Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

Reasons not to write memoirs sprout like weeds, and just when I think I’ve seen them all, I see a new one. One by one they drain the energy from the rewarding activity of finding your story. By uprooting these reasons your imagination will produce a better crop of interesting memories and fascinating insights into your life. In fact, once you get started growing your memoir, most of the objections will be overshadowed and wither on their own. However, if you’re not writing yet, and are still looking for ways to get past your reasons not to, here is a list of common ones and suggestions for turning them under so you can get started.

I want to live more in the moment.
With deeper understanding of burdens from the past, you can let them go, and be more in the present.

The past hurts.
You can ease the pain by telling about it, and revel in moments of joy you have forgotten.

If I tell the past incorrectly I’ll be a liar.
Absolute truth sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t exist. Your best chance for “truth” is to tell stories. Stories contain a sort of truth of their own that is more revealing than facts.

I can’t remember those times, so how can I write about them?
By writing, you will remember far more than you do now.

I’m not a writer.
By writing, you become a writer.

I’m too old.
You’re never too old to remember and share your life.

I’m too young.
You’re never too young to remember and share your life.

Nothing worthwhile has ever happened to me.
By delving into the story, you will discover unique and interesting things about yourself.

What if people are offended, angry, disappointed?
If you let them stop you from writing, there is also a decent chance you are letting them stop you from living. By telling the story, you can work on a healthier response to their demands on you.

What if I expose my flaws and weaknesses?
You don’t need to if you don’t want to. And when you see them on paper, you might realize they aren’t so bad. They might show other people a more believable and accessible version of yourself, and they’ll end up liking you more, not less.

It’s narcissistic.
Whether we like it or not, we’re inside our own head all the time anyway. Writing about what goes on in there can break the isolation and increase sharing and mutual respect with other people.

If I con myself into believing an inaccurate story, I’ll become a less authentic person.
You might already be conning yourself, and writing about your life could turn you into a more authentic person.

People might not like it.
Some people won’t like it. Some people will. Stick with the ones who do.

I don’t have time.
This is so big I wrote a whole blog entry about it. In fact, I wrote a whole book about it. If time is your enemy, overcome it with strategy, tools, insights, desire. This is your life. Fit into it what you want.

by Jerry Waxler

When you cut your skin, you bleed, and if you don’t clean it, infection sets in. Human beings also have another type of skin, made not of flesh but of stories. This skin provides a sense of purpose, of safety, of place in the world. When it’s healthy it is resilient enough to shrug off an annoyance, or a small setback. But the slings and arrows of fortune occasionally break through this skin and then it no longer protects us. In our vulnerable state we must continue to live and make decisions designed to seal up the hole, to protect us from the insult ever happening again. The decisions we make in this state often affect us far longer than the original injury itself. Like broken flesh that develops a life threatening infection, a damaged story can be dangerous.

Take for example the crashing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. We watched in horror as our story of safety was penetrated, and then through that gaping wound poured two full fledged military invasions, and subsequently many more dead bodies and torn lives.

While that incident shows how the minds of millions of people can be damaged, we each have individual stories, and these can be damaged, too. Violence is the bluntest way, but there are others. A lover or business partner cheats, and the world becomes dark, no longer worth living in. Betrayal doesn’t even require another person. You can betray yourself. When addicts start wrecking their lives, they cling for dear life to the story that everything is fine. But at some point, the realization crashes in that they are letting themselves down. “I’m a rotten person” creates a dangerous hole in their story.

During this wounded period your decisions are not made in the clearest frame of reference. The urgent need to patch up the hole, might lead you to choices whose consequences continue to resonate years later. The cry for deliverance often rips people up more than the initial event. The jilted lover, the avenging family, the self-imploding addict, the litigious spouse, the almost athlete or artist, create even more wounds in the name of setting the story straight.

Despite this messy process, eventually we do stand up, ready to move on. And then, when we are calmer and wiser we can regain some of the ground we lost during the throes of pain. Look past at the initial pain, and from the place of safety you feel right now, approach this as a valuable opportunity for review and deeper understanding. How did you regain your sense of self? What decisions did you make, and how did they affect you later? By reviewing the decisions and actions you made during trauma, you can learn about yourself, reduce the pain and backwards suction of those memories, make amends, and find new and higher ground.

