It has been one full year since my memoir published.
The day it went out into the world was overwhelming for me on many levels. I thought I was ready. But really, how can anyone be ready for laying out their most private secrets in full view? And, how can you prepare yourself for what might come back in reaction to it?
You can’t.
You just have to go on faith, a gut instinct, that you showed up here on this earth plane for a purpose greater than the trauma that has happened on your journey. And yet, maybe it happened with purpose. Because here I am, with open heart, telling you about it. And you are telling me your stories, and together we are growing in our awareness and understanding of healing from trauma.
Until recently, there were two important questions that remained difficult for me to answer. When asked these questions, I could feel my face flush red. I often looked away, my eyes darting, my mind wandering to where I could sidetrack the conversation. And at the same time asking myself, how could I live it, spend fourteen years writing it, and still not know the answers?
“What is your book about?”
“What was the most important thing you learned while writing it?”
The morning my book flew out of my hands and into yours, was, as I said, overwhelming. Sitting at my desk computer, I could see the link on Amazon for A Voice in the Tide: How I Spoke My Truth in the Undertow of Denial and Self-Blame. I was excited and proud.
What a long trip it had been. Too many drafts to count, five editors, a book-designer, dozens of ink cartridges and boxes of paper later, and there it was on the laptop screen. My book cover staring back at me, my mother and I in front of my childhood home, and my name, “A Memoir by Nancy Shappell.” I felt out-of-body exhilarated.
And then, almost in that same moment, an email arrived from a long-time friend with comments on a previous blog I had posted.
“You’re a good writer, but your words have the power to hurt.”
My whole body crashed. I only read that line once and filed the note away to read later, or not.
My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly keep my fingers on the keys to respond. Did I hurt her, this person I loved, perceiving I had personally lashed out at her through a piece of writing?
Shit. I have waited for this day my whole life and now it’s ruined. In reaction, I internalized her statement. I was hurt.
I had survived so much trauma, spent years healing and writing about it, so how could this one comment take me so far down? Shit. I really, really believed that I was much stronger than this.
That day I heard from so many beautiful people. People I knew, who revealed they had lived their own horrific, secret life. People I didn’t know, also in pain, reaching out for help. A teenager who attempted suicide, a sixty-five year old who had lived her life thinking she was crazy, a short story writer who now had belief in herself that she too could publish.
My studio phone rang. My cell phone rang. A best friend sent flowers. It was an amazing first “out in the world” day. When my husband came home from work, he whisked me out the door to celebrate. But on our way for sushi, I asked him to pull into Burger King. I just wanted to sit in a dark parking lot, shut off my phone, and hide. Just for a little while. I couldn’t shake off that one comment. Was it true? Did my words have the power to hurt?
It has taken me one year to understand what happened that day of exhilaration and hurtful reaction. And, what a beautiful gift my long-time friend had given me. The missing pieces, the answers to the questions.
What is your book about?
My book is about our internal dialogue with fear, the choices we make because of it, and how that creates our life experience.
What was the most important thing you learned writing it?
The most valuable lesson I have learned is that people can only come from their own point of reference.
So who was right? My friend perceiving my words hurting her?
Who was wrong? Me perceiving her words hurting me?
Neither. We had both done the same thing.
Our truth is what we perceive in a right and wrong model of interpretation. It is our individual beliefs, based on our own past, present, or future perceived experiences. And with this, we either shut down in fear of rejection, or open up with faith that awareness will grow.
We live our lives according to our perceived limitations. However, if we allow ourselves to get beyond the fear reaction and look as the observer without judgement, a perceived worst day can gift us with the best lessons of all. And that is a huge step in our healing process.
THE DARK SIDE OF A MEMOIR WRITER
THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR FEAR
In Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, Wild, she states, “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told."
There is a darkness in the deep world of a memoir writer. It’s as hidden as the inside marrow of our bones and the microscopic cells of our body memories. Joy, bitterness, shame, reach and grab at the private parts of us, inside and out. Memoir writing is as electric as death bolts in a Florida lightning storm. Cryptic as pulsing orbs in a New Mexico night sky. It is a place we all must go if we are to honestly write memoir.
If you write memoir, you will find it’s like a leaky faucet. A rusty, annoying, dripping sound that you hear rooms beyond your desk. A brain-tapping flow of memories and sensations that, once you have opened its valve, will not shut off no matter how hard you try to make it stop.
Memoir takes you miles and years from where you expected it to. You find yourself deep down in dirty holes of earth that secretly wind through pinching veins that lead to people and places you buried there decades ago. Dead people come back to life with cigarette in hand, blowing their rancid breath up your nostrils. Conversations and colors are vibrant, much too much, at times.
