Memory Writers Network

By Jerry Waxler

I asked horror writer Jonathan Maberry why the characters in his Bram Stoker award winning supernatural thriller Ghost Road Blues, are so vivid, so horrible, and strong. He said because they were based on his experience. As he grew up, he struggled to overcome the helplessness and brutality of his abusive father. Then, even after the external abuse stopped, he still had to face the demons that had already become part of his memory.

Maberry’s frankness took me inside this battle waged in real life. To become a fully empowered human being he had to overcome the darkness implanted by his abusive father. He first assaulted evil through the advanced study of martial arts. He achieved black belt after black, and then as a world class martial artist, he began to teach self-defense, and helped kids and women deal with bullying. He has made a lifetime career not only of conquering the evil in his own life but helping others conquer it in theirs. His ultimate platform is of course writing. Through writing he can share the insides of this battle, and hundreds of thousands can see it for themselves and learn from it. Maberry’s personal struggle against the memories of a father bent on destroying the dignity of a small child is embedded in his novel, Ghost Road Blues.

Based on this interview I came to see horror writing with fresh eyes. Previously I thought horror stories were simply abstract battles with ghouls and vampires, in a senseless appeal to the darker side of human nature. Such an appeal had no interest for me. After speaking with Maberry, I realized horror is not some abstract force. Horror reaches into the roots of the human psyche, because for many people, that’s where it has been planted. Children look up to their parents as gods, and when those gods betray them, their budding personalities become clouded by the darkness of horror like some sort of demonic plot to hurt people from inside their own mind. From then on, the battle becomes an interior one.

After our talk, I realize for many people horror fiction is the battleground where good and evil can duke it out. And the reason they need to think about it in this symbolic way is because it is so difficult to talk about in terms of the actual memories. Even the recipients of such abuse bury their memories, afraid to remember at all, or afraid to hurt the perpetrator, or afraid to make themselves look like victims, or ashamed of having provoked it or given in to it. Abuse perpetrated against children defies our sense of fair play so profoundly, the only people who talk about it are politicians who defend us against the bogeymen who prowl our neighborhoods and prey on our children, predators so demonized they are not too dissimilar from the ghouls and werewolves of horror stories. See Maberry’s book, Cryptopedia, another Bram Stoker award winner, written with co-auther David Kramer, for an encyclopedic discussion of other creatures that fascinate and horrify us.

But child abuse perpetrated by someone who knows the child has been protected by a collective bargain with the devil. We keep it hidden so it can continue behind closed doors. Now that bargain seems to be breaking down. I believe that Maberry’s story hints at one of the first great sea changes of the twenty first century. In the internet age, people are speaking more openly in memoirs and blogs, and in this exposure to the vast variety of human experience, domestic child abuse is emerging as worthy of our collective discussion and consideration. We no longer need to couch it in terms of vampires and ghouls. We can uncover it in the very real struggle of ordinary people right here on earth, and finally begin to shed light into these darker places of human experience.

In part two of this article, I’ll review one of the best memoirs I’ve read, Ten Points by Bill Strickland in which, like Maberry, the author offers hope that while abuse is possible in real life, so is redemption.

by Jerry Waxler

My grandmother was looking at me, her mouth drawn taught. She had just found out that I had to climb in through the basement window to get into my house. This was not something a good boy does, she said, and backed it up with a financial incentive to never do it again. She wasn’t a harsh disciplinarian. She was an advice-giver. Most of the advice she gave me was more suitable for old people, like when she told me to think positively in order to feel better. I ignored her, letting myself think anything I damned well pleased, even if it made me miserable, as it often did. I knew she meant well, but I didn’t really care. I never understood what she wanted from me, so I kept my distance, and obeyed her advice, or pretended to.

As I grew up, I continued to see her as a remote figure, more interested in molding me than relating to me, and this connection prevented both of us from opening up and sharing ourselves with each other. It’s only recently, as I delve back into my memories that I see beyond these rigid impressions of her and uncover nuances of our relationship.

