Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

When Doreen Orion’s husband noticed they were getting older, he suggested they buy a recreational vehicle, take a year off from work and drive across the country. She fought the idea at first. (What’s a story without some sort of conflict?) It sounded cramped, and she would only be able to take a hundred pairs of shoes. Eventually she gave in, went on the trip and wrote about it in this delightful memoir, “Queen of the Road.”

When I first started studying memoirs, one question I asked was “Are travel books really memoirs?” It seems like cheating, since the events just took place last year. But upon reflection and further reading, I have discovered that books like this one are lovely containers for musings and sharing of the author’s life experience. So if this is cheating, give me more.

In fact, by understanding how she put her book together, I see the goal of a memoir. It is designed to take you inside a real person’s experience of life. Inside the author’s point of view, we see what they see and how they see it. It’s the closest thing to mind-melding we can get on this planet, and if the author sees interesting things in a fun way, we enjoy the experience. Doreen Orion satisfies these goals fabulously.

As a traveler, she sees interesting stuff. Traveling across country provides endless opportunities for description, so like any memoir writer, she had to select the scenes that will add up to a good read. Her choices tend towards a mix of “famous yet quirky” like the vast Wall Drugstore in South Dakota, a huge mountain-carved statue of Chief Crazy Horse, and that strange place a guy built in Florida in the 1920’s out of chunks of Coral. (see my notes for more about these travel details.)

Her observations inside the bus are just as interesting as what took place outside. She has some great scenes with her husband, while he drives and she sits there with the dog and cats. She keeps it interesting by playing up her fear of crashing, rolling, and smashing when they approach overpass or hit a bump. She portrays her phobias with grace and humor.

Within this mix we are working through Doreen’s midlife crisis. Since I (along with a few million boomers) am recently discovering the weird fact that I keep getting older every day, midlife is a topic that is particularly interesting. Considering that both Doreen and her husband are psychiatrists, she could have applied a lot of analytical fire power, but instead of getting all heavy about it, she just has fun.

So let’s see. It’s a midlife crisis book. A travel book. A memoir. A romantic comedy. An introduction to the RV lifestyle. It even has cats and dogs. This tremendous variety becomes one of its most intriguing stylistic features. And it’s a story. Her scenes add up nicely to give me a picture of the whole trip. She lets me feel the rhythm of their day: sleeping late; socializing with neighbors in the RV camp where everyone is just passing through; unhitching their tow-along Jeep to do some sightseeing; and then back on the road, bouncing along, navigating, and making jokes to pass the time.

And that brings up a valuable lesson for writers. Just as important as the fun things she sees is the fun way she describes them. Her style is engaging and keeps the pages turning, a crucial requirement for any publishable book. I always get in trouble with the literati when I say things like this, but Doreen Orion’s memoir reminds me of Shakespeare’s plays, at least in one regard. To appeal to a mixed audience, Shakespeare laced the dialog with sophisticated innuendos for the intellectuals and gags to keep everyone guffawing. Orion does the same thing in Queen of the Road. She’s funny.

Within this simple premise of a travel book about two people at midlife, there are hidden a number of clever layers that create a wonderful read as well as a wealth of ideas that you might be able to apply to your own memoir. In fact, I find so many aspects of the memoir enjoyable and informative that when I tried writing them all, I ran out of time before I ran out of ideas. In future posts, I’ll have more to say about the many lessons from Doreen Orion’s Queen of the Road.

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Writing Prompt
Write two synopses of your memoir. The outside story will describe events in the world. The inside story will describe emotions, such as fear, hope, and disappointment. Each of these stories should feel like a journey, with a beginning, middle and end.

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Note:
About 20 years ago, I saw a documentary on public television about a guy who had built a sort of artistic compound, out of thousand pound blocks of cut Coral. I was intrigued by the weird fact that no one understood how this man moved this big rocks without any equipment. When I was in Florida, I went to see this strange out-of-the-way tourist attraction myself, and I was delighted to read Doreen Orion’s view of the place. Here is a note I found on the web with a link to the full article.

