You can’t write your memoir with AI because it hasn’t lived your life, experienced what you have or knows about any one of a million things that happened to you since you burst onto the scene. And more importantly, it doesn’t know how you felt in any one of these moments or later as you reflect back.

Yes, you can feed certain tools your experiences and have them organised into chapters. There are even videos promising a memoir written in thirty days, complete with testimonials with false names and pictures – but I’ll stop there, because it’s a waste of energy. A family history, capturing memories before they’re lost, I can see the use for. But for those of us with our own lives to tell, surely writing it ourselves is the point.

I was only writing a post this morning about something that happened a long time ago, and I felt pettiness and shame rise up.

In our house growing up, Dad’s stash of Fig Rolls was guarded like the Crown Jewels. You didn’t just take a biscuit; you made a formal mental application and weighed the odds of getting a clip round the ear.

In later years and a different RAF camp, loads of us would gather around Elaine’s house. This house had a rather large, less than exotic 1970s monument of a freezer holding the ultimate luxury: Arctic Roll. We descended on her house like locusts to scoff it and, while there, giving each other a Suzy Quatro modern style. Which was nothing more than a hack with a K-TEL comb razor while pretending we were chic salon stylists.

When I look back at these memories, so much comes up – too much to write in one post. I think most of all it was defiance – how dare the big people tell us what we could do. Why were the decisions theirs to hold?

But there’s something deeper that wants to burst from me – payback. Once, I Suzy Quatro’d someone with a double crown who had chopped all of my hair off first. She’d innocently said she’d slipped. Well, so did I – and strangely it feels petty and shameful now.

Our deepest understandings of power, scarcity, longing, and joy live in the ridiculous details of lost childhoods.

We lived by unspoken rules that made no sense, but looking back, I can see so much wisdom emerging. These stories hold some really deep emotional truths that only struck me as I wrote them. We don’t need mountaintop epiphanies; we just need to sit with our pens and memories.

So What Can’t It Do For Memoir or Life Story?

AI Has Never Been Anywhere

How can it? It’s a machine, and while it might have read every memoir ever written, it wasn’t standing in the kitchen one Friday night when you discovered a pink thing in a Facebook message from your husband to one of his fancies… Yes, I did giggle as I wrote that.

It can look at a story and work out a shape of where it could go, and it could write it beautifully, but it can’t generate the weight of the feeling of the utter awfulness of the moment or the rage that enveloped you.

Your memories live in your body, and your body has been places and felt things.

It Smooths You Into a Million Other People

What do I mean by that? Give AI your story with even your best prompts, and you will get something back that is clearly very competent. Because it knows patterns, grammar, sentence length, spelling and stuff you are meant to do with commas. Oh, and it will add in weird words like Tuesday for every event…

You’ll end up with the Wiki version of your life – which is nice – not.

You Write to Find Out What You Mean

I use something called the spill and soul method of writing. Simply put – you spill your guts, and then you bring your soul to it. I want to tell you that AI has neither guts nor soul – but you know that.

Insight arrives while you are writing, or at least it does for me. Like this morning. I felt that shame for my revenge haircut in the moment.

Vulnerability Can’t Be Generated

Now I am not inviting you to watch me write because I ugly cry at stuff as the memory wanders back in, puffed up and full of embarrassing confessions. AI has no shame; it hasn’t been abused or strangled or know what it might feel like if an ex should read what you really think of that holiday in Cornwall.

Great memoirs risk our hearts and possibly some people who should have known better.

Your Weird Voice – Your Voice Is a Fingerprint

Your voice is shaped by your humour.

Come on, open your eyes! And so I did. Naked, bent, saggy skin, ashen face, boobs – well, God knows what was happening to those babies – but they were resting on a huge tummy. This was my beautiful body, and I had to try to not hate her.

Then there are the words passed down by mum and dad, your cultural background, the way you describe your emotions, and so much more. Your voice is like your fingerprint – unique. AI’s fingerprints are smooth.

Can’t You Just Train AI on Your Voice?

We all know that you can give AI examples of your writing and tell it to copy your voice, but does it really work? For you maybe, but in my experience, not at all.

The AI Sparring Partner

I’ve used it to ask me questions like journaling prompts to get me to dig deeper, and I’ve found that challenging and useful. It can also stress test what you have written without changing it. This gives you food for thought about where you might go or how you phrase things. Then there’s research, which it can do, that will help you to deepen your understanding.

Do this after you have spilled your guts and it’s genuinely useful.

The Unforgiving Fact Check Police

Human memory can be a bit dodgy, and it is often rubbish at dates. You might write about a type of car and date it wrong, or a song that you love. I was writing about At Seventeen by Janis Ian (July 1975), convinced that I listened to it at a certain age, only to realise that when the facts were checked I was wrong. Teenage angst lasted a long time.

The Continuity Checker

Imagine saying that your dad was driving a Cortina in 1982 when earlier you’d written that he was banned from driving in 1981 for five years. I hasten to add my dad was not banned, but he did drive some dodgy old bangers.

The Bored Reader

You need a strong constitution for this one. Where am I boring you? Where do I stall? Where am I telling too much? Where sounds like a diary entry? So it doesn’t get to rewrite your scene, but it can tell you where you are a little tedious.

The Golden Thread

When you first started your memoir, you would have stated what the core message was, and now you can ask: Does this run through my memoir, and where does the golden thread break?

So, let AI support you, but tell it to keep its hands off your pen. The beauty of your life is that it is probably very messy; it’s a K-TEL revenge haircut that shows you how petty you were.

Spill your guts first is my best advice; bring your soul to it and then police it.

Come and join me in my Skool Community – The Soul Writers Lounge. We are here to support you, your life story and memoir.