The Agony and Ecstasy of Memoir Writing: Digging Deep

If you’re writing about—or trying to write about—an excruciating experience, you’ll identify with Kathy Pooler.  

She’s a dear lady and fellow memoirist who today shares with us—in a transparent, sometimes painful way—the agony as well as the ecstasy she’s faced while writing her second memoir.

So, we welcome you, Kathy, and look forward to the insights, advice, and encouragement you have for us, your fellow memoirists.

As I work on my second memoir, Daring to Hope: A Mother’s Story of Healing from Cancer and Her Son’s Alcohol Addiction, I find myself knee-deep in the swamp of memories that pop up at the strangest times—when I’m standing in line at the grocery store or trying to fall asleep at night.

I call them “scene pops” and have learned that anything that keeps me up at night is worth writing down.

When you write a memoir, the story is always with you. The challenge is to capture the moments that will invite and keep your reader in the story. The moments that matter.

But just when I think the manuscript is finished enough for a professional editor, I think of another scene or detail that I need to include. It feels like a faucet has been turned on and keeps flowing. The story is not quite ready, much like baking a cake requires all the right ingredients before you put it in the oven. My story needs a few more ingredients before I ship it.

Like most things in life, timing is everything.

How much deeper do I need to go?

My writing group tells me that I need to show more about why seeing my fourteen-year-old son drunk for the first time was so horrifying to me. They have challenged me to keep digging deeper so that the reader will feel and understand my responses.

This is the agony part . . . the part where revisiting painful memories stirs up deep-seated emotions.

A litany of questions bombard me:

Why didn’t this young mother take action sooner?

What could she have done that would have made a difference?

How could she stand to look into her son’s hollow eyes and not want to rescue him from his self-destructive tendencies?

How can she not blame herself for her son’s addiction?

How does a mother handle an addicted child while fighting her own cancer?

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg notes:

“Caress the divine details, touch them tenderly. Let your whole body touch the river you are writing about, so if you call it yellow or stupid or slow, all of you is feeling it” (page 50).

I’m listening and caressing those divine details in what I call “manageable doses,” meaning I work on it for brief periods of time, then put it aside. Sometimes I need a few days before I revisit it. As time goes by, the amount of time I need to stay away has decreased. There were times when I shelved this project for months as I worked through the sensitivities of writing about my children.

Too. Darn. Painful.

I want to honor the story and do it justice. Giving myself time to process it is part of taking care of myself so the story can take care of itself.

The only way to the other side of the swamp is through and, as long as I keep writing, I can begin to see the shoreline in sight.

Memoir writing is a journey of self-discovery that slowly reveals itself layer by layer.

There are surprises, detours, and potholes along the way. But if I keep persisting on the path, I trust it will make sense.

Here’s the ecstasy part . . . treasures that are unearthed as I keep digging past the guilt and shame and terror of loving an addicted child.

We all have a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Writing about it, though fraught with challenges, gives me the opportunity to make sense of it and even reframe the story. In my case, the mother who unwittingly enabled her son turned out to be the mother who never gave up hope. Reflecting on the struggles, losses and regrets—so the reader sees, feels, hears, smells in the moments I describe—brings that reader into my experience.

If I can make sense of the jumble of memories, my life review, I can reflect on who I am, the meaning and purpose of my life and where my pain has taken me. In doing so, someone else can relate my story to their story and perhaps gain some perspective that may help them travel their own path.

And isn’t that why we write memoir, to make sense of our lives and share the message that will inspire and enlighten others as well as ourselves?

Writing my memoirs has helped me 

lift the burdens of my past 

and share the lessons of that pain. 

The agony of reliving the pain 

is rewarded by the ecstasy of self-discovery 

and sharing a story 

that will touch others in meaningful ways.

When readers reach out to me to let me know 

that my story was meaningful to them, 

I know it was worth all the agony.

And what better time than now 

to tell the story only I can tell? 

If not now, when? 

And if I don’t write it, who will?

Kathy Pooler, a retired family nurse practitioner and a cancer survivor, authored Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Journey Away from Emotional Abuse and will soon publish her second memoir. Check out Kathy’s blog, Memoir Writer’s Journey, and follow her on Facebook.

This post was originally published on Kathy’s blog, 

Memoir Writer’s Journey,  November 6, 2017.

Kathy and I got together for lunch a few years ago.

Get real

“Only when you break down your usual way of thinking—the convenient, comfortable, easy, polite response—will you touch the textured grain of your life,” writes Natalie Goldberg.

“Submerge yourself below the standard version of the way your mother, father, school want you to remember your childhood to the way it really was for you,” she says. “If you were miserable, say it. If you hated peas and those white cardboard containers of milk, put that down.…”

Goldberg calls you, the memoir writer, to authenticity, to give yourself permission for “the disintegration of the not-true world you tried to maintain.”

Doing so can refine of the truth, upgrade the truth, hone the truth—not just for your readers but for yourself.

Each of us wrestles with distorted views of reality, sometimes because we choose to do so and sometimes because we are mere humans. This side of heaven, “What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror.”  “We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.” (1 Corinthians 13:12, Good News Translation, The Message)

Do your best, nevertheless, to strive for what’s true and right. 

“Maybe you’ll find,” continues Goldberg, “that you were wonderful after all but [for all those years you had] believed your brother’s image of you instead. You weren’t a dummy for loving Shakespeare and Keats. You were just different.”

Energetic, passionate, and considered by many to be a master, Goldberg is a mentor and a cheerleader to all who want to write a memoir. She says, “It’s odd how we’re are supposed to be cool, smooth as butter, act as though there is no place in which we weren’t accepted or hurt. How ridiculous. This is a tough world. This is your memoir. Get real about your life.” (from Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir; emphasis mine) 

Look over your vignettes. Question your assumptions. Search for places you wrote what you felt obligated to write—for whatever reason.

Straighten up distortions, first in your thinking and then in your writing. Revise and polish your story to make it more authentic.

Doing so will benefit you and your readers more than you might imagine. The truth has a way of setting us all free.