Therapy often gets a bad rap. It’s just two people having a conversation, or often as it works out, one person talking a whole lot more than the other with a few guided questions here and there from the mostly silent one who is writing (doodling? making grocery lists? CYAing?) on a pad concealed from the speaker. I jest, jest a bit.
Mary Karr, author of three memoirs and the memoir craft book, The Art of Memoir, makes it clear that she thinks memoir is in some ways more satisfying than fiction. Karr writes:
However often fiction has served as a fig leaf for lived, remembered experience, the form doesn’t promise veracity of event. As I turn a novel’s pages, a first-person narrator may seduce me, but the fact that it’s all made up and not actually outlived oddly keeps me from drawing courage outside the book’s dream. The deep, mysterious sense of identification with a memoirist who’s confessed her past just doesn’t translate to a novelist I love, however deliciously written the work (p xvi-xvii).
Confessed her past.
As if living were sin. As if to live a life and tell it is something you tell a priest to rid yourself of guilt. As if to live a life and tell it to reconcile yourself to events not entirely in your control that made you feel guilty and act in sinful ways - this is the job of therapy.
Karr even says, “In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them” (p. xxi).
With all of the revising I have done, it’s just possible there is one more revision needed. Of course, I’d prefer an agent to snap up my memoir and then work with an editor to shape the book into something even more sale-able. I think as it stands, it’s a sale-able book. The trick is convincing an agent to take a chance on it in a fickle and crowded marketplace.
But I also sometimes think, was I ready to write a memoir? I started out writing about my brother, more in line with biography than memoir. His life quickly dove-tailed with my own. Hitting a brick wall in career and the dysfunctions of academia, it became clear that it was that dysfunction I was writing about. Why didn’t I get sick like my brother? How was I able to overcome some incredible stresses and dysfunctions and get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other and keep remaking myself again and again and again? When were others going to stop pushing me off my path?
More to the point, when was I going to hold my ground and stop others from pushing me off my path?
It’s not that I was spineless or naive. You have to recognize some mistreatment AS mistreatment before you can hold your ground or shove back. You have to see clearly. And I was blinded by so many things for so many legitimate reasons. The thing is, I make no excuses.
Karr lists 10 reasons that you’re not ready to write a memoir. In brief:
1) caring too much what others think about writing a memoir;
2) having a bad memory;
3) you’re too close to events in time - let at least 7 or 8 years go by (my events are 7-18 years ago and comprise an 11-year span - and it’s actually the 7 year events that were easier to write about because the dysfunction was more overt and I had tools to deal with it);
4) wait, if you’re young - Dave Eggers not withstanding.
5) writing for therapy - writing may be therapeutic, but if you need therapy, go hire a therapist.
6) writing for revenge.
7) writing about people you hate, or while going through a divorce.
8) writing about a group or class of people - don’t bring an entire culture down on your head.
9) right-headed person - someone who never apologizes or changes her mind.
10) If you can’t rewrite (revise), give it up!
As I worked into the memoir form and began dealing with some traumatic events in my life, I sought out a therapist.
Because of my work situation and the benefits, it was very difficult to find a therapist in the northeast. I was qualified but of the 20 therapists I called in my network, only 2 called me back. But one of the ones who called back was someone I thought I wanted to work with based on what she’d written on her website. It took three months to find a therapist.
I worked with her for a little over a year. I had been in therapy for many many years in support of spouse and families, rarely for myself. Twice, both times following divorces, I had extended therapy to make sense of things and to find ways to move forward peacefully.
But therapy for writing was different. It was like I was also watching the therapy (something I did in much therapy that wasn’t for me but to which I was invited and encouraged to participate).
I liked watching and analyzing a therapy session from within, hearing the questions the therapist asked, seeing how the participants took on a subject straightforwardly, or skirted the issue, or outright lied.
Therapy while writing, however, was for the purpose of making art. I didn’t want to just “tell my story of woe.” I wanted to connect it to other people, readers.
I wanted to make that story of woe both artistically viable as well as something entertaining that could help someone get through similar dysfunctions in their own lives. But I wanted to be true to my experiences and that meant dealing with the shit in ways more honest than I had ever done before. I did not want my memoir to be a “he said/she said.” I want there to be the truths in it that anyone who reads memoirs can extrapolate from the overwhelming sense of subjectivity that a memoir necessarily offers. I don’t have answers to all of life’s problems, or even to all of my own problems.
But I know a whole lot more about how the past still nibbles at my heels like a piranha, or how I have dealt with or not dealt with the past for . . . reasons.
I have put most of the issues in this book to rest either out of necessity or because of someone else’s decisions. The past I write about, I don’t live there anymore.
I’ve learned to live in a present of my own making.
But I can still conjure the past and wonder - why the hell did things happen like that? What did I know? What didn’t I know? What was I told - and what wasn’t I told? There are stories in all of those question. I don’t always like the answers I find when I go searching for them. But I do try to get as close to the truth of them as I can.
Which brings me to the last point - who is my memoir for, dear reader? Why, it’s for you.
Karr writes:
And here are some questions that might nudge you along. What were you trying to get, and how? Which ways worked? Which didn’t? If it’s a particularly awful memory for your character, you have to be sure not to make it more awful than it was. Many of us disassociate or check out during awful times, so maybe you want to convey that to the reader. The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in [emphasis mine]. Otherwise, the reader will gawk at you like somebody on Springer, or she’ll pity you—in both cases, you lose some authority. The book becomes too much about your feeling and not enough about the reader’s (p. 33-34).
There are times when I thought Jerry Springer’s show was tame in comparison to my life, especially two specific periods (a divorce and an end of a relationship). They shared a great deal. One impacted the other. They were train-wrecks.
Karr says about working on/writing these difficult scenes:
Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself. What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have seen in differently?
And most of all, how am I afraid of appearing? Go beyond looking bad or good. Is there posturing or self-consciousness you could cut or correct or confess [my emphasis] and make us of? (p. 34)
We come full circle to the “confession” again.
How do I want to appear to readers? Have I been truthful about presenting myself, warts and all?
And so I go back, again and again. What truth do I tell? I’m attempting to tell an unvarnished truth. Perhaps a little varnish and shellac, a little finishing, is just what my memoir needs. I’ve polished it. I’m on the lowest grit sandpaper available.
But maybe, just maybe, I should go over it again.
Agents, editors - help me out here. I’m ready for my close-up.
Thanks as always for reading. If you enjoyed this, please share it with someone.
If you know of someone who is into memoir or T.S. Eliot or writing and querying and publishing, if you know of any agents or editors who are looking for THIS great memoir, please have them subscribe.
Less than 4 weeks until we’re on the road to a new home. For now, until next week, stay cool, stay hydrating in this heat, binge watch something good, eat good foods.
Until next week, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Great post!