Still Here Magazine

By Judith Owens-Manley

Although emotional realism is more often thought of as relevant to film and literary works of fiction, it is a critical approach to the writing of memoir. Memoirs tell personal stories that involve the narrator as a character, and, by necessity, involve family, friends, co-workers, and other people in the memoirists’ lives.  A memoir proposes to take the reader on an emotional journey through a specific period of the narrator’s life or a series of events that have challenged them, and have ultimately been transformative. In that sense, memoir should easily be “true to life” since it’s written directly from personal experience.

What makes a memoir successful is the emotional realism, the relatable exploration of the human condition and our ability to connect with the full experience of the narrator’s life. Writing memoir “wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self. . .” (Karr, M.,The Art of Memoir xxi). Unlike fiction, the writer has no distance from the narrator, save from a bit of ability to create the narrator as a character. But how do we best convey that as writers? In truth, memoirs seem to bedevil writers themselves, both in the personal cost and in staying true to what happened. Mary Karr also wrote, “I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little” (The Art of Memoir 27). As a memoirist, it’s important to me that a piece of memoir is authentic, has depth, is emotionally engaging, and potentially transformative.

When I read Joan Didion’s memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, her depiction of the sudden loss of her husband and how she struggled through that year stayed with me; her experience became, if not mine, since I hadn’t lost my husband, impactful in the way she was able to unpack and communicate the immediate and subsequent turns and twists to her insides, her outsides, and everything in between. These lines I couldn’t forget:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

A memoirist is dealing with a number of issues in writing, only one of which is, “How am I going to make this emotionally real to the reader and create a piece of good writing?” There is also, “How to tell a personal story, what to include for truth and what not to if it doesn’t need to be there?” and “What is my ethical responsibility to others who end up in my story through no intention of their own?”  

On a recent Zoom call with my three sisters, I told them, “I’m writing a new essay . . . about sisters.”

“Well, I guess we’ll each have to write our rebuttal when you’re done.” That was my sister Christine.

We all laughed, but what will make this piece of memoir authentic, as I worry about how my sisters will feel about what I’m writing, be deep and relatable in its depiction of my experience of my family, and also pull you in as a reader? What if you have sisters of your own? What if you don’t? I want you to have visuals, to see my sisters, to know them, at least a little, even in a small piece of memoir. 

Christine has a wry smile that pulls up a corner of her mouth. I can tell she is genuinely amused, but is there an edge to it? There was a lot of teasing in my family growing up–competition for attention, a passive-aggressive zinger to a sibling before they had a chance to throw a jab at you and insist, “It was just a joke.” There is an assumption in Christine’s droll smile and Carole’s hooting laugh that in what I write, there will be something to defend. Even without Terri’s video, it isn’t difficult to imagine her expression. She’ll be tentative, a giggle but a flicker of doubt, checking to make sure she’s fitting in, so often left out in the past as the youngest girl.

I also want to have you experience my unique family constellation and have a sense of how we talk to each other through dialogue. And I want you to know me authentically as the frightened, passive-aggressive kid that I was, no holds-barred.

We learned to be sneaky, to hide our feelings, to cry alone in the dark, to get back at each other in ways that wouldn’t easily get called out or get us in trouble.

Or maybe that was just me. I took it out on my sister Christine, two years younger, pinched her arm while making my mean face at her. She was afraid of The Twilight Zone, which we watched on TV, and I teased her by making “Billy Mummy eyes,” a wide-eyed, dead-eyed stare, to frighten her.

“Stop,” she’d plead, but I followed her around the house until I tired of it. She, in turn, poked holes in my First Communion picture, my saintly pose with white veil and hands folded in prayer.

“I’m giving it freckles like you.” She didn’t get in trouble for that. My mother had bigger things to worry about. Dinner. Laundry. The credit card bill.

So, the details are important to portray my experience in its unique permutations, yet critics of memoir, emotional realism aside, have cautioned against a “public striptease” (Shapiro, “A Rage-Filled Memoir”) or implied that it’s too much, self-indulgent, navel-gazing. I revise constantly when I’m writing memoir, probably more so than fiction writing, and I try it out in my writing group for impact, relatability, and also where I’ve chickened out, pulled back from revealing a deeper truth. For instance, there is something unsettled with my older sister that I haven’t completely gotten to yet. I’m on another iteration exploring that, using family pictures to open up the degree that I depended on her and where I’ve felt betrayed, like a child, in our relationship.  

There is a range of opinion on how writers feel about sharing their memoir, both for accuracy and emotional response, with family, friends, exes, who appear in our writing, all of the way from not at all to yes, absolutely. Anne Lamott famously wrote in Bird by Bird, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

            I find myself now as a memoirist confronting my own lines for authenticity and ethical considerations for those we write about in our stories. It’s been well-noted that when parents are deceased, truth becomes easier to be public about in our writing about family. Yet, as I’ve been writing the essay about having sisters, I notice my hesitation about what truth is and from whose perspective, what needs to be said, and what might better be left out and still be real, “true to life.” I have determined for myself to include the emotions, my inner and outer turmoil, and how it has changed me in writing memoir with these simple rules:

• Don’t flinch on my truth.
• Be guided by, but not stopped by “Do no harm.”
• Be respectful of what is mine to tell and what is not.

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