When you come upon traumatic moments in your own story, you will probably realize that you have not applied much retrospective wisdom to that time in your life, having naturally fallen into a longstanding habit of pretending it never happened. And this is one of the vast, profound, unsung benefits of writing about your life. By organizing your thoughts and putting them in order, you regain control and understanding over your own story. It’s one of my favorite things about memoir work. The best repair for a damaged story is to tell stories.

However, there are many challenges in retelling the story of old wounds. Foremost is breaking the pact of forgetfulness you had made with yourself. Remembering might feel dangerous. In my next blog, I’ll tell about a trauma I experienced, and how revisiting it has helped me revise and heal my original view.

By Jerry Waxler

It’s July 4, 2007 and I’m sitting in an outdoor pavilion at a new local shopping mall, writing in my journal while I wait for my wife. The pavilion is empty, perhaps because all the shoppers are getting ready for the fireworks or scared away by the rain. A few moments ago I was in the bookstore thumbing through a book called “Come to your senses.” The author, Jon Kabat-Zinn, says that by tuning in to sensory information, those things we see, feel, hear, smell, and taste, we become more alert and can connect more genuinely with our world.

Creative writing teachers offer the exact same advice. By writing specific sensory details, you invite the reader in. As my pen glides across the page of the spiral bound notebook, the electric air caresses my skin. I feel almost confused by the air’s cooling touch, considering that at this time of year, Pennsylvania summers are usually muggy, and make my skin feel sticky. The chair I’m sitting on is cushioned, another pleasant surprise. Most shopping areas have stiff chairs designed to keep you moving. I wouldn’t mind sitting on this chair at home on my porch.

Then a family sits near me and a little boy asks his father if he has ever been on a train. The man says, “Yes, when I was young, I went with my older brother on a train in the Punjab.” The boy asks, “What’s the Punjab?” Their voices are like music – the childish American singsong playing against the deeper resonance of India. The son’s curiosity has awakened an excursion into the past, and without realizing it, they are taking me with them to the other side of the world.

Memoirs are everywhere. In fact, in ten years, this moment itself could be part of my memoir. I start playing with this idea of time travel. The words I am writing right now will remind me of what I was seeing today. My journal takes on new significance, as I look around with keener attention, and wonder what I can record that will make a great story.

If you want to write your memoir some day, try this experiment. Think about today as an important day. What parts of your life right now, today, this month, this year, will be worth reading? This exercise can expand your relationship to memoir writing. For one thing, it will give you an incentive to keep a journal. Since diaries are not intended for public reading, you can say anything you want. This gives you writing practice without worrying about what other people think.

I kept a journal for many years, but in those days I had no intention of saving facts for posterity. I did it because I enjoyed writing. It was a powerful introspective exercise, but now when I look through those old journals I find little worth knowing. To write a journal intended for a future memoir, I need to write more than just raw feelings. I need to describe what I see, hear, and feel. To help me get back to the good stuff, I would highlight interesting passages. Perhaps I would transfer the good entries to a blog and let the computer keep track of them for me.

Once you get into the habit, you’ll realize that you don’t need to wait for ten years to make use of this material. As in most writing exercises, the benefits become apparent as soon as you start. Not only will it bring more attention to your writing. It might help you “come to your senses,” becoming more intimately aware of life itself.

When Alice Sebold, author of the memoir Lucky, told her writing professor Tobias Wolff, that she was going to the police station to identify her assailant, he took her by the shoulders, looked her in the eye and said, “Remember everything.” By thinking about your future memoir, you will become more vigilant, and sharpen your insights into the life you are living right now.

by Jerry Waxler

For most of the twentieth century, scientists believed we are stuck with the neurons we were born with. Well, it was actually worse than that. After birth our neurons started dieing, and it was all downhill from there. But then, in one of the great flip-flops of the last 100 years, neurologists now say we can grow neurons at any age. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how. “Use them or lose them” is appropriate not only for muscles. It’s also true for brain cells. So in addition to exercising to my body, I also exercise my brain. By exercising that part of myself, I not only prevent it from dieing. I help it grow. (If you are interested in more information about the science of growing neurons, or “neuroplasticity” check out the blog at the end of this entry.)

