This is my 20th year teaching memoir writing at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. I’m always in panic of the stories people want to tell. It is this passion or burning need to write that finally drives 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 a whole life. Not everyone likes to write a memo. This is not for the faint of heart. The strongest writing is fearlessness, courage, and a willingness to take risks. A note is a conversation with yourself. I often suggest that students start with a question they want to answer.
Traumatic memories
Trauma Notes are a category unto themselves. The most effective are both narratively and emotionally paced without the darkness overwhelming the story. Mary Carr and Joy Harjo have done this beautifully in their memoirs. In his last memoirs, Salvation by a songAs Mary Gauthier writes, when trauma is released through writing, it releases some of the infection.
One way to keep the story from being overwhelming is to include it humor. Another is that it moves between past and present, mixing adult and child perspectives. In his classic book Courage to createRollo May proves that courage is the basis of all virtues and makes existence and becoming possible. Being brave when writing a memoir means exposing your inner self, not just trying to win over readers attention but to call for change.
Emotional truth
The most important aspect of writing a memoir is telling your emotional truth. The emotional truth of the story is how you feel about your experience. You write not to be right, but to be “real,” and that can be liberating. Writing your emotional truth means writing from the heart and reflecting your experiences, which sets this genre apart.
When you write a memo, you write you your version of what happened from your perspective and emotional truth. Someone else may have a different version. It does not make one wrong and the other right. It just makes it different. Remember that your perception may change over time, and that’s okay.
Notes and changes
My doctoral dissertation explored the healing and transformative powers of journaling and later became my book, Write for Bliss. The memoirs I interviewed for my research stated that they had a story and felt that only they could tell it. Others had secrets to share or wanted to write a note to better understand the situation. Other reasons were to preserve their family heritage, to learn more about their family, to learn about them personalitygaining insight and healing from trauma.
In an interview with writer Maxine Hong, Kingston said that her inspiration came from her reflection on what happened to her immigrant family and the ghosts of her Chinese past about her aunt. suicide. Her aunt was ostracized for giving birth to an illegitimate child, which led to her suicide. This destruction haunted Kingston for years. While his mother wanted him to share his stories, Kingston was told to keep his aunt’s secret. Kingston wrote Female warrior as a way to explore these conflicting messages.
All her life, Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of the famous poet Anne Sexton, who died by suicide at the age of 40, coped with the loss of her mother in this way. Writing his two memoirs, Search memory street (1994) and Half in love (2011), helped her process and began to heal from trauma.
Writing also helped him deal with his emotional struggles. In her latest book, she said that writing helped her come to terms with her mother’s death and free herself from the lingering grip of that loss. Linda Gray Sexton’s writing is powerful not because it expresses it anger or revengebut because it seeks understanding and freedom.
The problem
In addition to the mental and emotional changes of writing a memoir, two of the most difficult challenges are finding a clear topic or focus and deciding on its structure. The memo may need to be revised several times until the author is satisfied with the final product. In his memoir, Bread of angelsPatti Smith claims that everything that happens in the years before we are born sets the stage for our existence and emphasizes the value of context. Like a novel, the character (you) must change from beginning to end of the novel. You also want to keep the reader’s attention, so there needs to be a sense of push and pull to keep the reader engaged.
