How to write a mini biography that your family will actually read

My uncle wrote a 300-page memoir. He spent two years on it. He had it printed and bound, gave copies to everyone in the family at Thanksgiving. I know where mine is — bottom shelf, behind the cookbooks. I've read maybe forty pages.

My aunt wrote something different. Two pages, front and back, on plain white paper. She called it "the short version." It covered her whole life: growing up on a dairy farm, dropping out of college to marry my uncle, the years she spent running a flower shop, and the afternoon she watched a customer cry over a bouquet she'd made for her own mother's funeral. That was the day my aunt realized she wasn't just selling flowers.

I've read my aunt's two pages probably a dozen times. I can almost recite parts of it. The 300-page memoir? I feel guilty every time I see its spine.

That's the case for a mini biography. Not because your life isn't worth more than two pages — it absolutely is. But because the two-page version is the one that actually gets read.

What a mini biography is (and why it works better than you'd think)

A mini biography is a short personal narrative — usually one to three pages — that captures who you are, where you came from, and what mattered to you. It's not a memoir. It's not a CV. It's not a chronological list of every job you held and every city you lived in. It's the version of your story that you'd tell a grandchild sitting across from you at the kitchen table, if they asked and you only had an hour.

The reason this format works is simple: people actually finish it.

A memoir asks for commitment. A mini biography asks for ten minutes. And in those ten minutes, if you've done it right, your family learns more about who you were than they would from a shelf of photo albums. They get your voice. Your perspective. The moments you chose to include, and — just as importantly — the ones you didn't.

If you've thought about writing a full memoir, a mini biography is a great place to start. Plenty of people begin with the short version and never feel the need to write the longer one. The short version said what they needed to say.

Deciding what to include (and what to leave out)

This is the hardest part. Not the writing — the choosing.

When you sit down to write your whole life in two pages, you quickly realize you can't include everything. You can't include most things. And that constraint, which feels limiting at first, turns out to be the best thing about this format. It forces you to ask: what actually matters?

Here's a test I find helpful. For any story or detail you're considering, ask yourself: If my grandchild could only know five things about me, would this be one of them?

That question cuts through a lot of noise. Your promotion in 1997 probably doesn't make the cut. But the reason you took the job in the first place — because your father told you once that you'd never amount to anything, and you spent thirty years proving him wrong — that's a different story entirely. That's the one worth telling.

What to leave in:

The turning points. The moments where your life forked and you went one way instead of another. Moving across the country. Leaving a marriage. Starting over at fifty. These are the decisions that shaped everything after them.
The people who changed you. Not everyone you ever loved — the specific ones who altered your trajectory. The teacher who believed in you. The friend who told you the truth when nobody else would.
The things you believe. Not abstract values, but the specific convictions you earned through living. "I learned that apologizing first is almost never the wrong move" is worth more than "I value kindness."
The ordinary moments that turned out to be extraordinary. The Tuesday night dinner where your daughter said something that made you see her differently. The morning commute where you made a decision you'd been avoiding for years.

What to leave out:

Anything you're including because you feel obligated to, not because it matters to the story.
Long descriptions of events your family already knows about. (They were at the wedding. They don't need three paragraphs on it.)
Anything that reads like a resume.

A framework that actually works: five stories that define you

Some people do well with a chronological approach — one paragraph per decade, moving through life in order. That works fine, and if you're drawn to it, go ahead. But I think there's a better framework for most people.

Pick five stories. That's it. Five moments, five experiences, five scenes from your life that, taken together, paint a real picture of who you are.

Here's how to choose them:

Story 1: Where you came from. Not just the city or the era, but the feeling of it. What was your childhood actually like? What did your house smell like? What did your parents fight about? What did Saturday mornings feel like? One paragraph that puts your reader in the room with you.

Story 2: A choice that cost you something. The interesting parts of a life aren't the easy decisions. They're the ones that came with a price. Maybe you turned down a job to stay near your aging parents. Maybe you left a religion. Maybe you chose honesty when a lie would have been easier. Whatever it was, this story shows your character more than anything else you could write.