The Secrets of Coral Castle
Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida, is one of the most amazing structures ever built. In terms of accomplishment, it’s been compared to Stonehenge, ancient Greek temples, and even the great pyramids of Egypt. It is amazing - some even say miraculous - because it was quarried, fashioned, transported, and constructed by one man: Edward Leedskalnin, a 5-ft. tall, 100-lb. Latvian immigrant. Working alone, Leedskalnin labored for 20 years - from 1920 to 1940 - to build the home he originally called “Rock Gate Park” in Florida City.

Crazy Horse Statue
During the 1930’s, Chief Henry Standing Bear watched in silence as faces of great white leaders emerged from the ancient granite of Mount Rushmore in his ancestral Sioux homeland: George Washington in 1930, Thomas Jefferson in 1936, Abraham Lincoln in 1937 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1939. Finally, in the fall of 1939, the Sioux leader wrote an appeal to a Connecticut sculptor who had worked on the monument: ”My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.”

Half a century and eight million tons of rock after the sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, acted on that appeal, the defiant eyes of Chief Crazy Horse once again glare across the Black Hills of South Dakota. One year from now, on June 3, 1998, sculptors plan to dedicate an 87-foot-tall version of his fearsome visage, a monument taller than the Great Sphinx of Egypt and higher than the heads of Mount Rushmore, 17 miles away.

By Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

David Sheff’s memoir “Beautiful Boy” oscillates between the uplifting joy of his son’s Coming of Age, and the tragedy of his son’s tragic fall into addiction to crystal meth. All the ugly stuff is there, how Nic lied, broke in and stole from his own parents and neighbors, slept in alleys and drug houses but refused help. And then there were the drug-free periods when this beautiful boy was back, a delightful human being, full of creative spirit and enormous promise.

Sheff, a professional journalist, recounted his son’s self-destructive journey, starting with the first suspicions. Then came the confrontations, the efforts to control his son’s behavior, and the gut wrenching worry. The horrible fact is that millions of parents ask themselves every day or even every hour, “Where is my child?” “Will this be the call from the police?” “What must I do to stop the downward slide?” “Should I pay for another round of rehab, or is that last relapse a sign that I must write this child out of my life?”

The book has all the elements of a compelling drama. There is the author’s loving second wife, and their two sweet younger children. There is the constant anxiety, and the play by play experience of watching the son grow up, and then fall apart. Sheff applies his journalism skills to report on the special hazards of methamphetamine addiction: the high rate of relapse after rehab; the irrational behavior of the addict when craving the drug or under its influence; the denial and lying. And then, the experience begins to take a toll on David Sheff himself.

It’s no secret that stress undermine health, and sure enough, the author’s extended periods of frantic worry almost kill him. About two thirds of the way through the book David has a life threatening brain hemorrhage. Until then, Nic’s father and step-mother had been going to Al-Anon meetings and hearing that they cannot change the addict. The addict himself is the only one who can do that. Al-Anon’s message is that the people around the addict need to figure out how to take care of themselves. But a parent’s job is to take care of a child. Right? So while hearing the Al-Anon messages they had not yet embraced them. Now, after the hemorrhage, they have no choice. At last, we remember this memoir is by the father, and now the story shifts inward to his own introspective journey.

Nic’s biological mother had played only a minor role through the course of the book. David rarely spoke to her, except to make arrangements to hand Nic back and forth between the two homes, one with dad in northern California during summer and the other with mom in southern California during the school year. When Nic started disappearing, they called each other to get information about where he might be.

Three pages from the end of the book, Nic’s biological parents have their first therapy session together. It turns out that they went through a bitter divorce when Nic was little more than a toddler. I try to understand what it felt like to be Nic, raised by parents who resented each other and who lived hundreds of miles apart.

I don’t know whether to laugh in relief or cry in rage that it has taken this much anguish to force these two people into a therapy session with their son. I, as do most therapists, believe that all the members of a family influence each other. With his two parents split apart, I picture Nic split apart inside himself, too. It must have taken a superhuman effort to hold these warring parts of himself together.

