Get Past the Guilt and Write Your Memoir
“I never could have written the book [Angela’s Ashes] while my mother was alive.”
If you’ve not read Angela’s Ashes, you’re missing out on some seriously impressive writing. It is everything that a memoir could be – highly entertaining, deeply insightful, and so real it aches. While reading it, it’s often necessary to remind yourself that this isn’t just a work of fiction; it’s a man’s life.
When we begin writing our own memoir, we get to find our own voice in a way that family life tends to stamp out. The “official” version of a family story is usually dictated by the most powerful members of a family – the parents – and a child’s “lesser” story gets buried. By writing a memoir, we get to un-bury our own story, recapture our memories and preserve them in an everlasting form.
Getting past the guilt – the little voice that says, “You can’t write that – what will your family think?” and “There’s two sides to a story – you can only write what you know, and that’s not fair” – can be a total roadblock. Most people never write a memoir simply because they can’t navigate through the emotional torrents of doing so. Those who do, often shy away from the whole truth.
Let’s face it: No family has ever been perfect. We all have pain in our past, filling our emotional baggage with as much content as the laughter and joy. If you’re going to try your pen at writing a memoir, do it fully and honestly – make us laugh with you, but make us cry, too.
Why You Should Write a Memoir
Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a writer, the process of writing a memoir has many benefits. For one, it can serve as a valuable heirloom. It is a peek at history – your history – and it lends an insight to future generations that nothing else ever will. There are fascinating stories in every life, even the most ordinary ones, and all that you have to do is pen them.
The positive benefits of memoir writing can be different for every person who tries their hand at them, but almost invariably include:
1.) Serving as a legacy for future generations.
2.) Offering buried treasure in the form of stories and anectdotes that will never be forgotten, and can be shared any time.
3.) When you’re feeling depressed or generally down, you can look back at all your accomplishments.
4.) Writing is a form of personal empowerment – it gives you the opportunity to exert some power over your life.
5.) When you write, you can work through many painful memories. Confronting past pain, anger, and betrayal helps you lay the negative emotions to rest and makes for a much healthier emotional and mental you.
When you first considered writing a memoir, I’m sure that the immediate thought which jumped to mind was, “Who would want to read about me?” – lay that thought to rest, because if you take the time to write your memoirs well, your family will treasure them forever.
Getting Past Memoir-Writing Guilt
As many teenagers do, I went through a very angry phase. I was sent to live with my aunt several thousand miles away for a summer, and found my bitterness finding vent through my pen. To this day, I have many of the pieces I wrote and am amazed by the clarity of voice in them – I was a whole sixteen years old, but the style I was writing in is something that I’ve never been able to duplicate.
Nearly every piece is a vent against my family, and nearly every piece has been “hidden” from them for many years now.
When my father committed suicide, it was almost as if that inner child – the angry, bitter one – bullied her way back to the front and forced her voice to be heard through a new series of writing. This inner child was stronger than the earlier version, though, and she wanted to be heard by everyone – she wanted to scream loud enough that her father could hear her from beyond his grave. These writings, mostly poems, found their way to my father’s headstone on a weekly basis.
It’s been almost four years since that angry, bitter child retreated again and let my writing return to some amount of peace. The poems that were placed at my father’s grave, though, survived despite her retreat. I learned only months ago that my grandmother, my father’s mother, found and saved each of the poems that I’d written. She carefully copied them, taking a copy home with her, and placed the original in a zip baggie that nestles beneath the flowers.
Sometimes, I think this is too creepy to contemplate. The point is that what I wrote meant something to someone else – anger, bitterness, fear and heartbreaking sorrow … my words were something that could be treasured by someone who had also loved my father very much.
Why am I saying all this? It’s important that you realize that by sharing your own feelings – good or bad – about the life you’ve lived, you won’t lose your family. You might risk making them angry, you might be seen as defying your family – but through the act of courage that it takes to write a memoir, you’re finding a way out. Think of it as therapy … many therapists actually recommend it.
So how do you get past the guilt? Here’s some starting points:
1.) Pinpoint whose voice is the one that stops you from writing. Jot down anything that critical inner voice says, and figure out what voice from your past is trying to keep you from writing – by identifying the voice, you can confront and silence it.
2.) Find some natural prompts that help you move past the “My family will hate me – what if I’m not writing the truth?” voices in your imagination. Photographs work great for me; try placing a series of photographs in a mini-album. Choose pictures that evoke strong emotions for you, and arrange them in chronological order. You can flip through your album any time you need a writing prompt.
3.) Never, ever delete anything you write in your memoir. I’ve often found that when your inner critic is being especially mean after a writing session, it’s usually because you hit a raw nerve that actually means a lot. Give yourself some space from the memoir for a day or two, and start back up without reading what you wrote.
4.) Some of the most difficult stories to write are the ones that involve abuse, neglect, or silence – if your childhood was a very nasty one, you’ve probably learned over time that your own point of view “doesn’t matter”. Don’t let that conditioning stop your story – tell it all, and tell it truthfully. You’ll find that your point of view suddenly matters a whole lot more, even if it’s only you that it matters to.
5.) Start slow, and stretch yourself into writing more. Begin by writing for five minutes a day, then move up to ten and then fifteen. Not only does this help you ease into writing your memoir, but it helps you learn to stick with a story in general. When you feel tempted to stop in the middle of a scene, keep going for another five minutes – when we start coming close to something really menaingful and emotional, our instincts are to shy away. Break past that.
