How to Show the Whole in Your Memoir

Narration as an Exercise in Being Everywhere All At Once

Grant Faulkner and I are in Los Angeles this weekend, presenting at the Writers Rising writing retreat. I already had this topic of narration in mind before I got here because I got to witness Maggie Smith (author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful) teach last week. She shared something she’d heard from Gina Frangello (author of Blow Your House Down)—that memoir writing is about two things: self-assessment and societal interrogation.

In my teaching, I often use the camera lens as a way to help writers access their understanding of zooming in/zooming out; the macro/micro; the specific/global. Each of these pairings makes way for writers to think/write about self-assessment and societal interrogation.   

How to hold this binary of self-assessment/societal interrogation is a central question for memoirists, and a central struggle. One of the reasons is because many memoir writers start their memoirs as a first-person account of “what happened” to them. The “what happened” is your scene writing. The narrator of what happened to you is a character—you, the writer—relaying your experience. It’s possible to tell a good story of what happened to you by only utilizing this limited narrative perspective, but it’s not enough for memoir.  

Both self-assessment and societal interrogation, I would argue, are the terrain of your reflective narrator (as opposed to the “in scene” narrator)—the you who knows more than the character to whom the experience happened (you as a child; you in your twenties; heck, even you last year). The world is a bigger place than what you, the character, knew at the time. And your reflective narrator is allowed to write about what you know “now” without needing to tell us when exactly you made the connections you’re making in your memoir. This is the work and integration of self-assessment.  

And just as the world is a bigger place than what you knew at the time, the world is a bigger place than what you know when you sit down to write your story. This is where the work of societal interrogation comes in—where you ask yourself questions about how your story might be bigger than your micro experience. How do you exact meaning from your lived experience to make your book about bigger concepts and themes?

Maggie Smith shared in her class last week that when she started her memoir, she felt like she was writing a small story about her “little life,” but then, as she started to write, she was shocked to see that her story was about big concepts—like patriarchy and gender roles, expectations placed on women and conditioning. This began a societal interrogation. What did she have to say about balancing her own ambitions with being a wife and mother? Why was her success hard for her then-husband? What resentments was she facing from him when she attempted to soar? In this exploration of what it means to  live as a woman/wife/mother in this society, she realized that her little story wasn’t so little after all.

And then there’s Cheryl Strayed’s story. Cheryl was last night’s keynote speaker. She shared how she had been writing about her mother and circling grief in her writing for years before she started Wild. She decided to try to write about the Pacific Crest Trail hike she’d done in her twenties because finally it would free her from having to write about her mother. (Cue the compassionate laughter from the audience.) Wild wasn’t going to be about her mother, but then she sat down to write the backpack scene at the beginning of the book. For those who remember, she lays out all the things she’s carrying, and comes to terms with just how much shit she has, plus she has to pack more water than she’d previously realized. The backpack is enormous, and she cannot lift it. Physically, it’s going to be an impossibility for her to hike with the contents of the pack. She shared last night how only in writing the scene did it dawn on her how powerful a metaphor this was. The heavy weight that she could not bear. She could not bear the weight of the pack. She could not bear the weight of living without her mother.

Cheryl hadn’t made this connection in the hotel room in her twenties. She just got on with lightening her load so she could get on the trail. But Cheryl the writer, narrating Wild using the device of the reflective narrator, informs us in no uncertain terms that this connection is present. Wild could have never been the success it is had it been just a story of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. It is her grief—a universal, human experience; a societal interrogation—that makes this book such a resounding and powerful story so many of us have read and remember. A young woman coming to terms with “unbearable loss” (as Cheryl described it) that she had to find a way to bear.

One thing I offer up to my students is to read other writers’ memoirs to identify what you think the micro/macro stories are. Where is the little story connecting with the universal story? Can you identify your micro and your macro? Writing the whole is sometimes overwhelming. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. And yet, it’s also freeing and reminds us to be expansive with our writing. There’s a place for everything we knew, everything we know, everything we’ve experienced, and everything our capacious minds may be inspired to interrogate.    

Snapshots from a Hollywood retreat—Grant with Marlon James; us onstage; and us enjoying a view of Joaquin Phoenix looking at us looking at him.