Story 3: A failure or a loss. Nobody connects with a story about someone who got everything right. Your family needs to know that you struggled too. That you got fired, or got your heart broken, or spent a year not knowing what you were doing with your life. This is how they'll know it's okay when the same things happen to them.

Story 4: A relationship that shaped you. Pick one. Your mother. Your best friend from college. Your first boss. The child who taught you something about yourself you didn't expect. Write about what that person meant to you and what you learned from knowing them. Be specific. Use their name.

Story 5: What you know now. Not advice, exactly. More like hard-won knowledge. The things that took you decades to figure out that you wish someone had told you at twenty. This is your chance to be honest about what life actually taught you — not what you wish it had taught you.

Five stories. Each one takes a paragraph, maybe two. That's your mini biography. Two pages, give or take. Short enough to read in one sitting. Long enough to mean something.

Writing it so it sounds like you

The biggest mistake people make with a mini biography isn't choosing the wrong stories. It's writing in a voice that doesn't sound like them.

You know the voice I mean. Stiff. Formal. The kind of writing that says "throughout my life, I have been fortunate to..." Nobody talks like that. And the moment your family reads a sentence like that, they stop hearing you and start hearing a document.

Write the way you talk. If you swear sometimes, it's okay to swear. If you're funny, be funny. If you tend to be blunt, be blunt. The goal isn't beautiful prose. The goal is that when your grandson reads this twenty years from now, he hears your actual voice in his head.

A few practical tips:

Read it out loud. If a sentence sounds weird when you say it, rewrite it until it doesn't.
Use real names and real places. "The summer I spent at Lake Huron with the Petersons" is a hundred times more alive than "a memorable summer vacation."
Don't explain your emotions. Show the moment and let the emotion speak for itself. Instead of "I was devastated when my father died," try "When my father died, I drove to his house and sat in his chair for three hours. I didn't cry. I just sat there, smelling his tobacco."
Skip the disclaimers. You don't need to write "I'm not a writer, but..." You're writing. That makes you a writer. Get on with it.

If you're looking for more guidance on getting your voice right, the guide on documenting your life story covers some of the same ground in more detail.

Getting it done (not perfect — done)

Here's what stops most people from writing a mini biography: they think it needs to be perfect. They want every word to be right. They want it to be moving and deep and beautifully written. So they never start, or they start and never finish.

Forget perfect. Write the ugly first draft. Write it in one sitting if you can — an hour, maybe two. Don't edit while you write. Just get the stories down on paper, in whatever order they come.

Then walk away. Come back in a day or two and read it fresh. You'll immediately see what works and what doesn't. You'll cut some things. You'll add one detail you forgot. You'll fix the sentences that sound clunky. That's your second draft, and for most people, the second draft is close enough.

If you want a second opinion, show it to someone who knows you well. Not for grammar — for truth. Ask them: "Does this sound like me? Did I miss anything important?" They'll tell you.

Then print it out. Put it in an envelope. Write a name on the front. You're done.

You can also pair your mini biography with a legacy letter — the biography tells your story, and the letter tells the people you love what they meant to you. Together, they're about as complete a personal record as anyone could leave behind.

The two-page version might be enough

There's a certain freedom in accepting that you don't need to write the book-length version. That two pages can hold a life, if you choose the right two pages.

My aunt's short version didn't include everything. It left out entire decades, whole categories of experience. It didn't mention her three surgeries, her years of volunteering at the library, or most of her travels. But it included the flower shop, and the farm, and the way she felt when she realized her work mattered to strangers. And that was enough. That was her.

Your life is bigger than any document could capture. But the people who come after you don't need all of it. They need the parts that were most yours. The moments that made you who you were. The stories that, when your family reads them out loud at the table someday, will make someone say: That sounds exactly like her.

Two pages. An envelope. The real version of you.

That's a mini biography worth keeping.