To see grandmom as a whole person, I recall the family lore about her own childhood. She lost her father when she was 12 and had to quit school to work as a bookkeeper in the Philadelphia department store, Strawbridge and Clothier. Her paychecks kept the family afloat, and then paid to put her brother Ben through college. He ended up graduating from Wharton, and then married into a textile family, while grandmom’s life remained modest. Her husband with his small neighborhood pharmacy was content with just getting by, and it was only thanks to her financial sense that they lived comfortably. When I visited their home on North Broad Street, in the midst of shops and a few yards from the heavily trafficked street, I would lose myself amid the thick bushes in her yard and imagine myself in a vast forest.

In high school, I was fascinated by numbers. When I noticed grandmom poring over the page full of numbers and symbols in the evening paper I asked her about them. I had stumbled on a topic we could talk about. Grandmom taught me which symbols represented preferred or common shares and how much dividend the stock was paying. I ordered annual reports to match the company face with its name. Then she hooked me up with her stockbroker and with her help and savings from working at my dad’s drugstore, I bought a few shares. Later, when I got to college, I moved on to calculus, which had the power to put a man on the moon, and I hoped, enough power to explain the mysteries of the universe. I lost interest in the list of numbers on the stock page and ended that connection with my grandmother.

A few years later, she took up still-life painting. We used to joke about her being like Grandma Moses. Now that I’m sixty myself, I no longer see her creative efforts as a joke. Now I see them as an inspiration. Her inquisitive mind kept trying new things. She never gave me any advice about art or life long learning. Instead she showed me by example.

Throughout my childhood, whenever we went to visit, we would sit dutifully while grandmom played the piano. The vibrant, youthful look on her face as she played leads me to believe she was getting at least as much pleasure from it as we were. She never gave me advice about service either, but later in her life I discovered she had been volunteering at a nursing home. One of her pleasures was to entertain the residents by playing the piano for them, a practice she continued when she moved into the same home.

It is only in this retrospective storytelling that I begin to see past all the advice and look more closely at the life she actually lived, her dignity, her desire to grow and her willingness to serve others. As a complete person, she has so much more to offer, adding richness to my own story, who I was, who I am now, and who I am yet to become.

Writing prompt
Which characters in your early life remain stuck in the simplistic mold into which you originally poured them? One of the most interesting things about writing memoirs is to revisit these characters and flesh them in. Looking back from your adult vantage point, consider what they wanted, and why they acted the way they did, allowing them to evolve from distant figures to real people. Write about a character who seemed distant when you were younger, and fill in some details that takes the reader (and you) beyond first impressions.

by Jerry Waxler
I think I saw Brooke Shields, once. I was having dinner with friends in Princeton, when Brooke was attending school there. I didn’t want to stare, but my friends swore it was her. Here’s an even lighter brush with fame. A guy I knew in college almost danced with Gracie Slick, the lead singer for the Jefferson Airplane. I was amazed that he was bragging about almost dancing with her, and now I’m even more amazed that I remember it 40 years later. I’m not the only one. When I tell people my stories, they share their own sightings. One saw a Broadway show. Natalie Portman was only 40 yards away. Another went into the same shoe store in Marin County frequented by Darryl Hannah. Yet, despite all this passion for stars I have absolutely no idea what their lives are like.

If you ever want to publish your memoir, you might have more interest in fame than you realize. Publishing breaks the barriers between a private life and a public one, and while few writers are hounded by paparazzi, we wonder what it’s like to be known by strangers. To help aspiring writers cope with their feelings about “Going Public,” I devoted a quarter of my self-help book, Four Elements for Writers, to the subject.