Most people find working out boring, preferring to get their physical activity doing something enjoyable, like playing tennis or gardening. Similarly, you can find brain exercises that are fun and productive. If you want an activity that can keep your brain growing and vital, try writing a memoir. Writing about your life, in my opinion, is the mother of all brain exercises. It forces you to search for words, puzzle out phrases, and organize stories. So while you’re writing, you are developing neuronal connections in your frontal cortex. That’s the body part that enables you to plan and think. And while you’re exercising your brain, you are also shaping your ideas about who you are and where you fit in with the world. If you tell a good enough story, you can share it with others. And you might even be able to sell it and add money to the long list of benefits.

When I was in my forties, to gear up for the second half of my life, I started to read self-development literature. One of the best was Stephen Covey’s, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It changed my life by pointing out that while most of my effort went into my employer’s success, I also needed to invest in my own skills and satisfaction. This magnificent concept put me through graduate school where I earned a Master’s degree in counseling when I was 52.

There were a couple of other concepts in Covey’s book that made a difference. One is his suggestion to write out a mission statement of what I want the future to look like. At the time, I was unenthusiastic about writing my values. I thought the exercise was too abstract. But later, when I became interested in memoir writing, I discovered the value of telling the story of life, and I recognized that a mission statement is simply a story that leads towards the future. So my self-help idea of writing memoirs made Covey’s idea of a mission statement more meaningful. Here’s how it works. Write about my life. See that life is a story. Write about the next chapter in the story. A self-help strategy is born.

What does Covey have to do with growing neurons? For one thing, according to neural science, self-improvement develops the brain. Follow good habits and your neurons will grow. But Covey also advocates a more direct approach. His habit called “sharpening the saw” is based on the observation that when you cut wood with a dull blade, your task takes longer. To work more effectively improve the blade. He’s talking about the things we do to take care of our physical and mental health, staying active, staying balanced, building skills. I suggest adding “growing neurons” to the list. What better investment could you make in your own future than daily exercise to maintain your brain? And my favorite exercise, with the most direct effect is to write your memoir.

-

For more about the science of brain development at any age check out the blog Brains on Purpose The author of the blog is Stephanie West-Allen, a lawyer who is interested in the way brain science can help reduce conflict. She has teamed up with Jeffrey M. Schwartz, MD, a leading researcher and author in neuroplasticity. The blog is loaded with references to neuroplasticity, and is a good starting point for learning about the general issues of exercising (and changing!) your brain.

by Jerry Waxler

When I remember my life, sometimes I get hot flashes when I stumble on things that make me feel stupid , things I wish had never happened. Regrets can be so uncomfortable they sometimes make me want to run away from my memories altogether. If you feel your regrets are interfering with your desire to write, you have company. We’re in it together. We all have regrets of varying degrees of intensity burning away in our past. And so, even though your regrets are uncomfortable, they offer another lovely benefit to writing your memoir. You will gain a deeper understanding not only into your own mind, but into the inner workings of everyone you know.

This is one of my favorite things about writing memoirs. It brings you face to face with the human story. Yes, it’s true that you can only directly see the one human story that you happen to have lived. But through this laboratory experiment you can learn so much about what makes people tick.

To explain how to use regret to go deeper into your very human condition, I’d like to offer an example, but this is as hard for me to talk about as it is for anyone. For the sake of explaining this idea, I’ll overcome my self loathing and admit that when I was little, I took some coins out of my older brother’s drawer. It was stealing, and there it is, like a zit on my memory, making me feel like a thief, making me feel like less of a person than I aspire to be. Now let’s look at the variety of options available to me as I tiptoe around my initial reluctance to even admit it ever happened.

Even though I’m embarrassed, I could just tell the story. That way, I get it off my chest. And I hope that people reading about it will assume I was just a normal kid. That’s exactly my attitude towards other people who tell about their childhood transgressions. Why shouldn’t they feel that way about me?

