Jacobs offers journal ideas for travel, grief, gardening, gratitude, healing and others. Write without fear of censorship. If you kill your internal editor, you'll find an authentic voice. A journal is an absolutely beautiful place to mine information for a memoir. What also happens when you write one of these lists is that you come up with issues to examine further.
Dialogues are also ripe options for self-exploration.
In one class, a woman with terrible rheumatoid arthritis wrote an imaginary conversation with her joints. But this student couldn't contain her emotion. She said, I didn't let my joints talk. All I did was rant and rave. I see how angry I am with my body.