So what is it like to be “known” by strangers? That’s where memoirs come in. Memoirs are supposed to show me what it’s like being in someone else’s shoes. But which memoirs? Many celebrity books are ghost written, not even a direct expression of the celebrity’s own words. And most such memoirs play the celebrity card rather than shedding light on it. When I found the book “Vinyl Highway, Singing as Dick and Dee Dee” by Dee Dee Phelps I had reason to believe it would go deeper. I discovered through interviews and personal correspondence that Dee Dee had written it herself. That increases its value for other writers. And because she was famous decades ago and is famous no longer, it places her closer to regular life. Down from Mt. Olympus she walks with us mortals, and I hoped she could speak our language.

Dee Dee was an ordinary teenager, working in a candy store in Los Angeles early in the 60’s. She met Dick St. John, and based on their mutual interest in singing, they formed a duo Dick and Dee Dee. They cut their first record before they even performed together in front of a live audience. Californians loved the “B” side, Mountain’s High, and it shot to the top on the west coast. It was as if fate threw a switch. Soon Dick and Dee Dee were driving around middle-America, looking for crowds and DJ’s to help them spread the word and drive up sales.

The music business back then was simpler. Performers and producers were making deals in tiny studios. On her first couple of tours, she crammed into the back seat of a car. Traveling with black performers like Gary U.S. Bonds, she encountered explosive responses in the segregated south. When Dick and Dee Dee sang in high school auditoriums in the Los Angeles area, the other act was an up and coming boy band. These were early days for the Beach Boys, and so they were happy to play back up music for Dick and Dee Dee.

As Dick and Dee Dee gained recognition, the hotels and buses improved, but the grind continued: hoping for hit records, getting onto bigger stages, putting on a smile, and then getting back in the bus and doing it again. When they became regulars on the national television show Shindig, it looked like they made it, but the duo’s fame was only as good as their latest hit. Their style fell behind the rapidly changing music of the sixties, and gradually they sank back down into seedy night clubs, not much better than the ones they started in. At the end of the sixties the pair split up.

On the surface, the book is about the rise and fall of a singing duo. But if the only story arc was the “Dick and Dee Dee” act, and if the book ended with its death, it would have left me feeling empty. The death of the main character is better suited to a Shakespearean tragedy than contemporary popular fiction. So I looked deeper. What dramatic tension kept me engaged from the beginning, and then provided release and satisfaction at the end?

To find the answer I look more closely at Dee Dee’s own hopes and dreams. Her external world with its endless parade of night clubs, stage acts and television shows, seemed to be sucking the life out of her. Internally, I realized this book is a coming of age story about a young girl becoming a woman. At the beginning of the story, Dee Dee wanted to grow up, and by the end of the story she did by getting married and having a baby. Fame was a detour, a distraction from real life. When her act died, it felt like she had escaped the superficial and needy life style of a famous singer. She finished the detour and it was time to return home.

It reminds me of Homer’s Odyssey in which Ulysses was stuck on the island with the beautiful Calypso for years. It was only when he escaped this island and returned home to Ithaca that his journey was complete. Greek dramatists had a wonderful word for this circle. “Nostoi” is the coming home at the end of the story. When Dee Dee returned, she was not the same young girl who had left home ten years earlier. Her experience in the world of celebrity showed her sides of life that most of us never see. And so, like a good Hero, she returned from her Journey with wisdom, which forty years later she can now share with her community, telling us what it’s like to have been famous and to have returned. Welcome back, Dee Dee. And thanks for the stories.

Also see Part 1 of my book review for Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee.

by Jerry Waxler

Dee Dee Phelps was a singing celebrity in the 60’s. Just out of high school, she joined Dick St. John to form the duo Dick and Dee Dee, had some chart-topping singles, and went on to national television, international tours, and singing with a few big name stars, and a lot of smaller ones. Forty plus years later, Dee Dee Phelps wrote a memoir about those times, “Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee Dee.”

While the book contains many celebrity scenes, on stage and hobnobbing with stars, she also shows me her life as a real person: what it was like for her as a young girl, surrounded by the hassles of the record business and how it felt working with her distant, at times emotionally abusive relationship with her singing partner Dick St. John who was intense and ambitious, and who thought of himself as both the brains and the talent of the duo. He treated her as an instrument of his own success. And she shares her long-term love with her emotionally unavailable manager Bill Lee.

