Hurt into Memoir

January 21, 2022

“Having gone through the profound discomfort of writing from personal history, I don’t think most writers amble into this arena to cash in on some grisly past, nor to settle scores, nor to jack up every hangnail into a battlefield amputation. Truth summons them, as it summons the best novelists and poets. And, it’s not only memoirists who get it wrong. ‘What is the novelist’s sentimentality,’ Tobias Wolff once said, ‘ — whether expressed in unearned cheer or unearned cynicism — but a lie of the heart.’ Most memoirists are driven to their projects by their own deeply felt psychological reasons. As Yeats said, ‘Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry,’ so most of us have been hurt into memoir.”

Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

Some say memoir is cathartic, allowing the writer to release the toxicity from our bodies, a juice cleanse for the soul. I have found accessing the darkest regions of my memory to be debilitating at times. While I was going through the trauma, I was dissociating from it. Events were recorded on my psyche like images on a hard drive. There was no connection to them because I wasn’t experiencing them in real time. Whatever self-preservation mechanisms I possess saw fit to shut down my emotional responses.

Now, the writing process is like going into the editing room to start piecing together the big picture. Suddenly, I’m forced to watch traumatic scenes over and over, this time as a viewer who is mentally engaged. I can’t help but identify with the heroine, because she is me. Her pain is my pain. Her present is my past. I feel what she did not. I’m forced to bear what she could not.

Truth has become my north star, guiding me as I write.