What are you obligated to put into and leave out of a memoir? What kind of consequences should you expect if you’re completely honest about others in your life? Well-known writers, including Pat Conroy, Cheryl Strayed, Sue Monk Kidd, Anne Lamott, and Edwidge Danticat consider such questions in Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Writing About Ourselves”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. As a journalist, I’ve written a ton of nonfiction, but more and more I’m thinking about writing memoir. Maybe not for publication, but what about you, Grant? Do you ever think about writing a memoir? I do, but I want to write the memories that involve certain other people. Yes, and that’s an issue, right? So it’s not about me, it’s about me being there in the lives of other people. And are you concerned about being published and people being happy with what you write? Well, back when I was a blogger, I was a blogger in the early days of blogging, and I did that for like eight years or so, and you can still find some of the old stuff out there. A couple times I wrote about my relationships with people like roommates or an old high school friend. They found it, and I went back to reread it, and I felt that even though I was honest, they had taken it as an unkindness to even share some of those things about them.
Oh, that’s really interesting.
And so, yeah, I feel a little burned by that. But I gather that you’re headed towards the larger point of memoirs, right? I am indeed. And it’s interesting that you say that because this comes up again and again in this book I’m reading called Why We Write About Ourselves. It’s edited by Meredith Moran. And it’s 20 contemporary writers. A lot of names will be familiar to you, like Sue Monk Kidd and Pat Conroy and Cheryl Strayed and Anne Lamott and James McBride. And they’re all talking about the craft, the process, the challenges and rewards of writing memoirs. And also the kind of thing that you’re talking about, because if you’re writing about yourself, you’re naturally writing about other people as well. And that can be a real risk. And you can get surprising responses, as you just said. They don’t appreciate your honesty or they don’t appreciate your perspective. And then you start to wonder, what were the stakes when I wrote this? Was it worth it? Did I get out of sharing this thing about them what I needed to get? Should I even have bothered?
Right, right.
And that’s exactly what a lot of these writers are wrestling with in these conversations in this book. And it’s interesting that you talk about honesty because that’s another big point that I keep coming across again and again in this book. There was one section I particularly liked that was a conversation with Darren Strauss who wrote Half a Life. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for that. And it’s a memoir about he wrote it when he was 36 years old. And half a life before that, he accidentally killed a girl when he was driving his car. And so he had this struggle within himself. He just felt like it was time to address that. And he wrote with with searing honesty about that pain. And the memoir turned out really well, I think, because of his honesty. And in fact, he talks about the fact that there was a celebrated literary editor who was teaching a beginning memoir class. And the assignment he gave the students was write about the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you. And he said the only criterion, the only rule is that you have to be completely honest.
Wow.
And, I mean, gosh, what a tough assignment. I was trying to think, what if I got that assignment? Yeah, I don’t even know. I don’t even know if I could pull it off. I don’t know if I could either. One of the things that Darren Strauss suggests doing is writing it in the third person. And I was thinking, you know, maybe I could do that. But his point there was that of the 15 people in that class, at least half of them got that essay published. It was accepted for publication someplace. Because of the honesty. Because of the honesty. Because of being honest about the pain. I think you might enjoy this book. It’s called Why We Write About Ourselves, 20 Memorists on Why They Expose Themselves and Others in the Name of Literature, edited by Meredith Moran. If you want to share a book with us or there’s something that you want to recommend, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send the book information and the link to it to words@waywordradio.org.
