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.
