It’s All Just Too Painful
When writing memoir becomes an emotional burden
A student of mine in a memoir class is concerned about “digging up” bad memories. It is going to be uncomfortable, she told me. Plus, she wonders, with all that tough and emotional baggage, isn’t the memoir going to be so, so depressing, not only for her to write but for readers to read?
Many times, for the memoirist, the story is all so painful. And now, you want to write about? You want to put it down on paper? You want to share it? Expose it? Is this process just a kind of bad therapy? And are you fooling yourself that anyone would want to read about your pain?
Art, especially personal stories, reminds us that we are not alone. So much of our human experience is common, even when it’s painful. Yes, especially when it hurts. Readers, if the memoir is written well, are more than likely to say, “That’s me, too! I know that feeling.”
We share so much.
The great writer James Baldwin said, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
Baldwin was a novelist, but his thoughts are also fully relevant for the memoirist.
Write through the pain. Write the truth. In the end, it will bring you comfort. Let the raw emotions arise and boil over. It’s okay. Then, write more and more. Redraft. Write again. And in time, you will find a kind of emotional distance and balance. Through the process, give yourself a break. Breath. Take a walk. Take a day. Take two. A week. Undoubtedly when we write about a tough subject, it is not the first time we’ve visited it. So let your history with the pain lead the way. Remember that the process involves a double responsibility—first to ourselves then to the reader. It’s a kind of dance.
The question for many writers is how much pain is too much, pain for you and pain for the reader. Will the reader shutdown if everything is too difficult to take? The truth is the reader can take it. But work toward writing with intimacy and not with information. You don’t have to give every traumatic detail. Sometimes the subtle approach can say much more and make more of impact. This is not to say one should sugarcoat. Certainly not. But “too much information” as the popular phrase suggests is just not necessary. Truth, however, is. That’s where your focus should be, Be authentic. Be real.
Memoir should not be a therapeutic diary. Dragging a reader through every single detail of a horrific event is not good reading. But you have to reveal the truth and then you must show the transcendent moment, the reflective and emotional shift in your being because of the pain. Do this and you are onto something.
Pain may be necessary to face. But pain is not everything. Not in life. And not in memoir. Find your balance. Be truthful to yourself and the reader. Let the pain carry you to a story well told
David W. Berner is a former associate professor at Columbia College Chicago and currently teaches memoir and fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop. His newest memoir, Daylight Saving Time is available now.