For most of the book, I was sucked into the premise that it was all about Nic. When will he come back? Will he completely resolve the addiction? But that’s the son’s journey. I finally realize this is David Sheff’s’ memoir. I want to understand more about his inner world. Will he awaken psychologically and spiritually, so he can offer his love to his two younger children and his wife, and stay centered, healthy, and supportive himself? David Sheff’s inner journey begins close to the end of the book and runs out of room. After finishing Beautiful Boy, I could see that dad was just getting started.

I felt a little cheated that it took the author so long to start looking within himself. Then I look at my pile of memoirs and realize that most of the authors continue through the darkness for a really long time. Dani Shapiro in “Slow Motion” took forever to realize she was destroying herself. Jeanette Walls in “Glass Castle” took forever to grow up and get away from the clutches of her weird parents. Frank McCourt had to grow up and get away from his destructive father in “Angela’s Ashes.” Jim McGarrah had to fight in a war, and then go home to figure out how to heal in “A Temporary Sort of Peace.” William Manchester in his World War II battle memoir “Goodbye Darkness” first had to show us his demons, before finally coming to terms with them in the final chapters.

Despite the fact that David Sheff’s knowledge of himself remained hidden for so long, it did finally force itself to the surface. This long climb, known as the Character Arc, creates hope, letting me know that through the circumstances of life, the character is becoming a better, smarter, deeper person. This journey the author has taken through the course of his memoir fulfills my faith in the human experience - that if we keep hacking at it we will end up smarter by the time we die than when we started. This faith is one of the unspoken agreements we have with the authors of our books. We conspire together to promote this lovely truth about life, that in living we learn and grow, or as stated more poetically in the lyrics of Amazing Grace, “I once was blind but now I see.”

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Writing Prompt – Character Arc
As you look for a structure for your life story, your job is to find a meaningful segment or point of view that will provide the reader with a compelling experience. One way to look for this segment or point of view is to find the lessons contained within it. Of course, your end result does not need to beat the reader over the head with such a lesson but if you can find this Character Arc, and hold it in mind, it can help develop a compelling time frame and structure for your memoir. Name the life lessons you think you have drawn from your experiences. For each one, brainstorm how it might fit as a template for your memoir.

Writing Prompt – Drugs and alcohol
While the horrific downward slide of David Sheff’s son is hopefully a minority experience, millions of people are affected by substances. Often the abuser creates a wall of denial, convincing him or her self that they can handle it and it doesn’t affect anyone else. Write an anecdote about how you or people in your life have been affected by substances. If you have a romantic notion of your own use when you were younger, write the experience from your parents’ or partner’s eyes. If you were deeply affected by someone else’s abuse, write a story seeing what that experience might have looked like from their eyes.

Note

David Sheff’s son Nic also wrote a memoir, called “Tweak” about his experience as an addict. I am just getting started on it. “Tweaked” is the slang term that describes the frantic mental state of a methamphetamine high. From what I have read so far, the book is quite explicit and should be eye opening about the other side of the drama.

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By Jerry Waxler

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

One Friday night, I drove 50 miles to Philadelphia to hear a lecture by John Bradshaw, the author of bestsellers “Homecoming” and “Healing the Shame that Binds You.” He has been writing about shame for so long the Philadelphia Inquirer dubbed him the Shaman of Shame. Despite his world-class credentials, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend an evening learning about this edgy topic when I could be relaxing at home. But curiosity prevailed, and I’m glad I went. The evening’s insights have helped me answer some of the deepest mysteries of my life. My powerful ah-ha resulted from Bradshaw’s simple observation that there are two types of shame.

The nasty variety of shame is the one I have always run away from. This disturbing emotion creates a crashing loss of self-worth. I’ve always hated this feeling so completely that I thought in order to be a good person I had to completely eradicate it from my mind. Experts like Bradshaw believe the self-loathing of shame creates much of the suffering in the world, hurting people and giving them an excuse to hurt each other.

