Today’s article is written by regular contributor Christi Craig.
“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.” ~ Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club
I don’t plan on writing a memoir. My life may be busy and fulfilling, chaotic and frustrating at times, but I doubt I could compile my 42 years into a riveting 300 page book of Me. Still, there are certain stories my gut wants me to put down on paper.
Like the one about the summer I turned twenty-two, when I climbed into the back seat of a tiny Isuzu Trooper and rode all the way from Norman, Oklahoma to the Catskills of upstate New York. So much changed for me during that trip, change embodied in the green hills of Pennsylvania as they rose and fell alongside me like waves. I left in one state of mind and returned a totally different person: tan, nursed by the woods of Rhinebeck, New York. And, in love.
And another about how, the week after my mother died, I desperately clung to whatever artifacts of hers I could, from her Bible to that pair of gaudy glasses she wore in the late eighties. Those glasses sat out on a table at my house for months, maybe a year. Why did she keep them, and why couldn’t I let them go?
As I begin to put some of these memories down into tiny essays, I realize more and more that memoir—in long form or in short—presents an ongoing challenge: that of telling the truth.
The Fact of the Matter
It isn’t that I don’t remember the details, or that I worry about who said exactly what. When it comes to memoir and memories, you “tell the stories as accurately and artfully as your abilities allow,” as Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd say in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. The Who, What, Where and When of a story shouldn’t vary between two people, but the How or Why might unfold in entirely different ways.
After my road trip from Oklahoma to New York that summer, I flew home to visit my parents and discovered that their marriage was quickly falling apart. Or perhaps, after too many years of strain, the threads holding them together finally unraveled. Either way, in the months that followed, I found myself in the middle of their divorce. By choice, but also because I didn’t know better. Certain events and conversations stick with me in uncomfortable ways, so I’ve tried to write about them. The facts are set down easily enough; it’s everything in between—and the potential effects afterward—that present the hazards.
Emotional Consequences
“There is a ripple effect each time a memoir is published, and while the memoirist cannot fully prepare for it, he or she should expect it.” ~ Anthony D’Aries in Writing Lessons: Memoir’s Truth and Consequences
The ripple effect, that’s what I worry about. How can I write what I saw and heard and felt and avoid shedding negative light on someone I love? Do I need to write those stories? Even more important, must I share them?
I’m a writer. It’s what I do, how I understand the world around me. And, I know I’m not alone in walking this tricky line when writing about personal experiences. So, I’ve been studying books, talking with other writers, and asking for critiques of my early drafts. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up so far:
- First drafts are for your eyes only. Sometimes, I have to get through all the weird and uncomfortable and (what feels like) an inventory of wrong-doing before I get to a place of real understanding or peace about an event. First drafts offer a safe haven for such writing, because I’m the only one who will be reading the work at this point anyway.
- Check your motives. Through each rewrite after that first draft, I ask myself, Why am I writing this? And, who is the main focus in this story? Never, ever, write for revenge. And, as Kidder and Todd in Good Prose say, “Be harder on yourself than you are on others. . . . You will not portray [them] just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.”
- Share the story with someone you trust. I’ve requested feedback from a family member as well as other writers on some of my recent work, asking if my story reads full of self-pity or too much criticism of another or less literary and more fit for my journal. When writing memoir, friends or family may be just as valuable as writing partners.
- Let it go. After I’ve checked my motives and revised an essay time and again, after I’ve discussed it with someone else (and rewritten it one more time), then I have to let it go. Like D’Aries says, we cannot control what others think or how they see an event in comparison with the way we saw and understood it. But, if we’re driven to put our stories on paper, and share them with others, then we have to be ready to face every consequence—good and bad.
Do you write memoir in short or long form? How do you move beyond the anxiety of telling the truth?
Great post, Christi. Flash memoir is hot, and a great way to get those “snapshot” memories out there, but even in those short pieces you can be treading tricky terrain. I’m working on a long memoir and have many short pieces I’d like to submit, but some of them make me gulp when I think about it. These are great tips for reviewing those pieces before I hit send.
Susan,
Both the book by Kidder & Todd and the Rose Metal Press guide are excellent books for anyone working on nonfiction, especially flash. I’m actually leading a workshop at the end of August on flash nonfiction using both these books as primary resources. If you’re in town, I’d love to have you join us!
Hello Christi Craig,
I’m totally agree with your great post ! The sense of this article is really amazing & great…I’m totally unable to share what I really feel insight of my heart for this post.
