By Madeleine Blais

So you want to write a memoir but you don’t know where to start. You cannot begin to fathom how to narrow down the themes that most define you. The story or, more accurately, stories, of your life feel like a crazy quilt of fabric swatches and paint chips and tile samples gone amok: too many choices and not enough guidance.

I know first hand how intimidating the process of writing memoir can be, having written my own a few years back. I used to feel defensive about adding my words to the mix, like a timid guest at a dinner party. “Just what the world needs,” I would sigh, “another memoir.”

But it strikes me that people have many ways of constructing meaning, and that storytelling is one of the better ones. 
   
I have long found that the stories people tell and the stories they don’t tell are equally haunting. The desire to listen to and to read about not only what happened but also to the silences in between is so ingrained that, despite years of working as a reporter and of teaching personal narrative, I still cannot claim to know all of its roots.

I do know that because I write, read, and teach memoir, I lay claim to an almost limitless passion for the genre and as a result, I often receive manuscripts from other writers of their work in progress. Life is not always easy, and the stories are often wrenching, yet the writers persist: the desire to take the mixed feelings, the stew of second thoughts and misgivings, the old loops they play over and over in their heads, the puzzles in search of missing pieces, and to turn them into narrative is the oldest fuel a writer has.

Someone once said we ought not to die until we have explained ourselves to each other and surely the best memoir writers understand that precept at its deepest core.

At this moment I am reviewing two promising works-in-progress.
One is by a single white female novelist who adopted across racial barriers, in Texas. The other is by a writer of international renown who lost her older son to suicide when he was 42 years old after a troubled stint as a support worker in Iraq. Both offer what I consider the hallmarks of fine memoir writing: a story worth telling and a wise writer to tell it. 

Yet the impulse to write memoir is not limited to professionals.
Plenty of civilians want to have their say as well. To leave a record is a great gift for future generations. Even if your goal is casual and private, to create, for instance, a limited-circulation document to be distributed over the holidays or in honor of an anniversary or a birthday or a family reunion, there is still no reason not to be mindful of the standards of literary memoir and to be as rigorous as possible so that whatever you create is as enduring as possible.
    
Getting it all down, sooner rather than later, is the writer’s mandate in a nutshell. Given the public and unabashed nature of my love for memoir, I am often consulted about the form itself.  Among the questions I am asked:

What memoirs should I be reading?
 

How do I find my subject matter?

What is the best way to get started?

Do you have any writing tricks or exercises that might help?

Is it useful to keep a diary or a notebook?

How important is a sense of place in memoir?

What about all the landmines: what if you can’t remember?  Is it all right to make things up? To use fake names? Composites?  What about if family members disagree with your version or simply don’t want anything exposed, whether what you write is accurate or not? 

What are the ethics about writing about your family and friends? Do you owe them any special consideration?  Is it better to ask for permission or forgiveness?  What happens after your work is done?  Agents? Reviews? Family reaction?

How much easier it would be if the act of writing were one long, leisurely, word-perfect love letter from the unconscious that required neither rewriting nor methodology, but the fact is that while inspiration matters, so does sweat.  

Just because something happened to you doesn’t make it a story, or at least not a story that others would wish to read. As for a simple definition of the genre, I would say that most memoirs are composed in varying measures of gossip, whispers, intrigue, outrage, puzzlement, and joy, which makes memoir no different from most works of literature, with one key exception. 

In memoir, the author never totally disappears. The writer haunts the enterprise, demanding personal attention: the limelight at last, even if it is many years after the events being recounted.

(Nonetheless, it doesn’t hurt to recede into the woodwork on occasion.  There is no reason to introduce a signal moment with words like “I’ll always remember” or “I’ll never forget.”  Those sentiments are implicit in the storytelling and are a form of verbal littering. As the fashion magazines always counsel, in their snippy way: fewer accessories, please.) 

At the heart of memoir is a conundrum: while writing about the most subjective of experiences, your own life, you have to find the most objective of frameworks. Consider how a simple list of the names of your childhood friends might be enough to move you to tears, but that won’t work for readers. Readers need you to supply context, physical description, character sketches, the whole range of verbal wizardry, if they are to come close to feeling as you do about your material. 

“You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arm, like a drunk, and say, ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting,’” as Annie Dillard has written. 