Aspiring memoir writers wonder, as we dig back into our memories, how we could ever convincingly portray the dreams, the fears, or the passion of our past. It’s a daunting challenge. Dee Dee succeeded at this task. In her memoir Vinyl Highway I feel like I am back there with her, feeling her mix of awe at being involved with world famous people, exhaustion at being herded along from show to show, frustration with her business and singing partner, and so on.

She succeeds her task, not by telling me what she felt but showing me the scenes that made her feel that way. She crafts each scene to show the actions of the people around her, neither glamorizing nor complaining about them. While she describes her world, she understates her own emotions, allowing me to draw my own conclusions. This writing style is powerful, and follows a tradition developed by such masters of literary non-fiction as Tracy Kidder, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Sebold. In their memoirs they report emotionally complex situations, without beating me over the head with their emotional reactions. They make the reader do the emotional work. To learn how to write about emotions from your own life, take a closer look at how Dee Dee Phelps achieves this effect in Vinyl Highway.

[To explain more about Dee Dee's writing style I will be interviewing her in a future blog.]

As I admired Dee Dee’s page-turning style of storytelling, something bothered me. It wasn’t just her writing style that was sparse. She kept her feelings so under control it puzzled me. When her partner Dick was rude, I was thinking, “How can she put up with it?” And when her manager, with whom she was in love, sent her mixed signals, instead of asking for clarification, she kept silent. I felt like something must be burning under the surface, something almost tragic, as if she was a passenger in her own life.

Finally it dawned on me. She was staying silent because she was accurately reporting the true feelings of a “good girl” at a time when good girls were trained to be unassertive. Dee Dee was honestly portraying her state of mind, just watching the world without a sense of being able to change it much. It’s an interesting psychological study of a pre-feminist mentality. And I think Dee Dee’s insistence on an authentic style brings this out by letting me see it, rather than her telling me about it.

The way she portrayed her state of mind offers another lesson for memoir writers. To portray the most authentic picture of what life was like for you, stick as close as possible to reporting the thoughts and emotions you had during the original scene. Resist the temptation to retrofit your childhood experience with your adult understanding. Of course, you can see the situation more clearly now, through your adult eyes. But by inserting too much of today’s insight, you take the reader out of the scene, and into the present. This breaks their connection with the actual experience, and creates more distance between the reader and the book. To keep readers engaged, let them get into the scene the way it happened. You can report how you grew up in your next memoir.

Dee Dee’s memoir pulled me along with her. It was a different time, and she showed me a glimpse of what those times were like for her, which is exactly what memoirs are supposed to do. It was a wild ride, and you can share it in Dee Dee’s memoir, Vinyl Highway.

[In the second part of this review of Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee, I will talk more about the overall structure, and Dee Dee's character arc through her journey, how she developed and grew.]

by Jerry Waxler

Sometimes a memory from days, months, or years ago will pop into the foreground. For a moment I’m back in the original experience, often from my childhood home, my dad’s drugstore, or walking around the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, where I went to college. Once I’m in the scene, I can look around to find more detail. In fact, this is a good trick to cultivate to gather material for writing memoirs. When I work with such memory glimpses in my memoir workshops, it almost always results in interesting, and often revealing moments in a person’s life.

Recently, I finished reading Expecting Adam by Martha Beck, about how her Down Syndrome baby changed her life. A few days later a scene from the book started playing in my mind. Martha is in a hospital examination room with her husband, waiting for a nurse. While they are waiting, her husband fools around with the equipment. Here’s a passage from the scene that jumped into my mind:

“This must be the ultrasound thing,” he said, picking up the metal detector. It had a plastic handle, which was attached to a flat metal disk. John held the disk to his ear, then rubbed it along his forearm. “Put that down,” I said. “You’re going to break it.” “No I’m not.” He poked the buttons on the keyboard.

