The Challenges of Writing Memoir

Shame attacks, vulnerability hangovers, and resisting our own worst impulses

For the past twelve years, I’ve been teaching a six-month memoir class with Linda Joy Myers of NAMW. We’re seasoned enough in the emotional complexities that come along with writing in this genre that we encourage our students to let us know if they’re submitting something particularly difficult, so we can tread gently as needed in our feedback. Because of how long the course is, and because we invite students to write the hard stuff, we’re well versed in fear of exposure and shame attacks and vulnerability hangovers. We also know that no matter how much we tell writers not to put the “publishing horse before the writing cart,” the work of purging experience onto the page is not easily isolated from where and with whom those words may eventually land.

Recently, I got a homework submission from one of my students letting me know in the email holding the attachment that the piece dealt with an experience of sexual abuse. She was doing what we’d asked her to do, getting out ahead of her feelings of exposure. She wrote that the piece felt intense, that the week of writing had been particularly tough, and that very few people knew about what had happened to her.

Every time I’m the recipient of a submission like this one, I feel a sense of honor. I see the act of hitting send on that work as courageous, even though I know well that writers can find themselves feeling sick and anxious. I also know there’s a progression because I’ve seen it—that the more a writer shares, the easier it gets, until over time she feels ready enough to go the distance with her story.

I want this post to be about why it matters that we share adversity and struggle and hardship in our memoirs because these are the murky waters of the writing world. And also, memoir gets a bad rap as a self-indulgent genre for a reason. It’s because the act of purging alone is not the point. The act of bearing witness alone is not the point. The act of putting your experience into words and sharing them out loud alone is not the point. These may be doorways into the genre, but over time, it’s essential that the memoirist craft whatever challenging experience they’ve lived through into something that holds meaning for the reader. I read a lot of manuscripts in which writers have not yet gotten beyond the facts of what happened, what they went through. To miss the part about “why it matters” can have readers feeling like they’re there for your therapy rather than to extract understanding about the world we live in, our place in it, and why something like experiencing and surviving abuse matters not only to survivors, but to all readers.

This type of personal narrative has shaped my worldview. The prevalence of these kinds of stories has taught me about violence, about patriarchy, about power, about victimhood, about strength, about perseverance, about resilience, and much more. The stories that most touch me are those that do the hard work of placing the most challenging experiences into a broader context.  Carmen Maria Machado has said about her memoir, In the Dream House, that she wanted it for the archive—to chronicle an experience of same-sex domestic abuse because too few of these stories exist. In writing about her abuse journey in What My Bones Know, Stephanie Foo placed her story in the context of growing up Asian American, the child of immigrants who carried their own traumas. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls’s dysfunctional upbringing sheds light on mental illness in families. A powerful abuse narrative forthcoming on She Writes Press, Facing the Jaguar, by Babs Walters, centers confronting her abuser (her father) in later life, and weaves a story of how the choices she made in love and in partnerships were informed first by being a survivor, and later by her insistence that her father take accountability.  

Figuring out your why is essential in the journey to share things that feel particularly exposing. But even after the why, the anxiety of the future sharing with the world can become unbearable. It’s stopped many a writer in their tracks. Timing matters, too. I recently wrote about why I will wait until my son is older to publish my memoir. For others, that waiting might entail waiting for someone to die, or coming to terms with an outcome that may result in alienating a person, or a whole side of the family, or a whole part of community. Questions of how and when to do put your exposing stories into the world are uniquely personal.    

I was struck by this quote from Maggie Nelson in an interview in The Guardian this summer, in which she said about personal writing:

If you work in autobiography, you find that a lot of people approach the genre via binaries of withholding-revealing, and/or shame-shamelessness, probably because they think there is something exhibitionist or meretricious at the heart of the endeavour. I’m not saying those terms never apply, but I don’t feel them to be the engine of the art for me, and they aren’t at the core of my emotional life. I think, for some people, the very idea of talking or writing about the self in public produces anxiety, but given that it’s been one of my native modes since I was a teenager, I don’t feel that anxiety so much. So often I find myself in the position of fielding anxiety or judgment from others that I don’t feel myself, which can be peculiar and a little tiresome. But at the same time, it may be a sign that the writing has taken a risk, which it needs to do.

I’m jealous of writers who feel little or no anxiety about putting their revealing stories into the world, but also grateful for how they show the way. Getting past our own judgments is the first step in being able to share the work. We’re lucky (in a sense) that social media platforms and places like Substack give us practice ground to put out test bubbles, to see how things land when we share our truths.

Over time, the shame attacks will feel less acute. You’ll recover from the vulnerability hangovers more quickly. Few writers I work with are like Maggie Nelson, for whom writing and talking about self is a native mode that produces little to no anxiety, but I think all of us can get there in time. That said, I think the best way to land there is to do the hard work of considering your scary, exposing, shameful experiences in the context of a broader human experience.

In my own memoir, I’m writing about being adjacent to the fallout from sexual abuse, as the partner of someone who recovered memories later in life. Part of what I’ve struggled with is how to frame my story as one that’s both personal and universal. How to write a story that helps others who’ve found themselves in this position, but not to fall into a trope that presents a too-simple equation about how something uncovered in the past explodes the present. I’ve had to resist my impulse to tell a story of regret, a story of what could have been, a story of how we together were wronged by this past abuse over which neither of us had any control. This is the “what happened,” but the why it matters is the stronger pull. That’s the story about how we fail the people we love; about the seismic aftershocks of abuse, which can splinter and shatter those who love the survivor too; and the truism that love isn’t always enough.

Memoir is such a profound genre. Sharing our stories matters so much. Our world has changed for the better because writers have released their stories—showing the rest of us that we’re hardly alone in the hardships we’ve faced. But keep in mind that your memoir isn’t there, yet, until you extract those broader truths, until you know what impulses of your own you must resist, until you find ways to articulate the deeper meaning your story holds for yourself and for others.