I’ve been watching something interesting happen in the publishing world regarding memoir writing in 20205, and I’ll be honest: it surprised the tar out of me.
Memoirs are everywhere. Not just the celebrity tell-alls you’d expect (though yeah, those too), but regular people writing about their regular lives. And here’s the kicker: readers are eating them up. Amazon’s 2025 bestseller lists are packed with personal narratives. Grief memoirs. Coming-of-age stories. Tales of complicated family relationships. Books by people whose names you won’t recognize but whose experiences will gut you, comfort you, or help you understand your own messy life a little better.
This memoir surge isn’t random. Something’s shifted in our culture, and it’s worth understanding if you’ve been sitting on your own story, thinking nobody would care.
The Perfect Storm That Made This Memoir’s Moment
Three things converged to make 2025 the year of the memoir, and they’ve created a rare window of opportunity for writers with authentic stories to tell.
- First, we’re all processing collective trauma. The pandemic. Political chaos. Economic uncertainty. Climate anxiety. We’ve been through a lot together, and readers are hungry for stories that help them make sense of their own experiences. Personal narratives about resilience, grief, and finding meaning in chaos are resonating because they validate what we’ve all been feeling. When Geraldine Brooks writes about losing her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband and navigating the bureaucratic nightmare that follows death, readers recognize their own struggles with loss. When someone shares how they rebuilt their life after it fell apart, we’re not just reading for entertainment, we’re looking for roadmaps.
- Second, authenticity became more valuable than polish. For decades, memoir meant you needed an MFA, a literary agent, and a New York publisher who believed your story was “important enough.” Those gatekeepers are still around, but Amazon and the Kindle revolution blew the doors wide open. Now readers can find your story directly, and they’re actively seeking out voices that sound real rather than workshop-polished. The publishing industry has finally caught up to what readers have been saying all along: we want truth more than we want perfection.
- Third, we’re all grappling with the same fundamental questions. Who am I? Where did I come from? What’s the meaning of all this? What have I done with what I was given, and what am I leaving behind? These aren’t new questions—humans have been asking them since we first sat around fires telling stories—but something about our current moment has made them urgent again. Maybe it’s the aging population (guilty as charged at 77). Maybe it’s the way technology makes us question what’s real and what matters. Whatever the reason, memoir has become less about ego and more about the universal human need to translate our lives into meaning.
“But Nobody Cares About My Life”
Let me address the elephant in the room, because I know what you’re thinking. You’re not famous and you’re not a celebrity or a politician or someone who climbed Everest or survived a plane crash. You’re just… you. Why would anyone care about your story?
I get it. I wrote paperback thrillers for years because I thought my real life wasn’t interesting enough for “serious” writing. My late wife Ellen always wanted me to write something more substantial, something with literary merit, but I figured that was for smarter people with more important lives.
Then she died on Thanksgiving Day of 2019, and I spent five years writing a memoir about our 47 years together, and here’s what I learned: The “nobody cares” objection fundamentally misunderstands what memoir does.
Memoir isn’t about proving your life is more interesting than everyone else’s. It’s about illuminating the human experience through the specific details of one life lived honestly. When you write about losing your wife, you’re not just telling your story—you’re helping every widow and widower recognize their grief. If you write about your complicated relationship with your mother, you’re giving voice to everyone who’s struggled with family. When you write about finding yourself at 40 or 60 or 80, you’re creating a mirror where readers can see their own journeys reflected.
The specifics of your life are what make it universal. That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. The more honestly and specifically you write about your particular experience, the more readers will recognize themselves in your story.
Besides, “interesting” is overrated. You know what readers consistently say about the memoirs they love? “This could have been written about my life.” That’s not a criticism; that’s the highest compliment. It means you’ve told a specific truth so well that it became a universal truth.
The Grief Memoir: A Special Case
I want to talk specifically about grief memoirs for a moment. If you’ve lost someone and you’re wondering whether to write about it, the answer is probably yes.
Grief memoirs are having a particular moment right now. Geraldine Brooks’ Memorial Days is getting huge attention on Amazon for its raw honesty about losing her husband. These books are selling not because readers are morbid, but because grief is one of those universal experiences that still manages to make us feel utterly alone. When you’re in the thick of it, you’re convinced nobody understands the specific weight of your loss. Then you read someone else’s story and think, “Oh my God, they felt that too.”
Writing about grief serves two audiences: the writer and the reader. For the writer, it’s a way to process the impossible, to find meaning in loss, to continue the relationship with the person you’ve lost through the act of remembering and writing. For the reader, it’s validation, comfort, and a reminder that they’re not alone in this terrible club nobody wants to join.
If you’ve experienced significant loss and you’ve thought about writing about it, don’t dismiss that impulse. The world needs more honest grief memoirs. Not trauma porn or tragedy for entertainment, but real, messy, complicated stories about love and loss and learning to live in the after.
The Amazon Advantage: Why Kindle Changes Everything
Here’s where I want to get practical for a moment, because understanding the business side matters if you’re serious about this.
Traditional publishing still favors the famous, the connected, and the “platform-ready.” But Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing doesn’t care about any of that. It cares about whether readers want your book. And in 2025, memoir is one of the top-selling categories on Kindle. Regular people—not celebrities, not influencers, just people with stories to tell—are finding readers who need exactly the story they have to offer.
The Kindle ecosystem has created something remarkable: a direct connection between memoir writers and memoir readers. You don’t need a six-figure marketing budget or a spot on Good Morning America. You need a compelling story told honestly, a decent cover, and basic understanding of how Amazon’s algorithm works. (More on that in my next post about the practical side of getting your memoir onto Kindle.)
The financial barrier to entry is almost nonexistent. The gatekeepers are gone. The only question is: do you have a story worth telling, and are you willing to tell it honestly?
What This Means for You
If you’ve been sitting on a memoir or if you’ve been thinking about writing your story but convinced yourself nobody would care, 2025 might be your moment.
The readers are there. The platform exists. The cultural hunger for authentic personal narratives has never been stronger. What’s missing is your particular story, told in your particular voice, illuminating some corner of human experience that only you can illuminate.
You don’t need permission, you don’t need credentials, and you don’t need to be younger or smarter or more accomplished than you are. You just need honesty, specificity, and the courage to tell your truth.
In my next post, I’ll walk through the practical side: how to actually write and publish your memoir on Kindle, from structure to formatting to hitting the publish button. But before we get tactical, I wanted you to understand why now matters, and why your story—yes, yours—belongs in this conversation.
Because here’s the truth I’ve learned at 77, after spending five years wrestling with my own memoir: the stories we tell about our lives aren’t just for us. They’re how we connect, how we make sense of the chaos, how we leave something behind that says “I was here, I lived this, maybe it’ll help you understand your own life a little better.”
That’s not vanity. That’s what humans do. It’s what we’ve always done.
And right now, in 2025, the world is listening.
Hey, I’m 77 and I’ve Got Stories…
Stories about what it’s like to navigate life at this age (spoiler: it’s weird, wonderful, and occasionally terrifying). And stories about collaborating with AI to write books in ways that would have seemed like science fiction when I started putting words on paper. Stories about the daily realities, unexpected surprises, and hard-won wisdom that comes from three-quarters of a century on this planet. If you’re curious about authentic aging, writing innovation, or just enjoy good storytelling from someone who’s been around the block, subscribe to my weekly newsletter “Old Man Still Got Stories.” I promise to make it worth your time.