This is my 20th year teaching memoir writing at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. I’m always in awe of the stories people yearn to tell. It’s this yearning, or burning need to write, that finally gets them to the page.
A memoir is written in the first person and follows a clear theme or focus. It’s about a slice of life, not an entire life. Not everyone is inclined to write a memoir. It is not for the faint-hearted. The strongest writing is fearlessness, courage, and a willingness to take risks. A memoir is a conversation with yourself. I often suggest that students begin posing a question that they want answered.
Trauma Memoirs
Trauma memoirs are a category in themselves. The most effective ones are paced both narratively and emotionally, without letting the darkness overwhelm the story. Mary Karr and Joy Harjo have done this beautifully in their memoirs. In her recent memoir, Saved By A Song, Mary Gauthier writes that when trauma is dislodged through writing, it releases some of the infection.
One way to keep the narrative from becoming too heavy is to incorporate humor. Another is to move between the past and the present, blending the narrator’s adult and child perspectives. In his classic book The Courage to Create, Rollo May argues that courage is the foundation of all virtues and makes being and becoming possible. Being courageous while writing a memoir means exposing your inner self, not only to grab readers’ attention but to invite transformation.
Emotional Truth
The most important aspect of writing a memoir is to speak your emotional truth. The emotional truth of a story is how you feel about your experience. You’re writing not to be right, but to be “real,” and that can be liberating. Writing your emotional truth means writing from the heart and reflecting on your experience, which is what sets this genre apart.
When writing a memoir, you are writing your version of what happened from your perspective and emotional truth. Someone else might have another version. It does not make one wrong and one right. It simply makes it different. Keep in mind that your perception might change over time, and that’s OK.
Memoirs and Transformation
My doctoral dissertation explored the healing and transformative powers of memoir writing, and later became my book, Writing for Bliss. The memoirists whom I interviewed for my research claimed that they had a story to tell and felt that they were the only ones who could tell it. Others had secrets to share or wanted to write a memoir to better understand a situation. Other reasons included preserving their family’s legacy, learning more about their family, exploring identity, gaining insight, and healing from trauma.
When interviewing writer Maxine Hong Kingston, she said that her inspiration stemmed from her reflection about what had happened historically to her immigrant family and the ghosts from her Chinese past, regarding her aunt’s suicide. Her aunt had been ostracized from the community for having an illegitimate child and this resulted in her suicide. This erasure haunted Kingston for years. While her mother wanted her to share her stories, Kingston was told to keep the secret about her aunt. Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior as a way to explore these conflicting messages.
For her entire life, Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of celebrated poet Anne Sexton, who died by suicide in her 40s, has struggled to come to terms with losing a mother in such a way. Writing her two memoirs, Searching for Memory Street (1994) and Half in Love (2011), has helped her process and begin to heal from the trauma.
Writing has also helped her confront her own emotional struggles. In the latter book, she said that writing helped her to come to terms with her mother’s death and to disentangle herself from the lasting grip of that loss. Linda Gray Sexton’s writing is powerful, not because it expresses anger or revenge, but because it seeks understanding and release.
The Challenges
In addition to the psychological and emotional shifts of writing a memoir, two of the most difficult challenges are finding a clear theme or focus and deciding on its structure. The memoir might have to be revised many times until the author is comfortable with the final product. In her memoir, Bread of Angels, Patti Smith claims that everything that happens in the years before we are born sets the stage for our existence, underscoring the value of context. Just like in a novel, the protagonist (you) must change from the beginning to the end of the memoir. You also want to keep the reader’s interest, so there needs to be a sense of push and pull to keep the reader engaged.