This article is very helpful. A year ago I showed the unpublished manuscript of a book poetry — about the loss of our 21-year-old son — to several other poets and two close friends, and asked them to read it and give me honest responses. I was surprised and hurt to hear my close friends found it too overwhelmingly sad. I’d thought they’d understand, I thought i had “dialed down” the “volume” of sadness enough. For 6 months I could not face the manuscript myself I was so disappointed by their response. Now, almost a year later, I have revised the book a lot, have taken some poems out. The book is still not published because I still feel something has to settle / distill / that I am waiting for a turning of the season. When that has happened, I will be able to let it go. Then I will feel brave enough to trust in the book’s own ability to find its readers. Thanks.
Anne,
You put it well, some things need to settle and distill. Time has given me nice distance from certain events that I couldn’t have written about before and helped me weed out more maudlin parts. Good luck with your manuscript. I think it’s important we pay attention to our instincts that pull us–again and again–back to certain pieces or stories.
This article is very helpful. A year ago I showed the unpublished manuscript of a book poetry — about the loss of our 21-year-old son — to 2 close friends, and asked them to read it and give me honest responses. I was surprised and hurt that they found it too overwhelmingly sad. I’ thought i had “dialed down” the “volume” of sadness enough. For 6 months I could not face the manuscript myself but now, almost a year later, I have revised the book a lot. The book is still not published because I still feel something has to settle / distill / that I am waiting for a turning of the season. When that has happened, I will be able to let it go. Then I will feel brave enough to trust in the book’s own ability to find its readers. Thanks.
Hi Christi, I’ve been following your blog for a while, but I haven’t written to you before. I have been working on my memoir for over ten years, had two agents, and have been rejected by every publisher out there. Now I am doing my MFA, and my peers are encouraging me to keep working on it even though I feel exhausted by the process. There is something holding me back, and mainly, I think it’s because my story includes the stories of my mothers, one of whom I would be alienating completely if it were published. I decided to only work on the first eight years of my life, prior to my adoption, which had nothing to do with my second mother. It’s amazing how much guilt and resurrection occurs when you work on memoir. It’s all I can write, really, because there is so much to write about. I think the honesty thing is why we call it “creative” nonfiction. We cannot recall every conversation, but I focus not on the words, but on the images. My memories ground me in my narrative. Good topic! thanks for writing it.
Marina,
Thanks so much for your comment. I completely understand how you feel. Since writing this post, I signed up for an online class with Lisa Romeo called Writing About Loved Ones (http://lisaromeo.blogspot.com/p/one-week-workshops-you-choose-week.html). Within the workshop (which is only a week & only offered during the summer), Lisa mentions a quote by Kim Barnes who says we should write about loved ones with “complexity and compassion.” In doing so, we give them more depth and lean less on who did what & why it hurts so. I would certainly recommend Lisa’s course and wish you much luck with your manuscript!
Great post. I think this is one of my favorite blogs these days – and this is certainly an issue I’ve struggled with myself.
My memories are what they are, and I do recognize they may not be accurate. When I write about family, I start with writing out what I remember, good or bad, and then I may speculate on motive.
I don’t make the assumption that bad people do bad things because they like being bad. That’s too simple. Sometimes, speculation on the ‘why’ of a circumstance can be as interesting as the event itself, and certainly softens the blow of a bad event.
Dianna,
Thanks! And, I agree with you: write first, speculate in later drafts. As they say, the real writing happens in the rewriting.
Great post. I think this is one of my favorite blogs these days – and this is certainly an issue I’ve struggled with myself.
My memories are what they are, and I do recognize they may not be accurate. When I write about family, I start with writing out what I remember, good or bad, and then I may speculate on motive.
I don’t make the assumption that bad people do bad things because they like being bad. That’s too simple. Sometimes, speculation on the ‘why’ of a circumstance can be as interesting as the event itself, and certainly softens the blow of a bad event.
Suzannah, thank you for inviting Christi to post her thoughtful commentary on Write It Sideways. Christi, I am posting nightly entries from the diaries I kept in high school and college on my blog, currently called A 1961-65 Park College Diary. I like to think of those entries as snippets or vignettes from my life. This summer I am posting entries from my summer back in Iowa, written 50 years ago to the night. Occasionally I omit something about another person that would serve no useful purpose to post. My thinking is that if I had not chosen to write about it in the first place, it wouldn’t have made it into the diary.
Barbara,
What a cool project. Journal writing is a lost art, I fear, with so much Social Media in our presence these days. I love that you’re keeping it alive in this way.