As memoir writers, we drink when we shouldn’t. Forget to eat when we should. We go a day and half without brushing our teeth, lose track of when we showered last, and ignore the people who mean the most to us. We dive deep into our fear, in order to bring up past pain, our torturous teacher. We live in a secret world of conversations with dead people, ex-lovers, and friends we told our toxic secrets to, those who called us crazy and turned away. We seek praise for our work, then doubt it when it comes.
Memoir writers create piles of dusty notes on the floor, just as unorganized as we are. All night with our brains refusing to shut down, we write in our heads, morphing in and out of dream travel. Our bedside light flicking on and off as we grab for pencil and paper, making drunk morning notes too tangled to decipher. Some mornings we pull the covers over our head, knees to our chest in fear, crying out that again we refuse to go to school, only to remember that happened 30 years ago.
When people ask how our memoir is coming, we give a quick answer and change the subject. We know people have no clue how deep into our pain we are, nor do we want them to know. Not yet anyway. What’s your book about? They all ask. That’s the toughest question of all, because we still don’t know. But each morning, again we show up at our desk vowing that today will be the day we figure it out.
Memoir is truth. If you aren’t comfortable with truth, don’t write memoir. If you are opposed to running naked in front of the world with nasty flab dragging off your backside, don’t write memoir. If you only want to write the “they all lived happily ever after” version, and skim over the fucked up parts, don’t write memoir. Readers want to know the down and dirty of you, and they know when you’re avoiding it. Hence, non-truth telling. Don’t do it.
If you only want to take your reader on the “drive by house tour,” telling them what the rooms look like inside, that is not writing memoir. If you take them by the hand, walk them up to the door, step inside, and viscerally help them to experience every detail, how it smells, tastes, and feels, that is memoir.
If you are worried about being judged, shamed, or blamed by everyone you know, and those you don’t, you are in good company. Every memoir writer is terrified of that very same thing. If you do have things that will hold you up to criticism, then you must have some juicy stuff to share. And that’s the whole point. You are not just writing your story, you are writing everyone’s story. Memoir is never about the memoirist, it is about all of us. A universal truth. We all fear. We all want to belong. We all want to be validated. Ultimately, we all want to be loved. And for all of existence, what has been our best teaching tool? Storytelling.
As we shift in our fear, and we must always shift, we understand that in pain there is no stillness. And that this is what brings the light to illuminate our darkness. This is our truth.
HOW MY CATS HELPED ME WRITE A KICK-ASS MEMOIR
It is 8:30 A.M. In the kitchen, I pour my second cup of coffee, then walk through the laundry room, and put my hand on the studio doorknob. Salem is fast on my heels, her black, shiny belly swaying side to side as she jogs. She looks at me with squinted eyes, her long tail swishing as puffs of dryer lint breeze by. She is the only boss I’ve ever had who allows me to come to work in my pajamas. In fact, she insists on it. She doesn’t care that I am not wearing makeup, or that my teeth may not get brushed until just before Michael comes home from work.
Meggie is the next to arrive. Hopping like a kangaroo on her three legs, she finds a warm patch of sun and lingers for a while, laying anchor on a pile of notes. She looks up at me, the corners of her little tiger mouth smiling. I can almost hear her say it, “Whatever you write today, Mom, be it a paragraph or a chapter, will be great.”
Salem moves between the seat of the Pilates Chair and the AB Lounger, never looking any thinner but always with an in-charge attitude. As I get up for another cup of coffee, she nips at my legs all the way back to the desk. Intent on my emotional creative state, they both listen as computer keys click, I make long sobbing sighs and talk to the ceiling. Meggie and Salem have heard it all. Every sentence of my molecule rattled life, read over and over aloud until I could finally do it without crying.
Today my bangs have been pulled back in frustration so many times that they are now standing up like antennas. My waste basket is overflowing with crumpled tissues and cast off pages full of typos. On my desk there is a cup of yogurt I started four hours ago, and next to it is my fifth cup of coffee, which is now cold. I need a break of inspiration and a nap, but as I lay down on my yoga mat, Meggie and Salem nudge at me until I get up and start again.
It is now 6:00 P.M. My teeth have been brushed, I have pulled on some leggings and a sweatshirt, and dinner is bubbling in the crockpot. Meggie makes a bolt for her food dish as Michael comes through the front door. I reach out, running my hand the length of Salem’s silky coat. “Time to end another writing day, Boss”, I say to her, “Tomorrow we will do it again.” Then with a dismount from the AB Lounger and a swishy strut to her back end, Salem and I call it a day.