The Characters in This One Can Read.
A memoir goes wrong in ways a novel doesn’t. A life has no plot, the cast can read the book, and parts of it may be nothing you’d want on anyone’s server. Shiro is memoir writing software built with that in mind: the memoir arc to find a shape, a truth and consent pass for the people in it, and files that stay on your computer unless you move them.
A Life Won’t Tell You Where Chapter One Is
Novelists invent their structure. You have to find yours in forty years of material, most of which was not about anything at the time. The usual first draft runs in the order things happened, or the order they still hurt, and neither one is necessarily a book.
Shiro’s memoir template starts with the memoir arc on your Board: the life before, the rupture, the aftermath, the descent, the lowest point, the reckoning, the turning, the life after, and a coda with the narrator looking back. Its beats sit on your cards as a suggestion, with where each might fall, and your life can decline to cooperate without any complaint from the software. The Timeline then sorts sections by when they happened, on real dates, so you can tell 1994 before 1979 and still see what you’ve done.
Research, When the Subject Is You
Memory is a poor archivist. It will swear that the kitchen was yellow. The Research lens keeps the people, places and events of your book in one place, and each entry connects to the sections that name it, by plain word-matching on your computer. Pictures can live on entries, and if you switch on sources, you can read a scanned letter or a hospital record as a PDF in the app and highlight it. There’s also room for an entry on what your aunt remembers, and how that differs from your mother’s version.
The People in It
Among a memoir’s revision passes is one called Truth and consent. Its question is whether the book is true, and fair to the people in it. Its checklist asks whether events happened as told or the book says otherwise, whether every real person is shown fairly, whether consent was asked where it should be, and whether changed names are changed everywhere.
That last one has a tool behind it. Rename someone’s entry and Shiro offers to replace the name throughout the text, snapshotting each changed section first. And when your sister should see the chapter she’s in and no other, a review link on a paid plan shares chosen chapters, with an optional password and an end date. Shiro can’t tell you whether a passage is defamatory. A lawyer can, and for some books should.
The Sections Nobody Else Should See
Some of this book may be written for no one yet. Set a section or a note’s AI access to Never, and it’s marked ai: never in its file: no model, agent, search index or outside tool may read its text or details. If you’d prefer, run AI on a local model that stays on your own computer, or turn it off for the project.
The rest of the privacy is simpler. A local project is a folder on your disk, and the app works offline with no account. Dictation runs on your computer, for the passages easier to say than type, and read-aloud uses your system’s voices. Shiro never trains models on your writing.
One thing to know plainly: cloud projects aren’t end-to-end encrypted, since the server reads them for history and other features. For a book like this, staying local may be the better choice, and you can add encrypted backups with a passphrase.
The Questions People Ask
Can I keep my memoir completely off the internet?
Yes. The desktop app works offline with no account, and a local project is a folder on your disk. It makes no call to a Shiro server until you sign in, and with AI off or on a local model, your text goes nowhere.
Will the AI read a chapter I don’t want it to see?
Not if you set that section’s AI access to Never, which writes `ai: never` in the file. No model, agent, search index or outside tool can then read its text or details. You can also turn AI off for the whole project.
How do I change someone’s name throughout the book?
Rename their entry. Shiro tells you how many times the name appears and offers to replace it in the text, taking a snapshot of each changed section first.
Are cloud projects encrypted so that nobody can read them?
No. Cloud projects are not end-to-end encrypted, because the server reads them for history, webhooks and agents. If that matters for this book, keep it as a local project. Local projects can have encrypted backups with a passphrase.