A few seconds after our 13-year-old asked for lunch during a road trip this summer, those ubiquitous McDonald’s arches suddenly appeared, turned into index fingers, and summoned us. Come here, the fingers said, this will be so easy and will bring your child so much joy. My husband and I let our eyes gloss over and he steered off the highway.
Then there we were, ordering into a microphone embedded into a faceless, backlit sign the size of a movie theater screen. It glowed with an overwhelming number of options. While our 13-year-old sat up with excitement, I recoiled. I reached for the small container of ultra-boring nuts I’d preemptively packed for myself and began to nibble. At least nothing we ordered contained lettuce. The act of eating pretty much all food had become fraught for me due to the recent glitches in the edible matrix, the uptick in foodborne illnesses, and how, seemingly, no growers or producers were being monitored by the CDC or the FDA.
But the more alluring sign in that drive-thru journey was printed on a small piece of copy paper taped inconspicuously in the pick-up window. It was titled: SAUCE POLICY.
This had to do with Chicken McNuggets and how many free dipping sauce packets each customer would be allotted. (FYI: 4 and 6 pieces come with one packet, 10 pieces come with two.) With a bit of hard-hitting journalistic digging, I just now uncovered that each franchise can decide how much they charge for extra sauce, ranging from $0.15 to $0.38 per packet.
We hadn’t ordered any McNuggets, but I knew instantly that Sauce Policy would be the name of my band (the one I shall oft reference but never form: alas, no musical skills), my next novel (there hasn’t even been a first), or hey, an essay.
Soon after that, I realized it directly spoke to my work as a fiction-writer-turned-memoirist and now a teacher of memoir. Extra sauce was in fact exactly what I’d been talking about in the memoir classes I’d been teaching this summer, in between McDonald’s visits.
In my recent attempts to read every memoir ever published (don’t ask how that’s going), I’ve started to place memoirs on that Loud-to-Quiet spectrum we sometimes hear about. In the loud camp, we of course have Celebrities! Influencers! Politicians! People who have had truly dramatic things happen to them! Trauma Porn! People who’ve snorted cocaine off the backs of tigers! In the other camp, we have the rest of us: the people who have a story to tell, but zero social media followers, or 242 followers, or 3,335 followers (my hard-won Instagram count as I type these words). We likely wouldn’t be recognized by paparazzi, yet we’ve probably survived something extremely common, and therefore highly relatable (arguably more relatable) to many people on this planet. Our lived experiences have the potential to inspire wide swaths of readers and make the world feel smaller and friendlier. While reading our pages, many might say, Wow, this happened to me, too.
With a messy sheath of notes in front of me, and my oversized earrings dancing in sync with my enthusiasm for the subject, I asked my fellow writers, But, how do we make our quiet stories entertaining? Intriguing? How do we get people (and maybe even publishers) to open to our first page and keep reading from there?
It’s commonly understood that memoir thrives not in the “what happened” but in the “how” of what happened and the larger meaning we can extract from a series of events. Since our readers know that we, the narrator-protagonists, survived to tell our tale, the tension has to come from elsewhere. For those of us who are not famous and who are weathering fairly common experiences, a helpful way to create that tension or intrigue is through literary devices, intentionally making our stories a little extra through the kind of craft choices often associated with fiction. Metaphors, motifs, flashbacks, flashforwards, toggling between tenses, all manner of unique structures.
All sauce, all free, and I might mix them all together, too.
Of course, the examples of this in both fiction and nonfiction abound. In her latest novel, Whistler, Ann Patchett creates a haunting metaphor out of a seemingly minor side story about a horse, while The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans, is written almost entirely in letters and emails. In the realm of recent memoirs, I love Hua Hsu’s masterful treatment of exposition and generalized time in his Pulitzer-winning Stay True. Michelle Zauner starts Crying in H Mart with a first line that seems like a spoiler. In my classes, I often reference the proliferation of sensory details in the work of both Susan Ito in I Would Meet You Anywhere and Kelly McMasters in The Leaving Season. I marvel at how Javier Zamora maintains a childlike voice and POV throughout the entirety of Solito. All of these works are the result of decisions and personal, stylistic policies. Each of these authors has crafted their story with extra sauce.