The insight Bradshaw offered me was to see that shame also has a positive function. When I see this emotion through Bradshaw’s compassionate eyes I recognize that when it is good, this feeling helps me maintain humility, avoid anti-social behavior, and reel me back from mistakes. Bradshaw uses the analogy of cholesterol, which comes in two forms. The bad one clogs your heart and can kill you, and the good one protects your blood vessels from damage and can save you. This clever analogy has already helped me reformulate my hatred for shame, allowing me to look past its ugly exterior.

This lesson is especially valuable for me now that I am researching my memoir. As I scavenge through the past looking for material, I turn over many rocks, and I don’t always like what I find. My first inclination is to replace the rock and back away. This is an especially enticing option considering the fear, “If you reveal this part of yourself, people will despise you.” If I listen carefully to this warning, I end up hiding all the things that make me human. When I remember my teenage years for example, my mind is clouded by this fear, and I try to stuff my memories back down into the darkness. But I’m tired of running away from own humanity. I want to explore what it has meant to be me. With some exposure to the light, the pain eases and I accept parts of myself I have been avoiding for decades.

Take for example shoplifting. This was especially evil for me, since my dad owned a drugstore. If I thought it through, I would have hated shoplifters. However, as a 12-year-old, I didn’t think it through. And after the deed was accomplished, I didn’t know what to do with the disgust and fear that accompanied each stolen ballpoint pen or candy bar. I buried those feelings, and every time they lurch into view they reduce my sense of self-worth. Nearly fifty years later, in light of Bradshaw’s insight, I look again.

Now I realize feeling disgusted with myself was part of the emotional package that steered me away from that behavior. So now, I am able to overcome the impulse to flee. I talk myself down from the self-anger, annoyance and secrecy and gradually more details emerge from their dirty hiding place. I see the furtive glances over my shoulder, hoping no one is seeing. (How comical that it never occurred to me that these furtive glances were in themselves so obvious.) I listen to my tense, confused, almost dopey thought process, and hear my confusion. “Why am I doing this? It doesn’t feel like me.” I see a young boy experimenting with the rules of property and power. And now I even see hope, because there is an inner voice that is trying to convince me to do better. Shame used to seem like a tattoo that would mark me to my dying day. Now I see that it can fade, and I can grow.

While I expand my insight into the relatively innocuous shame of a good boy being bad, there are all sorts memories that can cause memoir writers to shy away from their past, some of them so horrific they seem outside the range of human decency; cheating, betraying, chaos on the battlefield, teenage pranks that went too far, crimes. I recently read a memoir Ten Points by Bill Strickland. When he remembered his father’s psychological abuse, he hated not his father but himself. Like many abused children, he thought the situation was his own fault, because if he had tried harder he should have been able to stop the torture. The memories made him feel filthy, and as an adult, he determined to break their hold. His victory came within reach when he realized the horror was “just shame.” Once he found a label, he was able to pry back the curtain and gain control over emotions that threatened to destroy him. His experience is a good example of the positive power John Bradshaw is offering anyone who wants to heal from the pain of humiliation or self-doubt or disgust with their own memories.

I drove down to John Bradshaw’s meeting prepared to face the thing I feared the most. Two hours later, as I walked back to my car, I felt lifted, perceiving hope where there was previously only disgust. I had been given a light that would help me learn from my past, give me more compassion for other people, and would let me share myself with more energy and understanding.

Note:

The John Bradshaw lecture was hosted by Acorn, and produced by Dolores Proto, the director of a recovery house in Philadelphia. Learn more about the Acorn organization here: http://www.foodaddiction.com/index.html. This organization runs programs designed to help people cope with overeating, food addiction, and other shame-based addictions.

For writers, shame holds an additional challenge. Exposing one’s writing in public can feel daunting, especially considering that many writers are shy and would rather stay private. If you are one of the people who like me have resisted publishing because of the shame of shyness and self-exposure, or fear of rejection, see the section in my Four Elements for Writers book about Going Public.

