Putting The Memoir Away For Now
I’m taking a break from the memoir that has been my main creative focus for the past couple of years.
I started writing the memoir soon after my mother passed away in September 2022. It took shape during the months I spent on the Granta Memoir Writing Workshop. It grew through other workshops and during regular sessions with my writers’ group. The writing, the structure, the quality of the work evolved and deepened with every iteration.
The memoir is about my relationship with her. How it changed over the years. Especially after I left Australia. And what happened to us as she became ill in her final years. But it’s also about growing up as an immigrant kid. How gentrification has changed the Australia she chose to settle in. How racism meant she never felt fully at peace and I felt compelled to leave. And what it means to come to understand yourself as a result of living a long way from home.
I workshopped my query letter and sent out queries to a long list of agents who deal with memoir. I also wrote and delivered a pitch to publishers here in Australia. There was interest. Sometimes very intense interest. But in the end, everyone passed.
There’s a lot of industry talk about how this isn’t a good moment for memoir. I tried to emphasise the hybridity of my work. It’s a Latin American immigrant story, a work of cultural criticism, and a book about cooking and food, complete with recipes.
At the same time, I had a pretty challenging 2025. Part of what made 2025 so challenging was that I sent out a lot of submissions to literary magazines. Far more than I ever had before. And apart from one little rant, they were all rejected. Some of these are among the best essays I’ve ever written. And as we turned the corner into 2026, the rejections kept coming.
I need some time to think about what I’m doing.
My tendency, when it comes to writing, is to push out a lot of work. But also, to push myself to burnout. And that path to burnout often involves judging my craft harshly. More revisions, rewrites and restructuring, until it becomes impossible to know whether the words are improving or simply changing for the sake of difference.
I’m going to put the memoir aside for now. Probably for the rest of the year. To give myself time so I can come back and reread it with fresh eyes. Maybe in that time, the market for memoir might change. Or other opportunities to share the work might appear.
