I have been thinking about what it means to write toward the parts of your life that hurt. Not around them, not through some clever detour that keeps the wound at arm’s length, but toward them. The raw ones. The memories you have purposely pushed so far down that you almost convinced yourself they belonged to someone else.

This is the strange work of memoir. You sit down to write about your life, and sometimes that means sitting with things you would rather not remember. And the act of remembering is not passive. It is not like opening a filing cabinet and retrieving a clean document. When you reach for a painful memory, you do not simply retrieve it. You reconstruct it. Every time you recall something, you rebuild it from the fragments that remain, and in that rebuilding, you are changed by it again.¹Bartlett, F.C., 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. https://archive.org/details/rememberingstudy00bart

So the question is not whether the writing will affect you. It will. The question is how you stay present for the work without being destroyed by it.

I read a piece recently from Writer’s Digest where a writer described her experience of diving back into a painful time in her life. She wrote about pushing those memories down for years, for self-preservation, and then finding that the more she wrote, the more she remembered. Tears ran down her face as she allowed herself to recall and write. There is something in that image that I cannot stop returning to. The tears are not a sign of failure. They are a sign that the writing is doing what it is supposed to do, which is to make you feel the weight of what you are describing, not just report on it from a safe distance.

But here is what the writer also said. While writing, she allowed herself breaks. When the subject became too much to bear, she walked away from her work for days and sometimes weeks. She practiced self-care intuitively, aware of the heavy emotional toll writing her truth was having on her.

I find this honest in a way that a lot of writing advice is not. There is a kind of toxic positivity in some craft circles that suggests you should just push through, that any sign of emotional difficulty is weakness or lack of commitment. But this writer understood something more nuanced. She was not avoiding the pain. She was working with it at a pace that did not break her.

Marion Roach, writing about vulnerability in memoir, makes a related point when she cites Brene Brown’s research on shame. When we make ourselves vulnerable by writing about our own shame, we give readers what they desire most from memoir: to discover their own essential okay-ness, their own humanity.²Roach, M., 2013. How Vulnerable To Be When Writing Memoir. https://marionroach.com/2013/11/how-vulnerable-to-be-when-writing-memoir/ The moments we wish to hide are often the very moments that will most resonate with someone else. But this only works if we actually go to those places. And going there requires a kind of courage that is not reckless. It is the courage to feel something deeply while also knowing you will need to recover afterward.

I think there is a contract you make with yourself when you write about difficult experiences. The contract is this: I will not pretend this does not hurt. And also: I will not let the hurt destroy my capacity to keep writing. Both parts matter. The first part keeps you honest. The second part keeps you alive.

What does this look like in practice? It might mean setting a timer and committing to twenty minutes of writing toward the difficult thing, and then stopping regardless of where you are. It might mean having a ritual after a heavy writing session, something that marks the transition from the world of the memoir back to the world of the living. It might mean having a person you can call, someone who knows what you are working on and can remind you that you are not alone in it.

Some writers find that physical movement helps, a walk or a swim that lets the body process what the mind has been holding. Some writers need to journal first, unfiltered, to get the raw material out before shaping it into something for the page. There is no universal prescription. But there is a universal principle, which is that the work requires you to be tender with yourself at the same time as you are being honest. Tender and honest at once. That is the balancing act.

I wonder if the resistance many people feel toward writing memoir is not really about not knowing how to write, or not having an interesting enough life. I wonder if it is about this. The fear that if they start writing toward the painful parts, they will not be able to stop. They will drown in for some people it. And maybe that fear is warranted, maybe there are experiences that are too close and too raw and the kind thing to do is to wait, to give yourself more time. But for most of us, I think the fear is bigger than the reality. The reality is that you can write toward the pain, and feel it fully, and then close the laptop and make a cup of tea and sit with the ordinary comfort of a quiet evening. The memory will still be there tomorrow. And you can go back to it then.

The memoir does not need to be written in one sitting. It does not need to be written in a fever. It can be slow. It can be gentle with you. That is not cheating. That is wisdom.

So if you are working on something difficult, give yourself permission to cry while you write it. And then give yourself permission to stop. Go for a walk. Phone a friend. Watch something foolish on television. Come back tomorrow. The story will wait. And you will be more ready to meet it.

The contract is with your own pain, and the contract includes the clause that you will take care of yourself in the process. That is not weakness. That is the only way the work lasts.

• 1
  Bartlett, F.C., 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. https://archive.org/details/rememberingstudy00bart
• 2
  Roach, M., 2013. How Vulnerable To Be When Writing Memoir. https://marionroach.com/2013/11/how-vulnerable-to-be-when-writing-memoir/