Make peace with writing about yourself. Your permission slip for writing memoir.
Decision #8 from Sixteen Superpowers Memoir Writers Need to Have. Over sixteen posts, I help you make pacts with yourself so all will go well for you.
Photo by Levan Badzgaradze on Unsplash
8. Make peace with writing about yourself.
YOUR MANTRA: Self is the highway to story.
Personal narrative is a force for cultural progress. Why? Because the personal is political, as Gloria Steinem once said. Because the only way the culture changes is from the inside out. Because it starts with honoring your voice as one among all the voices. When you honor your voice, you create the path for others’ voices.
I say the self is the highway to story, and that writing about yourself is a generous and creative act. Bear in mind that others are suffering with your pain, and they don’t have a voice. You’re a writer, and you are opening up the empathy vein.
The self isn’t the story. It’s the way through the murk, as I write in “The Self As the Highway to Our Stories.”
Every so often someone will come out and disparage memoir as self-indulgent—yet the genre has exploded in the 21st century and the innovations in craft just keep coming.
Happiness guru Arthur C. Brooks is one of those recent naysayers, saying that talking about yourself all the time can’t be good for your mental state. I agree that one of the best ways to get perspective is to get out of the strange soup of your own mind.
But that’s not what a memoirist does. It may be what a lazy memoirist does. It may be what’s prevalent on social media. But social media is not literature. (It’s not journalism, either.) It’s people nattering on about themselves.
Here’s what you’re after: universal resonance.
And you don’t get that by nattering on. You don’t get it with the parade of events and the onslaught of opinions. You get that by treating literature as art and making some art.
For more on this, see Brooke Warner’s great Substack post, “Why You Maybe Should Write a Memoir,” in which she refutes Brooks.
Highlights?
There needs to be poetry and beauty there, says Raphael Kadushin, publisher of the University of Wisconsin Press, in this piece on TheWriter.org.
“What I’m really looking for now are beautifully written memoirs that have some universal resonance. That’s what I think is the problem with most memoirs – there is nothing universal there. It’s rather just the writer’s own story, which is ultimately boring. Unless there’s some poetry or beauty to a memoir, it’s really just another blog.”
RAPHAEL KADUSHIN
And you need to make people think, as David Brooks, author of How to Know a Person, writes:
“A writer could blast out her opinions but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think, but when they provide a context within which others can think.”
DAVID BROOKS
DECISION: Create poetry. Create beauty. Create a context in which people can think. Bring them into a conversation that they otherwise could not have entered, without the art of literature. Remember, you’re creating art, and as Frederick Buechner writes,
“Art is not difficult because it wants to be difficult, but because it wants to be art.”
FREDERICK BUECHNER
ABOUT SIXTEEN SUPERPOWERS OF MEMOIR WRITERS
It’s easy to write a memoir! All you need to do is write something with universal resonance that is true and comes from your life.
Let’s get real. To write a memoir, you need a basket of superpowers.
As a memoir writer with a forthcoming book (BOUNDLESS, coming December 2024 - pre-order here at Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Amazon and as a book coach/developmental editor who works with memoir writers, I’ve learned quite a lot about tapping into literary superpowers.
What’s enduring about memoir is that it is real, and it matters. A few decisions you make on the front end will determine whether it will go well.
In this series of posts, I give you 16 decisions to install at the beginning of your journey. Make these pacts with yourself, stick to them and you’ll get there!
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The Sixteen Superpowers of Memoir Writers: Make These Decisions on the Front End, and All Will Go Well for You
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