When I talk about writing a book and what I’m doing, I always say this: It’s like cleaning your closet, when you have to pull everything out and look at it to see what’s there and decide what’s going back in. You make a mess, assess what you have, then put back what you plan to keep. That’s how I’m approaching this book.
One of the hardest things for me to explain is that I’m writing this book. If someone asks me what my book is about, the easy answer is it’s a memoir. It’s about my life. But what about my life? I don’t exactly know yet. I don’t have one particular story that’s burning inside me.
What I know I have are stories. I have big stories that span my entire life and small ones that were only for a season. I have stories about things that have left me curious, stories I’ve been told that have turned out to be untrue, and stories that I’m still in the process of living out.
I have stories I don’t really know how to tell. They don’t belong in the public sphere yet because I have to sort through them, pick them up, and feel their weight in my hands. I need to decide which stories are mine, what I’m allowed to tell. And, of course, which stories are asking me to tell them.
I wish I could understand why I feel compelled to write about my life. But I’ve always felt that I’ve been living out this story for a reason—the broken relationships, the pain, the overarching feeling of being unloved. For years, I’ve been fighting to deal with my past so I don’t recreate it in the present. I’ve been working to live a better story.
What I’ve found is hope. Things can turn around. There’s healing and redemption if you’re determined to find it. And when you do, you can tell your story, even the ugly bits, and come out on the other side. Not that it’s all tidy and cleaned up—because it isn’t—but because something beautiful can be made from all that mess.
The trickiest part about writing my own stories is how they abut against other people’s stories, primarily people in my family. I don’t want to hurt or offend anyone by telling what happened to me or what my experience has been, but that’s bound to happen. Dani Shapiro says that telling a shared story is like being on two sides of the same door. You can only tell your side; the other person can tell their side.
In her memoir, Inheritance, she writes:
When it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own… One person’s experience is not another’s. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five different stories…
Students sometimes tell me that they’re waiting for someone to die before they can write their story… I tell them that they may as well just start now, because it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living. The dead can’t fight back. The dead have no voice. They can’t say: But that isn’t how it was. You’re getting it wrong. They can’t say: But I loved you so. They can’t say: I had no idea.
Shapiro’s words give me courage to write about what happened to me, what it felt like. What I experienced may have been unlike what other family members were experiencing. I felt isolated, alone, and misunderstood. In many ways, I still feel that. Peeling back the layers and retelling the stories is helping me reframe what my life has been. It’s giving me new eyes and a resounding compassion for everyone involved, from my earliest days until now.
I reread Marion Roach Smith’s The Memoir Project last month and was encouraged when she said this: “It’s a mess, it’s supposed to be a mess, and if it’s not a mess, then you don’t yet have what you need, so [vomit] up another one and let’s see what we’ve got.”
The entire book is a kick in the pants to keep writing, asking at each step, What is this about? Stop asking why and look at what. Tell the truth, however you remember it.
I thought about my own work-in-progress—what is this about?—and wrote this in my journal:
- Transformation
- Redemption
- Healing
- Freedom
- Love
I think of these themes when I sit down to write. What I aim to do is look back at the past with a wide-open heart and do my best to tell the truth. As I suss out what this memoir is really about, all I have is the truth and memory. Both faulty and both real.
For everything else, I am still trusting in what I heard someone say earlier this year: The book you’re writing teaches you how to write it.
Because I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyway and trusting that, somehow, whatever is meant to become of all this will become. That includes me, the writer, the one who’s lived these stories and is being shaped by this whole experience.
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