Are you too scared to write memoir?
Memoir is an ethical minefield, but what if all the protection you need is in the craft itself? A guest post by Lily Dunn
This photograph above is of my hand, making a star with the hands of my two children. There’s a scattering of yellow rice next to my son’s hand, which takes me back to when we took this photo, nearly ten years ago at an arts festival where we spent the day with someone who was to become very important in our lives.
I could write a story about that day, how my most vivid memory is dancing in the barn after dark, the four of us holding hands and laughing, and how when I left with the children he waited and watched us go, me and the kids walking down a long path out of the grounds of the stately home. I kept looking back at him, his figure just a shadow in the dark, as still as a tree, until he turned ragged in the moonlight; I could barely see him but knew he was still there.
My story would have been particular, my memory and my truth, different from my children’s memory (which probably involved ice cream and the craft workshops they took part in, basket-making and ceramics). But my version would have been as true and as valid as any one else’s, just as theirs would too for very different reasons.
It seems too obvious perhaps to state that memoir is subjective, but having taught it for the past ten years I’ve seen that the most trouble writers get into stems from others not quite grasping this seemingly simple truth. So I elaborate by adding: the recollection of memory is highly personal and often driven by a strong emotion, which can make it faulted, factually suspect and fallible. Memoir is a very odd specimen because it is by its nature based on truth, and categorised as nonfiction, but it is also above all else a story. And because it is driven by emotion, it is often flammable and volatile.
Which of course makes it problematic in its nature, both morally and ethically, for ourselves but also for others.
But what if our biggest protector in writing memoir is the craft itself? We are not putting our journals out there for all to read, and we’re not recalling scenes for the sake of simply recalling detail. Detail should be in service to meaning, or a message that the writer is exploring. I want to write about love, for instance, with a particular man (just so happens it’s the man in the memory I captured above), but rather than get hung up on trying to depict him and my feelings for him as realistically as possible, I think of my relationship with him within a greater question: how important it was for me at the time I took my children to meet him at the arts festival to believe in something, and how this need to believe extended to my relationship with my therapist of the time, and back further to the relationship I had with my midwife when I was pregnant with my first child. If my story is about belief, rather than simply love, I have a framework, a place from which to write it - the therapist’s couch, for instance - and the story has a reason for being. It becomes an exploration of an idea, and that exploration gives the story purpose, a reason to explore love, and a drive, a quest to answer questions, which in turn gives the story forward momentum. Craft then acts as a protective framework for the tender stuff of personal experience and memory. It gives what can otherwise feel subjective and ephemeral authority, breadth and gravity.
With our commitment to the craft of memoir and shaping memory, comes time to really get to know our content, seeing it from all sides, holding it up to the light, as if it were a diamond (to steal a metaphor from serial memoirist
in a fascinating discussion we had recently). When writing memoir, we need to constantly check in with ourselves, not simply about how best to write a particular scene, but also about what impact we are chasing, and how much can we expose about our lives and still feel comfortable? These questions and decisions all go towards building a personal and strong relationship with the text and coming to learn your own moral and ethical standard, so when it comes to the work being published you can stand by it as your story, your version of events, thought through and considered. This building of confidence in your voice and your story will also help with your sense of autonomy, and your right to write this story.If you are acting too soon, you are too close to the events, the feelings, if the wound is too raw, if it has not yet scabbed over, then wait. Write, edit, read, think, craft and form, write poetry, write fiction, write something profoundly academic. Go work with the vulnerable and see it as helping a community, but also as part of your research, part of getting yourself ready. Be open and free with the process. But above all write that first draft for yourself, because it is only then that you will engage with your true voice, and do it justice. And when you come to having to defend your words, because you will have to – you will know that you did the best you could because you wrote honestly and truthfully about what you remembered, and what mattered to you.
You can find me here on Substack at
and I will be teaching my very popular online memoir course, starting in September, but places are already booking up, so if you’re interested I would move fast to grab a place!Here are details of our courses:
Creative Nonfiction: Compelling Memoir starts online on September 10th, with Lily Dunn.
Enchantment in Fiction starts online on September 24th, with Zoe Gilbert.
Writing Our Way Back, a live online masterclass in therapeutic writing, will take place on September 28th, with Katie Watson.
Lily and Zoe will both be running their monthly Writers’ Workshops from November – small, chaired critique groups for those who want to give and receive feedback on work in progress. Zoe’s group will run on Monday evenings, and Lily’s group on Thursday evenings.
Times are no less tight than before, and all our course can be paid for in instalments where that’s preferable. Just drop us a line at info@londonlitlab.co.uk and we can set this up for you.
Thank you. I have something, waiting, bubbling, not at all ready to unfurl and reading this helped. Thank you.