on Jane Friedman site:

I started teaching memoir writing in 2008. At first, the only knowledge I had to draw on was what I had learned from writing my own book. So that was what I taught my students. Unfortunately, I was working with very limited information. I was like a doctor who had treated one patient in her life and was now using a single medical case to diagnose every other person I saw. Just having written one book did not make me an authority on the genre.

Little by little, however, I kept seeing new manuscripts, new problems, and each time I solved one person’s problem, I was in a much better position the next time I saw the same issue creep up again.

After doing this for seven years, my situation was dramatically different. I thought I’d seen it all. I’d seen the chicken pox, hepatitis and gangrene of memoir problems. I had a lot more data to draw on and was doing a much better job at diagnosing the issues that most of my students were having.

But there was one thing that I hadn’t been able to quite work out.