“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.
