Why Will Anyone Want to Read Your Story of Suffering?
Mining for Meaning in Memoir
Last week, I wrapped up a six-week memoir course called “The Story of You” that had enough insights to be the subject of many Substack posts to come. Every teacher offered something profound, but it was a small nugget from the Q&A section of Mark Nepo’s session that has stayed with me.
A student asked about discernment—how to come from a place of understanding in our memoirs versus a place of regret? A powerful question since what fuels memoirs are usually stories of regret—of loss and grief, of victimhood and abuse, of suffering. And while this is true, no one goes to the bookstore specifically seeking out stories of suffering. Rather, readers pick up books for the experience they promise—of survival, or resilience, of fortitude. Thus, it’s incumbent on any writer of memoir to mine for meaning. Why does any of it matter? is the most important and difficult question memoirists face.
As he does, Mark surfaced a beautifully philosophical response to this student’s question that focused on the difference between significance and meaning. Significance, he shared, is that the first woman he loved had auburn hair. Meaning spreads wider than that, to show how some detail of that first love, through Mark’s lived experience, touches into love for everyone who’s ever lived.
Significance and meaning could be stand-in words for reflection and takeaway, topics central to the memoir classes I teach with Linda Joy Myers. If I could bottle up reflection and takeaway as a serum for memoirists, I would, because these subjects are at the heart of why anyone will care about your story—especially if it’s a painful one, a story of heartbreak, loss, suffering, grief.
I’ve known Mark for sixteen or seventeen years now, and was lucky enough during the pandemic to step into the role of being his support person when he pivoted to teaching online. As such, I’ve taken in hours and hours of his content, so it was fascinating to me that I extracted new meaning from two of his stories that I’ve heard many times.
These are two stories Mark often shares:
A Zen story:
“Why is the road to freedom so long?” asked the troubled apprentice.
The master replied, “Because it has to go through you.”
A Lakota saying:
“The longest journey you will make in your life is from your head to your heart.”
Mark is known as a spiritual teacher, and his classes aren’t usually or specifically for writers, so when I’ve heard these stories in the past, I’ve understood them to be meditations on the challenges posed by being a human stuck in a singular body with culturally imposed beliefs. To reach freedom, if there even is such a thing, we must live it.
But here, in a course designed for memoirists, the context shifted. This time, I saw “the journey” and “the road” as the story of you. Memoir writing is a spiritual journey, and it will change you. If you’re doing the work, it is a journey from your head to your heart.
Writers often come to memoir because they’re circling a wound, but no reader comes to memoir to circle your wound with you. The invitation to the writer, therefore, is to enter those wounds. To get into the hurt of what happened and to see what’s there. “The only way out is through,” a line often attributed to Robert Frost, serves as a kind of mantra for memoir. It’s a practice to travel from the head to the heart—from the “this is what happened” to “this is why it matters.”
This practice is hard-won, by the way. People don’t just sit down to write and extract deep meaning on the first go. Mining for meaning takes deep consideration, and is one of the reasons memoir writing takes as much time and commitment and revision as it does. Mark said, “The self is a very large continent and it takes time to travel it.”
When I think about the memoirs I love, they’re full of suffering. They’re stories of challenging upbringings, of heart-wrenching loss, of hurting others, of self-destructive behavior, of harm endured. And yet, I do not seek out stories because I want to suffer. I’m drawn to human-suffering stories because I want to understand human experience, and because I am curious about what people have lived through and how they’ve come through. I want to be witness to that journey from the head to the heart.
A simple exercise to do when you write is to keep a meaning journal, or to have a place (maybe Notes on your phone) to capture the utterings of the heart. I’ve long said that takeaway is the heart of memoir. If meaning is the heart, significance is the doorway. Keep interrogating your work and asking the hard questions. Why does this matter? And if this feels hard, that’s because it is. I’ll leave you with these final words from the brilliant Mark Nepo: “It’s not what we get for it but what we become by it.”
Looking for a memoir class? I have two coming up.
April 22-May 13 (4-week class): What Made Maggie Smith’s “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” a Bestselling Memoir?
July-December 2025 (6-month intensive): Write Your Memoir in Six Months
I think this is a smart and articulate piece about the limitations of memoir. I write narrative nonfiction as well as fiction, and I taught narrative nonfiction for many years, and my own work is not memoir, other than indirectly. My collection “The Redneck Way of Knowledge” was published in 1982, reissued in 1997 with an Introduction by Dorothy Allison, and is being reissued again in 1996, probably with another Introduction by someone else. My work has stayed relevant because I am not the subject, I am the lens.
The self as the lens, using what is autobiographical as a way to look at subjects that are not the lens, is imho much more powerful than attempting nonfiction that posits ‘objectivity’, a notion that seems false everywhere but in science and math. Using one’s own experience as a lens makes looking at ‘the other’ or what is not the self more accurate (and possibly quite moving and even funny), not less.
But simply writing about the self, about one’s own life and experience, may be helpful for the writer. However, it has to reach beyond itself to matter. Read Sloane Crosley’s “Grief Is for People” for a wonderful example of autobiographical work that reaches beyond her own experience. She is the lens, not the subject. There are many examples of this, and I may write a piece about it in my own substack, Blanche.substack.com, which is free and always will be.
I have a friend, a playwright, who created a character Creates a Path While Walking, who is, at his best self, fully in the present—lessons from many spiritual traditions, but particularly Buddhist and Native Americans. It seems to me if we create our path while walking through our days at best we are naming/seeing our experiences and feeling our way to integrating and sharing. Memoir can take many forms. Some of the earliest were religious, i.e. St. Augustine, Catherine of Sienna, etc. Certainly poetry. A book I particularly love is Joe Brainard’s I REMEMBER.’ Muriel Rukeyser’s THE LIFE OF POETRY. I also highly recommend to my clients and co-travelers to be ready to tell the truth as best you can, and if you can’t maybe you’re not ready to write this particular memoir yet. Mary Karr, whose amazing book THE ART OF MEMOIR, says it like it is in a blunt and honest recollection from her own life and from her teaching and other people’s memoirs. Her book taught me you have to be ready. I just want to reiterate that you have to tell your readers the truth and you have to have found a truth beyond or with the pain that buoys the reader. Whatever the form—poems, chronological narrative, your own story in non-chronological order, reporting with narrator/observer/reporter being also character. It’s a big tent.
Brooke, thanks as always for sharing your thoughts. I’m beginning a six week class teaching memoir in person in White Bear Lake MN at the Center for the Arts. I will be sure to share your writing and your intensive with the writers there.