The very word, memoir, has a dainty, precious, scented sound, like boudoir or bon-bon, and that there is something admirable and old-fashioned about the often slow-paced explorations practiced by writers of memoir. Most memoirs are about events that occurred in dusky venues long ago and would be doomed to remain obscure but for the author’s perverse insistence to the contrary. Memoirs are more moon than sun, more ocean than mountain, more, in some ways, feminine, at least according to certain stereotypes.

But do not kid yourself.

There is nothing about a good memoir that is soft or easy.

It is not a genre for the faint of heart.

If you are eager for actual publication and working on something beyond a vanity document for friends and family, be prepared for the possibility that your memoir, like a lot of serious nonfiction, will be greeted as second-class, valued less for its writing than for its subject matter, and classified that way by bookstores and libraries. There is something vaguely insulting about this and certainly not a trend anyone would want to encourage because unchecked, if it spilled over to  fiction, for example, we might find ourselves looking for Moby Dick under "oceanography," or Sophie’s Choice under "Brooklyn, New York in the 50's" or A Farewell to Arms in the nursing section.

Just because writing is a quiet act that involves sitting still for long stretches does not make it any less of a blood sport.

With memoir the sword slashes in two directions. Not only is the work being reviewed, but also the quality of the life led by the writer. If skin were biologically capable of generating its own extra layer, this would be the time. In addition, the very material that gets documented can often be nearly unbearable. The landscape of memoir is littered with dead babies and with absent parents.

Does that mean that memoir has to be about trauma?

Not necessarily. Books such as An American Childhood by Annie Dillard, Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell, Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin, Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick, Piano Lessons by Noah Adams, and French Lessons by Alice Kaplan compensate in elegance for what they lack in fireworks.

Their subject matter ranges from growing up privileged in Pittsburgh, to launching a career and a marriage in the city of cities, to strolling amid old neighborhood haunts, to documenting a fierce mother/daughter bond, to learning to play an instrument in one case, a foreign language in another: the subjects not of screaming headlines so much of as of quiet exchanges between interested parties.

In general, it is helpful if you grew up in a situation that included, if at all possible, siblings and nuns, the more of each the better: this was my lucky happenstance. It also does not hurt to have lived in the boonies. West Texas and Limerick, Ireland and Concrete, Washington and the outback of Australia have all been spoken for but not to worry: the world is filled with places people want only to be from.

But since you cannot back-order colorful characters or geography any more than you can happiness, or trauma, your work will, in the end, reflect your own set of “givens.”

The majority of writers have experienced a major  “before” and “after” along the way, a strong dose of what it is like to be on the outside looking in. As the novelist Anne Tyler once put it, quoting a friend who is a poet: “You have to have had rheumatic fever in your childhood. I’ve never had rheumatic fever, but I believe that any kind of setting-apart experience will do as well.”

For Lorene Cory (Black Ice), it was being part of a racial minority at the exclusive St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire in the seventies. For Helen Fremont (After Long Silence), it was because of sexual orientation as a gay woman as well as her falsified ethnic and religious identity, thanks to parents who chose to hide their Judaism in this country out of fear of the reprisals they faced in Europe during World War 11. For Rick Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin’) it was economic and regional disenfranchisement. 

For Jennifer Finney Boylan (She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders) it was the feeling of entrapment that came from being transgendered. In the end, you will not be judged by what has happened to you in your life but by how well you wrote about it.

As one critic said, “It’s all in the art, you get no credit for living.” Childhood itself is by definition a marginalized state in which we are dependent on people much larger and more powerful than ourselves for our safety and well being, people who often fall down on the job. 

But just because you’ve had it tough, just because you possess a “given” story, a cataclysmic event in your past, does not mean you can write a shaped, literary memoir simply by spewing forth all the grisly or touching details. If it’s such a cinch, why did it take Frank McCourt until his sixties to finally write his in a way that did justice to his story? Or, as he said in a talk with some high school students on Long Island a few days after he won the Pulitzer Prize for Angela’s Ashes, he was able to finally write his memoir after he learned the “significance of my own insignificant life.” 

A few years ago a successful memoir by Nuala O’Faolain was published with a title that could fit almost anyone’s story: Are You Somebody? An honest unflinching answer to that question is likely to be the heart of your memoir.

For more than 20 years, I have taught memoir writing to undergraduates willing to embark on that most treacherous of journeys, entering what William Butler Yeats called the abyss of the self. You may well wonder whether college kids are too young for that kind of self-scrutiny. Nothing has happened to them yet.

