At a recent book event where I spoke, an audience member about my age took hold of a microphone to ask, with something bordering on combativeness, if I had a will. She said she asked because I was old, as was she, and we were both going to die soon.
I was taken aback. My memoir, The Erratics, touches only glancingly on my age and not at all on how I keep my paperwork – but this question made me think about how we write memoir, and how we read it.
I have put myself on the page, the real me, as close as I can get, no makeup, no filters. That is your brief as a memoirist: to tell the truth, clear and unadorned. You say not how you wish it had been, but how it was.
It remains, nonetheless, your truth. You may hope a reader will relate to the larger themes and dilemmas your story illustrates, but you have written a personal story. If you have written well, readers will feel they know you, the same way they might know a character in fiction.
And since it is personal, and because they too have stories to tell, they often ask: was it painful to write this? Was it a relief to get it out there? Was writing this book cathartic? If you have written vividly, they may imagine you did so in the grip of the chaos of emotions and occurrences you describe.
Memoirists seem to come down clearly on one side or the other of the catharsis question. You will find many who feel as I do, and say no, it was not cathartic.
Here is the American writer Dani Shapiro, quoted in Meredith Maran’s collection of interviews, Why We Write About Ourselves, expressing the idea that memoir is not catharsis:
I’m not a believer in memoir as catharsis. It’s a misapprehension that readers have that by writing memoir you’re purging yourself of your demons. Writing memoir has the opposite effect. It embeds your story deep inside you. It mediates the relationship between the present and the past by freezing a moment in time.
I agree, and I would go further. My feeling is that to write your best book, you must come clean to the page, no agenda, with a story to tell: willing to make yourself vulnerable, wanting no revenge or payback, not expecting the writing to assuage your grief and your pain. If you can do this, you are free to find the most fitting form to tell your tale.
When I was younger, I was obliged to deal with my destructive demons. I could not have lived the life I have, had I not confronted them. There are many ways to do this: psychotherapy in many guises; spirituality, meditation, mindfulness; physical effort and achievement – marathons, mountain peaks; fighting for a cause that seeks redress for trauma. I chose one, and it has served me well.
However, for every memoirist who thinks as I do, there are many who feel the opposite: that writing a memoir should, and does, provide catharsis. Sometimes the next step, when a writer feels this, can be a desire to provide a guide for readers who are suffering, a plan for reconfiguring the past and using it to move forward.
I believe the difference between these two positions lies in intent, and in process. When I wrote The Erratics, I simply wanted to tell what I believe is a common story – a broken family, the need to make sense of trauma, the search for meaning in choices – but not because I believed I could provide an example to follow. I just hoped the themes I evoked might resonate with readers.
I took care with the form I gave the memoir; I tried hard to keep the voice true. I hoped to create some beauty on the page, and felt I might find a way – not at all through detachment from my subject but because, having dealt with my demons elsewhere, I had breathing room to concentrate on how best to write.
An important thing to remember about writing is this: it is infinitely elastic, the possibilities limitless. Every writer feels differently about the endlessly morphing process. You can spandex what you want in there, and hopefully you may touch some readers with what you have toiled over.