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"I was vindicated. I'd solved even more of the mystery--Nancy Drew and the Case of the Homeless Girl ... 'I'm glad I found out. Knowledge is power, right?' If I only knew what to do with all this power I had."

That’s Janice Erlbaum writing about a homeless girl she befriended at a New York City shelter. Over the course of a difficult year, Erlbaum struggled to help this girl, uncovering some dark secrets along the way. You can read the results in her new memoir, Have You Found Her.

While fabulists like James Frey give the form a black eye, good memoirs are based on plenty of detective work, both emotionally and physically. Today, Erlbaum explains how she reconstructed the life of this troubled girl named Sam in her new book--helping us become better memoir detectives.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your book incorporates letters, speeches, phone messages, and other archived material from Sam. How did you collect all this material and how did you turn it into prose? Any advice for using this kind of research in an active way, so our memoirs don't end up sounding like scholarly papers?

Janice Erlbaum:
Well, I’m hugely sentimental, and a little bit of a pack rat, so I tend to keep things like letters and cards, especially when they’re from someone very dear to me. So I had a manila folder in my files called “SAM,” into which I stuffed all her letters, drawings, and etc; I also had the few emails she’d sent me in an archive.

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So when it came time to write the book, I just copied and pasted everything she’d sent me, exactly as she’d written it, into the appropriate places in the text.

I wanted to use her words verbatim, firstly because she was an amazing writer, and secondly because I felt that, in a post-James-Frey world,  exact documentation was important in a memoir. But the Random House lawyers actually asked me to paraphrase her words, since I did not own the copyright to her letters. That surprised me.

As for researching a memoir, I would usually recommend that a writer do it sparingly – only as much as she or he needs to in order to jog memories, or to authenticate something crucial to the plot.

And if you do wind up doing research, I would recommend leaving a description of your research out of the narrative. It’s like in movies, when a character has to hack into a computer – it’s really hard to make the act of typing appear dramatic, you know?

So it is with poring over a book. Unless you make a really jaw-dropping discovery in the course of your book-poring or internet-surfing, skip that part, and just tell us what you discovered as a result.