Making Sure Your Memoir Doesn’t Sound Like a Therapy Session (unless you want it to)

After I had finished a second draft of my memoir, I was dying to share it with someone but knew it wasn’t ready for prime time. After my third draft, I shared it with someone and they didn’t like it, and I didn’t like how that felt, so I was reluctant to share it with anyone else. But I knew I was in a bind. It wouldn’t get better until I showed it to someone, and it wasn’t good enough to show anyone.

Fortunately, I came across a Craigslist ad for a writing group and they liked whatever it was I submitted. The group had been formed after a playwriting seminar, but the group’s membership had dwindled down to two people, and they were eager for fresh eyes and new stuff to read. For my first critique, I submitted a part of my memoir that I had reworked a dozen times and knew to be half-decent, thanks to the feedback of a writing instructor I’d met.

The very first piece of feedback I got was from Josh, whose own work resembles Tom Robbins. “It’s . . . good, I guess. I’ll be honest, I don’t read memoir, so this isn’t really my bag. What I particularly don’t like is when it reads like a transcript of your therapy session.”

I may have audibly gasped. Clutched at my neck like the dude that Vader chokes in Star Wars (you know, Admiral Motti). Therapy session was not the genre I was going for. Josh pointed out the bits he meant, and I got it. Anywhere in the text where I just said what I felt — “I was so angry” — sounded like I was talking to my therapist. This led me to a critical revision tool: cutting out the therapy talk.

The point of good writing isn’t for me to tell you how I feel. The point is to make you feel the same thing I felt without me telling you what that was. And it’s hard to do that. But the writing is so much better if you take the time to excise the “telling” and replace it with the “showing.”

And not only is the writing better, but the catharsis is much more real.

My memoir is about growing up in the eighties with a gay dad and a Catholic family. My life was strange, and it was lonely. We were afraid of getting AIDS just from being around my dad (he wasn’t infected, but it didn’t matter back then). We weren’t allowed to tell people and we didn’t know any other gay people. It was weird. If I were doing a therapy journal, those are all the things I would say. But since I wanted to write a piece of good literature — a literary memoir — I needed to dig a little deeper than feelings. I had to relive seeing a man dying of AIDS carried to his garden. I had to capture the strange feeling of relief that my father liking men, not hating my mom, was the reason my parents divorced. I had to tell stories. Beautiful stories that make the reader have feelings. To write the beautiful stories, I had to have the feelings again, not just say what they were.

Since I am being fake How-To about this (“How to write your memoir” by A Person Who Has Only a Draft of One Sitting on Her Computer), I suggest that in your first draft, you do your therapy dump. Put down all the feelings and all the details. Dump it all on the page. Only later, after you’ve eliminated your adverbs and sidelined your vignettes, should you turn a critical eye to each story and ask, “What feelings did I write about and what were the facts that created them?” The weather, the clothes, the words said or unsaid, the facial expressions. Put those down and tell your story like the best story you ever read. Fictionalize yourself. Who is this character and why do we sympathize with her (or not)?

You don’t have to do this kind of revision, however. The mental, physical and spiritual benefits of writing memoir — as a kind of therapy — are very well-documented, and whether you choose to de-therapize (a word I just invented) your story is your choice. You should only make that choice after you have done your first draft, however. Don’t let anything inhibit that first flow of words, not your inner editor or your inner emotional security guard.

If you haven’t read my first essay on writing your memoir, please check it out HERE.

You can also subscribe to my newsletter HERE.