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Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on UnsplashToday’s post is by writer, editor, and book coach Jennifer Landau.
Many of the memoirists I coach are writing stories that focus on a significant relationship in their life. Often, this person looms so large (for good or not-so-good reasons) that the book ends up centering them instead of the writer. But it’s your life the reader should want to follow and your transformation they need to track.
So, if your book leaves them more interested in the other person’s life, there’s work to do. Here are some tips to make sure you don’t end up a supporting player in your own story.
Sharpen your point
When someone asks you what your memoir is about, do you say, “It’s about discovering that my father had a secret second family” or “It’s about growing up with a sibling who had schizophrenia?”
Either one would be the premise of your memoir, but not its point. The point is what you have to say about friendship or loss or how we move away from toxic family systems. This matters because the point focuses on universal ideas that resonate with your reader, whatever the particulars of your story.
The premise of Stefan Block’s memoir Homeschooled is the years he spent being homeschooled by his needy and controlling mother. Feeling isolated when the family moves from Indiana to Texas, his mother weaponizes her talent for the silent treatment, and Stefan, desperate to pull his mother out of her funk, agrees to be homeschooled (the term should be very loosely interpreted as they spend an inordinate amount of time at TJ Maxx and the ice cream parlor) for the remainder of fourth grade.
Block’s mother praises his smarts and artistic talent while doing all she can to keep him stunted. She longs for a return to Stefan’s younger years and goes so far as to use hydrogen peroxide to lighten his hair to match the blond of his toddlerhood. Block refers to their arrangement as a “two-person cult” which he is unable to escape until the start of high school.
When he finally returns to school, it is a beloved teacher who drives home the point of Block’s memoir. Referring to his mother, the teacher says, “You are going to have to break that one’s heart just to live your own life.”
That gradual breaking away, and breaking her heart, serves as an organizing principle for the book. Clear in his point, Block chooses scenes that show both how he got caught in this bizarre arrangement and how he moved past it.
Block is not trying to settle scores. He gives his mother a lot of grace and gives the reader enough of her backstory to understand the tragic circumstances that formed her. She also becomes a more sympathetic figure as the book progresses and Block starts to lead a more independent and richer life.
Honing your point doesn’t require invention, but a paring down of all that the relationship represents. Some of my clients worry that by focusing on their point they are not telling “the whole story.” Not to be harsh, but unless you’re Cher or Barbra Streisand, readers don’t want the whole story. They want a clear throughline that shows them who you were and who you became and how the dynamics of that relationship helped you move from the former to the latter.
In your own work
Outline five or six critical junctures that cover the timeline, fractured or not, of your memoir. Then focus on the state of your core relationship at those times. How did that pivotal person influence your decisions? Did something about that relationship propel you forward? Hold you back? What were they–directly or indirectly–teaching you about your values or flaws or what you had to overcome? And what message are you trying to convey to the reader?
Widen your world
Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home is about her friendship with renowned memoirist Caroline Knapp (if you haven’t read Knapp’s memoir Drinking: A Love Story, put it at the top of your TBR pile), who died at forty-two, just weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
Caldwell’s relationship is far healthier than Block’s with his mother, though no less profound. She describes her bond with Knapp as like “placing a personal ad for a friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.” Though Caldwell saw Knapp as the “good girl” and herself as the “rebel,” they had much in common. They were both writers who had struggled with addiction, both lovers of dogs and solitude and nature. Both had a history of complicated romantic partnerships.
But Caldwell doesn’t lose herself in relation to this other, more famous person. She uses her friendship with Knapp as a jumping off point for her own stories. There are long stretches where Caldwell recounts events and relationships that predate her time with Knapp. We don’t lose sight of that relationship because of the ingenious way Caldwell threads their similarities, but also their differences, throughout the book: One a critic and one an essayist. One private about her addiction and the other pubic. And in the end, tragically, one alive and one dead.
In your own work
Don’t be afraid to expand the world of your own memoir. If you’ve communicated the importance of that primary relationship, it will reverberate throughout. You take a job abroad and think about how your mother never got the chance to leave your hometown. Date someone new and realize it’s the first time you’re not comparing each potential partner to your former spouse. Join a grassroots movement that runs counter to everything you were raised to believe. The connections don’t need to be heavy-handed, just authentic. You might even find that widening the lens offers some breathing room for both you and the reader.
Deepen your interiority
Interiority has become a buzzword of sorts in the writing world. The most elegant definition I’ve found comes from agent CeCe Lyra, cohost of the podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing: “Interiority is access to a protagonist’s psyche as they process information. Interiority is partial. Narration is neutral.” Lyra says the primary goal of interiority is to “forge a bond between the reader and the protagonist.”
By moving beyond straight “reportage,” as Alexander Chee calls it, you avoid the dreaded “this happened and this happened and this happened,” recounting which barely skims the surface and might make your reader want to skim–or abandon–your memoir.
Block’s Homeschooled is written in the present tense, which makes the reader feel as if they are interpreting events right alongside him. He is also incredibly insightful about his relationship with his mother, which keeps the focus on him as he describes how his presence helps his mother’s loneliness: “Mom’s laughter is a chest-deep, howling thing, and right now it spooks me a little, how happy I can make her, how much she seems to need this.” This is a great use of interiority showing how a memoirist’s dialogue runs counter to what they are feeling.
In another scene, Block’s mother holds him in the pool like a baby, though he is ten. When she asks if he likes the sunshine, he plays along saying, “Me likey sunny….” But when she dunks him underwater for answering a question wrong, he realizes that his mother is only tightening her grip and he won’t return to school in the fall as planned. The contrast between the boy doing everything he can to please his mother and the boy who knows it could be his undoing is powerful.
In your own work
Making use of interiority won’t stop the forward momentum of your memoir—you’re not screeching to a halt to explain your feelings about the relationship. But when readers see how you process an event or conversation, they become attuned to your emotions. In turn, those emotions convey whether you are moving closer–or farther away from–whatever goal you’ve set out for yourself in your memoir.
You can use direct thought to accomplish this, as Block often does. Say it plainly. Or use physical sensation, especially if it differs from what one would expect. Maybe that gorgeous sunset makes you want to vomit, though don’t go overboard with the sweaty palms and sinking hearts. That way lies melodrama.
And always give yourself some grace. There’s a famous quote from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir: “In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.” I think that’s especially true when writing about thorny relationships. This work is an opportunity for growth, for both you and your readers.