It intrigues me that I remember a moment in Martha Beck’s life, a woman I’ve never met. Remembering a scene from another person’s life is a perfect example of why I read memoirs. I can now glimpse a bit of her world. But as a writer I want to know more, not just about her life but about how she told her story. I’ve been trying to “read like a writer” for years, and frankly, I have been failing miserably. Once I’m inside a fictional story, I enjoy suspending my disbelief, and don’t want to disturb it by figuring out how the author got me there. It’s different when I read memoirs. When I connect with a real person telling me about a real life, I seem to be able to keep my wits about me. This lets me absorb not only what they are telling me but how. By watching my own emotional response to the story, I am gaining deeper insight into the story teller’s knack. So what does Martha Beck’s scene in the hospital teach me about writing?

The first thing I notice is that the repartee is so relaxed it reduces the tension of being in a hospital. While John is putting Martha at ease, the scene is putting me at ease. The ordinariness of it makes it easy for me to be there with them.

Second, it gives me a glimpse of their relationship. In this one snippet, I learn that John uses humor to distract his wife from an awkward situation. He’s a nice guy.

Another function this interchange played was pacing. The episode takes place at a crucial moment. She’s about to have her amniocentesis, and since the book is about her baby’s genetic defect, the reader knows the medical procedure is important. But instead of jumping ahead to the test, she takes a small detour, slows down, and brings us into the room with her. It’s a classic technique of pacing, and something I should have known from years of reading fiction. But I didn’t really learn it until I saw it in a memoir.

Fourth, the scene shows her physical surroundings. A memoir isn’t just about introspection. By showing me the inside of a hospital, or a classroom, or a school psychological testing office, she shows me the places where her life happened.

Fifth, it shows me her uniqueness. Lots of people have prenatal tests. If she had rushed through it, Martha’s experience would have been just another one. By slowing down and describing personal details, I feel like I know what that moment was like for her in particular, rather than a person in general.

Sixth she is teaching me a technical fact. When John played with the ultrasound equipment, I started seeing it and even touching it. Once I became oriented to the machine, I gently and enjoyably learn a little about sonograms and amniocentesis. For example when the technician saw how the fetus was positioned, she marked an X on Martha’s abdomen at the spot where the needle could be safely inserted. I always wondered about that.

Now that I’ve learned these writing lessons, I can try using them to enrich a scene of my own. I might want to teach something to the reader, show the nuance of a relationship, and by adding this sort of detail, the reader can relate to me not as a general person but a unique person, telling a story that can only be told by me. In a story I submitted to Ronni Bennett’s story site, I dig through my memory for a scene that will help the story in some of these ways. If you’re interested in submitting stories, or reading reader-submitted stories check out this site.

 by Jerry Waxler

I found insight into the power of memoirs from a surprising source, the movie Pursuit of Happyness. The movie is based on a true story about Chris Gardner, down on his luck in San Francisco in 1981. Gardner, played by superstar Will Smith, is working at a dead end sales job that has left him unable to pay his rent. Gardner, a single father, struggles to stop the downward slide into homelessness. Despite his effort, he continues to fall, sleeping on trains, in bathrooms, and shelters. And through a tenacity that is almost incomprehensible in its ferocity, he keeps his wits and determination, striving to provide for himself and his son.

Then he gets a break. He is accepted as a stockbroker trainee at a major financial firm, Dean Witter. But it’s not over yet. He must prove himself before he can get the job. He grips this first rung on the ladder while circumstances continue to pull him down into the abyss. To earn enough money to live, after a full day at Dean Witter he goes out to ply his other sales job, selling diagnostic equipment to doctors. Then he retrieves his kid from daycare, and starts the nightly search for a place to sleep. In the end his tenacity pays off. He is accepted as a stockbroker. It’s based on a true story, and the real man went on to become a millionaire and a social activist.

