All I have to say is Wow.
Here's a recent Jen Louden blog post, wherein she reveals the memoir she has worked on for the last four years doesn't work. The title is My Memoir Doesn't Work and Why I Am Not Devastated About It.
My favorite part is in the middle, but read all of it:
What I mainly feel is light and peaceful. That’s because I have learned and changed and grown so damn MUCH from writing this book and I wouldn’t change that for anything. Writing these 500 pages (!!) has been more powerful than any personal work I have done.
I am a different person because I took on the shaping of my story. I am a different person because I wrestled with and made some sense of the suffering and ugliness. I am a different person because I stretched my self as a writer to choose to make the dross into meaning. Into story.
We become the person who can write the story we want to write by writing it. And even if the story doesn’t come out beautifully shaped and ready for readers, even so, we carry the boons of the quest back for ourselves and our community.
"We become the person who can write the story we want to write by writing it."
This sounds reductive or iterative, but it is so so true. And it really takes me back to the zero ground place of - if we aren't writing memoir in order to write memoir, then we are writing for the wrong reason. Publishing and success are far from guaranteed, and what they bring will absolutely not match our preconceptions. So get something out of the journey, or stop doing it altogether.
No comments:
Post a Comment