Merging Life with Fiction

Today we have another international visitor, and a topic with an unusual twist. Mary Hamer explains how writing a historical novel, Kipling & Trix, gave her the opportunity to creatively showcase some personal experience in a setting that may be a more effective than memoir. Read on to learn how this is relevant for memoir writers.

It’s a challenge, writing memoir, to make all the other characters interesting, not just darling moi. One that’s especially hard when we’re writing about experience that’s been difficult or painful. How to give a rounded account, how to keep a balance? Avoid presenting ourselves as the sad victim or proud hero? As readers we all know what a turn-off that can be. And yet we want, we need to write into those painful experiences we’ve had to overcome. They’ve helped to make us who we are.

And they’re powerful: young film-makers in LA used to be told to think of the worst thing that had ever happened to them: and then find a metaphor for it, make a film about that. I’ve got a tip rather like that for memoirists. An exercise you might find helpful. It comes out of my experience of writing Kipling & Trix, my novel about the writer, Rudyard Kipling and his sister, Trix. When I realised that I too had been through an early experience that marked them, I felt I had what it took to tell their story.

Let me explain.

When these two were small—he was just coming up to six and she was three—their parents left them with strangers and went back to India. They meant it all for the best: India’s climate and fevers were dangerous for European children. All the British sent theirs back, if they possibly could. What was unusual in the case of Ruddy and Trix, though, was the treatment they got from the foster-mother their parents left them with.

This woman introduced terror into their lives. When she threatened them, vulnerable as they were, with Hell and the eternal flames in which they would be punished, how could they not be overwhelmed? They’d never heard of Hell, or heaven, for that matter. I’m sure the woman believed, like their parents, that she was acting in the children’s best interests, though she can’t have had much of an instinct for childcare or much understanding of her own desire for power and control.

We have testimony concerning the damage this caused. At the age of seventy, writing his own memoir, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling was bitter about the fear and confusion planted in him at that time. His sister, Trix, never recognised her own confusion. Worse, she lived it and acted it out. You don’t have to be a therapist to make a connection between the impact of those early experiences on a developing three-year-old brain and the string of later breakdowns that Trix suffered.

As a child, I too had shared a similar experience, though it was decades before I understood how it had affected me. Then, at a time when I’d been working on a book about trauma, so knew enough to take them seriously, I had a flashback. Until then the memory of my Irish mother teaching me about Hell when I was small had always been quite neutral. Without warning, the emotion which had been missing from that memory returned and I found myself dizzy with shock, disoriented, lost. I was back in the body and mind of my five-year-old self.

From that moment, I knew the power of such teaching to undermine. Imagine then how I sat up, reading Kipling’s angry memory of being subjected to the same experience! I’d been studying his life, wanting to write about him but not sure whether I could find anything new to say. There are several excellent biographies. I certainly hadn’t fancied adding to them—all those footnotes! Now I had a new and original angle. One that made sense of Kipling’s lifelong battle with depression and his compulsion to write, to imagine his way out of pain. I decided to write his life in the form of fiction so I could position readers to enter his inner world and understand him from the inside.

I found his sister’s experience just as compelling. Trying to repair ourselves by writing seems to be instinctive. Like her brother, Trix wanted to write. She did succeed in publishing two novels with a number of stories and poems. But over time she lost confidence in her own voice. As a woman writer it was all too easy for me to identify with Trix. Inventing scenes of exhilaration and passages of writer’s block came readily! But I do believe that the story I’ve told about Trix in my novel, tracing her long struggle, is more powerful, more just to the trouble she caused and above all more interesting than any doleful account of my own fight to keep writing.

So where’s the tip for you memoirists out there? Look around. See whether there’s someone else’s story that resonates with your bad stuff. Try telling their story, instead of your own. You could make it an exercise: just a scene, a passage of dialogue. Make it really embodied, concrete, not just inside heads. You may discover fresh perspectives. Better still, you might decide that their story is something you could tell really well, using what you know from your own experience. Why not run with that?

Mary Hamer was born in Birmingham, UK. She has published four books of non-fiction, having spent years teaching in the university. She is married, with grownup children and seven grandchildren. Kipling and Trix is her first novel, and it received the Virgina Prize for Fiction in 2012. Mary’s website: http://mary-hamer.com/

Is Memoir a Betrayal?

“Writers are always selling somebody out,” wrote Joan Didion at the beginning of her first essay collection, 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

This sinister quote was included in Boris Katcha’s feature article on the New York Magazine site discussing Didion’s brutally personal new memoir, Blue Nights. Katcha considers Didion’s words “a statement of mercenary purpose in the guise of a confession: not a preemptive apologia but an expression of grandiose, even nihilistic ambition.”

How might this apply to “ordinary people” writing lifestory and memoir? How many memoir writers have grandiose or nihilistic ambitions? My previous post, “Above All, Cause No Harm,” emphasizes that shadows give depth to a character, and that speaking our truth may be inconvenient or painful for others. So, yes, in a sense, even without Didion’s mindset, memoir can be seen by some as a betrayal, in at least a small way.

Most thinking people will agree that this is a matter of degree. Mentioning that Aunt Agatha was portly won’t raise nearly as many eyebrows as sharing the news that Uncle Elmer groped children, specifically you.

So here’s the ethical dilemma. Assuming it is true that Uncle Elmer groped children, even if “only” you, most would consider that Uncle Elmer betrayed family trust, and yours  most of all. Perhaps by opening this wound to light and air you will help yourself and an entire family heal and move on. Perhaps you will inspire others to speak out and help rid society of this evil, or at least give future generations the strength and awareness to teach children to speak up so we can deal with it quickly before permanent damage is done.

