A year ago this week, a dear friend’s husband was killed on impact when their SUV slid on an icy patch of New Hampshire highway, rolled, and crushed his side of the car. The next afternoon, I stood with my friend in her bedroom in an unbearable moment so heavy with grief it felt difficult to breathe and listened while she talked to her son and daughter, fifteen and twelve, about going to the funeral home to see their dad’s body one final time. To say good-bye.
While his sister sobbed openly, my friend’s son stood stoic, his arms held tight across his chest, his jaw clenched. I watched him struggle to contain the agony I knew he must feel. I reached out my hand, gently touched his arm and said, “It’s okay to cry, Bud. This is sad. You can cry. You don’t have to do this by yourself.” I felt his body lean into my palm. His arms loosened. His shoulders sagged. And his face softened as tears began to trail down his cheeks.
The worst story that we can tell ourselves is that we are alone.
Human experience is universal though the specifics might vary. On the day I stood watching my friend’s son confront the impossible grief in that moment of losing his father, the grief I’d felt when I lost mine entered that room. My loss connected to his, and I knew that in that intersection, I had comfort to offer.
When I sat down to interview the memoirists for this book, each one held out the same cup of comfort for me. They’d been where I was in my writing journey. They’d felt similar fears about committing their hard stories to the page, and they knew that I needed to hear that what I was feeling was okay. Normal. Even expected.
During a presentation I attended at the Miami Book Fair, Mary Karr—author of three best-selling memoirs and the 2015 Art of Memoir, a uniquely personal exploration of the genre—said, “Writing memoir, if it’s done right, is like knocking yourself out with your own fist.” In one sentence, she summed up what we all discover when we venture into this territory: writing hard stories is excruciatingly hard work.
The lesson I learned, though, from my two years talking with writers who’ve done that hard work, in some cases more than once, is that carrying around the terrible weight of hard stories without ever seeking a way to transform it into something lighter—even something beautiful—is a whole lot harder.
Author and counselor Allan Hunter, a firm believer in and practitioner of narrative therapy, wrote a book called Write Your Memoir: The Soul Work of Telling Your Story. At the beginning of this quest, I was privileged to spend an afternoon with him at his home in Watertown, Massachusetts. Among the many wonderful insights he shared that day was this: “Pain is like a little stone. If you put it in your pocket, it weighs nothing at all. If you put it inside your shoe, it will cripple you. The same little bit of pain. Where are you going to wear it?” In his book and his practice, Hunter advocates writing memoir to help us to shift the weight of our pain. “You are moving the grief from where it is doing no good to the place where you can carry it more easily.”
But Hunter also understands that though the composition process is solitary and finding the voice with which to tell our stories is solitary, facing the traumas in our stories need not be. He ended our conversation that day with the story of Dante’s journey into Hell in The Divine Comedy. “He goes to edge of the most terrifying and painful thing he can imagine—the devil himself, frozen in place. But he’s not alone. Virgil guides him. And he is kept completely safe.”
I found my Virgil in each one of the authors who spoke with me for this project. Collectively, they took me by the hand and said, “Come with me. The trip might be scary, but don’t worry. I’ve been to where you are going. I know the way.”
Their words buoyed me and nudged me back to my desk, back to that blinking cursor on my laptop screen. Their voices drowned out the noise of my fears, and I felt a newfound courage to continue writing into my story. While I completed this book, I also finished my creative thesis—two-thirds of my memoir—and received my MFA. I’ve found a rhythm to my writing and I know where I’m headed. The memoir isn’t finished, but for the first time really, I believe that it will be. Soon.
At the beginning of my memoir-writing journey, I set out to put my story to rest. I really thought it was something that I needed to let go. But, now, I can echo the insights and wisdom of the writers in this book: Writing through the experience has, instead, offered me something tangible that I want to hold on to. By giving its pieces words and contour and structure and meaning, I’ve learned that I can take that crippling pebble out of my shoe and start finding other places to wear it.
This is the passage through which any one of us who is experiencing or has experienced trauma can travel. A more finite way to come to terms with our stories. If we’re writers, coming to terms is exactly what we do. We find language to unravel the complexities of what happened, and we re-stitch those complexities into narratives that can become meaningful to others. And those are the narratives that have the potential to give others the courage to find their own.