By Grace Loh Prasad
What I found hardest about writing my memoir The Translator’s Daughter wasn’t dealing with other people’s reactions, treating myself as a character, or figuring out what to put in and what to leave out. My biggest challenge was structure: how to narrate a decades-long arc when my story doesn’t have an obvious end point. My second biggest challenge was my writing style, which varies from piece to piece. How was I going to assemble various standalone essays into a cohesive book, and how would I know when I was done?
If you’re in the “messy middle” of writing your memoir—especially if you’ve been working on it for more years than you’d like to admit—you’re not alone. From beginning to end, writing my memoir took more than 20 years. I don’t say that to be discouraging—in fact, I’m grateful for how much I learned about writing and about myself before sharing my book with the world.
My memoir’s gestation began in 2001 when I enrolled in the MFA program at Mills College. By then I had taken a few community writing classes and written three solid essays. An MFA is not necessary, of course, but for me this marked the beginning of taking myself seriously as a writer. The first iteration of my memoir was my MFA thesis—more than 200 pages about rediscovery and reconnection to my Taiwanese American identity.
After graduating, I was burned out and put the memoir aside to focus on my new corporate job. My relationship to Taiwan kept evolving—I visited my parents there almost every year and I continued to explore my heritage. As I was starting to feel more at ease in my Taiwanese identity, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It felt like a cruel twist—I was getting closer, yet one of my main sources of connection to Taiwan began slipping away.
Meanwhile, my life was changing in other ways. I got married and had a baby—both wonderful developments—but raising a young child meant my writing again took a backseat. I wrote diary entries during stolen moments of free time, accumulating dozens of pages detailing my family’s visits to Taiwan, my parents’ ongoing health challenges, my brother’s sudden passing from liver cancer, and ultimately, the death of my mom and then my dad, all within a period of six years.
Writing teachers will tell you that a good memoir has to have both action and reflection. There must be dramatic events, setbacks, complications, and surprises; a sense of movement; a before and after. Another common bit of advice—especially for those writing about trauma—is that you need appropriate distance and judgment before you can write about difficult events successfully. The writing won’t work well if it’s just an outpouring of pain while you’re still going through it; you have to get to the other side. You need to have control over your material before you can take others on the journey.
When I first assembled my thesis in 2003, and the second time I workshopped the full manuscript with my writing group in 2007, I had no idea that my book would (also) be about the loss of my family members between 2010-2016 and how that grief deepened the loneliness I felt living in a different country from them.
The shape of my book changed significantly over time, and I still struggled with structure. I was good at writing standalone pieces that maxed out at about 5,000 words, but I had no idea how to write a book-length narrative arc in the same voice and style all the way through. No one was more relieved than me when the memoir-in-essays and other innovative forms became popular, such as books made of fragments and vignettes; narratives incorporating imagery and ephemera; memoirs with mythical and speculative elements; and other hybrid approaches to storytelling. These examples finally convinced me that conventional memoir structure wasn’t going to work for my unconventional life.
My friend and fellow memoirist Faith Adiele once said, “Hybrid lives deserve hybrid structures.” My book was already done and submitted by the time I heard this, but the phrase was like a lightning bolt to the brain, perfectly summarizing how I finally “solved” my structure problem. My book is a mix of narrative chapters (heavy on action) and standalone essays (mostly reflection). Sometimes the two are combined, but my voice and style vary from piece to piece. The book is loosely chronological with a couple of exceptions, and it ends with a letter to my son—not a specific thing that happened, but a symbolic passing of the baton to the next generation.
Ultimately, what worked for me was trusting my reader to make the connections between my different chapters, with plot providing just enough scaffolding for extended reflections on what it means to live in the diaspora and forge my own connections to Taiwan amidst so much personal loss.
When raising my son, I remember reading somewhere that a parent need not panic or spiral into shame if a child didn’t eat a perfect balance of veggies, protein, and carbohydrates in every meal. It turns out the nutritional content of individual meals is less important than the cumulative intake over several days. Whatever is missing from today’s lunch can be added to tonight’s dinner, or tomorrow’s breakfast. In the aggregate, it all works out.
The aggregate approach was what ultimately worked for my memoir: the book combines different structures, techniques and points of view—representing a span of more than two decades—and hopefully it all adds up to a satisfying meal.
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Grace Loh Prasad is the author of The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books, 2024), a debut memoir about living between languages, navigating loss, and the search for belonging. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Longreads, The Offing, Hyperallergic, Catapult, KHÔRA, and elsewhere. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI writers collective Seventeen Syllables, Prasad lives in the Bay Area.