Click here to see my full review of Bill Strickland’s memoir, Ten Points.

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 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

Since I was a teenager, I tried to understand how my own mind works. I read Freud in high school and psychology was the first college course I ever took. Then I turned inside myself for insights. I’ve meditated since 1971, been in therapy for 15 years, and kept a journal for 20 years. After all this work, I finally found a way to make sense of my own mind. Rather than speculate who I might be, I simply review who I really am, by finding and writing stories of my life. Memoirs are a fascinating window into the workings of life, and they are filled with lessons that don’t require any jargon or psychological theory.

But it’s not easy to understand the past, lost as it is in hazy memories. Through a gradual process I’ve been piecing the past together, like an archaeologist reconstructing the Dead Sea Scrolls from tiny fragments. Over time, I am becoming more familiar with long forgotten periods. I am learning the trajectory of my life, how my hopes and dreams propelled me to arrive here. Introspection and recollection enable me to link together parts of myself which have been disconnected for years, and let me understand the people who have influenced my life.

To understand more about the effects of memoir writing, I look at my book shelf. What do self-help authors have to say on the subject? One of my favorite, Dan Goleman, in his classic “Emotional Intelligence” uses brain science to back up the claim that we can improve our feelings by describing them. Similar principles have been pursued for decades by Drs. Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, founders of cognitive therapy, which teaches that people can change the way they feel by changing their thoughts. Just in the last few years, their work has been validated by brain imagery that shows brains while people label their emotions. Such imaging shows that words stimulate the thinking part of the brain and soothe the emotional part. Since describing emotions helps soothe people, it’s reasonable to assume that telling stories about emotions works at least as well.

As I study the relationship of writing and the mind, I begin to see my two great interests converge. It turns out that writing can be therapeutic. Many writing teachers have made this connection between powerful writing and genuine emotion. Natalie Goldberg, arguably the most influential writing teacher of our era, wants writing to bubble up from deep within our spiritual and emotional core. She calls such authentic writing “cutting to the bone.” For a more literary explanation of how memoirs heal, see the fantastic book Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo, a literature professor at Hunter college, an author and a scholar of the life and writings of Virginia Woolf. The book explores in a thousand ways how memoir writing heals.

Desalvo makes the case that writing is an introspective activity that lets us reach into our mind for words to help us make sense of life. By finding those words and writing them, we explain events long forgotten, or never clearly thought through. And then when we share these words, telling our story to others, we open ourselves to the healing effects of social connection.

During my many years of studying literature in school, and hearing stories told about fictional characters in movies and books, it never occurred to me that writing about life could be turned inward. After decades of searching, I’ve discovered the answer to many of my questions about healing and the mind might be answered by taking a fresh look at storytelling, turning it inward towards my own life.

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.

 by Jerry Waxler

I have enjoyed thousands of stories that involve brutal murder and outright assassination. Why am I so attracted to mayhem, when most of the time my thoughts are no more edgy than wondering what’s for dinner, or what I am going to do tomorrow? It turns out death is closer to everyday life than you might think. Just turn on the news — murders, war, disasters, disease, terrorism.

Even in the most innocuous circumstances, life and death battle under the surface. Take food for example. Fine cuisine sounds like it’s about pleasure and elegance. But that need for food is caused precisely by our need to stay alive. We try to stay as far to the alive side as possible, which results in eating more than we need. But eating too little can cause death. This balance drives so many decisions, even when we’re not thinking about it.

It’s the same thing when we pursue a career. On the surface, we’re driven by many things, by challenge and drudgery, pride and frustration, but we also need food on the table and a roof over our heads. In short, it keeps us alive.

