Personal Memoir Essay Examples

For my memoir essay, my initial critiques were that it was not as personal as some would have liked. The readers wanted to be more immersed in my story of “growing up”--to get a glimpse into exactly how my experiences have shaped the person I am today. In my drastic rewrite, I decided to take a brand new approach by writing letters addressed to important individuals, or groups of people in my life. These people include my dance team, high school friends whom I haven’t seen since I graduated from high school, and current and previous love interests. In each letter, I speak the words that I either never had the chance to or didn’t have the courage to say (hence the title “Unspoken Words”). This rewrite feels much more genuine this time around

I feel incredibly guilty for having allowed distance to grow between me and the people that were once my source of support. Although I have talked with them on occasion and even helped one of them through a stressful college experience, there were many things I should have caught them up on and asked for their advice. This letter was meant to address things that I have done wrong, and to show that I am indeed working on incorporating people from both my past and presents lives. In addition, it provided a glimpse into the kinds of neighborhoods I grew up in and how they contributed to my impressions of the people I

The fourth and fifth are most pertinent to my current world, and are meant to show my improvements (e.g. letting go of things I can’t control, like the outcome of my relationship and being okay with being alone) and work in progresses. One of the biggest things I struggled with in this relationship was how back and forth it felt, hence why I emulated feelings of confusion and moments of self doubt in the beginning through lengthy, sometimes run-on sentences. However, the turning point is in the last paragraph where I finally achieve peace with the whole