In the bonus material at the end of the DVD, there is an interview with Chris Gardner that turns this from a good movie into a fascinating exploration of a memoir. When they started filming a movie of his life, the producers asked Gardner, who by this time was a wealthy man, if he would he be able to handle the emotional turmoil of revisiting this humiliating, dark period in his life. He was willing to try, placing himself in an unusual position of watching Hollywood specialists reenact his circumstances. For example, they recreated the day care center where he had to drop off his boy, and designed a set to mimic the station bathroom where he slept when there was no room at the homeless shelter. Through the process Gardner saw his life acted out.

As you organize your thoughts about your own memoir, consider the power of reenactment. You can gain many of the benefits Gardner got, without having a multi-million dollar Hollywood production team. A much more modest effort to act out your past can provide you with surprising insights.

While I don’t have acting or drama experience myself, I have experienced the power of reenactment in a type of therapy group called psychodrama. In this method, without formal props or acting training, the psychodrama leader directs the group through a reenactment. The actors are selected from your fellow group members. As each actor comments on how the drama feels from their own point of view, you find yourself revisiting important scenes in your life, this time accompanied by concerned participants and observers.

If you don’t have access to a psychodrama group, you can achieve insights with a few friends. Organize the scene, and play out the various roles. I’m not talking about stage acting here. No one is going to pay to see it. It’s like a primitive sketch that helps you see things in a new light. You can even do it alone. Imagine the scene yourself, put yourself in each character’s shoes and see what you would say.

Consider this example. I try to remember a scene with my brother. We’re in the basement. He is studying and I am soldering a transistor, helping him build a hi-fi kit. The room is dark, except for the lamps each of us is working under. He is building the hi-fi because he’s moving away to go to Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut, which would make him 17 and me 10. I don’t remember the conversation, so I pretend. I say, “Ed, I enjoy helping you. I’m going to miss you.” Now I ask a friend to pretend to be Ed, but the friend doesn’t know what to say. So we switch places. My friend, now playing me, says, “Ed, I enjoy helping you.” Now that I’m sitting in Ed’s chair, I imagine what he would say. I struggle but don’t say anything. As Ed, I’m preoccupied with studying, and nervous and excited about going away. Sitting in his chair helped me understand how he felt. We’re boys. Of course we don’t talk about feelings. Now I’m me again. I feel lonely. I’m glad he’s letting me help him with the soldering.

So what feelings did Chris Gardner report about making a movie of his life? Here’s what he says in the interview at the end of the DVD. “I didn’t know if I was ready for it. But this whole process, this entire production helped me tremendously, by helping me to create, if you will, new memories of San Francisco, instead of the film I had been running in my mind for the last 23 years. It’s part of letting go. It’s been a beautiful experience in that regard.” By revisiting the past, he has relieved some of its pain.

There is a powerful symbolic gesture at the very end of the movie that evokes the mysterious journey through time. Actor Will Smith walks along the street, ready to embark on his new life. Across his path walks the actual man Chris Gardner, successful, and now famous. Smith turns around to look at the person he will become 23 years later.

Writing prompt: Pick a scene in your past that continues to hold mystery and power. To help you write about it, think of it as a stage play, and you are the screenwriter and director. Write stage directions. And then try acting it, either exactly as it happened or improvise to create another way it might have happened.

by Jerry Waxler

I’ve read excellent memoirs about a spiritual journey and reviewed two of them on my blog. You can see these reviews by clicking the links for Anne Lamott’s “Traveling Mercies” and Martha Beck’s “Expecting Adam,” Both of these books stayed engaged in the author’s dramatic unfolding. Not all books about spiritual searching stick so close to the writer’s feelings. It’s a common tendency to shift from personal experience to explaining the teachings. I have nothing against using personal experience to teach. In fact, it can form the basis of an excellent teaching book. [see my book review of two books that teach] However, too much teaching may detract from the dramatic tension. To keep the reader turning pages, be sure to convey the unfolding of your own dramatic tension.