Once I’ve written about the incident, I can think it through. Why did I do it? What was I thinking? How did my actions affect other people? What did I wish I could have told people, or how could I have paid for the crime? My brother was probably hurt and felt a little less safe with his stuff. I learned from my experiment in dishonesty that when I stole things I felt bad. That was part of my training as a young man.

After writing it and thinking about it, I could delete it. There’s no rule that says I have to make public every darn thing that happened to me. If I don’t like the way it looks on paper, I could delete it and move on.

I am the writer, and this gives me enormous flexibility to soften the impact of the incident with phrasing and positioning. When I first stole those coins, I felt terrible guilt. I was betraying my older brother. If I downplay the guilt, and look closely at the human elements, I find that all those big emotions, the sense of betrayal, fear, and guilt, flooded me as a child, but don’t sound like such a big deal now. When I look back, the act itself was almost ludicrously simple. Once he found out, I gave the money back. All that remained were my miserable feelings.

In the process of writing, insights creep into your story. You are applying today’s wisdom to help you explain actions from the past, and in the process, the regrets lose some of their power. You don’t feel like such a miserable cad. Veils of regret lift and you see the incident more clearly. If you want to learn more about your self, you can even use these intense moments as beacons, lighting your way into the interior of your psyche. As you unravel the impact of one, it will lead you to other glimpses into the dynamics of your past.

Look for other examples when that particular power expressed itself. If you stole something, talk about your guilt, about owning stuff, about how stealing was so important it made it into the top ten commandments. Talk about how you hated it when someone stole something from you. Talk about the tension and confusion you felt as a little boy, unsure of your role, unsure of yourself, and how money represented power, and how the coins you stole weren’t just any coins. They were steel pennies your brother had collected from the cash drawer at dad’s drugstore. Coin collecting was a special bond your brother shared with dad and you were too young to get into the club. If you took a few of those coins, perhaps you’d get some of the love.

What if you’re not sure whether to write it or not? Be careful, and take your time. Once it’s out on paper, you can never retract it. Bill Clinton stated publicly that he never inhaled marijuana. Since marijuana was illegal, it was his choice not to admit he had broken the law. Jimmy Carter said he lusted in his heart. Admitting his flaw probably improved his public image, showing him as a real human being. But notice that having made these statements, there they are in the public record forever.

If you’ve written about your regrets, you’ve already benefited by thinking them through, seeing nuances, and trying to understand the implications. The increased richness of your memories now belongs to you. And like a pin hole in a balloon, you’ll come back later and find that much of the tension from the old emotions has been deflated. It loses its hold on you. Now it’s just a story. Perhaps some time in the future, you’ll find a perfect time to share it, where fits in with something you are trying to illustrate.

If remembering this experience continues to feel damaging, talk to a therapist and see if you can work it out with help. Regrets are like heavy weights. By letting them go, you can live more fully and energetically today.

I’m an Anne Lamott fan. I loved her book, “Bird by Bird,” in which she writes about writing. But when I saw Anne Lamott’s “Traveling Mercies, Some Thoughts on Faith” I had mixed feelings. Even though it is shelved with other memoirs, I didn’t know what “thoughts on faith” meant. Finally I broke through my reluctance and read it, and now, I’m an even bigger Anne Lamott fan.

It turns out there are some really interesting lessons memoir writers could learn from this work. First of all, consider the storyline. My favorite example of a memoir with a simple storyline is George Brummell’s “Shades of Darkness.” He grew up black in the segregated south, joined the army, got blown up in Vietnam, and came back, blind. He went to college, and then became the director of the Blinded Veterans Association. Another memoir with a straightforward storyline is Brooke Shields’ “Down Came the Rain.” She wanted to get pregnant, but couldn’t. Then she had a miscarriage. Then a baby. And then she struggled to overcome post-partum depression. These are big sweeping events, and on any page of the book, I know exactly where I stand in Brummell’s or Shields’ life.