Great advice. When I was working as a freelance editor, most of the books brought to me were memoirs. They were often “oh poor me” or revenge pieces and I’d have to turn them down. Or people would get so caught up in the minutia of “the facts” that they’d forget story.
The truth is it’s very hard to create a compelling narrative arc in memoir, so the “memoiric essay” is, I believe, the best form for memoir. Great insights here, Christi!
Thanks so much, Anne!
As someone who has been writing fiction for years currently making a foray into writing a memoir, I couldn’t agree with your four points more. It’s a different process, writing memoir, it certainly is! I’ve experienced every one of the things you’ve listed during the writing: writing a first draft for my eyes only; always questioning the motives; sharing excerpts of the second draft with a few trusted and honest readers to tell me how it reads. I am still working on the fourth point and some days I seriously wonder if I will just cram the whole thing in a drawer once it is completed. It’s a sad story. I’m trying to find the light and redemption in it that will balance this out.
The story has haunted me for almost 30 years. I’ve spent that time looking at the events in it from every angle. Many of them have ‘seeped’ into my fiction. The memoir is an attempt at finding the order in the chaos of the events of that time head-on and with direct honesty. Of course, I can’t possibly remember the details of the conversations, the exact chronology of events, the way things looked… it’s too far in the past. The thing I focus on, in this regard, is to remain true to the emotional landscape of the story: I ask myself constantly, as I write, ‘Is this emotionally true?’ ‘Is this true to my experience?’ If it’s not, I try to figure out why – am I glossing it? deflecting something? — and then I rewrite until it is. This can sometimes require a brutal honesty of my own role in the story that can be downright humbling, but I think that by doing this, it keeps the story honest, even if the ‘facts’ aren’t exact.
Cynthia,
I love what you say here, “the emotional landscape of the story.” Even in just putting down the facts, we have to consider which facts we choose to include and which we leave out, as they all affect the emotional landscape of a story.
Good luck with your memoir!
Great article!
Oh boy, how nonfiction presents its own challenges. Facts can be easy enough to report, as mentioned near the beginning of the article, but when you get to states of mind of different people things become blurry, interpretable, and relative. I imagine after writing as objectively as possible, then it may be helpful to remind the reader somehow in the text (without directly addressing them) that the writer’s thoughts as well as the writer’s interpretation of other characters’ states of mind are just that: an interpretation.
And I never really thought about it before, but maybe the question of audience is more important in nonfiction than fiction. Maybe sometimes what’s written should just be for the writer? I don’t know. But even when we write for others where characters are portrayed in a possibly negative light, I imagine we just do our best to write without any judgement. And, possibly write those particular negative scenes from a respective distance without gratuity? Like in a horror movie, we don’t always need to see the actual gore to feel and know what’s going on.
This article really made me think. Would love to read more by this author. Nice job.
Michael,
Thanks for your comment. Definitely, audience plays a part in anything we write. And, I’m working on another piece of nonfiction right now that keeps falling in and out of the “submittable” pile to “other eyes shall never see.” Until I finish the piece (to the best of my abilities today), I won’t know whether to share it or keep it.
Thanks for this post. I’m so happy to read all these comments, too. I’m 50K into a memoir about love and some days it’s so hard to face the page again. I’m glad I’m not alone in this process. I usually write poetry and the length of this book is such a different beast compared to writing a book of poems.
Evelyn,
Longer works are certainly difficult to tackle. I’m learning, though, that shorter works sometimes drag me along at an even slower pace, just as much (with more aches and pains). But we keep at it! Good luck with your memoir.
It just not only article, in fact it’s amazing & superb & appreciable post about truth & life. I really like & appreciate it.
great post. i have a weekly letter to write to my professor and her topic to write on was the quote from Mary Karr. I enjoyed your piece and it also gave me insight of what a memoir should be, because i also have a paper to do on writing a memoir. so again thanks.
I’m in the midst of memoir, younger generations wanting information, but have become aware by their questions, that:
genalogy may list some women, but will follow the male line, and focus on the stories about the males in the family that support an idea of heroism and patriarchy
if the women’s stories are told at all, it will be about their purity, goodness, delicious cookies, and generally how they supported the male’s life.
For example, a recent conversation about a grandmother’s gift at decorating was responded to with a question about guns, and exictement and glorification of the collection and the marksmanship etc. But how does one who lived it include the terror, the misuse to batter and abuse, the money spent on the collection but not food, or even a chair to sit on, the armed threats and drunkenness? And finally, the mother’s constant struggle to protect herself, and that’s why she is memoirized as a b*****?