I listened to a wonderful conversation between Emma Gannon and Elizabeth Gilbert last night. I’m a paid subscriber to Emma’s Substack, The Hypen, and we’ve met a few times. When I saw this treat drop into my inbox earlier in the week I knew I wanted to save it until I had time to properly enjoy it. So last night, I cooked myself a dinner for one (accidental reference to Emma’s recent novel there), snuggled up under a blanket and devoured their words.
There was so much that stuck with me about this conversation and it really fuelled my thinking about why people write memoir. This has been on my mind recently as I’m writing my own memoir. This was a piece of work I started around five years ago then promptly put in a draw. I remember driving somewhere when the radio got stuck on some strange station for intellectuals that I never listen to. An author was being interviewed and the interviewer was talking to them about the process of writing their book. This person said, “writing a book is bloody hard, you have to really want to do it.” And at that moment I thought, I don’t think I want this enough and I stopped. That was maybe three years ago.
The fact is though, I do really want to do it. And if I’m honest, I think I have to do it. One thing Elizabeth Gilbert talked about was how she often doesn’t have a choice over what she writes. That it chooses her. And I think it’s the same for me with this story. While I’ve toyed with the idea of experimenting with other books, and I have a few ideas, they just don’t seem to want to form. Almost as if they’re not ready and they know it’s not their turn yet.
With memoir I also think timing is critical. Elizabeth talked about how her recent book, All the Way to the River is about a period of time that happened over eight years ago. This is a book that’s getting a lot of attention, and rightly so. People are calling it raw, and it is in a way, but one of the things I loved most about Elizabeth and Emma’s conversation was their discussion about when writing is raw and when it’s ‘cooked’. All the Way to the River is a beautifully crafted and curated work of art. Yes the emotion and feeling that’s gone into it are raw, the ingredients as Elizabeth puts it so eloquently, but it’s not raw as an entity.
While the period I’m writing about concluded around 10 years ago now, I wonder if even two years ago, it wasn’t the right time. Distance is so important for writing memoir and I think this means different things to different writers. Memoir often covers difficult or traumatic periods in a persons life so that distance is needed, not only to protect the writer but to allow them the time to derive meaning from the experience. Mary Karr, in her brilliant book ‘The Art of Memoir’ talks about how she once heard Don DeLillo quip “that a fiction writer starts with meaning and manufactures events to represent it; and a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.”
One of the most common misconceptions I get when I talk to people about my writing is that I’m doing it for therapy, to process what happened. To that I usually offer a fairly sarcastic response about the amount of money I’ve spent on actual therapy. While I am sure many memoirists draw on journals to shape their work (I really wish I had some of those), memoir isn’t therapeutic processing and it’s often not for the writer themselves. Yes it can be healing for the writer but I would offer that most memoirists are doing it to help other people. Emma Gannon talked about her how her writing has often come from looking for a book during a difficult time and not being able to find it - so she wrote it. Books can be life lines for people and that’s ultimately why I want to write memoir. I want people to see themselves in my stories and know they are not alone.
I’m going to be honest that there is a self motivated reason for writing this today. I have my first tutorial at Goldsmiths next week and I know I’m going to get asked why I’m writing this book. So, with the help of Elizabeth and Emma, I think I’ll say that I’m writing this book because I have to - if I ever want to write any further books! I’ll say that I’m writing it for the people out there who are living, or have lived, the same unusual family dynamic that I experienced. I’m writing it hoping that other people can connect with twenty something Emma, and the reckoning she went through to start making sense of what had happened to her while she searched for connection, belonging and stability elsewhere. And I’ll be continuing to derive meaning as I write. Meaning that I hope will impact my own understanding of that period of my life while shaping me as a person.
This doesn’t mean it’s an easy task. I have to admit I started off thinking it would be easier than fiction but there are so many aspects of memoir that are unique to the genre. Wrangling memory and truth, figuring out how to characterise people you know, grappling with how to represent others fairly and factually. And that’s before you even get into the legal and ethical ramifications. It’s not something people undertake lightly and I question my motivations regularly if I’m really honest. Maybe I’ll hit another point where it goes back in the drawer for a few more years but for now I feel motivated to dig this story out of me and get it down on the page.
Well spoken. I agree that the memoir chooses you and that there are certain things that HAVE to be written down before we all go mad! A bit of time and distance away from the rawness also helps with clarity and turning personal feelings into something beautiful that others will want to read. This was the big lesson I learnt at our course last year - there are loads of projects in my writing suitcase but Musa persuaded me to take one, the most powerful and most important to me and get that finished. I nearly have and, like you, my aim now is that part of its appeal will be as a self-help book for others in a similar situation. What's the course at Goldsmith's? Or can I guess...?!