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‘You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.’ This quote by Anne Lamott appeared on my Instagram feed. I immediately and aggressively liked the post. It seemed like vindication. A permission slip of sorts, albeit one year after the release of my memoir.
But the truth was, although it felt nice to have something to point to and say: ‘THIS’ (and literally comment ‘THIS’ under the post because the aggressive liking needed to pack an extra punch), the thrill didn’t last. It gave me a sense of moral superiority for which I was undeserving. Couldn’t we all, at some point, have behaved better?
There is an inherent power imbalance that exists between the writer and their subject. ‘It is profoundly unfair that a writer gets to author the public version of a story that has as many true variations as persons involved,’ writes memoirist Melissa Febos. This profound unfairness doesn’t mean that a book or an essay should not be written. But it is important to acknowledge the asymmetry, or at least consider it, if not in the first draft, then definitely during the editing process.
There is an inherent power imbalance that exists between the writer and their subject.
There is an author’s note I added at the beginning of my memoir:
Found, Wanting is a work of narrative non-fiction based on my experience of loss. In some cases, people, places and events have been purposely altered to maintain some level of anonymity. In other cases, places, people, and events have been forever altered by the lens of grief. Trauma distorts the present moment and twists our memories of the past. As a grief memoir, it is accurate only insofar as it captures the madness of grief.
Recently I opened the first pages of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, the new memoir by poet Maggie Smith. ‘This isn’t a tell-all because “all” is something we can’t access. We don’t get “all,”’ she writes. ‘This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing, because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that.’
I had written my author’s note in the last stages of the editing process, just before it went to print. I wondered at what stage Smith added her prologue. At what stage did the panic hit? The panic that no matter how careful, how considered we are, we writers may need to explain ourselves.
There were people who I love who I wrote about. The kindest parts of them. The worst days of their life. And yet even when they gave express permission, I felt terrified of both writing them and having the best parts of them and the hardest moments of their lives in print. ‘What have I done?’ was a thought I had more than once. And yet what would the consequence be? That people would know them and love them as I do? Maybe. Still, it felt like a line had been crossed and there was no going back.
No matter how careful, how considered we are, we writers may need to explain ourselves.
The only person who saw an early draft (albeit after a year of writing) and to whom I gave complete veto power was my husband. He never exercised that right. In fact, it was the opposite. His only feedback was that I held back. He could tell I was being protective of him and of our relationship. ‘Go all in,’ he said.
And yet even with this express permission, even with this radical empathy and support, the reality of our relationship on paper was overwhelming. ‘Do you know what it’s like,’ he said in the weeks after publication, ‘to have people who have read your book ask personal questions about your sex life while you’re waiting in line for coffee?’ Even when we’re prepared, we can never really be prepared. In the aftermath of publication, I walked around feeling like my skin had been peeled off. Like I was all muscle and organ and sinew. And I was the one who had written the thing. I thought about the people I loved who had appeared in my book. Had I flayed them too?
‘This is a memoir, which means it’s fiction, I wrote at the start of my new book. I wanted to be very clear,’ says Ella Risbridger in her essay ‘The Pain-Writing-Money Trifecta’. The book in question was a memoir about her late partner. She continues:
It had taken me three and a half years to write the book, and I had given everyone pseudonyms. I had taken out several passages that seemed to my publishers to be unwise, and many more that seemed to my friends to be unwise: too wound-y. And yet I was still afraid […] that someone is going to try and tell me I didn’t do it right. People do, sometimes […] They like to tell me how he belonged to them […] And in some ways, of course, I am asking for it.
Like Risbridger, I was afraid in the aftermath of publication. Someone would tell me I was doing it wrong. And they did.
‘Looks like nonfiction and fiction are very similar these days,’ wrote someone I barely knew in the comments section after an online publication shared an extract of my book. (I can only assume this was written in defence of people she knew who appeared in the memoir.)
It’s non-fiction, I wanted to write back, but didn’t, because I am nothing but graceful/the bigger person/terrified of confrontation.
In the aftermath of publication, I walked around feeling like my skin had been peeled off.
And yet months later, when I read Risbridger’s essay, I wondered if that was entirely true. Would I go so far as to say I wrote ‘a memoir, which means it’s fiction’? No. But what I wrote is not ‘truth’. Or should I say, it’s not the only truth. Like Risbridger, I wrote about people who died. And while I don’t think they belong to me, that I wrote about them and published those words means I have claimed something of them. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) take anything away from others who love or miss or have grieved for those people. But regardless of my intent, I have to acknowledge that it might feel that way. It’s the power dynamic at play. Those inclined to write are able to put a fully formed story out there, while those who appear in a book are relegated to side characters in the story of their own lives.
I felt that writing about others without judgement, merely for context, and reserving the harshest treatment for myself would somehow balance the scales. There is a scene in my book in which I shit my pants while driving. Perhaps I should have included that in the author’s note instead: I wrote about shitting my pants, give me a break. But perhaps that’s not quite the way it works. People see only what they want to see.
Two pieces of advice informed the way I wrote my memoir. The first piece of advice in the draft stages was from author Chloe Higgins, which was that it was not a problem for now. No one was reading my crappy first draft. I had to write into the book to find what the book was about anyway. That was a future-me problem, and as someone skilled in the art of creating issues for my future self, this spoke to my soul. It also meant that I could write without consequence and know I would edit both ruthlessly and compassionately. At some points, I wrote knowing, even as I typed each letter, that those sections would be cut (too ‘wound-y’). But I knew I needed to write them to find the shape of things. Even when cut, the ghost of the original still exists. The things people said or did went unsaid or undone, yet they are just there, lurking beneath the surface.
The second piece of advice was from the editor Nadine Davidoff after a manuscript assessment, which spoke to the wider question of what my story was actually about. What was the central question I was exploring? What were the themes? What was tying everything together? The book was not about grief, which was the book I had set out to write. It turned out that it was a book about what it means to live in the aftermath of loss and how we make sense of the multitudes of lives within us all. Anything that didn’t serve this theme didn’t belong.
What I wrote is not ‘truth’. Or should I say, it’s not the only truth.
During the copyedit, I took out a paragraph relating to a friend’s ex-husband. At the time of writing it felt clever and funny and relevant, but only in the very last stages, when I sent my friend the short section, did it feel cruel. It felt unnecessary. It was fun to write, and I became attached to it for that reason only. However I had to ask myself: does this give context to the wider questions I am exploring? The answer was no. I was just being a bitch. I cut the section.
In physics, the ‘observer effect’ posits that witnessing a situation or phenomenon can change it. So, too, the act of writing memoir changes the events being described and the people in them. The nature of time and distance and perspective. The way we gather words and pin them to the past. But the act of reading changes the nature of the thing observed as well. We are all refracted versions of ourselves, changed by the nature of time and distance and perspective. Changed by the act of writing and reading.
The murky, messy parts of our lives naturally intersect with the lives of other people. But memoir is not a diary or journal. It’s not a substitute for therapy. It’s not journalism. And it isn’t objective. Narrative non-fiction shouldn’t be a way to have the last word. It is not the last word, in fact. It’s the beginning of a conversation. It says: Isn’t it strange to be a person that exists in the world? Isn’t it strange how we behave when we’re pushed to the brink? And so, we can change names and eye colours and accents (with apologies to my ‘Dutch’ therapist). More than that, what’s key in writing our version of events is to try not to speak for other people but to speak to what it means to be human.
