Writing Your Own Life–Before You Begin (Part 1)

Now, we come down to the brass tacks, or knuckles as the case may be, concerning family memories. Preserving them for posterity, "just for the family," is one thing. Writing as the author of our own memories is quite another. There's nothing I like better than a well-written memoir. I even prefer the word "memoir" to "autobiography" because it implies, not just a recording of the facts as they occurred, but the author's perception of what actually went down; how it affected them and their behavior, forever and ever amen.

A couple of really good memoirs that will help acquaint you with the process of memoir-writing are: The Liar's Club by Mary Karr; A Girl Named Skippy by Haven Kimmal; Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, and absolutely anything by Anne Lamott and/or David Sedaris. In fact, there are nearly as darn many memoirs out there as there are authors. I encourage you to find the ones that appeal to your sense of story-telling. Don't let the sheer numbers of memoirs stop you from writing your own. You need to believe that your life story is as interesting and educational to others as anyone else's. It's true. Really.

My favorite writings within my writer's group, Hen's Teeth, are the ones that tell their stories. Memories are so intimate and real that they can terrify us in a way. We ask ourselves, "What if that got out? What if someone outside this small group heard how redneck my family was; or that it was full of criminals; or that Uncle Pete had an affair with the Baptist minister in our home town whose population numbered in the high hundreds? We don't want just everybody knowing about that. What will Mummer 'n' em think? They could excommunicate me. Not that I would lose anything financially...but emotionally I can just feel the hate rolling off them like heat off a Southern blacktop in July." When you start asking yourself these questions, you are getting to the good part.

I want to spend some time blogging about this memoir stuff because I think it's important to us as creatives, and to me, since I'm writing my own now. My working title is "Frankly I Think I've Been Freaked Out All My Life." The title is good for a few reasons. One, the term "freaked out" is pretty much dated to my childhood, or at least teenhood (hmm...a good made-up term, so don't steal it. I was a teen hood). For instance, "My first trip to a gay bar in Jackson, MS was really freaky!" or "I was so freaked out I shook the screen loose, leaned out the bathroom window and fired up another joint."

The second reason it's a good working title is that I can reinstate the term whenever I get off track. It gives me a kind of base of operations to which I can return and find my focus. "Do you know what really freaked me out?" Like that. Especially since I tend to wander all over the place, between past-past, present-past and fear for the freaked-outness of my future. And finally, I don't want people to think I got this freaked out just in the past few years, due to climate change or Congress or something equally as freaky... (cont'd next Monday)

—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.