and prefers revealing character through deeds. So in Chinese, a promo or bio should let facts and detail speak, and use fewer first-person emotion-adjectives, or it picks up a translated, overblown tone. Same core, different calibration.
Text, spoken (interview), video — how does telling a personal story differ across the three?
Text can be polished endlessly and wins on precision; it can hold nuance. Speech runs on rhythm and pause — one concrete detail beats three summaries, and it must be short enough to be remembered and repeated on the spot. Video adds image and expression: showing beats telling, one gesture outweighs a paragraph. Same story, the text version can unfold; the spoken version cuts to one image; the video version lets the image speak. Change the form, change the grain.
Does restraint (Principle 3) fight with pyramid / BLUF "conclusion first"?
No — they govern different axes. BLUF governs information structure: lead with the conclusion for busy readers. Restraint governs emotional expression: don't package feeling for the reader with big words. They stack: lead with the conclusion, and still keep adjectives lean and facts concrete in the body. The worst combination is the reverse — emotion first, facts missing — leaving the reader with neither the point nor real feeling.
Can AI help you write memoir / personal stories?
It can help with structure and language, but not the one thing that matters: supplying "the moment only you have" — material AI doesn't possess and can't generate. Let AI be the editor (cut adjectives, find the thread, flag off-topic passages); don't let it be the author: it only produces smooth, generic templates — exactly what Principle 4 condemns. You own the truth and the specifics; AI handles polish and trimming. That's the right division of labor.