To understand more about the dilemma between drama and information, consider a memoir by Donald Walters, called “The Path, One Man’s Quest on the Only Path there is.” This memoir straddles the two goals, teaching quite a bit about a spiritual path while staying connected with the author’s journey. Walters is the disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, author of another spiritual memoir, “Autobiography of a Yogi.” I read “Autobiography of a Yogi” in the seventies. Steeped in the rich, diverse spiritual culture of India, it is an extravaganza of occult and mysterious perspectives. When I came across the memoir of his American disciple, Donald Walters, I thought I could continue the journey started in the Autobiography of a Yogi, and learn about another memoir in the process. [Note: Walters' memoir, "The Path" is also available from audible.com.]

The book starts with Walters growing up with his American parents in Europe in the 1930’s. Walters was well educated, preparing him to become a high-powered participant in the world. Since adolescence, though, Walters discovered he was not content with the ordinary goals of growing up and making a living, so he searched for deeper meaning. After stumbling upon Autobiography of a Yogi in a bookstore in New York, Walters went to California, met Yogananda, renounced worldly life and became a monk. Since he found what he was looking for, the original dramatic tension was resolved. At least it was resolved partly. I still wanted to know how he would relate to life in a monastery, a lifestyle so different from his past and from his culture.

Then, much of the middle of the book showed me events in the monastery and conversations with Yogananda that all ended with some spiritual point, or principle. This emphasis on teaching might have stopped the action of the memoir, but I stuck with the book anyway. When I make it to the end of a book, I can learn a lot by asking “What was it about the book that kept me turning pages to the end?” For one thing, as a student of world religions and spirituality, I found interest in the teachings themselves. And despite a heavy dose of Yogananda’s teaching, the book kept me in touch with people, through dialog, and anecdotes. As the characters grew older, I continued to empathize with them, wondering how their understanding would evolve.

Walters’ first climb as a young seeker ended when he found his teacher. On the next leg of his climb, he was integrating the teachings and applying them in his life. Gradually, I began to notice another dramatic theme unfolding. He started to take on duties as a minister and a leader in the organization, shifting the story arc from a young man who looked up to others to a teacher who had to learn how to lead. This is a problem I’ve had to face over the years, feeling discomfort as I made a gradual transition from beginner to elder, from student to teacher. I was curious to see how this transition worked for him.

Finally, there was a dramatic twist. The story shifted again, keeping my interest still further. Walters spent his entire adult life serving the organization that was founded by Yogananda, the Self Realization Fellowship or SRF. Then, he was forced out of the organization. That was an enormous blow, apparently undermining his life’s work. And yet, in a way it was expansive, showing him and the reader one of the fundamental dramatic tensions in the spiritual journey. To find spiritual insight, it’s natural to gain insight into our personal relationship with a higher power by absorbing the teachings of a group. Entering the group creates paradoxes and dramatic tension between the individual’s needs and the organization’s. Walters show us the mounting tension. As he became more deeply aware of his own spiritual development, he was asked to take on more responsibility for the group. Then, finally, when he was forced out of the SRF, he was on his own again. How poetic! He went full circle, or as the Greeks call it nostoi or “coming home.” Walters’ story shows us how the group helped him find his spirituality, but the fulfillment he achieved, in the end belonged to him.

Writing Prompt:
If you want to write about spiritual unfolding, sketch out the story arc that will keep the reader engaged. What drove you at the beginning? What questions about life needed to be answered? What obstacles did you overcome to reach those insights? What events will show your growing awareness, and the breaking down of previous walls? How will the unfolding story finally show that you relieved the tension you introduced in the beginning?

by Jerry Waxler

(This blog is also available as an audio file. See the Podcast player control at the end of this post.)

A woman in my workshop wondered if it’s narcissistic to write a memoir. I take such objections seriously, because they can drain away enthusiasm from this project. To help anticipate and refute these objections, I’ve compiled a list of some of the top reasons people have proposed for not writing a memoir and offered suggestions on how to bust through each one.

