Memoir Writing: Finding What is True, and Balancing Darkness with Light

I have been writing a lot of memoir and creative non-fiction recently. In plumbing those murky depths it feels like I have tapped a well, one that is often unpredictable.

It’s tiring, it leaves me fuzzy-brained, full of nostalgia, regret, wistfulness for the passing of time. It's me judging “past me” for not making better decisions, it’s a whole host of emotions.

Writing memoir is sometimes (often 😉) cringe-inducing for me, but I believe it is something that I can write semi-well, so it’s a push-pull of wanting to be a better writer and also not wanting anyone to read it, ever!

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last. — Ralph Keyes

It feels like I am clearing out the clogged gutters of my mind with memoir writing. Many of the stories feel uncomfortable or elusively slippery when I try to look at them with a critical eye.

In certain cases, I was young and so, so dumb, but it also amuses me on some level so I try to make light where I can. But then I second guess myself on that too — was this mortifying moment really funny or am I just trying too hard to re-write it as such to ease my embarrassment or regret?

When writing about struggles in life, it can also be tempting to wallow, oh, just a little. Just me? Often I am discovering for the first time how I really feel about something I maybe buried or haven’t dealt with.

“Do not go about in pity for yourself” — Tony Soprano (co-opted from an Ojibawe quote: Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.)

It can be liberating and intoxicating in a way to open up these vaults. The urge to rail against any injustices suffered, or to self-soothe with words, is often potent for me.

Sharing tough times can be connective and illuminating, but it can also be draining on both author and reader if it goes too far into self-pity or despair.

It’s totally ok to feel those emotions, but as a writer, I feel the need to balance them out with some kind of distance or humor to avoid overwhelming or even alienating the reader.

In terms of happier moments, they present the different allure of rolling around in the fluffy, warm memories, sometimes blowing them up to be bigger than they were. Wasn’t it all too beautiful?

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” -William Faulkner

(Damn Bill, why you gotta call me out like that?! )

It’s easy to sink deeply into our feelings when writing memoir; it feels good once we get going, tapping into that well. But to connect with a reader they also need to have breathing room.

It is a balancing act, an art form when done well. Someone like David Sedaris can recount the grim details of his drug addiction and have it be among the funniest things ever written, but it’s a very high bar.

Of course, not all memoir needs to or should be funny. As someone who has written about my experience with cancer, I oscillate between the heavy stuff, (admittedly most of which doesn't see the light of day), and trying to find ways to inject humor where I can. It’s not easy.

It’s one thing for me, a person who got through it, to joke about it, but I don’t want to be insensitive to the plight of others either.

Overall I do feel humor helps create a common ground if a writer is covering subjects that the reader is otherwise less inclined to understand or care about.

If humor isn’t naturally in a writer’s wheelhouse, it’s not the end of the world, but finding ways to insert a feeling of lightness to try to balance out the darkness in the writing is something I try to aim for.

I also think it is good to take a step outside yourself when writing memoir or non-fiction, to ask if you are being truthful in the ways that matter, and fair on anyone else involved who might god forbid stumble across it.

All memoir is just one person’s version of events after all, but I think it is in the writer’s best interests to show a little perspective that isn’t totally one-sided where possible.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Great fiction actually teaches us a lot about this skill as a writer, in showing us ways that protagonists can be fully fleshed, imperfect, and even untrustworthy at times.

Nobody likes a boringly perfect character; it’s not relatable. Their imperfection is what makes them interesting, and it can be fun to play with your image of yourself, to make fun of it even, in personal storytelling.

For instance, I have a story I have been working on for a while that originally stemmed from me feeling powerless and humiliated during a series of related events. But I wasn’t comfortable where that left “me” as the authorial voice. It made me feel like I sounded like a victim*.

So I looked at it from another perspective and got more honest about my own part in the story. I wrote as if outside myself and found that I felt more comfortable presenting “me” as an additional antagonist of sorts in it.

It had the side benefit of lifting my own internalized heaviness to acknowledge that I had an agency that I might not have felt or understood at the time, despite the experience initially feeling disastrous in every way to me.

I admit I find this easier to do with the slight additional distance that creative non-fiction provides vs. straight memoir.

I think it is a more empowering story now. It’s not as clear-cut as it might have been, but it no longer reads as too one-sided (I hope) on a subject that could have easily been written in shades of black and white.

Channeling this “outside of ourselves” perspective can be helpful in creating space for the unexpected when it comes to writing memoir or cnf, which can often feel constricted with the authorial obsession with finding the “truth” of the situation.

There is a popular saying from the author Anne Lamott that writers like to reference that goes “If people wanted you to write warmly about them they should have behaved better”. I like it, but it’s not the biggest challenge of memoir writing in my opinion.

I don’t think it’s as important as telling this part of the story: How did you behave? Are you sure you’re not giving yourself an easy ride? Can you write something more about it that isn’t merely retelling your version of events/perhaps over-justifying or making your own actions seem heroic/unassailable?

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the “I” that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist. -Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction — (I haven’t read this book but I like this quote!)

If you keep writing through it you might remember that one thing you did or said that you really want to leave out. It may make you look weak, silly, pathetic, arrogant, desperate, unkind — any number of things it’s easy to whitewash when telling our version of events.

If it reveals some secret underbelly of yourself you aren’t proud of, maybe take a peek at that. It’s uncomfortable and scary sometimes, but it feels more authentic, to me anyway, to dig for the sometimes less flattering sides of our humanity where we can.

Maybe people will judge you, but at least they won’t be bored. It might even turn into something that changes how you originally processed the event. And you will know you tried to say something true not just for you, but for all of it.

The writer must hew the phantom rock— Carson McCullers

*When I say I don’t wish to sound like a victim, I want to clarify that I feel writing about actual trauma is an entity unto itself. I believe in the bravery and importance of sharing certain stories however they need to play out. Get that stuff out in whatever way is possible.

This article was originally published on Medium.