Memoir Writing

Hello! If you’re thinking, “Dear Kate? Wait… who’s Kate?” — fair question. Don’t worry, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. There’s a fun little origin story behind the name, and I can’t wait to let you in on it.​ ​ The Story Behind “Dear Kate” Kate was the wife of a former (and favorite!)…

Don’t join the comparison Olympics team. There’s a belief most women carry when they think about writing their story. It has to be big. Dramatic. Resolved with a neat redemption arc that feels Hallmark complete. Then they think: Mine isn’t any of those things. So maybe I don’t have a story to tell. Or even…

Freshman year, 1985. San Marcos High School newspaper. That’s me in the polka dots, interviewing President Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes. I was terrified. It was the nicest outfit I could pull together at the moment, and maybe it matched exactly how unprepared I felt. Fourteen years old, holding a tape recorder and a notebook,…

On the cost of moving fast before you’ve decided anything Isn’t it interesting how many appeals to potential writers rush you? It starts before you even open a document. “Just write a bad first draft.” “Don’t overthink it, just start.” “You’re thinking too much — you need to do.” Forward motion matters in most things…

I had been writing for years before I wrote the book. Personal journals. The Katie blog, which I’d been writing publicly for almost 25 years. But that was a carefully edited version of the story — the portion I could share without exposing too much. I was protecting everyone (the facade was alive and well),…

When I opened my inbox this morning, I deleted five emails after reading the first paragraph because they were clearly AI-generated. And while I’m a fan of outsourcing many tasks to AI, I cannot support “writing” major components of your story through Chat, Claude, or Gemini. As a reader, I deserve more, and as a…

Last time I told you about the woman who had been carrying her story for years and couldn’t make herself begin. The woman who’d told it privately but couldn’t go public with it. That woman was me, six years ago. And what I said was: I eventually figured out that what I was afraid of…

Six years ago, there was a woman who had already written the hardest parts of her story in her head. Probably a thousand times. She knew exactly which moments carried the most weight and which ones she’d have to find a way to write around. She just couldn’t make herself out there where other people…

Yesterday on Substack, someone asked if “pantser vs. plotter” was basically the Enneagram for writers. Note: That’s nerdy writer-speak for: do you plan, or do you write by the seat of your pants? So I had to follow that thread to think about the real reason writing your story feels hard, especially for memoir writers. Naturally,…

Why Sharing Our Stories Matters If you’ve ever wondered whether sharing your story is worth it — whether anyone will care, whether it’s too messy, too personal, or too much — this post is for you. I’m resharing something I wrote in April 2022 that articulates exactly why I believe so deeply in the power…