‘Can I Still Write My Memoir If It Exhausts Me?’

Dear Yanyi,

I studied creative writing in undergrad and graduated in 2015 with 15,000 words of a memoir that I continue to be proud of. The book focuses on the loss and grief in my childhood, through the lens of the suburban neighborhood I grew up in. It’s written as a collage, where multiple important people in my life are shared with the reader through everything from script-like conversations to short scenes, before many of those important people pass away. It is also still far from being a completed manuscript.

Truthfully, the reason this collage style works so well for my memoir is because my experiences with grief and other trauma left my memories holey, at best, and the text is a reproduction of how my brain recalls the first 16 years of my life.

The problem that I’ve been running up against for the last seven years is the fact that continuing to write this memoir is so emotionally challenging for me that I’m unable to squeeze in an hour of work here or there because that hour then requires multiple hours of emotional recovery. I wouldn’t be surprised if this prompted the idea of attending therapy, which is something I’ve been on a journey with for the last few years already. It has helped me off the page, but this particular problem continues to keep me from deep-diving into this work that I believe in wholeheartedly.

The Midwestern-American-raised part of my brain keeps trying to say “power through” or “you’re being lazy,” and other such unhelpful and self-sacrificing catchphrases. I have had extensive positive feedback from a variety of professors and other writers over the years, and received a prize for an excerpt from the text, and I think part of this inner dialogue stems from the intrinsic “you should’ve been done writing this already” subliminal messaging I glean from those same professors and writers now.

I think that part of the answer is simply Sit Down And Write, which makes sense. I'm not naive enough to think that finishing this memoir will be a painless process. Perhaps, though, I’m naive enough to believe that revising a few pages or drafting a scene of neighborhood night tag shouldn’t leave me emotionally hollow?

Thank you so much for your time.

Sincerely,
Healing-ish (she/her)

Kansas City, Missouri

Dear H,

Thank you for your letter. It sounds as though this book has become a tremendous occasion for you to cope and reflect on a formative period of your life. It’s also clear that something about it is stuck, and it has been for at least the past seven years.

This inner conflict you’ve shared with me isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of change. If you can pinpoint a time in your life when you would have just kept going without a second thought, then it’s change that’s already happened.

In the past, perhaps you wouldn’t have listened to that emotional exhaustion and paused your writing. Perhaps you would have dismissed therapy as not for you. You would have powered through the book. But what would that book have been?

You didn’t choose that book. You chose no book, which is, from your letter, where you’re feeling some doubt now. But are you just someone with no book? I don’t think so. I think you gave up not the book, but one version of this book. And, in return, you chose much, much more than nothing. You chose to preserve yourself.

No major lesson in life is learned only once. The world will test how much you want to change. Time and again, things loop around. There’s a prickly occasion for encounter; for the same old arguments to reanimate. And for you, H, that occasion is this 15,000 word manuscript you’ve got in your (proverbial) drawer.

This manuscript is a fragment of that Book That Could Have Been. It’s a talisman of you from 2015—it carries the prize you won, the professors and writers you impressed, and the dead you want to honor. It holds all your old ambitions and the ghosts of why you had them. In order to write into this book, you must take on the vantage point of the person who was writing it.

Who was this person? Someone for whom others’ opinions mattered (your former admirers). Someone who wanted to keep the dead alive (writing down your memories of important people before they passed away). Someone who, despite all the pain you can feel now, would have kept going.

Powering through any task, small or large, is rarely about what you have right now. When you power though a task that you dislike, a task that is even harmful to you, there’s always a goal, a core belief you hold, that you’re convinced will be fulfilled on the other side.

Perhaps this person’s belief was survival. They powered through because they were alone, and there wasn’t anyone to help them. They couldn’t afford to be weak, to feel the things they were meant to feel in the moment. Eventually, they powered through out of sheer habit, because that’s what they’d gotten good at.

But you, dear H, wouldn’t do that. You can hear that voice but won’t listen to it. Perhaps you’ve found more choices in the ways you can live. In seven years, you’ve begun to transform. So perhaps the person who was writing this memoir doesn’t actually exist anymore.

I’m not telling you to give up on this book you so believe in. But I will guess that it means more to you than just a literary escapade. This manuscript is “a reproduction of…the first 16 years of [your] life.” It’s the “holey” version, the one that can’t quite come into focus, because the memories themselves are not quite in focus. But they’re all you have. They’re shards you’ve kept of a former life. They’re the relics you keep coming back to.

I don’t know the circumstances of your losses, but grief takes us away from ourselves too, whether it’s to the rites we must observe when we lose the ones we love or tending to the silences they leave behind. That’s part of grief, isn’t it? Animating the bodies of the long-dead through our bodies. Giving them a bit of space to stay a while, if only just in our lives, borrowing our sight, our smell, our laughter, our sorrows. We let the dead haunt us because we miss them. We want them around.

Who or what were you honoring? How? In what ways was your memoir first about other people? What was it to you?

Perhaps also you wanted to be recognized. Perhaps you needed love and admiration when you had lost so much. Perhaps sharing your pain was a way of holding that. Perhaps safety was in another person telling you that yes, you were doing something right. That yes, you were wanted. That you had a place here.

But using your energy to buy the pleasure of others meant that you were always poor in what you could give yourself. And there comes a point of saturation when we deplete ourselves in the name of others. The dead can’t give us their selves. Nor can the living, even the ones who love us. They need themselves back, eventually. So do you.

What will you make of your life when it’s no longer about being with someone else, dead or living? Who will you be when you’re not in relation to another person?

That’s the cinch—the most painful part. Because choosing to act for yourself means confronting a very painful thing: that you are alone, and that you have been alone for a long while.

You never asked to be alone, but you ended up alone. All these years, instead of facing this truth about your life, it’s been easier to dwell with those who have passed on. It’s been easier to search for others to replace them. Who can blame you? You were so young. You didn’t deserve to lose that love. You had to go through more than you were ready for. And you did so valiantly, it seems. You did the best you could.

But now, because of this book, you’ve come upon another opportunity. After spending the last decade of your life protecting yourself from loneliness, it might be time to be alone. Whatever happened to you shouldn’t have happened to you then. But you need your whole self in order to write the next version of this book. It’s time to reclaim the selves you left behind to watch over the past. It’s time to be all here, all and only for yourself. Perhaps the book you want to write now is an altogether different book. It’s a book not for others. It’s a book for you.

Life gives us funny metaphors. It’s possible your memoir stayed incomplete for so long because you were also “holey” at the time you started writing it. You’re proud of it because you’re proud of the person you were then, the person you were able to become despite all that happened to you. When no one, alive or living, was able to love you, you loved yourself.

Transforming this manuscript into a different one isn’t abandoning that self. It’s honoring them too. Honoring that they still could grow and change. Honoring not only the scale of losses in their life but also the joy and surprise still possible in it. That person would have wanted you to have what you do now, what you will have soon. I think they would be proud of you and support what you’re about to do. Write to them. Let them know what’s next.