I have been working on my memoir since 2014, over 8 years now, and I'm still nowhere near completing it. As I've been peeling away and examining the layers of my past I keep making unexpected discoveries that knock the wind out of me. It takes days, weeks and sometimes even months for me to process the new reality, to accept a new perspective.
At the start of the process I naively banged out what I considered to be my first draft during the 2014 NaNoWriMo challenge. At that time I was frequently attending my author friend Elizabeth Rosner's "First Words" afternoon writing workshops in what those of us who attended referred to as her "magic living room." The bulk of the early material in my memoir came directly from writing prompts Liz provided in those workshops.
In addition to the material I wrote during LIz's afternoon writing salons, I also initially included whole swath's of entries from the 70+ journals my mother left me when she died in 2008 in my "shitty first draft" (Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, 1994). When I hired my friend Liz to provide developmental editing, she gave me the best (and most glaringly obvious) advice possible: "Ditch the journal quotes, write about your experience of what you discovered in your mother journals, not the journal entries themselves." I would receive the same advice from two other author friends, Beverly Donofrio and Susana Sonnenberg at memoir writing retreats and masterclasses over the next several years. My favorite quote from Bev at the first memoir writing retreat I attended of hers at Ghost Ranch, NM in 2018: "Get rid of those damn journals!"
I had been attempting to hide behind my mother's journal entries rather than use my own words to share what I felt about them, to own and express my grief about our fractured relationship. Memoir is about the memoirist's memory and experience, from his/her/their perspective. There may be artifacts that inform that memory, that shape perspective, but they may in no way substitute for the memoirist's experience. And that's why memoir writing ain't for sissies. It forces this memoirist to rip off the band-aid, to own his experience and find the words to share what is only his to share.
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