Let's confront some of the fears writers must face as they begin working on their memoirs. Simply considering these fears is capable of preventing many of us from ever beginning in the first place. In order to write our reality, we know we must be fair to our readers; we need to be honest. We can do no better than to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as we remember it. This will be your escape clause. There may be a great deal of distance between what really happened and how we remember it.
Memory is a tricky character, after all. Think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Clark Kent and Superman. Remembrances love to dress up and disguise themselves, especially as superheroes and monsters. But that doesn't mean they aren't the TRUTH–the author's truth. Be compassionate with yourself, even if you don't have the facts just right. It all will be forgiven if the story is well written. Nobody else remembers the order of events, how things unfolded exactly, unless it's Aunt Susie with the photographic memory.
Tell yourself you'll never publish your memoirs anyway. You're just doing it for you, and maybe the audience at the open mic you attend monthly. They love the stories, so why not read them there? It's just a bunch of beatniks, poor poets, and queers. You can let yourself go. Once you begin writing and reading, you may quickly realize how addictive memoir can be. You'll want to work on it all the time. Your poetry will wither on the vine; your essays dry up and fly away like WalMart bags after a Mack truck has blown by. Don't worry, you'll find them stuck among the roadside branches once you're memoir writing has cooled. I can't think of a better reason to keep more than one iron in the fire at all times.
Writing the truth of our lives is incredibly freeing. We remember more and more as we go along. We often find keys to locked doors that contain creaky skeletons; letting them loose to dance and rattle across the page. For this reason, you don't want to take the act lightly. Remembering can be hard, painful, sometimes brutal work. Having a support group of other writers willing to delve into their own past is helpful.
Using humor to offset some of the more difficult passages is crucial. It gives you the leverage you may need to open the next rusty-hinged basement door. Humor also opens hearts and minds so that your audience or reader can swallow the more bitter realities of your (and perhaps their) lives. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" is not just a phrase from a silly song after all. Look up the word "levity."
Do not hold yourself to a timeline. The events don't have to be sequential, written in the order in which they occurred. That's not how memories work, after all. They come and go, fired by the smell of coffee one morning; the breeze off the lake on a hot summer day; the crisp pink taste of watermelon; the saltiness of tears that run down into the corners of our mouths as we grieve a loss.
Your best writing is there, just a few blocks away. Your very own interesting, inspiring, outrageous life story. You know somebody needs to write the thing. It might as well be you. At least then the tale will be told with your slant of the light, instead of bitter old Uncle Floyd's.
—Mendy Knott is a writer, poet and author of the poetry collection A Little Lazarus (Half Acre Press, 2010). To order your copy of A Little Lazarus directly from the author, please click here. Or, if cookbooks are more your style, get a copy of Mendy's family cookbook Across the Arklatex at www.twopoets.us.
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