You need to know this. It can make or break your story.
I see talented writers lose readers over it all the time—and often, they have no idea they’re doing it.
I was editing a memoir recently and found myself obsessing over something the author wasn’t writing about.
Money.
She had written beautifully and vulnerably about incredibly difficult things. Trauma. Relationships. Healing. Starting over.
But there was one glaring omission: She had money.
It’s not that she had private-jet, champagne-for-every-breakfast money. But she did have enough financial freedom that she could take time away from work when she needed to. She could travel to gorgeous locations, get world-class support, live in stunning surroundings, pay for the best therapists, and give herself time and space to heal.
None of this bothered me. What irked me was that the book never acknowledged it. And I’m finding this surprisingly common.
“If you don’t address the elephant on the page,” I find myself writing in the margins a lot lately, “you risk slowing your reader’s momentum—or maybe losing them altogether.”
As readers, we’re little investigators. We’re constantly collecting clues, trying to understand the world of a book. Where does this person live? How do they support themselves? Who pays for this? How are they able to take six months off? Who funded their restaurant, their startup, their PhD program? How can they afford all this therapy? How are they traveling yet again?
We may not consciously formulate the questions. But some part of our brain is keeping track. And when the math doesn’t math, we notice.
You Don’t Have to Explain Shit
This is essentially what I told my client. You don’t owe readers your bank statements. You don’t have to list your net worth, explain your inheritance, defend your investments, apologize for your house, or provide an audit of every financial advantage you’ve ever had.
Please don’t.
But sometimes one or two sentences can create enormous trust. Something as simple as:
Thank God I’d gotten lucky with a few investments during those hardcore working years—that I could afford to take some time off. I knew how fortunate I was. So many women don’t get that luxury.
Done. Mystery solved. The reader can move on.
Because here’s the deal: If there’s something obvious in your life that you’re working hard not to tell me, I can feel the hole where the information should be.
And that hole can become more distracting than the truth.
Money Is Part of the Setting
We talk constantly in memoir about setting.
Where are you? What does the room look like? What can you hear, smell, taste, touch?
But financial circumstances are part of setting, too.
Money—or the lack of it—affects virtually everything: where we live, how we work, how we heal, how long we can grieve, whether we can leave a marriage, hire childcare, take a sabbatical, afford treatment, or get on a plane when a loved one needs us.
Far from judgment, that’s context.
If your memoir is filled with five-star hotels, live-in nannies, spontaneous travel, expensive treatments, or long stretches without an obvious paycheck, readers are going to wonder how you’re paying for it. Just as they’d wonder how you were surviving if the electricity kept getting shut off.
Both are relevant. Poverty affects the plot. Wealth does, too.
Don’t Make Readers Find Out Somewhere Else
There’s another reason I’m a fan of addressing the obvious yourself: Somebody else will likely address it for you. And then you lose control of the narrative.
We live in the age of internet sleuths. Readers Google. So do journalists, TV producers, and podcasters. People look up houses and companies and divorces and lawsuits and family histories and everything else imaginable.
Especially once a memoir gets attention.
If your book presents you as struggling financially while public information suggests something very different, that discrepancy can become the story—which we’ve seen play out in a very high-profile way this year around Belle Burden’s juggernaut memoir, Strangers. After the book became a sensation, The New Yorker dug into court documents and raised questions about financial details the memoir had left out, including the extent of Burden’s inherited wealth. Suddenly, instead of everyone talking about the heartbreak and betrayal at the center of her story, a whole new conversation erupted around what she had, or hadn’t, disclosed.
Whether you think the criticism was fair or wildly overblown isn’t the point. From a memoirist’s perspective, the lesson is worth paying attention to: If readers discover important context somewhere other than your book, the omission itself can become more interesting than the story you wanted them to focus on.
And maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation! You can have money and still be terrified about money. You can inherit wealth and feel tremendous shame about it. You can own valuable property and have very little cash. You can look rich and be drowning in debt. You can have access to family money you refuse to touch or can’t access yet.
Money is complicated, whether you have a lot of it or a little.
Great! Put the complication on the page. That’s interesting. That’s memoir.
