What is the reason behind people choosing to write memoirs instead of novels or poetry?

Speaking for myself? I’m not very creative, but my life has been dramatic and fairly emotionally compelling. It’s a story of hope overcoming adversity that includes the pit where no hope genuinely exists. It shows that evil and hatred have a tangible cause and that they can resolve into happiness and peace. It proves that no soul need be lost.

I arose from that despair through magick—magick as it is, not magick as fiction imagines it, which is reasonably well-characterized as spicy psychology. Regardless, it’s a testament to the utility of religion even in a skeptical world, for skeptical people. It demonstrates the ability of dreams to change reality through their function of changing people.

Portrait of the Bookseller E.J Fontaine by Gustave Caillebotte. Public domain.

It even has ample fantasy elements enabled by the temporary psychosis magick can cause. It humanizes incredibly scary thought processes and psychiatric symptoms that are routinely written off as too frightening or intractable to be cured while offering a genuine story of those very symptoms being resolved into a stable, happy mein.

It’d make good fiction, and I’ve thought about fictionalizing elements, but the potential impact is larger when it’s delivered as a memoir. Fiction entertains. Nonfiction, with stories like mine, offers real hope. They prove the degree of change that’s possible for individuals while showing some methods that lead to that growth.