The Workshop Response is an attempt to describe the qualities of your peer’s manuscript specifically, to say more than, "I like this," or "I think this is just beautiful," which is no good, unless you can say why.  At the same time, your job is to help improve the piece, and this involves the delicate, important task of constructive criticism. Your first thought must always be: How can I encourage this person to help them make this piece better? Especially because we are dealing with real stories about real lives, you must always remember to be conscientious and constructive.  I can’t say enough about the importance of this. The first rule, always, is do no harm. Whatever your comments, your goal is to encourage, to have the writer read your comments and turn, excited, to the hard task of revision at hand. At the same time, take a risk, say something that will help the author make their piece better, but say it in a way that it can be received well.

The Workshop Response:

1. What is the memoir’s situation, and what is its story? (You’ll understand what I mean by these particular terms after you read Gornick’s essay THE SITUATION AND THE STORY)  Here are questions about focus that ask you, in two or three sentences, to attempt to get at the essence of the work. 
2. What is the essay's limited persona?  Is the persona limited enough?  How might the persona be more limited in the next draft? 
3. Why is this memoir being told now?  In other words, how is this problem still a dilemma for the author at the time of writing?  How is this problem still vexing, still thrashing around inside the author?  (If the author seems at peace now with this problem, there's no clear reason why this is being told.   If the author seems too much at peace (and you don't buy it), perhaps this is because the resolution is over-simplified, and the author hasn't yet embraced how this problem continues in the present. 
4. What basic orienting facts might be clarified or developed?
5. Is there a "time-of-writing" voice in the draft that is struggling to make sense of the past?  How might this voice be rendered more fully?  What might this voice reflect on?  (Lopate’s Retrospection & Reflection speaks to this.)
6. How does the beginning of the memoir create an "exchange of expectations" between the author and the reader?  Does the piece, as it evolves, meet these expectations?  How does it fail (in this draft) to meet those expectations?  How might it better meet these expectations in the next draft?  Do the expectations created by the beginning of the memoir need to change?  Does the beginning need to change? 
7. How is the memoir an exploration of change for the narrator?  How might this change be made more clear, more developed? 
8. What does the narrator want?  What's in the way?  Are the obstacles formidable enough?  How might they be made more formidable in the next draft? 
9. Are the scenes rendered in this draft the most important scenes?  What needs to be dramatized still? What needs to be more dramatized?
10. What questions do you have that the memoir does not yet answer?  What suggestions can you make that would move this story closer to what it really wants to be about?  What craft areas might be developed that would make the draft stronger and more compelling?  (A characterization more complexly drawn; a scene written that's only suggested; a scene expanded; the setting better described; an object or metaphor put to further use.) 

Notice how, in this response, you're not being asked whether you "liked" the memoir.  You're not in the business of judging this.  It's not done.  You're being asked to describe the formal qualities of the draft.  You're not being asked to "evaluate": you're not being asked to say whether the memoir is good or bad.  You're not being asked to decide whether you would ever want to hand this memoir to someone else to read.  You're being asked to describe it as a system.  Hopefully, what this does for you is take the pressure off.  At the same time, we also have to help the author make their manuscript not just better, but publishable.  All too often, the author has a lot more in their head than is on the page, and they think they've communicated something that they haven't yet.  Help them by telling them what you think it's about, by alerting them to what's missing, and help them by speculating with them (but not prescribing) about the next draft.

Good Luck!