It’s My Story and I’ll Tell It the Way That I Want To
I’m still feeling the power of Rachael Herron’s seminar on memoir at the Writer’s Digest Conference this past weekend.
I don’t write memoir — at least none beyond the bits that appear here in blog posts.
I’m a novelist. I make things up and I write them down. Should something that I write in a story appears to be remarkably similar to something people know happened in my own life, it’s not.
I mean, it might seem like it. But it’s not.
What I ultimately write and share is filtered, integrated, mashed, mauled, shaped into something that is useful for me in the here and now. The words on the page are only the palest approximation of anything I might have experienced — and only I know for sure what that experience was and how I think and feel about it now. The truth that I lived is between me and my creator — as it only ever is, for any writer.
A number of writers were concerned about writing a memoir that included difficult, damaging people with the power to wreak havoc in the current day or family members who might get upset. In discussing difficult people and horrific events, we talked our way through ways to honor our own experience and to speak our own truth while respecting others. There were many opinions, no final conclusions about the best way to do any of it. We’ll have to find our own ways.
I went home that night, read a passage that still haunts me given the discussion we had. From Laurie R. King’s excellent The Beekeeper’s Apprentice about a young woman apprenticed to retired Sherlock Holmes:
“I find it necessary to interrupt my narrative and say a few words concerning an individual whom I had wanted to omit entirely. I find, however, that her total absence grants her undue emphasis by the vacuum it creates. I speak of my aunt.”
The aunt was a brutal, controlling woman who robbed the young woman, did all that she could to thwart an intelligent, energetic person. Throughout the book, this terrible woman is not named and her actions and their results are described only to the extent that they impact the person that the protagonist became. The reader has an adequate impression of the aunt, but a total understanding and picture of the protagonist. We root for the young woman, ignore the terrible person and pay attention to her only as she serves to shape a remarkable hero.
Possibly, this kind of manueuver can be done in a real-life memoir.
I work hard to stay true to my story whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Sometimes it looks remarkably similar to what I may have lived — but I am the only one who can say what my experience was — and only if I want to do so.
Living well is the best revenge — and writing our own version of our own life an essential part of doing just that.
Dedicated to a remarkable, talented, brave young woman who has an incredible story to tell — I know that she’ll find her way to telling it and we will all of us be the richer for it.
