Taking the Leap Into Memoir

The challenges of life writing

The garden where I’m currently staying in Surrey. I could spend forever reading and writing in this yard!

Even before I started this trip, I wanted to write about it. Everyone I mentioned it to showed so much curiosity and, in some cases, astonishment. “You know you’re doing what most of us would like to do but never will,” my agent told me. “I hope you’re taking notes.”

I have been taking lots of notes. But it wasn’t until I settled down in Edinburgh for three months that I began to write in earnest. When I was in Berlin last April, I had started to find my way towards writing it. It wasn’t easy. I felt completely overwhelmed. How much backstory should I include? How far back in my journals should I read? How should I structure it? How should I focus it—what should my theme be? The options were paralyzing.

I finally started simply by collecting ideas and scenes under topics. I used Scrivener and made folders I could dump them into. It wasn’t long before ideas started to brew and I began writing possible beginnings. And it has just been growing from there. Scrivener has been great because I can write a piece (that may vary from 50 to 1,000 words) and move them around or easily move them out of the draft and back again later, if I want. (Scrivener is an alternative to Word. It allows you to see the whole project in one frame, and is great if you are managing lots of bits and pieces.)

So far, I’ve been writing a chapter for each place I’ve stayed, but I’ve only covered the first two and a half months and I’m already well over 30,000 words. That’s about a third of what the overall word count should be. So I’m thinking I won’t write about every single place, probably just the main places: Paris, Provence, London, Cassis (France), Sicily, Berlin, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

I also tend to write too much. My first drafts are bloated, and an important part of my process is hacking and pruning. Rather than write through a full draft, as I did with the novel, I’ve been going back over the first three chapters quite a bit. The fourth is in an earlier stage and my next bit of work is to start trimming it down. By revising and rewriting while I write, I am finding out what this book is really about. Is it a travel memoir? A (late) midlife transformation memoir? A biographical memoir with the stories of women writers and artists woven into mine? So far, it’s all of those, but it’s difficult to hold all three balls in the air and keep the manuscript a manageable size.

I was able to print out what I have so far while I’m staying at a friend’s house. It was exciting to see it on paper, after having only worked with it on screen. Soon these pages will be full of pencil marks. I love editing on the page!

Women Writers and Memoir

I’ve also been reading a lot of memoir lately, looking for inspiration. I have been typing up passages that I particularly like, which is a great way to get a feel for writing that you respond to, to see how it’s put together and how it communicates insight.

I was already a big fan of Deborah Levy’s trilogy of “living autobiographies,” as she calls them. The third one, Real Estate, is my favorite, although they are all great. I’ve been rereading it and noticing the command she has over her ideas, slipping in a quote from Marguerite Duras or the film director Celine Sciamma, circling around and around as she explores different facets of her topic. Reading it is like driving along and then suddenly finding yourself turning a corner into some new interesting landscape. Here is one of my favorite passages, to give you a taste:

I had started writing on a typewriter with a sheet of carbon paper between the pages when I was twenty-four. In my late teens I had read the dusty literary journals my mother kept stacked on her shelves, dating back to the sixties and seventies. I was interested in the interviews with brilliant male writers and barely noticed there was not a single interview with a female writer. Yet I had glimpsed a shape for my life when I was quite young. I knew I was a writer. Who is she then, the writer girl/woman? To not have been offended at the absence of women in the pages of those high-end journals was a terrible disconnect from whatever I must have felt at her absence. It was just normal. It was normal to be disappeared. It was normal to be discouraged.

(Image from penguin.co.uk)

I’ve also been reading Katie Roiphe’s The Power Notebooks. It’s an exploration of the imbalance of power in relationships (particularly heterosexual ones) and keeps circling around the question of why so many otherwise powerful women in public give up their agency in private. This early passage got me hooked:

I obsessed over writers whose lives seemed to hold out some sort of template even if it upended certain expectations I had for successful women. Why did Mary McCarthy have to ask her husband for a nickel to make a telephone call? Why did Sylvia Plath fall in love with, as she put it, the only man who could boss her around? Why did Edith Wharton, at the height of her success, write to her faithless lover, “I don’t want to win—I want to lose everything to you!”?

We “think back through our mothers,” Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, but it’s often painful to look into the lives of women writers in previous centuries. We want our lives to be different. But we also want role models. I’m fascinated by how we relate to these stories of earlier women’s lives, what we expect or hope from them, and what use we make of them.

Roiphe also looks back over women’s writing about their personal lives—past and present—and notices how we give up our power there too. She writes:

The pressure for women to “be honest,” by which people nearly always mean be vulnerable, show weakness, soften the edges, sound like you are not totally pulled together, confess that you are drinking too much, say, or crying in the street, or stylishly neurotic a la Joan Dideon or suffering with an eating disorder or struggling with depression is a very powerful one. . . .The writer has to telegraph “I am a mess” to mitigate an otherwise arrogant or chafing presumption. Especially if the writer is a woman.  

(Image from the East Hampton Star)

Of course, we don’t just do this in our writing. We also do it in everyday life, she says: “diffuse competition, brush off compliments, be self-deprecating, anticipate and dismantle the question ‘What makes her think she’s so special?’” I’ve noticed that I’m often uncomfortable saying that I am writing a memoir. And I think it’s because of that lingering question. What makes me think I’m so special?

But then I’ve also found that I’m writing about this past year for me as much as anyone else. It has become a way to ground myself when my whole life has been up in the air. It is helping me make sense of everything. There is something about giving your life a form, making it into a story, as messy as that may be, that is transformative. I know that I am already a different person for doing this work.

I’ll admit that I’ve thought more than once about the common wisdom among memoirists that you should not write about something that is too fresh. Write from the scab not the wound, they say. In my case, I’m writing about a trip and a year in upheaval while I’m still living it. I don’t know where I’ll end up. And I don’t know what the end of my story will be either. But writing about it is helping me live through it. I was reassured recently to read how Melissa Febos describes her own life writing:

A common piece of writing advice for those who write from personal experience is to wait a long time before writing about a subject, so that you can acquire the necessary perspective, the insight that comes with hindsight. While I understand the logic undergirding that advice, I have often written my way out of experiences. Without hindsight, I’ve been left with other tools, often more lyric modes of articulating my experience and that has yielded writing that I couldn’t have produced at any later time. Writing is my best way of thinking, of coming to insight about my experiences, and mostly I prefer to do it sooner rather than later.

You can read the whole interview here.

I’ve also been reading Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me and am just starting her book Body Work. My daughter had the opportunity to see her last year at Bryn Mawr, where she is going to college, and loved her. I’m intrigued and will have more to say about her in the future, I’m sure.

Until then, I hope you are well, and I would love to hear your thoughts about women and memoir or anything else you’d like to share. I always love to hear from you!

Happy reading and writing until next time,

Anne

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