Person on the Page

Several years ago, I attended a week-long writers’ conference on a university campus during which participants were divided into workshop groups based on genre, theme, or focus. I was in the group of memoirists whose workshop was titled Writing through and about Trauma.  We were eight women who had survived various kinds of childhood and other traumas and felt compelled to write about our experiences. We bonded quickly and, supported by our excellent workshop leader, provided each other with meaningful feedback and substantial encouragement.

During the week of the conference, our group was shunned by the other attendees. The poets, fiction writers, and dramatists in the other groups dubbed us the “Trauma Queens.” During mealtimes and social hours, we were left to eat and socialize together in our group while other attendees mixed and mingled. The few who spoke to us at all asked us why we would want to write about our personal traumas. Why would we want to share that embarrassing, awkward information with the world? We were considered whiners, sensationalists—not real writers. What we were doing was somehow less valid than the kind of writing the other groups were doing. Our writing didn’t count.    

Despite the recent popularity on the bookselling market of memoirs and other personal nonfiction, the attitude among writers persists that personal nonfiction, especially when it addresses victimization, objectification, physical and psychological abuse, incest, and other sensitive subjects, cannot be good writing. 

This attitude exists among academics as well. I didn’t discover this until after I left graduate school. As a doctoral student at West Virginia University, I studied with Dr. Timothy Dow Adams, at the time an internationally known theorist on life writing.  In his seminars, we read and analyzed memoirs that treated an array of painful personal subjects. We approached them as literary art. So, I was unprepared for the attitudes I would encounter after grad school.

Over the years, I have worked with a number of colleagues who taught literature but did not include works of creative nonfiction, especially personal nonfiction, among the literary works they assigned students to read. Drama, fiction, and poetry defined the boundaries of the literary. Historically significant nonfiction texts sometimes made the cut. Several times when I suggested that we include authors of personal nonfiction along with the poets and novelists we invited to speak on our campus, my suggestion was politely but decisively brushed aside.

I was reminded of these experiences last week while I was reading Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.  In it, Melissa Febosrecounts her own experience with the bias against personal narratives in the literary world:

A few years ago at a writers’ conference, during a panel of literary magazine editors, a female audience member posed a question about the potential audience for her story of surviving a familiar kind of trauma. One of the male editors on the panel rolled his eyes and shrugged. “I mean, I’m not sure we need any more of those stories.” The other panelists nodded in consensus: Stories like hers belonged on talk shows, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don’t need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche. 

The resistance Febos describes uncovers an important reality surrounding the status of personal narratives in the literary realm. Stories of difficult personal experiences are inherently political. Accounts of physical and psychological victimization point to a victimizer. They bring difficult social truths to light. Whether enacted consciously or unconsciously, the resistance to personal narratives is an effort to silence those who have experienced trauma at the hands of others.

To this reality, Febos responds,

I’m finished referring, in a derogatory way, to stories of the body and sex and gender and violence and joy and childhood and family as navel-gazing. . . .  [T]he dominant culture tells us that we shouldn’t write about our wounds and their healing because people are fatigued by stories about trauma? No. We have been discouraged from writing about it because it makes people uncomfortable. Because a patriarchal society wants its victims to be silent. Because shame is an effective method of silencing.

Let’s legitimize personal nonfiction.  Let’s push to make certain that those who exert control over what stories are publicized, what kinds of messages reach readers, acknowledge the practical and artistic value of writing about the personal. Let’s continue to make people uncomfortable.

Don’t shy away from telling your story.  Keep writing.