The Thing You’re Most Uncomfortable Discussing May Be the Thing We Need
Often, a writer will say to me: “But I hate talking about money.”
I understand the pushback. Money can carry shame in every direction. We’re ashamed when we don’t have it. We’re ashamed when we do. We’re ashamed if we inherited it. We’re ashamed if we lost it. We’re even ashamed if we’ve earned every penny of it.
We’re ashamed if we want more. We’re ashamed when other people have less.
But discomfort isn’t necessarily a reason to leave something out of a memoir. Sometimes it’s evidence that you’ve found something worth examining.
You can even write about the discomfort itself:
I’ve never known how to talk about money.
Well, hello. Now you’ve got me.
Why can’t you talk about money? What did your family teach you about wealth? Were you told it was gauche to discuss? Do you feel guilty for having more than your friends? Did money make you safer? Lonelier? Freer? More frightened of losing what you had?
Did money protect you from certain consequences while making absolutely no difference when tragedy arrived?
That’s where the real story may be.
Beauty, Wealth, Talent—and the Relatability Problem
Years ago, a writer friend said something to me that I’ve never forgotten.
She told me that certain advantages can create distance between an author and a reader before the author has said a word.
Beauty can.
Fame can.
Talent can.
Money definitely can.
I was startled by this at the time because we rarely experience ourselves the way strangers experience us. We know our insecurities. Our childhood wounds. The bills we worried about. The rejection letter that gutted us. The parts of our bodies we’ve hated since seventh grade.
The reader doesn’t know any of that yet. They only see what’s on the page.
And if what they see looks impossibly glossy, they may unconsciously think:
Easy for you to say.
Now they can’t relate to you. They may even dislike you without knowing why.
That’s where vulnerability holds real power.
Don’t Apologize for Your Abundance. Make It Mean Something.
This is one of my favorite ways to handle money in memoir.
If you had resources that helped you survive something terrible, perhaps that’s part of the story.
If you could afford excellent therapy, leave your grind of a day job, move overseas, hire a shark of an attorney, or retreat somewhere beautiful while you put yourself back together, here’s an idea:
What if, instead of hiding that fact because you’re afraid readers will judge you, you acknowledge it—and let it deepen your purpose?
“I kept thinking about the women who couldn’t do what I had done. Who couldn’t take three months off. Who couldn’t afford this therapist. Who couldn’t leave. I began to understand that telling this story might be one way of sharing some of what my resources had allowed me to learn.”
Now you’ve got my buy-in. Because we’re going somewhere interesting. Your abundance stops being something you need to defend and becomes something you can use in service of others. Maybe even a big part of why you’re writing at all.
Control the Narrative by Telling the Truth
This is advice I give authors all the time, and it applies to far more than money.
If there’s something readers are inevitably going to notice, don’t make them drag it out of you. I’m talking about anything materially relevant that the reader can see—or will eventually discover.
Race.
Beauty.
Age.
Fame.
Family connections.
Education.
Religion.
Addiction.
Privilege.
Debt.
A famous last name.
A powerful spouse.
A trust fund.
Whatever materially affects the story.
You don’t have to explain everything. Or reveal things that aren’t yours to reveal. It’s not your job to surrender your privacy to write an honest book.
But ask yourself:
What is my reader going to wonder? Where could I slow their roll?
And then:
Have I given them enough information that they don’t have to keep wondering?
Sometimes the answer requires a chapter. Or a paragraph. And sometimes? Two sentences will do.
But those two sentences can be the difference between a reader thinking, She’s hiding something from me and thinking:
Okay. I trust her. Keep going.
Your reader doesn’t need your bank statement. She just needs the truth. 😉
Write on!
Linda xo
PS. Want more insights and writerly ramblings? I’ve put my most cherished know-how and stories in Beautiful Writers: A Journey of Big Dreams & Messy Manuscripts—with Tricks of the Trade from Bestselling Authors. It’s my soulmate book. If you’ve ever received value from my work, I’d be over the moon if you’d purchase a copy, listen to the audiobook, share a review—you know the drill. It’s all so appreciated. You’ll never know how much it means to me, until perhaps you publish your book! 😀
