Memoir vs Therapy

"Was it therapeutic to write your memoir?"

It's a question I often get from readers of To Have Not, my account of growing up poor in 1970s San Francisco and what poverty can do to the soul.

The answer is "No."

I had done the therapy before writing the book, and that is why I could craft my story into art. The distance between events and writing about those events provides a crucial perspective that we cannot have when we are in the middle of things.

By the time I started writing about my younger self, she felt like a character to me; I thought of her as "she" rather than "I." This allowed me, as a writer, to tap into her thoughts and feelings the way actors might immerse themselves in a character in order to create a palpable, authentic portrayal. So I could revisit the yearning or bitterness, but I could also let them go when a writing session was over. Staying with our feelings can be an important part of therapy, but it tends to create melodramatic, short-sighted memoir.

Artful memoir is not simply a record of memories; it is a questioning of them. It is connecting the dots that you don't see in real time, looking at the other factors going on, doubting your own take, and rethinking how you've always interpreted things. The work of a memoir writer is the same as the work of a novelist; both must deftly weave together plot, characters, setting, symbols, and themes. It's hard to see the literary aspects of a situation when you are still smarting from it. But it's just that vision that you need to turn a life into a story.

Can writing about your life be therapeutic? Absolutely. While I was living through the events of my childhood and young adulthood, I wrote about them constantly, often in a desperate, sprawling cursive, in my ever-present college-ruled composition notebooks. That writing--in a journal, for my eyes only--was part of the therapy. For a person trying to come to grips with things, it's crucial to have a safe outlet to express one's feelings, no matter how ugly, whiny, or one-sided they are. But it is difficult to create art from an open wound. Journal-writing is not for public consumption; it's about the process, more than the product. Writing a memoir is an artistic endeavor made to communicate with readers.

This is not to say that memoir writers should have everything figured out before they start writing. That approach would lead to boredom--for the reader as well as the writer. When recasting our memories as memoir, we have the chance to shed automatic assumptions and long-held beliefs, to take the broader picture into account. Take that chance! Readers can tell when the writer is just putting down the same old story she's always told, and when she is pushing herself to discover something new and profound about it.

My advice is to write it all out, every detail; immerse yourself in your feelings, endlessly berate yourself, your parents, the nuns, or the unfair world. Then put the writing away where no one will ever see it. Eventually, and it might take years, you will be able to approach those memories as a memoirist, to see them as pieces of a story.