In this case the question may be, if Uncle Elmer betrayed trust in general and yours in particular, is disclosing this fact in a published memoir betraying Uncle Elmer? Betraying the family? I leave that for you to decide. There is  no right answer.

Are hurt feelings a betrayal? Who owns reactions? Does Aunt Agatha ever look in the mirror? Does she think nobody knows she is the elephant is in the room? Is she truly unaware that people whisper and snicker behind her back? If you know Aunt Aggie’s feelings will be hurt, perhaps you don’t need to mention her size and eating habits, at least not so bluntly. Perhaps she’s eating herself into an early grave and you can wait her out. If it is an important story element, you’ll have a decision to make.

On balance, published memoirs do tend to include “juicy” material, perhaps because most people who feel motivated to take on a writing project of that scope generally have some sort of traumatic event or series of events to report, in the belief that doing so will have benefit for others. But even these thorny stories have rose petals strewn among them.

Decisions about what to include and what to leave in the closet are always an individual decision. Use these questions to help make your own:

• What is my purpose for including this event or detail?
• Does it further the purpose of the story?
• Am I using it to gain sympathy or a laugh at the expense of the person I’m writing about?
• What are the long term consequences likely to be?
• Do the anticipated costs of  expected turmoil outweigh the benefits?
• What will that person think? Others who know the person?
• Can I generalize enough to mask the identity of this person?

You may think of other questions to add to this list. I’ll continue writing about this thread in future posts, so please participate in the conversation by posting additional questions and other thoughts in a comment.

Write now: a draft of a story with juicy content that you aren’t sure about sharing with anyone. Write the draft without consideration for propriety or anyone’s feelings. When you finish, look back through the story and underline sensitive passages. Consider each one. How does it contribute to the story? Would your message be clear without that line? Is there another honest way to say the same thing in a less offensive way?

The Transformative Power of Memoir

Some people write memoir to celebrate, some to inform, some for self-exploration, some to heal. In her second guest post on this blog, Samantha M. White explains that the results can go beyond your initial intention. 

Writing my memoir transformed my life. Not only my day-to-day present, and my future, but even the past about which I had written!

Transformation was not my goal. I wrote it because I had a story pent up inside me, pressing to be told – to share what had happened to me, and how I had found my way out of pain. I wanted to assure readers of the universality of suffering, and the reality of healing and finding new joy. I felt driven, and afraid that if I died before publishing the book, an important message wouldn’t be heard.

I had read that one-third of trauma survivors never recover, and another third make it back to approximately where they were before the trauma occurred. Following the violent death of my daughter in the wake of two other major life losses, I knew I didn’t want to end up in either of those two groups. I couldn’t bear to waste the pain. I needed to honor her life.

So I set my intention to land in the remaining third – those who grow from trauma, become stronger, deeper, wiser, and more effective at bringing about positive social change. How I accomplished that is the subject of my memoir, Someone to Talk To: Finding Peace, Purpose, and Joy After Tragedy and Loss. The book gestated in me for years before I actually began the writing, and took fifteen grueling months of daily writing to complete. The results of all that effort were multiple: I enjoyed the great satisfaction of having completed something that felt important to me; I reached and helped people in need whom I didn’t even know; I was acknowledged for my achievement, and received a prestigious award (a 2012 Nautilus Book award); I even got a flash of something feeling like fame when a short clip of a TV interview of me ended up on YouTube; and a new identity: I introduced myself to my new neighbor (“Hi, I’m Samantha White,”) and she gasped, “The author?”

But the big prize at the end was that my painful past had morphed into something else – a happy past!

None of the facts had changed – my first marriage was still over, ended tragically, I had been betrayed, and my daughter was gone from me forever. But many of the other hurtful incidents, the lies and insults, the feelings of shame, and even my anger – had fallen away, lost their importance in the larger picture. The woefully long story of my personal suffering had been whittled down to what mattered, and the rest, I realized – well, the rest didn’t matter. Instead of continuing to passively allow my crippling memories to assault me, I could begin to choose what to remember and what to forget.

I choose to focus now on what I’m grateful for, and what fulfills me. I have resumed doing something I enjoyed before my daughter’s death – public speaking – and am making new friends, learning new things. I have a new husband and a life rich with music, laughter, and love. My book seems to be flying on wings of its own to people who want to learn how to triumph over trauma, and in that way honors the memory of my daughter.

It wasn’t catharsis, as people assume. Catharsis went on for many years before, when I wept and spoke of my sorrow, over and over again. This was not merely a final emptying of the deep well of my sadness. It was a penetrating examination of what was causing my pain, resulting in a metamorphosis, what some Buddhists call “turning the pain into medicine.”

The pain itself, which drove me to write the book, became the cure for not just my losses, but for my life, now renewed. My past no longer hurts me. Writing about it turned it around and helped me see it as something else . . . as the platform for my growth and (here’s that word again) transformation.

In my line of work (psychotherapy), it’s what we call “reframing.” Remove an old, murky, indistinct painting from its battered frame, dust it off and rotate it, examine it to find what’s hidden there, choose a truer frame, and hang it in a better light. Voila! – from a tired, old scene emerges a fresh, new view.

That’s what writing memoir can do, did do, for me.

You can read Samantha’s previous guest post, Accessing Intuition, here. Visit Samantha’s website and read more of her insights on her blog.

Write now: Do some freewriting about how writing has transformed your life – or how you hope it will if it hasn’t already. In the latter case, dream big. Make a list of topics to explore in writing that you’d like to understand better or see “detoxified.” Keep that list and write your way through it, but take your time and don’t rush. Leave a comment about your thoughts or plans.