The challenge with memoir is to make it interesting to someone other than the writer.
A memoir should expose the useful lessons, presenting them in a way that explores the inner territory as well as the universal.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is great (though he calls it a novel, not a memoir). He mulls the same Vietnam episodes from different perspectives in different chapters. This technique captures the objective outrage of what war does to the human mind and the inherent disorder in ground war, as well as what war destroys in the righteous warrior. The book is at once personal, intimate, and universal. He also explores the question of what is true in memory, rendering in the reader his own internal confusion.
Warning: The chapter about the young water buffalo brought me to question how intense writing has to be to make its point. I couldn’t sleep after reading it. And no doubt that was part of his intention in writing it for me – to convey his own pain at observing it. The marvel is that he is also conveying compassion for the grief of the soldier who killed it. Another effective and excruciating (and very short) memoir is Dorothy Allison’s The River of Names.
One suggestion is to be in the intensity of your experience, but be objective in capturing the structure that will convey the feelings without traumatizing the reader. I have been asked to give editorial feedback on several manuscript which feel crazy-making to me. For a reader who has been through a similar trauma, this experience could reactivate the experience. I believe that is not good literature. To capture the feeling tone without doing this to the reader, you need to look at the material obliquely.
Many memoir writers approach their story in the most simple and direct way, expecting the reader to understand and respond empathetically. Unfortunately for our culture, most of us are inured to the impact of that journalistic, full-on viewpoint. Try looking at your experience obliquely – perhaps from the perspective of a teacher whose class you were in during the experience.
Many memoirists begin by presenting the material/life chronologically, as it was originally experienced. Though I have seen this work, this approach tends to be short on musing – addressing the wisdom that was learned from the experience, or seeing it in the broad perspective of what the subcultural or life of the antagonist/s did to inform the action.
I just realized that I am writing as though every memoir is grounded in pain. And of course that is not so – for example, C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy. Yet most memoirists seem motivated to write as a way of working through their pain, to stand up for innocence, perhaps even to put the antagonist/s on trial in public view. Does that make for interesting reading for your audience?
An organized way to go about memoir is to focus clearly on the audience you want to reach and what you want them to learn from your writing. If you keep that in mind as you write, you can bypass distracting details that may be what you remember, but which will not further or enrich your story. (But do make notes of each of those distracting details – they are likely to be useful either as prompts or as vignettes within other pieces. Never throw your words away!)
Rather than unraveling the tale chronologically, consider beginning at the moment the turning point was seeded – that moment when the victim rises beyond the circumstances to take charge, to become the author of her/his own life. (In one I edited, it was the phone call informing the victim, who was too drugged out to react, that her mother had died. Which became the moment in which she saw her addiction as untenable.) Then fill in the backstory and explore the overall situation that made the circumstances inescapable at first, but how the inner strength and will were found to shift the situation into an inspiring story.
I will be presenting a teleseminar on working with an editor for the National Association of Memoir Writers on April 26. Please click here for details.
Until next time, delight in the process.
Download PDF The Challenge of Memoir Writing