Emily Dickinson famously said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” I’ll tweak this slightly to say, “…tell it with sauce.”
My quiet memoir, Motion Dazzle, is about losing my mother to dementia and other ailments when I was 40 and she was 77. This is not a particularly scandalous turn of events or overly dramatic (especially according to the faceless voices behind the backlit emails, articles, and newsletters of the publishing industry). To make my story intriguing (or more palatable or “tasty” for my purposes here), I leaned into the element of time and harnessed the power of coincidence.
My mother passed away on my son’s first birthday, the day I was hosting a zebra-themed party for him. I decided to tell the story of that one day as part of a dual timeline where I plotted forward through the party preparations à la Mrs. Dalloway. (Weirdly, I was not conscious of this similarity when drafting, and made the connection only while promoting my book). Then I jumped back in time to provide the context of my career as a former competitive figure skater and coach and also attempt to describe why I was only finally becoming a mom at the age of 40. I sauced up the story in a variety of additional ways, with…many (many) parenthetical comments, a directed you (to my son), and inviting in a few different metaphors connected to the most magical creature on earth: zebras. (Motion dazzle is the survival mechanism their stripes provide. When predators want to pounce, they get confused and dizzied by the moving patterns.)
My sauce policy for this book was: All sauce, all free, and I might mix them all together, too. I was Oprah, tossing out packets to my reading audience. I had them loaded into a sauce launcher and I shot them into my (hopefully adoring) crowd.
My sauce policy will of course not be your sauce policy. Just as yours might not be Ocean Vuong’s (swoon), or Lidia Yuknavitch’s (double swoon), or good ol’ Hemingway’s. As writers, we are developing our own styles as we go. We embellish our stories freely or we keep them straightforward and sparse. I would say this is true for all adult humans as we establish our own ways of being: as parents, as partners, as professionals, as friends, as conversationalists, as home and apartment dwellers. We speak with animation or keep it more controlled. We decorate our homes minimally or to the max. We accessorize a bit or a lot.
The nice thing about writing, and life (and I guess owning a McDonald’s, too) is that we can change our policies over time. This might happen as we rack up more life experiences or in the revision process. We can print out a new sign to put in our drive-thru windows, or just take it down and decide not to replace it, allowing our policies to remain in flux and unstated, until further notice.
As a result of reading (and living) widely, we might decide that yes, it’s time to add more nuanced offerings, and, maybe, try to concoct some that never existed before, too. This is my state of mind as I currently read The Sisters, the brilliant and well-sauced novel by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.
If McDonald’s can offer anywhere from 7–9 sauce selections for McNuggets, if Oreo can roll out Chicken and Waffle cookies, and if Michelin-rated chefs can make foam out of smoked potatoes and deer blood, we can bounce between third and first person with a packet of second person and perhaps sprinkle in a whole other invented language, or an alien in a dream sequence that ends up being your sleepwalking neighbor, Ted.
It’s equally valid to stop offering sauce altogether in order to simplify amid chaos. Unlike the current FDA and CDC, we can provide full oversight to our writing. As we move forward in our projects, in our careers—in our word kitchens—we can provide that extra sauce, or, if it’s not working for some reason (or proving to be hazardous!) we can, I tell you, choose to recall it or ban it altogether. Make your policy. Modify as needed.
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Jocelyn Jane Cox is the author of the award-winning book, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice (Vine Leaves Press, 2025). Her writing on craft topics has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Literary Hub, Brevity Blog, and Chill Subs, and is forthcoming in Writer’s Chronicle. Other work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, Literary Mama, The Offing, Colorado Review, and Belladonna Comedy. Her fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Sarah Lawrence College.
Cover image credit: German matus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
