Memoir

*** Please revise the essay (you can add, omit or further explain in details however you like) Below is feedback on how it needs to be revised. The memoir document is attached
First, how does the title fit onto the memoir's themes? Is MEMOIR an enticing title? Can you also add a subtitle maybe? It prepares the reader for the memoir's focused feel / themes, and this leads to my primary question: what are the questions this memoir tackles, and what would you say your primary
theme(s) are? Notice your first sentence. How does that lead the reader into a theme? As I see it, the intro is not an intro so much as you go straight into detailed storytelling. In a memoir, as the instructions suggest, students should have a theme that anchors the stories, so that any event you pull out or story
serves to illustrate that theme. You don't need to say everything, in other words, but only those things that participate in a focused theme. If I talk about "struggle" or "challenges," I present that in my intro through a quote, or questions, and then I start each paragraph after with some creative transition that tells the reader where I'm headed next in my investigation of the word "struggle.' One kind of struggle is your single mom. Another is family. Then you veer into one billionaire client, tennis, and jobs you had. Your details are good, but the focus of the memoir is missing. It's all sorts of material without direction, and an underlying theme that carries the reader through the journey you aim to show. This can take some time thinking about. You also bring up your latent desire to be a therapist, mental health, how you grew up observant, a listener, then your shift to cosmetology So do you see how you're jumping from stone to stone?
It's really important to take some time to reflect on what you're discovering and what stories matter most to tell in this slow and revealing transformation you have experienced as you've lived from then to now. It makes references like Steve Harvey make sense and not seem randomly inserted, same with the African American neighbor, the community you describe growing up with, and then lots of details that while I understand are part of your story don't necessarily all belong in this one assignment. Only choose those specific events and people who represent key aspects of your life changes and your transformation. As it stands I can't see the glue in this yet, but you do have an ocean of material we need to turn into a river. So read through this draft, make some notes on what you think you're seeing about yourself and your story in this draft, maybe it's -You get knocked down and get up again -You have to try and fail and try again -It's the little things that add up to my purpose …I'm just throwing out some ideas I surmise from the lot of what you submit here. So you have some work to do as you revise, and my first suggestion is to pull from this an outline where you look at it and say, okay, this is my memoir's purpose this is the memoir's goal, and then you start selecting what anecdotes to keep, which ones to toss for another day, which ones to shelf until you know better if and where they belong in the structure. Hope that helps