The terrain of your memories may be a minefield. As you venture in looking for past experiences to write about, you may happen upon stories that you feel you shouldn’t tell. You may find things that you don’t want to think about, details about people that you think should be kept private, or past life events fraught with pain. When, as a memoirist, you scan your memories for experiences to write about, you might hesitate. How do you navigate around recollections that might prove to be emotionally explosive? And should you?
Much has been written about the therapeutic benefits of writing. Psychologists and composition theorists tell us that we can heal through writing, that we can awaken, discover, or transform ourselves, that by writing we can improve our physical health and dissolve our emotional pain.
But as a memoirist, of course, you are not writing for the possible therapeutic benefits. You write to reach an audience of readers. You write to create literary art. If greater physical and emotional health results from your writing, that is a fortuitous side-effect of your work.
Since they delve into the terrain of memories, with all of its potential emotional minefields, memoirists should be aware of two important facts relevant to the intersection between writing as therapy and writing memoir as an art form.
1. While the goals of therapeutic writing and writing memoir are different, the techniques used to achieve them are similar.
For writing to be therapeutic, the writer must do more than merely sit down and write. The process involves more than just pouring out whatever is on one’s mind. Therapeutic writing consists of locating memories of troubling experiences, then writing about them in a way that both describes them and articulates the past and present emotions associated with them.
Similarly, a memoirist in search of a subject looks to memories of experiences that come to mind, no matter how seemingly trivial, and investigates the reason that a particular experience is remembered when so many others are not. Research into the nature of memory indicates that we remember experiences that have a strong emotion associated with them. So, the memoirist, like the person who writes for therapeutic benefit, chooses to write about emotionally significant experiences, and to convey those emotions, whether directly or indirectly, to the reader.
2. The therapeutic benefits of writing do not manifest themselves immediately. You may feel considerably worse just after writing about an emotionally charged memory than before. The benefits may emerge weeks after the writing takes place.
My own experience with writing about difficult childhood experiences confirms this fact for me. My intention has always been to write well about my childhood, and ultimately to turn the ugliness that is an integral part of my distant past into something beautiful. Immediately after writing, however, I have always struggled with anxiety and agitation. I have always felt worse after writing than before. I believe that I have benefited emotionally, and perhaps also physically, from having written about these painful experiences, but the benefits were not immediate.
As a memoirist, you may experience difficulty coping with the emotional impact of the memories about which you write. You may feel so uncomfortable that you question whether you should be writing at all. I, for one, have asked that question many times. But remember that you are writing for an audience of readers who may want or need your message. You are an artist. And with time, you may reap emotional and physical benefits from your work.
So please, keep writing.
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