Anne Lamott’s story goes something like this. She was a child. She played competitive tennis. She grew up. She had a father. She had a son. She drank a lot. She got sober and got faith. That’s about the best sequence I can explain. I know about a number of incidents that took place in her life. I know she lost friends to cancer. I know a lot about her beliefs in God. In fact, I know a lot more about the way Anne Lamott thinks than I know about the other 8 billion people on the planet. And I know some of the most profound moments in her life. But her essays didn’t walk me through a sequence of steps, so having just finished it I can’t say, “I see how the events of her life progressed from beginning to end” the way I can with George Brummell’s or Brooke Shields’ life.

That’s interesting for memoir writers because it demonstrates the vast range of possibilities for what is a memoir. If you think your life is too ordinary to be worth writing, read this book. You’ll see that ordinary events can turn into extraordinary stories. She writes about taking her son snorkeling. He lost his flipper and they saw dolphins. She hates her hair and eventually decided to go with dreadlocks. She tells lots of stories about her friendships, and an endless string of attempts at romance. It seems she can turn anything into a clever, uplifting, enjoyable, and sometimes laugh-out-loud essay.

With her expert style, humorous and sophisticated turn of phrase, and complex organization, her writing reaches inside her mind, and shares profound insights with readers. Offering this much insight requires commitment. And the fact that she has such commitment fills me with hope and cheer, not only about the human condition in general, but also about the potential of what we writers can accomplish. We really can share magical parts of ourselves if we work at it. And when we do it well, people want to read what we’ve written.

But there’s a sub-lesson I’d like to add to this. A passion for the fine turn of phrase is only one of many gifts a writer can offer a reader. Your main goal is to bring your authentic self to the page. Your insights into the dynamics of your own life become a window through which readers peer into a different life than their own.

As you try to learn about memoirs from reading Traveling Mercies, and you try to understand how it is organized, you might wonder if it’s even a memoir. It’s certainly not like most other ones I’ve read. It’s more like a collection of essays that add up. She tells a wonderful, powerful story (all her stories are wonderful and powerful) towards the end of the book about her son Sam. He is not a writer. Since he is only 8 he still has time to learn. For now, his creative passion is to find garbage and turn it into art. To show us what this looks like she describes Sam building an elaborate castle on the beach, not just from sand, but from all the dross that floats up onto the sand. Eventually her son has created a masterpiece. That’s not a bad model for Anne Lamott’s book, or for that matter her philosophy of life. Take whatever you get, even if it doesn’t seem like much and turn it into something beautiful.

By Jerry Waxler

Terri Gross interviewed Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse last night. Dr. Volkow, an expert on drug addiction, said, “When someone becomes addicted, they are no longer in control of their actions. Even though they want to stop, they can’t.” She continued, “I’ve always been fascinated by the conflict between what a person wants to do and what they actually do. It raises the question of Free Will.” I loved the interview. Volkow is an animated speaker, and she has a fascinating past. She grew up in Mexico in the house where her great grandfather Leon Trotsky was assassinated. (She could write a book about that.) Here’s the link to the interview if you’re interested in drug addiction, or simply want to listen to a great interview. http://www.npr.org/

But what really caught my attention was her comment about Free Will. That’s interesting to me too, from the opposite direction than is faced by addicts. Many aspiring writers have the problem of wanting to write, but are not able to do so. It seems peculiar that a person would want to do something, and then not. I wonder, “who is in charge.” To write your memoir, you’ll need to find the solution to this age old challenge of Free Will.

How do you exercise your Free Will when you say “I want to write?” Leave a comment if you have thoughts on this issue. If you want to read a book of my suggestions about how to tackle this challenge, check out, “Four Elements for Writers, How to Get Beyond “Yes-But,” Conquer Self-Doubt and Inertia, and Achieve Your Writing Goals” by Jerry Waxler

by Jerry Waxler

I picked Brooke Shields’ book “Down came the rain” off the shelf. The dust jacket gave me reason to believe it was deeper than just another name-dropping celebrity puff piece. Flipping through it convinced me it genuinely focused on her issues of having a baby, and so I decided to give it a chance. Now that I’ve finished it, I can say that I liked it. It was a decent read, not because of literary genius. After all, she’s not a professional writer. But even though you wouldn’t read this just for the beauty of the sentences, there is a sort of straightforward genuineness about the way it is written. It feels authentic, and I think that’s one of the most important qualities of any memoir.

