Personal Narrative as a Force for Cultural Progress
Personal Narrative as a Force for Cultural Progress
Why to stay the course with your writing, no matter the outcome on Tuesday
Tuesday night, I’ll be co-leading a class with Linda Joy Myers called “Staking a Claim and Building Confidence.” This will be the sixth and final class in our Women Writing Memoir series, so this post isn’t a pitch to sign up. Rather, it’s a reflection on memoir writing as a political act, even when you don’t necessarily intend it to be.
This is the first course we’ve ever taught to receive so much pushback. The reason? Because it ends on Election Night, and we wrote in our marketing copy that the outcome of this election would either honor or silence women’s voices. And that pissed some people off.
People will say that a candidate’s gender should not matter, and never to vote for someone just because they’re a woman—and I agree. There are women in leadership roles who actively work against women’s interests, and women are not a monolith. But this year, on repeat from 2016, we have in Trump a representation of the worst masculine extreme our country is capable of producing running (again) against a female candidate.
I can only see this election in the context of my work as a publisher/editor/teacher of memoir because being invited in to people’s personal stories will change you. Memoirists give you a front-row seat to their most difficult and traumatic experiences, and also to their hard-won fights and will to thrive in the face of life’s most extreme challenges.
Because I work primarily with women, I have read countless stories of sexual abuse and sexual assault. I have read stories of women’s mistreatment in the workplace; stories of sexism and misogyny and many experiences of being held back, passed over, ignored, or encouraged not to follow their dreams. During the height of #MeToo (2006) and ever since, the pretense has been upended that America was “great” for women when we were expected to take it, suck it up, smile, act dumb, diminish ourselves, be compliant, stay silent.
We can’t overstate personal narrative’s role in progress, but also in our culture wars. Trumpism has emerged for all sorts of reasons, but the social/cultural backlash against increased visibility for LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice movements, and feminism is one that can be directly tied to these communities’ writing and publishing. Gay people, people of color, and women are telling our stories. That those stories pose a threat to a large portion of our population is something to contend with, but we’re not going back.
I love being in publishing because it’s a window into a given cultural moment. Since the racial justice movement of 2020, we are seeing more immigrant narratives, more books being published in the US by international authors, more voices articulating the lived experience of oppression here and abroad, sanctioned and even encouraged by our government and our populace. The resultant anxiety by white writers who articulate having a hard time getting published in this moment is, more than anything, an opportunity for personal reckoning—for those who are willing and able to sit with what it feels like not to be among the privileged class, if only for a short period of time.
The phrase "the personal is political" emerged as a rallying cry during second-wave feminism. The height of this movement came on the heels of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, when people were fighting systematic patterns of oppression and challenging the public-private divide. These fights were (and still are) for visibility and exposure. Shining light on an injustice, like sexism in the workplace, or housing discrimination, or educational inequality, shifts our perceptions. We see differently, but this is a choice. Another reaction is to double down on blindness, to insist on staying in the dark. Willful blindness to injustice benefits those who align with the dominant culture or accepted standards.
This is where we find ourselves as we head into Election Day 2024. Half of us see and acknowledge what is happening, and the other half doesn’t, either by choice or because of the company they keep.
What we writers can do, what we do every time we sit down to write, is to keep shining that light. Personal narrative is testimony. Your voice and your story will matter equally, regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election. Writing changes the culture. Your story matters. Whether you’re elated or despairing in the aftermath of this year’s election, keep going. We can credit memoir (and personal narrative in all its forms) for showing us a breadth of human experience, for opening our eyes to the struggle that is ongoing and worth it—for equality, for freedom, and for staking a claim on behalf of your truth.
Write on.
One of the many things that worry me about this election is that if it turns out more of our rights are stripped away— women's rights, rights of LGBTQ+ and people of color, for example— all the effort it will take to claw those back will mean that other areas needing progress will suffer. In my world, that's adoptee rights...in other people's worlds it's disabled people's rights or animal rights, etc. So many causes will suffer if this happens. I've been thinking of all the memoirists I know and our collective wish to effect social change. I worry for all of us, for everyone, for the planet...the list goes on.
This is such a powerful and moving piece. Thank you for writing it, Brooke. When I was a graduate school student I went to the Duwamish Longhouse in Seattle, where I live, and learned about the displacement faced by the people of that tribe and others in the region. I was twenty-two at the time and, in shock, I asked my father, a civil engineer who has worked in water and utilities for most of his career, whether he had known about it. My father brushed it off as somewhat of a silly comment, and when I asked him how he could reconcile being complicit in the displacement of marginalized populations, he said something to the effect of, well that's just how it is, intimating that "some people" have to suffer in order for others to get ahead. I was struck by his comment. A few years before, he had betrayed me deeply with a sexual boundary violation I will not describe here. I am his adopted daughter, I am half Iraqi-half Bulgarian, and I was raised in a white family in an affluent, white community. I am some people. And even though I have worked hard at forgiveness, and maintaining a relationship for my own personal reasons, your essay is absolutely the reason I am now writing my memoir, and risking that relationship. I wish our world were better equipped to protect girls and women, in particular. When it comes to being a change agent, I've drawn my own line in the sand, and that is a fight I will show up for every single time.