But before you invest too much time in refuting any specific reason, step back and consider the way you achieve any goal. Take for example going on a vacation. The suitcase is too small, traffic clogs the road to the airport, and the flight is delayed. But you don’t turn back. You keep going. The obstacles are part of the journey, and in a sense are steps along the way. You are determined to reach your destination and after you push through obstacles, you reach the beach. Writing a memoir is the same thing. You want it, you overcome the obstacles, and you reach your goal.

If you feel mired in objections, switch your perspective. Instead of feeling like a victim of objections, become a strategist, turning your intelligence towards defeating doubts. Like a martial artist, turn doubt against itself. Doubt your doubt. Think skeptically about what it claims. Punch holes in it and watch its energy deflate. So now, with a critical eye, the reasons why some people worry that writing memoirs is self involved.

Is it because thinking about yourself is bad? Such a restriction would stop you from more than just writing your memoir. Without self-awareness you would be stuck. Understanding yourself is a generous act that can help you become a kinder person, more willing to serve others, less angry, more harmonious. By reducing the grip of regrets, and other self-involved emotions from the past, you become lifted out of your own worries, and as a result more caring toward others.

Perhaps you fear that it’s wrong and shameful to expect other people to read your story. I suppose at first glance that might seem self-involved… unless it’s a well-told story that gives the reader pleasure or simply offers them another slant of the human condition. You’re giving them a gift, and so, it would be selfish to withhold it.

To find out more about this concern of memoirs and narcissism, I turned to an article from the wonderful collection of essays in Slate Magazine’s Memoir Week. In this collection, there is a history of memoir bashing by Ben Yagoda. The article makes the claim that the spate of memoirs proves we’re becoming more narcissistic. To back up the claim, Yagoda includes impressive sounding quotes by famous writers. But just because a bunch of people express strong opinions doesn’t make their opinions right. I think their case falls apart when you look behind the curtain and see what they are doing. These writers are standing on their public platform complaining that other people want a share of the platform. Apparently they would prefer you pay attention only to them, or to people they deem worthy. Perhaps they sincerely believe the world will be a better place if we only allow the elite to speak to us. But that seems so out of step with our times. Haven’t we evolved beyond this point of view?

In the 19th century, the masses “knew their place” at the bottom of the pile, waiting for truths to come from pundits. In the 20th century, we became a faceless mob, drowning in logos, and slogans, fodder for marketers who wanted to know us only by our demographic categories so they could sell us stuff. Ironically, when my generation was growing up, we all decided to express our individuality the same way, by wearing blue jeans. The marketers had a field day. Rather than breaking out of the mold, we created a new one. I think many of us are ready to move beyond the authoritarian model of the 19th century, and the anonymous masses of the 20th century. In the 21st century, we want to share ourselves freely with others who have exuberant passion for life in all its diversity.

Out of the demographics of the billions are arising energetic and generous people who break through the wall of sameness and tell others about their individual history, a story that has evolved through the years of their lives, and that represents a life they have actually lived. Through blogging and memoirs, writers share the story of themselves and in turn want to know the stories of each other.

Each of us is an individual. We can’t get around that fact. We’re stuck with it. The challenge is not to become less of an individual but to become more caring about the other individuals on the planet. So we stretch beyond ourselves. To become a more generous, socially responsible, kind, respectful person we strive for a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be those other selves.

A wonderful way to break down the walls that keep us apart is to read someone else’s memoir. And a great way to jump into the ocean of humanity is to tell your own story. By telling your story, you participate in a world of mutual respect, giving voice to your own individuality and in the process expanding the vision and compassion of those who want to learn about you. Telling your story will help the world stay balanced and sane. So if you’re wondering if your story is worth telling, don’t worry about those people who don’t want to hear it. Reach out to the people who do.

If you’re interested in more of Ben Yagoda’s articles, books, and an amazingly rich literary link page, see his website at the University of Delaware.

(Note: This is a complete rewrite of an earlier post on this topic.)

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