In addition to a genuine voice, I also found other reasons to enjoy and recommend this memoir as a good read and a teaching tool for aspiring memoir writers. Just as the cover promised, its central function was a story about a mommy. I believe it does a lovely job of showing how a young, first time mother deals with some of the issues of having a baby. And so, by reading this story I gained insights into what it’s like to be a troubled mom. In fact there are so many bits about how she overcame obstacles, it reads almost like an instruction book for moms, addressing the question, “how to get over the hump if your baby doesn’t feel like the best thing that ever happened to you.”

People are so saturated with the expectation that the moment of seeing the baby will be the best moment of a lifetime. But in about 10% of women, this experience is very different. Moments after the powerful physical act of childbirth, it’s possible a woman may not feel emotionally receptive to the baby, and for Brooke this lack of connection was an extremely disturbing experience, as she watched in horror at her own less than spectacular response. She does a terrific job of helping us understand this situation. Addressing this issue helped the book hang together into a coherent whole. Here are some of the topics she covers:

• When she felt depressed, she denied she had a problem, blamed herself and refused to rely on medication.
• She didn’t want any help from anyone.
• She spends a fair amount of time showing how breast feeding saved her from her depression and created a bond with her baby. (No it’s not titillating. Despite the celebrity value of those particular body parts, this discussion really is for moms.)
• She offers a fascinating insight into the fact that having a baby changes her relationship to her own mother. Now she’s bumped up a notch in the hierarchy, no longer just a child, but now a mom as well.

I think the most psychological insightful material was the contrast between her elevated grandiose expectations of a perfect connection with her baby, and the reality she actually experienced, as a tired, somewhat overwhelmed and flawed human being, who does not respond in such a storybook manner.

Teaching turns out to be a lovely added dimension of memoirs. Adding a teaching element to your story will help hold it together. It potentially can make your book interesting to a special-interest audience. And by binding the story into a unified whole, it gives the reader an additional incentive for turning to the next page. As you work on your own memoir, consider what sort of lessons you would share. Did you learn to garden as a method to cope while your mother was sick? Did you learn to fly an airplane, while you struggled for a job after getting out of the military? Or like Brooke, were your lessons more emotional? Explain how you and your child coped with bullying while he grew up with Down’s Syndrome. Or even more abstract still, are your lessons spiritual, like Anne Lamott’s lessons in Traveling Mercies?

As you look for teaching moments to share with your readers, stay true to the central power of memoir writing. Share your authentic experience, and as the lessons unfold, let the readers watch. Like Brooke Shields’ memoir, combine the force of your authentic voice with the unifying principles of the lessons you want to teach. So as you read Down Came the Rain, you could be enjoying and learning about the following aspects of memoir writing:

You would be enjoying hearing deeper background about an old friend. (That’s what the star system is about. While most of us have at most a few hundred people in our social network, she has a few hundred million. I don’t understand it, but there it is.)

You are learning about how to relate to a child, especially if you feel disconnected. This information about postpartum depression could even be life saving if you’re in that situation and don’t know how to handle it.

You would be enjoying an interesting story, opening a window into the lives of people you don’t know, or will ever experience firsthand. Since I’m not a mommy, and don’t have to hide from admirers, to understand those experiences, I have to read stories about them. This expands my horizon as a human being, lets me relate more genuinely to people who are different from me, and makes my world a richer, friendlier place.

by Jerry Waxler

After listening to the audio version of Alice Sebold’s memoir, “Lucky,” I’m exhausted. She does a spectacular job of bringing me right into her experience, starting from the details of the attack, the numbing and disorienting results of the trauma, the eventual identification of the perpetrator, a detailed, harrowing account of the trial, and along the way, I felt disturbed. If I didn’t know it already, I am now convinced rape is a form of torture every bit as real as the horrors of war.

