Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So when
and I discovered each other’s work we both thought: ‘now this is a woman I could sit down and chat with for hours over a bottle of wine’. Yet geography – the miles between us – made that impossible. So instead we committed to writing letters to one another, to discuss life, memoir, writing craft and more. And in this series, Memories of the Future: letters of an examined life, we have shared those unedited – and often very personal – letters with you, our readers.For new subscribers, a catch-up, we started this letter-writing series in January and ran for four weeks, eight letters passing between us on a range of topics from motherhood to memoir and the ethics of writing about our personal lives, and how that is both felt by us and received by others. Here we return for another short series.
You can find Anna’s letter #11 to me here.
And here is my reply in letter #11…
Dear Anna
Thank you for your letter, which has patiently sat on my desk this past week, asking me to pen a reply. I’ve been teaching an Arvon Online memoir course, which has been back-to-back teaching and tutorials every day this week, and I have barely had time to think. Hence this letter being a day late to get to you.
I love your description of your novel that features Turkey, and the complications in its making – it’s coming into being – and the question you ask yourself about whether your heart is not in it, because of the ‘lie between me and the page’. This question – would this story be better told as a novel or memoir – is one that will increasingly rear its head in a world where memoir becomes more common, more of a possibility, particularly after the opening up that followed #MeToo. In a world where we are perhaps less frightened of writing through our shame. I will return to this in more detail below – in as much as I can attempt to answer these sticky questions!
I have been swamped in memoir this past week, teaching it, thinking about it, supporting those who want to write it, but are at the tentative beginnings or are frightened of how to do it, or how it might be received. And again and again I have encouraged them to write it anyway, to keep up the practice, but also to try to counter the voices that tell them: you can’t do it because of this… and what about that? What if so-and-so saw it; what if it hurts whatshisface? – These voices come from a real place, but they are also there to obstruct us. They come from fear, and fear’s intention is to defend. I observed this week that many of those writers who have a real urge to write in order to unburden themselves of secrets held tight for years and years, to lift the veil on a hidden life, and to use a voice that has been silenced, by family, through shame – end up shaming themselves; the critical voices inside themselves act as the disapproving mother or father, the opinionated critic who censors. These writers silence themselves because it is all that they know.
A defining quality of memoir is its straight talking nature, to tell it like it is – to step out from its hiding place. But this takes courage. So the process of getting your story onto the page is not simply the difficult process of ‘writing story’, but also becoming ready, prepared if you will to go to difficult places and to open yourself up to exposure. This might be a journey in itself, which could take months, years even!
Why, when it is so difficult to do, would you not simply write it as fiction? Because with some stories this might feel like a copout, those that demand this honest and bare-all approach. I was quoted in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago by author Leslie Jamison in her article on gaslighting: "There are many memoirs that recount experiences one might call gaslighting—indeed, the very act of writing personal narrative often involves an attempt to “reclaim” a story that’s already been told another way—but few trace the lasting residue of parental gaslighting as deftly as Lily Dunn’s “Sins of My Father.” Despite being quite proud of this quote – this reminds me I should add it to my list of endorsements on my website! – it also made me reflect on how so many memoirs spring from an enforced silence, a smothering. It is the natural urge in many of us to finally speak; it is also a platform to give voice to the unspoken. There must be a place for this or else where do these stories go?
I know I have gone off on a tangent, and not really answered your questions, but I am trying to work out myself – why choose memoir over fiction when there is so much at stake? And I think it is to do with the circumstance of the story, and whether you want the telling of that story to bring about change. Change in you, but also change in the world. It is a clear-sighted point of view that might otherwise have been obscured.
Last week I sent my novel to my agent, and it feels safe in her hands. I can turn my back on it and get on with other things. It is about marriage, and how we can destroy a family from one snap decision, how precarious is that tightrope from calm to destruction, from safety to insanity? It’s about misunderstanding our desire or need for creativity and autonomy, with a need for sexuality and to be desired. These are all things I have felt and experienced. But I decided to explore them with made up characters and a made-up setting, in a house that sits on an exposed lump of rock, in a dramatized landscape. It is a story that caught my imagination. The events themselves – those things that happened to me – were too fragile perhaps to stand on their own; too vulnerable to the elements. And a lot of this was because the experience I write from is not wholly mine to exploit.
I ask myself, if I had written this as memoir how would I now feel to have it sitting in my agent’s inbox ready to be sent out to a list of publishers, with the hope it might make it into the world? I suspect I would feel scared of the consequences. Many writers of memoir also feel scared at that point of putting their memoirs out into the world, but what if the story they’re writing is potentially bigger than the people it might harm?
I am in my novel, but only a small heart buried at its centre.
Neither approach is better. They are just different. And this brings me to your last question, about the difference of the submission process, between selling a memoir on proposal and a novel as a full manuscript. I advise people against writing a proposal before they have at least a full draft of a memoir because of all the above, because of what is at stake and because it is so important that that story of your life, or an aspect of your life, is told the way you need or want to tell it. Also, because it can take time to find the right voice for that story; to harness the depth of self-knowledge you need in order to author that story; as Mary Karr states: When the voice is right, a book ‘explodes into being’.
I’d love to know if any of the above resonates with you. If you agree or disagree, and where it leaves you in your own writing journey. I look forward to your response.
With gratitude, your pen pal, Lily
That's a great letter and covers so much I wonder about.