I’ve Finished a Memoir. Now What?

Background

I started writing in the fall of 2013, shortly after immigrating to the United States. I felt I had stories to tell from my experiences in Russia and the West, and how they all intertwined. I finished the draft of the manuscript already that year and then stalled. For over a decade…

I tried working with three different developmental editors, but their feedback overwhelmed me. There were stretches of several years when I didn’t touch my manuscript. Then, in the final weeks of 2024, I finally managed to organize myself.

Maybe it’s for the best that revisiting my memoir took an entire decade. The very concept of writing a memoir in my mid-thirties often felt awkward (well, J.D. Vance wrote his in his early 30s…). Now I’m older. The experiences I’m writing about have had time to settle. What seemed urgent and raw a decade ago has mellowed into something I can examine with more clarity. Time helped me recognize which characters and plotlines weren’t essential to my story, allowing me to greatly simplify the narrative. Simpler — easier to edit. Working on 65K words is a lot easier than on 100k. I also want to acknowledge without any shame that I’ve found the AI tools invaluable for cleaning up and proofreading. Previously I’d be exchanging my draft back and forth with editors AND paying money for it. Now I can focus on the narrative and my voice while leaving proofreading to AI.

While the book might still have a lot of room for improvement, I finally feel like I have…