And it happens without the military ceremonies, the awards of valor, the training, weapons, or body armor. A college girl innocently walks to her dorm, and two hours later, she’s a prisoner of post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma does not sit comfortably in the mind, so when we’re not in it we try to forget it. And yet, whether we want to think about it or not, it’s real and it’s awful. By sharing her experience, Sebold reminds us of its reality.

So what would make such a book worth reading? Like any story of another human being, such an authentic, well-crafted tale might be your best chance to see life from that other side. If you know anyone who has suffered this trauma, ever expect to be strong enough to help such a person, or want to switch the word rape from an abstract news item to a deeper understanding of the human condition, this book will do it for you. And while the focus is on her own rape-induced PTSD, late in the book, she realizes that war ravaged veterans suffer from many of the same psychological problems as rape victims.

When looking through this book for lessons about your own memoir, take into account that this is the culmination of decades of self-examination, teaching, and writing. Despite all of the power Sebold brings to the project, or perhaps because of it, her writing is exquisitely simple and accessible. Not once in the whole book, not a single sentence, does she pull away into her own world and leave me out of it. She never hides behind fancy, or even pretty words. Through all that training she has learned to be simple and direct. She tells the story. I am so impressed by the simplicity and rawness of her telling, and think it offers a valuable example for any writer.

If you have ever suffered a violent trauma, and you have never been sure how to write about it, or if you feel it’s too raw to put in a memoir, “Lucky” can perhaps offer some insights. Not only is the storytelling simple. It’s also open. I recently interviewed horror writer Jonathan Maberry, author of Bram Stoker award winning novel “Ghost Road Blues.” He explained that the emotional basis for his horror writing is his own actual memory of violent physical abuse. By sharing his real emotions, he injects his writing with the real power of life. He used the word “authentic” and I think it’s a quality that readers have a sixth sense about. If a writer shares real emotion, we feel it.

It is this sixth sense for authenticity that pulls me in so deeply to Sebold’s Lucky. If you can find the authenticity of your own experience, and harness it into a story, you will not only capture your reader, but will also capture the essence of your experience. It’s this combination of real shared experience, real to you and shared in an authentic way with the reader that makes memoirs so exciting, a window into our individual universes.

When our experiences are so raw, our initial attempts to describe them usually spill out in an unpleasant, disorganized way. We say the same things over and over. We hide. We don’t have words to describe our complex feelings. The trauma breaks down all the sense that has come before, and even turns sense upside down. How can you describe a life that itself no longer feels safe or reasonable. After violent trauma, victims feel isolated inside this strange senseless world. As they try to regain order, they want to reconnect with people. Humans live together in a shared experience. We like to believe our world has the same rules that other people have. In fact, one definition of insanity is that you think your world works differently than everyone else’s.

So to regain sanity, trauma victims try to convince other people that their story makes sense. But how? The people they are trying to tell also feel disturbed by the trauma and shrink away from hearing it. Perhaps the only way to find that connection with others is through writing. People accept terrible things in movies and books. Writing seems to bypass our natural abhorrence, and we can let in some of the horror. It bridges the gap between trauma and normalcy.
Sebold has spent much of her life processing on her attack, starting with her first rage filled poem about the rape shortly after the event. She has taken years to turn the emotional upheaval and horror into a story that is readable by others. And finally, by creating this story, she is able to share it with others who have suffered, or those who give care to sufferers, or anyone looking to understand the dark side of human experience in a way that allows them to hang on to their hope.

While writing doesn’t convert horror into amiable pleasantries, it does transform it into something that makes a sort of sense. In fact, much of life is an accumulation of stories, and we turn to these stories to find sense. Look at the very core of religion, much of which is communicated in stories. And we try to make sense about all kinds of things by telling stories. Writing breaks down the walls that isolate you from others and it also breaks down the walls that separate you from your own experience. So by telling your story, even about something that makes no sense, in a way the story itself makes it feel more organized, more like it fits in with the way the world works. Look to the storytelling to incorporate these events into your life and keep going.

 by Jerry Waxler

“Beatles.” This word contains the memories of a generation. Who among us has not seen videos of them waving as they disembarked from the plane on their first American tour? As they’re playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan show, the camera pans to the girl screaming so hard she has to hold onto her face with both hands so her head won’t explode. Since such scenes were part of your life, you might want to tell about them. But to a listener these culturally loaded words sound like clichés. Events that happened to you also happened to hundreds of millions of others. We’ve heard and seen these images until we are weary of them.

