Trust the image to bear the weight
+ Upcoming LIVE stuff: Seasonal Session for Winter 5th Dec / All Fours chat pt3 11th Dec / Memoir in a Month Jan 2025
I joined Memoir in a Month with a sense of curiosity about whether I could write a memoir, but no real confidence in how to approach it. Imposter syndrome loomed large - who am I to write about what's happened to me, let alone hope others might want to read about it? The supportive group calls were a great place to share some of these fears and concerns. Lindsay gave us some incredibly helpful scaffolding and prompts to begin to nurture and share our fledgling voices. I learned about all the component parts of what makes for a compelling piece of writing but, most of all, Lindsay's warm encouragement enabled me to discover and own my reasons for writing from life, to show up without apology, and to maybe, just maybe, begin to call myself a writer. Thank you for such a wonderful course.
, Tether and TendHi friends,
Somehow, it’s December.
This week, I’ve been thinking about some of the barriers life writers jut up against when grappling on the page with the knottiest parts of being human.
Working with writers embarking on memoir, often I’ll hear them say they “can’t” write about [insert topic here], yet what I’m really hearing is that they’re compelled to. Perhaps it’s that they need to interrogate the meaning of a particular episode of their lives and know others would resonate but the fear of exposure stops them. Maybe they burn to write about their father but can’t bear the imagined fallout should their words be read by people who know or knew him. Worse still if he can read them for himself.
These writers don’t want to fictionalise their lives. Make a novel of it. Sometimes they feel truth is stranger than fiction or are concerned that the veil of story would be all too easy to see through. I hear, too, from some who believe their non-fiction voice is their strongest and so want to work into that place. Quite right, I say.
In teaching life writing, I often defer to memoirist and academic Melissa Febos who, in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, says that “transforming secrets into art has transformed” her:
We are […] telling the stories no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to each other. What I mean is, tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go. Tell me about your drunk father and your friend who died. Don’t tell me that the experience of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal […] that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room.
I love this sentiment and, in my courses, go in heavy with praise for all the ways confiding in the page heals. When what you’ve written is for your own eyes only, of course you can do as Febos suggests, but is it that straightforward when you intend for others to read you? If you’re determined in said work not to skirt around the edges?
Hmm.
All of this has me wondering whether there are approaches we can employ that will allow us to write the stories we don’t think we can tell. Strategies we can borrow that might help us preserve our privacy and that of the people we love while still getting to the truth of things. Means by which we can leave space for the reader to find their truth, too. In this, I’m most interested in the alternative paths; the meanderings we might embark upon and the motifs we might employ to avoid a literal retelling for all sorts of reasons.
Perhaps this is where it can get exciting.
The “we” in “I”
I re-read this post from
who I remembered had something important to say on this. Her upcoming book for the memoir-junkie, INTO BEING: The Radical Power of Memoir and its Power to Transform (2025, MUP), will offer an expansive and generous framing of life writing that might take the literal as its starting-off point before soaring into places that succeed in making us think far beyond “what happened”:So I want to write about my marriage breakup, but actually do I? Isn’t it more interesting to dig deep into what marriage means in our society, and what it feels like to fail at it? When we tap into the deeper answers behind the questions, we begin to unearth aspects of the self.
She’s suggesting we take the personal and make it universal; broaden the scope to make space for the reader to see themselves reflected. This is an approach that provides the kind of cool, reflective stance that often makes memoir sing. It’s the critical distance that shows the “now” version of self is not the same as the “then”.
But what if that’s not enough?
I talk often about borrowing techniques from fiction: character, plot, setting, pacing, structure and so on. But what if we go one step further towards hybridity and borrow from poetry, too?
Scottish poet Don Paterson says that writers can and should veer away from the literal in order to locate the truth, which is a writer’s aim and not the same as a cross-referenceable account of events. This made me think of the 18th century German poet, Novalis, who said “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” That it does. And sometimes, too, we narrative non-fiction writers can be overly bound by reason in our writing. Scrabbling to say the thing as it really was when, of course, language will always fail us.
What if, then, we go the opposite way? Go big, go wild, go meta(phor)?
Can we do as English poet, playwright and master of the image Caroline Bird does and use the economy of poetry to hold meaning in a way that allows us to express the inexpressible when prose fails or exposes? Can we ask the image to be load-bearing?
Her poem, The Rags, from her 2017 collection, In These Days of Prohibition, fully exploits the power of one image and runs with it to devastating effect:
The Rags
When love comes through
the vents, you press wet rags against
the grill, lest you are smoked out
of your loneliness; you tape egg boxes
to your ears so you can't hear
the hissing; you swathe yourself
in shame like vinegar
and brown paper. At sundown,
you gather up the rags
and press them to your face
like the dress of a lover, hoping for
a slight effect, the remnants of a rush -
not enough to change your mind - just
enough to pacify the night.