What on earth do they have to write about?

The answer is, “Plenty.” Young people are always being reminded of how young they are: my class reminds them of how old they are as well.

The class has its rituals, but perhaps none is more important than the speech I make on the first day. It does not vary much from one year to the next and although it is geared to young people, in a classroom setting, the major points apply to anyone setting out to write memoir. I offer them with the hope that you will tailor what I have to say to your own purposes, no matter what your stage in life.

The speech, more or less:

“During the first half of the semester, you will read six or seven books by accomplished practitioners. As for the topic of your final paper, I have, I fear, a few rules.

“Just as it takes the bones of dinosaurs centuries to fossilize, it takes a long time for an experience in your life to become tempered with perspective. Generally, I want you to avoid the breaking news in your lives. No profiles of roommates, no matter how interesting or eccentric or irritating they are. No profiles of current boyfriends or of current girlfriends, and I don’t care which you have. No stories about how someone got drunk every weekend of his freshman year, or his sophomore year.

“What I am trying to avoid is the narrative that consists of:  I was smashed, I passed out, I remember nothing. My friends say they never saw someone that wasted.

“Usually, I don’t have to keep spelling this out, but just in case you are feeling especially sleepy or inattentive, let me add:

“Or junior year.

“Or senior year.

“Also, avoid writing about your spring break, especially in Cancun.

“No bulimia, no anorexia, no cutting, no you-get-the-point, the reason being that I have found that writing about an addiction, no matter how troubling or how influential it has been in your life, inevitably maintains your relationship with it, and I am more interested in having you capture some sense of yourself as a whole person rather than to focus on one diseased or disabled aspect. It is not so much that I oppose certain topics so much as I do not want to see them as the centerpiece.

“I have found that students are likely to react to the pathology rather than to the writing, so that the discussion becomes, ‘You went through an entire day and only ate one cookie which you parceled out in twenty pieces,’ and often ends with a note of sympathy, ‘That’s terrible,’ which, though true enough, cannot on any level be interpreted as a discussion of literary merits.

“This isn’t therapy. It is four credits in the journalism department.”

It would be misleading to suggest or, even worse, to promise, that writing about bad things will make you feel less bad. Sometimes it works that way, but there are no guarantees, and for anyone setting out to capture in words a trauma or a disappointment, it is useful to keep in mind that just because writing and therapy often address the same territory, they are not synonymous, the contradiction being that once you accept the distinction, the closer you will be to having the two processes dovetail.

The goals of therapy and of writing tend to run parallel:  one leads to self-acceptance; the other to art and only possibly, as a happy add-on, like shrimp on your Caesar, to self-acceptance. Therapy might make someone a better person, but not necessarily a better writer. 

Language, someone once said, is what we do to each other.  We know words can hurt. The fantasy for many memoir writers is that words can erase hurt as well and that going public guarantees a kind of automatic cure. 

The best memoirs are offered in a spirit that might be called post-therapy, after what one reviewer called “the rage, the indignation, the feverish pique” and the self-absorption have subsided, and what is left is the one true story, or as Graham Greene put it, the “icicle at the heart.”

Literary memoirs tend to avoid diagnostic categories: fine writers are forever describing substance abuse, and peer parenting, and abandonment, and all manner of upheaval without once resorting to deadening jargon and soulless abbreviations.
  
The speech, as it winds toward its conclusion:

 “In general, avoid self-consciously pretty words like tawny and silhouette and moonlight.
    “No sunsets.
    “No beaches.
    “And, especially, no beaches at sunset.”

At this point in the presentation, I usually pause, hoping it appears as if no such similar pause has ever occurred previously at this precise juncture.

I slow down for a couple of reasons, the chief being that the moment of silence helps to highlight a quote from the critic Laurie Stone, who, in one of those simple statements that conceals its complications, a statement which embodies the heart and soul of the entire enterprise, said that the goal of memoir is “not to tell your experience as a story, but to find the story in your experience.”

If, in other words, you fail to shape your story, to give it spine and heft, you risk producing nothing but blather.  You are in danger of turning yourself into the classic traveler’s nightmare: the person on the cross-country bus who won’t shut up and you are only in Chicago.

Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and author Madeleine Blais is the author of Uphill Walkers, a family memoir. She teaches journalism at UMass Amherst. This summer she's also a columnist for The Boston Globe.