Writing A Memoir: Self-Serving or Community Service?

My previous entries into the world of literature have been fiction, middle-grade fiction to be precise. I've loved the opportunity to create a world and populate it with characters, conflict and creativity. And I'm a little burned out.

So I thought I'd try my hand at non-fiction. After all, if it happened, then all I need to do is re-tell the story and "bang" I've got a book! And if that book is a memoir, even better, right? All that requires is me to drop into "old man" mode and inform the reader about how my experiences will benefit them in every situation...

Wrong.

I'm choosing to write a self-help type book that will allow others to fall back upon my experience as an affirmation that they need not despair, someone else shares their adversity. It deals with my time at the age of 19 when I was diagnosed with mononucleosis. For those of you not aware, I'm LDS, or Mormon (a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), and the nineteenth year of a young Mormons life is very important. It is when he sets aside two years of his life to serve a full-time mission, usually to a foreign country. That's changed a bit, now. A young man can serve at 18, young woman at 19 (it was previously 19 for males, 21 for females).

I pull out the laptop and the first 4,000 flow like water, lots of exposition about why I'm writing this book, how I believe it will help, stuff like that. But now I'm into the retelling of the facts, and I'm finding it rather challenging. Between all my written correspondence with my family (we wrote letters back in 1992) and my personal journal, I spent an entire writing session organizing the dates and events--without writing a single word!

Despite the challenge, I'm enjoying the process very much. It is a story I knew I needed to tell...lots of missionaries get sick, and the conflict between serving God and healing is quite a difficult one. But it feels so self serving. Have any of you ever tackled a memoir? How did you approach it so as to avoid being preachy or arrogant? I'd love to know, so drop me a comment and tell me how your memoir went.