The poet can, of course, hide behind a persona. Life writers don’t have that luxury. Or do they? I wonder about that reading Damage from her 2012 collection, The Hat-Stand Union. Is there some way of playing with narrative perspective as well as metaphor we can borrow? Bird talks about flinging ourselves at the object so fully that we leave our impression upon it. The need to believe in its “is-ness“ to the extent that it is no longer just a symbol of what we want to say but actually becomes that thing. In a sense, it moves beyond even metaphor. It’s dreamlike. Un-paraphrase-able. True.
Damage
Her teddy bear eloped with her mother.
Her father went out to buy flowers for himself
on Father's Day and never came home. Her grandma
was a wastepaper basket. She was raised by staplers.
Her skin was deathly white. Her birthmark
was the shape of Africa. No one explained
anything to her. She excelled at school until
she was abused by her own calculator. She ran
away from home to join a troupe of travelling
accountants. She could balance a Filofax on her head
and yawn at the same time. Audiences loved her.
She married a man called Jerry, who turned out to be
a hat-stand in disguise. She contracted a disease
transmitted by celibacy. She slept in a violin case, smoking
rosin. She lost all pleasurable sensation in her ears.
She drank to forget. She drank to remember where
she'd left her bike. You met her during the winter.
She said, "I need someone to save me." You did
what any sensible person would have done.
Bird says that we should rev up rather than wrap up approaching the end of a poem; go even bigger with the “is-ness” than you might feel comfortable in doing because this is where the meaning of what you’re trying to get at really lies. I know I’m revving up as this post comes to a conclusion of sorts, too. In a way, maybe I’m driving you completely beyond the bounds of life writing. Completely beyond prose, too. Maybe so far beyond reason that you find it all completely unreasonable? Maybe it’s the opposite and, in the spirit of “is-ness,” it’s left an impression on you?
I’ll finish with something
said in our recent conversation for the Cost of Caring series. As a life writer and poet, she says she finds flexibility and freedom in being able to move between forms. She uses the form best suited to the subject, which gives this non-poet something to mull over. And I wonder if you’ll think about this in relation to your own work, too. Perhaps you’ll work some strong extended metaphors into your prose or even be open to something more hybrid in texture as an exercise in loosening up if nothing more.Remember what Febos says: it’s vital that we tell our stories. So find the form for the traumatic birth story, your mother’s mental health crisis, your wild love affair. Maybe in this way you’ll allow yourself to go to the places your writing really needs to go instead of shutting yourself off to it. Open up spaces for your reader to recognise a wildness of their own.
Upcoming live stuff
A reminder that this Thursday evening, 5th December 8-9pm GMT, I’m hosting our Seasonal Session for winter. Check out this post for everything you need to know, plus the Zoom link:
On Wednesday 11th December 7.30-8.30pm I’ll be back with
, and for the third instalment of our conversations sparked by All Fours by , who has arrived in Substackland this very week. Will she drop in, I wonder… Our topic is rage, and I am ready for it. Here’s the Zoom link:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86053251903?pwd=JYeoFRQMlSq9K9ph4SGwNH5eDE1C2u.1
Meeting ID: 860 5325 1903
Passcode: 084758Memoir in a Month kicks off on Wednesday January 15th 7-9pm GMT and runs for five weeks with a combination of live sessions, 1:1s and feedback on works-in-progress. Each session is recorded with replay and resources sent out, so you’re welcome to work asynchronously if it suits you / your time zone. The waitlist button is above, and I’d LOVE to have you join this intimate group of writers embarking on the life writing journey.
Lindsay x
I love that Febos quote and I agree that we should find whatever way we can write our story. I really agree with this. But I also agree narrative nonfiction is far more flexible than many realise. I did a talk recently for the MA students at Bath spa and was struck that loads of them were writing ‘autofiction’ - because they wanted to write about their lives but wanted to protect themselves behind ‘fiction’. What I took from this is that there is a real movement still - and maybe even more so - to write from life. But I also felt a bit disappointed they weren’t choosing memoir. Memoir I think still has a kind of stigma around it and I’m sorry about this, because it’s ability to get to the heart of the matter and to tell it as it is has a boldness and courage that feels essential somehow. Anything less feels a continuation of that shame. (I know there is the whole question of hurting others and this is perennially difficult to overcome). Also, as I pointed out to them, if someone wants to see themselves in what you write they will see it in fiction as well as nonfiction . Fiction doesn’t necessarily protect you from that.
Gosh Lindsay, so much sparking in me from this great piece. The 'alternative paths' is where I find it gets REALLY interesting for me when I'm writing, constantly excavating to find the way to write about something that is deeply true, but also sometimes poetic rather than literal. I find it interesting that some of my favourite memoirs of late have all been by poets - Amy Key, Doireann Ní Griofa, Tamarin Norwood ... when that 'alternate route' is found for the telling, it is exquisite.