If you tell a story with loaded words, people will hear what they already know, rather than learning about you. The loaded words will wash out the individual meaning from your story. So how do you write about the past, without falling into this trap? Use the storyteller’s advice. Slow down, set up the scene, and tell the reader how they affected you in particular.

So how could I unpack the meaning of the word Beatles and turn it into a unique image in my own life? I can see myself standing at the record store in Madison, Wisconsin, where I stopped on my way home every day from class, to stare at the rack of new releases. My mind was blazing with an almost supernatural desire, as if each album might release a Genii that would grant my every dream. But describing a boy standing at a record rack doesn’t give the reader much to go on. To share my unique feelings, I have to set up a scene in a way that you’ll be able to relate to.

Here’s a piece of advice on this topic by author and writing teacher Philip Gerard, from his book “Writing a book that makes a difference.” He says, “The key is always to include your reader in the process by which you arrive at your position. Instead of demanding that the reader experience anger or love simply because you say so, create for your reader the same experience that led to your reaction.”

So I try to remember a scene that would help me show my relationship to music in the sixties and I remembered the summer when the Revolver album was released. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I wanted to get back to campus early. When I returned in mid-August, all the summer classes were over, and even the faculty and staff were away on vacation. Madison, Wisconsin was essentially a ghost town. I didn’t have anywhere to live yet, but an acquaintance was out of town and told me I could crash at her place.

I walked in to the apartment building, musty from years of student tenants, and set down my belongings. My stuff was stored in another friend’s basement so all I had with me was a suitcase and the Revolver, which I had picked up from the record store on my way in to town. As soon as I sat down, I took out the album, turning it over and searching the graphics, the liner notes, and even the names of the production staff as if they might reveal some secret.

Ripping off the flimsy cellophane, I pulled the record envelope out, and then grabbed the record by the edges between my open palms to avoid letting any finger oil smudge the surface. Positioning the record over the turntable, I dropped it gently, feeling the anticipation not only that this would be the first time I listened to it, but also disappointment that this would be the last time I would ever listen to it for the first time. This troubled me because records lose 40% of their quality after the first playing, wearing down the little plastic ridges that jiggle the needle to create the sound.

In rapt attention, I turned towards the speakers and listened. And as I entered each new song, I felt a wave of excitement. Somehow the Beatles had broken with their genre over and over, as if they were inventing a new style of rock and roll in each song. I was especially smitten by the haunting violin accompaniment like cries of sadness, wails really, on “Eleanor Rigby.” I wondered who she was, and why I felt so drawn to her.

That afternoon, I left the apartment to buy food, and I saw a girl walking my way. A person! As she came nearer, I smiled. The smile of a stranger always made me feel okay, like the world was safer and more fun. So I smiled at this stranger, and she kept walking past me, as if she didn’t see me. Despite the long, cruel winters, Madison in August is blazingly hot and muggy. I looked around at the apartments that would in a few weeks be teeming with kids living in every possible space. The houses had not been painted recently nor were the gardens groomed. It was a student neighborhood, run by landlords we never saw, and kids who were just passing through. And now they were empty. I wondered where my home was. Certainly not Pennsylvania. I was no longer a child, and it was time to get away from there. And I didn’t feel at home here either, where there were no other students, and the only person I saw didn’t even smile at me.

The one thing I did have, the one element in my life that made me feel connected at that moment was the Beatles. Their passion for breaking with all the things that were wrong with the world leapt out at me. But rather than providing simple answers, they asked questions, set to music. Not just any music but orchestral music and fresh melodies and rhythms. They poured their creative energy into the album to let me know they shared my sense of urgency. We had entered a pact in which we agreed that our questions were important, were powerful. I closed my eyes, and hummed along with the lyrics, already starting to burn into my memory.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

I too lamented about life, while those violins tore into my heart. Hearing the lyrics made me feel more peaceful, understood, and one with the world.