Three Stages of Mindful Memoir

One of the trickiest aspects of memoir is how to turn an aspect of your life into a story - something with a beginning, a middle, and an end; something with plot and conflict; something that will hook the reader and keep them invested. Without it, you are recounting, and that may work at dinner parties, but it won't work for memoir-length work.

Unless you are writing down memories for family (see my post on memoir versus memoirs), and not looking to publish at all, or share other than for the record, this kind of building, engaging, communicating, and directing requires outside help (tester readers, if not editor(s)).

It is in the mirror of other readers where we often run into the gap between what we experienced and what we express - all the way from, "But that's how it happened" to "I can't express it any other way." 

Memoir, by definition, uses the structures and teachings of fiction to shape fact into stories that will pull people along like fiction. We have to take anecdotes, stories we've told, beliefs we've had - subconscious and conscious - and shape them into a narrative, a flow with direction and feeling. We cannot simply lay out the facts and hope others will put two and two together.

This gap between experiencing and expressing is an issue for all humans, in all forms of communication, much less art. How do you take what you are feeling, thinking, what you have experienced, sensed, and turn it into something others can understand? 

There are three stages:

Mental Health Memoir

In the last few months, I have found myself coaching four separate people working on memoirs about mental health struggles. The more I work with groups and individuals on these issues, the more it becomes clear to me how essential these stories are. How rarely they are told with accuracy, total honesty, and just how hard it is to express the experience of struggling with reality, or what you are told is reality, in a way that can be conveyed clearly.

I asked one student recently if she could explain more clearly, for instance, what is it like to lose time? She experienced a manic period a few years ago, and for a month or so she couldn't seem to track time. I asked her if this is considered normal - not because I needed to normalize her experience, but just to give some context. Yes, she said, but she didn't know that until later. She's reluctant - understandably - to explain what was going on since at the time she didn't know. It feels truer to her experience to just tell it like it was, which is to say that she not only lost time but wasn't particularly aware of it, much less losing it.

Autobiography of My Mother

For this quarter's Read and Write, we read and discussed and wrote from Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid. The book, from title forward, is a bit of a mind-fuck, as I said to my students.
First of all, how can someone write someone else's autobiography?
Second of all, the character immediately writes that her mother died.
Third of all, it becomes clear (if it does) that the narrator is actually telling the autobiography of her mother, but in her mother's voice. So this is a story that exists - and yet - the mother claims she has no children, and her child is the one writing her autobiography.
Finally, this book is classified as a novel. What?

What do all of these gaps do? They turn the head on its side, playing with our expectations and biases in literature and memoir. Hopefully, they keep us wide open. The book demands that we stay open, keep exploring, sometimes coming in at a distance, sometimes going in full face, right up to oppression and trauma.