When you tell your own life story, listeners and readers, without necessarily realizing it, are tuned in to the issues that kept you alive, or brought you nearer the edge of death. You can keep them engaged by becoming more aware of these forces, and learn how to insert them into your tale. Here are some examples of the way life and death might enter your memoirs:

If you escaped Hitler’s clutches, your story becomes a fascinating race for your life. But even if you didn’t have such a dramatic escape, look for any instances when death came near. When I faced an aggressive, armed policeman during a 60’s war protest, walked away from a broadside car crash, was mugged by a gang of kids, survived self-imposed starvation when I decided to eat only fruit, sitting peacefully one moment by a campfire and then thrust into panic as flames raced through the parched grass and leaves of the forest floor, I came a closer to the precipice. Children are especially vulnerable, so childhood memoirs like Jeannette Walls’ Glass Castle feel like cliffhangers, as we wonder how those kids are still alive. In Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, some babies lost the fight.

When important people in your life die, these are potential areas of trauma. Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking centers on this confrontation with death. In my life, I have lost my older brother, Ed, when he was 37, and my first cousin, Jules, when he was in his twenties. And there was John Kennedy. How did their deaths affect my life? Since then, my parents died, and friends have died, events that feel like a great, mysterious knot, tying together the forces of life, death, and love.

In war, people kill each other all the time. Even though most wars happen far away, they affect us in so many ways, whether we fought in one, had loved ones go off to war, been caught as a civilian in war, protested war, or fled from war. Whenever war touches your story, it parts the veil between life and death.

When I was sixteen, I read about the Nazi death camps. Only a few years earlier, across an ocean that seemed very small, millions of people had been murdered for being born into the same religion I was. Since then I have watched many people take their groups seriously enough to kill for them. So when you write about the group you are in, or ones you interact with, it might be appropriate to wonder about the deadly nature of group identity.

Look at the faces of sports fans when their team loses. It’s a moment of grief. Games are battles, in which adversaries fight, and the loser of the game symbolically dies. Kids cry over games. Gambling and other addicts step even closer, risking their property and sometimes their lives for the next fix. By conveying this visceral connection in your memoir, between competition or addiction, and the quest for life, your reader will be able to feel its power.

Wrinkles in the skin at first seem a mere cosmetic annoyance. But signs of age remind us that we are not going to live forever. As friends die, you may look more closely at the meaning of life. In fact this quest is a great reason to write your memoir. When you become aware of the dance of life and death, it prods you to dive in deeper to understand the urgency and intensity of your own story. And when you feel this connection, your reader will feel it too.

by Jerry Waxler

Entire epochs of my life, like the decade after I got out of college for example, have disappeared into the haze of the past. And I’m not sure that decade made much sense when I was living through it the first time. The past is strewn behind me in a jumble of memories that won’t go away, but won’t come clear either.

So instead of leaving that pile just sit there and bother me in its messiness, it’s more fun to search through the piles, and turn them into something beautiful and sensible. This exercise of finding the stories in life might seem daunting at first - so many memories, so little structure. But like cleaning up any messy pile, the starting point doesn-t really matter. I could start anywhere.

For example I could take out a photo album and when I feel an emotion stirring, jump into the scene and write about it as if I was there. Or compile a timetable of my life, including dates and short descriptions of major events and transitions. “I was born in 1947. When I was five I went to Pennypacker Elementary School. I walked three blocks to school and then walked home for lunch, everyday for six years.”

Ask yourself questions about the past. You’ll discover remarkable material lurking within your mind. Describe the furniture in your living room. What year did you move? What did you plan to do for a living, and what changed as you grew? Describe your aunts and uncles.

Then add emotion. What frightened you? (Recurring dreams of being chased by dinosaurs.) What did your parents want from you that you could never do right? (Be perfect.) How did it feel when you visited your grandparents? (It felt good when grandmom pulled out her piano music and started playing. It felt bad when she lectured me.) How did you feel at summer camp, or during a big argument? As you gather the information, and turn memories into scenes and time-lines, take a step back and think about how you would pull these disparate elements into a story that would make sense to someone who doesn’t know you.

By seeing it through the lens of a story, you regain so much of who you are. Out of the pile of vague memories emerge a sensibility that can help you organize who you are today. And if you strive to make it a good read, you’ll be taking the next step of your journey, turning yourself into a craftsperson, a storyteller of life.