I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
I have been wondering exactly what stories I should include in my memoir, or more accurately, in the first, abbreviated version of it. I have so many interesting and potentially meaningful stories from the decade after my divorce. But I want to finish just ten (along with ten paintings) to compile into a small printed book by the end of this year.1
I have stories that would be difficult to share, because they reveal things about me and about other people that are sensitive and private. I will use pseudonyms and change identifying details where that is the case. But of course people know who I am.
My mom noted that my memoir is fictionalized after she read my story Powder Skis. Well, yes, it is lightly fictionalized, but only lightly. That story is mostly.
But very sensitive, private stories might provide the most insight about it was like for me to go from the devastation of my divorce to the happiness and creative joy I live with today. So can I really leave them out?2
Another problem with those stories is that they introduce a new set of complications into the story I’m telling. They suggest some detours from the easy-ish “and then I found my creative power and personal sovereignty” story. But adding complexity is not necessarily a bad thing. Life is complicated, right?
In Novelist as Vocation, Haruki Murakami writes about why we need novels (and this would seem to apply to memoirs also):
Novel writing is indeed a most inefficient undertaking, consisting of repeating “for instance” over and over. Say there is a personal theme you wish to develop. So you transpose it into a different context. “For instance, it could be like this,” you say. That transposition or paraphrase, however, is not complete: it has parts that are unclear and fuzzy. So you start a new section that basically says, “Let me give you another ‘for instance.’ ” It can go on and on like that, a chain of paraphrased “for instances” that never ends. It’s like one of those Russian dolls that you open again and again, always to find still another, smaller doll inside. Could there be more circuitous, inefficient work than this? If a theme could be voiced clearly and rationally from the outset, then there would be no need for this incessant round of “for instances.” An extreme way of putting it is that novelists might be defined as a breed who feel the need, in spite of everything, to do that which is unnecessary.
Yet the novelist will claim that truth and reality are entrenched in precisely such unnecessary, roundabout places. I know it may sound pretentious, but it is in this belief that the novelist plies his craft. Thus it is natural that we find, on the one hand, people who believe that there is no need for novels and, on the other, those who maintain that novels are absolutely necessary. It all depends on the time span you adopt and the type of framework through which you view things. More precisely, our world is constructed in a multilayered way, so that the realm of the roundabout and the inefficient is in fact the flip side of that which is clever and efficient. If one or the other is missing (or if one is dominated by the other), then the world is distorted as a result.
[emphasis mine]
I’m thinking of each memoir story I write as one Murakami’s “for instances.” Each story might present a different way I fell down (and got back up) as I moved from divorce devastation to midlife satisfaction and artmaking. And I will show truth and reality in roundabout, difficult, sensitive places.
I wonder if the reason I have leaned towards writing non-fiction in the past—essays mostly instead of stories—is because I am a straightforward systematizing thinker. Now, however, I want to tell stories, and I’m realizing that the messages they communicate are not always straightforward or systematic. They are complicated, full of caveats, and never expressed with easy obviousness. Although, Powder Skis had a pretty obvious message, or two: (1) men and women tend to ski differently (2) the love and gifting between female relatives (mother-daughter, sister-sister) is as important or more than romantic love between two people.
I’m working on a story right now about the man I lived with for about six months. This was the crisis moment of my story, where I finally got what I thought I wanted—a committed live-in relationship with a smart, successful man—and it was all wrong. That had been a false goal.
The story of our short time living together keeps changing as I learn more things writing here every day and then apply them onto the events of my past. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not the events that keep changing. I remember those well. It’s my interpretation of those events that keeps changing.
I could, I guess, simply report the events and let the reader decide. Was David too domineering towards me? That’s what I thought when I lived with him. But as I write and rewrite scenes, I see that I was as problematic as he was in that relationship, mainly because I didn’t really want to be in a live-in relationship at that time, and what I needed was something entirely different. To be in a live-in relationship you do need to be able to adapt to your partner (a task he wasn’t ready to do either).
I see that where I was most naive and ignorant was around my art, such as it was in those days. When he applied his own interpretation and meaning onto my art, I felt offended and overwritten. But that’s exactly what art viewers do, Anne! I probably should have welcomed his statements of what it seemed like my art was about. He was engaging with my art. That’s what I want people to do!
Memoir stories maybe are different than fiction in that ideally you do apply both the storytelling lens (this is what happened) and the interpretation lens (now, with benefit of time and distance, this is what I think means). Philip Lopate says you should use a double perspective, using both retospection and reflection, “which will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self.”
But what I’m finding a challenge is that you can overinterpret and apply too strict of meanings to a story rather than letting the reporting of events get at the subtle complexities of life. Sometimes it’s better to be “roundabout and inefficient” in communication. Isn’t that how stories work best?
- Althought I’m feeling wary of setting such a goal versus letting this project play out in its own way and its own time. I’m (re-)reading Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote, and in it he suggests that we set goals to avoid feelings of uncertainty, not because they are actually all that helpful. ↩︎
- Could be that I am better writing those for my own eyes only for now. Should I just be working towards a full memoir in 2026? ↩︎