What I Wish I’d Known is a regular series where we ask some of our favourite writers to reflect on their writing and publishing journey, and share some of the unexpected and useful things they’ve learned along the way. In this instalment, writers reflect on the complexities of telling your own story.
Image: Internet Archive Book Images, Flickr (PD)
Kylie Maslen, Show Me Where It Hurts
One of the things I found most difficult when writing my first book was knowing when to stop. When writing about your own life, there is constantly more material appearing. As I write primarily memoir—through essays both collected or published standalone—there are always more opportunities to write about my life. Writing my second book, I’ve found it freeing to know what is already on the page. Looking back, if I were to write my first book again I would create a timeline for myself, marking out major events and how they contribute to the points I’m trying to make and setting anything outside of this aside for the time being.
Shannon Burns, Childhood
I wish I’d known that the emotional experience of producing a book-length autobiographical thing (which is how I think of ‘the memoir’) is different to writing a series of personal essays. By the time essays are published I’ve typically acquired distance from the impulses that drove me to write them. They can even seem a little alien. But writing a book doesn’t permit that kind of freewheeling mobility and distance. Instead, you lug every part of it around with you all of the time, for several years in my case. This is not fun when the material is unpleasant.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Yassmin’s Story, Talking About A Revolution
It’s a snapshot in time. You won’t always feel the same way about your own story, and that might be frightening, but in a way it is its own gift.
Jess Ho, Raised By Wolves
No amount of therapy or arse-covering will prepare you for the sleepless nights before your book is out. While the rest of the world was asleep, I was staring at the ceiling, thinking WHAT HAVE I DONE, even though I cherry-picked the stories to tell, asked friends for permission to borrow parts of their lives, fact-checked things with my sister and didn’t write anything that could get me sued. Just accept the freight train of existential dread.
It’s strange having the book out, now, because the reality of 70, 000 words is that it will never give people full insight into who you are and what you’ve experienced, but people develop parasocial relationships with you regardless. Either use that to your advantage when you’re promoting the book or make friends with the ‘block’ button on social media. I am very grateful for Past Me insisting on not using a current photo of me for the book cover.
Natasha Sholl, Found, Wanting
Memoir is obviously so personal, and yet when my manuscript became a book that actually existed in the world, in some way it became something that was not about me at all. It became its own thing, which was both glorious and terrifying. I felt all these seemingly contradictory feelings: shame, embarrassment, grief, loss.
It had nothing to do with the content itself—I had written and edited Found, Wanting for so long that it already felt ‘other’ to me. But the act of publication was another kind of goodbye, and I felt that acutely. It was something I was completely unprepared for. That letting go. The feeling of no longer being in that world (a kind of past that was living in my present) and moving on to the next stage.
Lee Kofman, The Writer Laid Bare
When I was writing my first memoir The Dangerous Bride, like many beginning memoirists, I was under the impression that this would be my only opportunity to describe my life, so I tried to put everything into one book. The memoir was about relationships I had during my early years in Australia, but I also wrote about my preceding love affairs, and my life in Israel and Russia. I discussed my favourite books and my religious upbringing. I wrote about my parents, including their lives before I was born… I wish I’d known already then that a memoir is merely a slice of life, which luckily means most memoirists have more than one book in them.
Emily Clements, The Lotus Eaters
The Lotus Eaters was released in February 2020; Melbourne entered its first lockdown in March. I wish I’d been able to brace for the emotional impact of one of the most exciting things to ever happen to me being almost immediately stomped on by a global pandemic but at the same time, the experience taught me how to hold fear and grief together with joy and pride without too much slippage. Although the slippage is normal, too, so don’t beat yourself up for the moments where euphoria is trailed by nausea and vice versa. There’s no one right way to feel.
Katerina Bryant, Hysteria
I wish I’d known that writing memoir has the power to impact other people’s lives in the same way reading memoir has changed mine (somehow I thought my words were immune from being read, by virtue of being mine). That this is a wonderful part of the work we do and to hold on to that tenderly. But also, this means some people will form ideas of you (and your family or friends)—that is both inevitable and okay. Know that, mostly, this has nothing to do with you.
Sam van Zweden, Eating with my Mouth Open
Memoir is the stuff of life, but I’ve spoken at length in promoting Eating with my Mouth Open about how the self on the page is a character. That’s a useful way of explaining to readers that it’s not 100 per cent confessional, they don’t have access to all of ‘me’, and that it’s subjective/biased—all important things to reiterate. However, I need to remember it, too. Writing such a deeply personal story as that of my relationship with food and my body created a version of my lived experience of mental illness and eating disorder recovery that came to feel authoritative. I’m still in the middle of remembering that the character only reflects the Eating with my Mouth Open part of me—my relationship with my body and mental health keeps going, forever and ever and cannot be contained between the covers of one or even lots of books.
Lauren Burns, Triple Helix
Transcribing your diaries is not a memoir! After a terrible first draft I rewrote my memoir as a novel, paying attention to the story arc, pacing, and character development.
Travel stories are generally boring. I eventually figured out I was writing my memoir to answer a question. After distilling this question, the relevant themes fell into place and I was able to cut out 25,000 extraneous words.
Figure out your core truths, and what you can compromise on. After weighing the relative importance of conveying the facts or the feelings, I disguised or omitted some story elements for the sake of others’ privacy.
Want to learn more about writing memoir? Check out our All Things Memoir bundle, featuring online courses by Lee Kofman, Sisonke Msimang and Rebecca Starford, or any other of our Online Writing Courses, available to complete in your own time, at your own pace.
Check out the previous entry in the series, on what writers wish they’d known about endings.
