Change Your Book and Change Your Life

Writing memoir is not therapy. Sure, the process of writing can be therapeutic, and journaling, free-writing, and writing with intention can be part of a healing process (ideally one with professional support). But writing for strangers to read, to be moved and entertained and perhaps even to apply the lessons of your life to their own is not therapy, any more than cabinet-making or art-quilting or singing in the choir replaces prescription medication or a good psychologist.

Writing memoir can be better than therapy.

I’ve written before about how to end your memoir: discover your dramatic question and end with the answer. What, in the beginning of the book, is Memoir-You seeking? The book ends when you find it.

• If you don’t yet have the answer, write an imaginary final chapter in which Memoir-You finds the answer.
• Make a list of the steps Memoir-You would have taken to reach that answer.
• Take those steps in your life until you get to the answer.

You’re allowed to write the answer you want! Try drafting a final chapter where you reconcile or come to terms or move on, but pay attention to what feels false or like wishful thinking. If you can’t sell a resolution to yourself on the page, you’re unlikely to be able to bring it to reality—yet, when you write the answer that is within your power, even an improbable conclusion will feel true. Perhaps it’s the hard answer, or the one that takes steps you dread (but that your writing brain knows are necessary). Writing down the destination and identifying how Memoir-You got there can bring a sense of purpose, of control over our own outcome. Clearly identifying steps that make sense in a manuscript plot allows us to take those steps in reality.

This process may sound over-simplified, but more than one writer has told me, months or years after trying this technique, “I just lived the end of my memoir!” The answer wasn’t always exactly what they’d written—but having analyzed the ending they sought, they knew when they’d reached finality.

Writing the rest of the book can also change our lives. As an editor, I don’t know your family. I see characters, actions, situations. When a narrator and a major character fight, I don’t see the years of hurt before the explosion unless it’s written. As an outsider, I see larger context, not only the actions of the rest of the people in the story, but also the times, the social mores, the cultural expectations.

Responding to a manuscript, I asked one memoirist: Why is Character-You still so angry with your father at the end of the book? I see your dad hugging you, taking you to baseball practice, paying your college tuition, trying to kick heroin and failing, then trying again, and again. Adult-You despises his weakness, but from the outside, it looks like your father kept trying, and finally succeeded. Throughout your father’s addiction, he still showed up for your milestones and was present in your daily life. Why is Now-You still concluding, “Dad didn’t love me enough to quit so now we’re estranged” rather than “Dad tried really hard to get out of a powerful addiction and eventually did”?

Revisiting what he’d written, looking at his childhood with an analytical eye, assessing his father’s actions as the writer had written rather than as he remembered, allowed the writer to reconsider their relationship and reconnect before his father died. Re-evaluating the character allowed the writer to forgive the person. Changing his view of his own story changed his life.

As editors, teachers and colleagues, we are a small part of a writer’s journey to publication. As I wrote last week, we are not therapists, and must carefully consider our feedback in terms of drama on the page, not the person in front of us. Personal change through writing memoir is a byproduct, not our primary goal.

But creation for an audience, focusing on the consumer, the reader or viewer or listener of our work, allows us to step outside the moments we emotionally experienced and take control as author. It is powerful to retell our own story with care for the reader, and more powerful still to examine our own character with the cold eye of the dramatist. To look back and say, That was terrible behavior—and now I see why they did that. Now I see why I did that. We grant grace to ourselves and others by stepping back and weaving in context, setting, situation, our passions and our foibles. We truly understand—and we can make the reader understand, too.

One gift of memoir is when the reader realizes, I’m not the only one who felt like that. Another is when the reader learns, I, too, can change. The most valuable of all is the writer’s discovery: I already changed.

--

*Originally published on the Brevity blog: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2024/11/01/change/