"Get Rid Of Herpes…"
Memoir Is Not the Trauma Olympics
Something clicked for me when I read Susan Shapiro’s December 31 opinion piece in the New York Times this week. I realized that memoir writers are actually getting advice from memoir teachers, and probably from agents and other industry professionals too, to showcase as much messiness and tragedy as possible (granted, with the transformation or metamorphosis that will inevitably follow) if they want their work to get published.
I admire Sue Shapiro a lot. Her students love her. I truly enjoyed Lighting Up. She even published a book with Seal about writing, though I wasn’t her editor. But as a memoir teacher myself, I think her advice to writers is a slippery and problematic slope. Her piece is opinion, no doubt meant to be provocative. What Sue is talking about, however, when she’s writing about confessional writing, is what’s referred to in the industry as “misery memoir.” Misery memoir sells. I have a whole section about it in my own book. Regina Brooks, awesome agent and friend, refused to label misery memoir as such in her book, You Should Really Write a Book, instead opting for “transformational memoir,” and for good reason. People writing misery memoir usually hate the term. But misery memoir does sell.
Bestselling misery memoirs include Running with Scissors, The Glass Castle, The Tender Bar, Lit, Dry, Jesus Land, Tweak, Unbearable Lightness, and many many more. These are memoirs about drug abuse, eating disorders, messed-up relationships, kids who are messed up, dysfunctional family dynamics. Sue writes in the NYT:
Sharing internal traumas on page one makes you immediately knowable, lovable and engrossing.
There’s something to this (where misery memoir is concerned), though I think the value of spilling out your internal traumas on page one is a bit overstated. In Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, we eventually discover she’s a sex addict. She cheated on her husband. She more-than-dabbled with heroin. It’s intense, for sure, and her vulnerabilities made her likeable. But I wouldn't characterize her book as misery memoir, and there were many scenes far more engrossing (the one in which she shoots her mother’s horse; or the one at her therapist’s office where she tries to explain a divorce she can’t fully understand).
The point I want to get across is a point of caution: memoir is not the Trauma Olympics. Not even misery memoir. I used to receive query letters at Seal Press that made me wince. After all, a publisher known for its sexual and domestic abuse list gets a lot of really difficult-to-read queries. You must treat your traumas so delicately. Parading them around feels exhibitionist and off. Being too dispassionate about them makes you seem disconnected. The only people who really can and do pull off successful misery memoirs are those writers who have done a lot of personal work, and who are, to some extent, “healed.” We used to say at Seal that certain submissions felt like a writer’s journal. Like a cathartic draft. I’m VERY supportive of this kind of writing, but it doesn't mean it’s ready to be published. And it doesn’t mean that the author has any idea of what’s in store for him or her once it is published. Are they ready to talk and write about and relive their traumas not only while they write, but while they promote and sell? Certainly some are, but many are not.
We live in a confessional society, and no doubt the popularity of misery memoir has encouraged many writers to write stories that would otherwise never have seen the light of day. But when approaching a publisher, you must be tempered. I saw countless query letters in which a woman’s story included some combination of eating disorder, abuse, sexual promiscuity, dysfunctional family dynamics, substance abuse, etc. They were showcasing their traumas, and it was too much. Real misery memoir works when you drip in the painful stuff little by little. It works when you have enough distance from what you experienced so that your self-understanding of who you were back then shines through as much as your recalling of the difficult experiences.
Don’t for one minute believe that the more messed up you seem on the page the more likely your book is to sell. You must be honest, it’s true, but more important, you must be grounded and level-headed and self-aware so that the reader knows that you actually are okay.
Comment
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Comment by Brooke Warner on January 12, 2013 at 4:10pm -
Thanks for this perspective, Barbara, and congratulations on the success of your memoir. That's wonderful.
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Comment by Barbara Morrison on January 12, 2013 at 6:28am -
Thanks, Brooke. I think your piece and Susan's give us much to think about. I agree with Susan that there has to be tension to drive the story, and that new writers in particular need a jolt to make them dig beyond the superficial. On the other hand, having read many memoirs, I find that I am uninterested in the trauma sweepstakes you describe so well. No matter how lovable the narrator, I want more than just a journey through cancer/addiction/grief/etc. I want a memoir to speak of something larger than that person's life, some issue or concern that we as a society face. Some examples include Andre Dubus III's Townie (sons growing up without fathers) and Jill Sadowsky's David's Story (how society and the medical profession do/do not support families struggling with schizophrenia).
It took me a long time to find a publisher for my memoir, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother, which has gone on to win a bronze IPPY and be a finalist for ForeWord Review's Book of the Year (both in the Memoir category). Recalling the rejection letters, some of them hand-written and full of encouragement, I believe that my memoir was not sufficiently miserable for their market, and that their preconceptions created expectations that weren't met by my picture of myself and other welfare moms I knew as--yes, struggling with horrible problems--still normal moms taking our kids to the park and enjoying good times when we could. Those problems provided plenty of tension for my story! I understand that many readers will struggle with the same expectations, but response so far has been very good.
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Comment by Brooke Warner on January 11, 2013 at 8:20am
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Thanks for your comments @Linda and @B. Lynn. I agree that sometimes what will be your memoir must start with some serious journaling!!
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Comment by Linda K. Wertheimer on January 10, 2013 at 6:14pm -
Brooke,
I absolutely love your thoughts here and couldn't agree more. I wrote the cathartic version of my memoir more than a decade ago than put it aside until I could write with more distance and perspective. My new version is completely different.
Susan Shapiro's piece prompted a lot of debate on my Facebook page as well as on a FB writing friends group I run. Many people thought she was going a bit too far in what she was suggesting.
There is a difference between spilling our guts on the page and writing something that's truly worth sharing with others.
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Comment by B. Lynn Goodwin on January 10, 2013 at 5:51pm -
"Real misery memoir works when you drip in the painful stuff little by little. It works when you have enough distance from what you experienced so that your self-understanding of who you were back then shines through as much as your recalling of the difficult experiences." Wise words. You can't write the memoir when you're going through the experience. Keep journaling instead... JMHO
Author of You Want Me to Do WHAT? Journaling for Caregivers
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Comment by Brooke Warner on January 9, 2013 at 10:36pm
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Thanks for your perspective, Miranda. Agreed about The Year Of Magical Thinking!
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Comment by Miranda C. Spencer on January 9, 2013 at 7:22pm -
I'm a bit late to this party but Brooke, your blog post and all your comments ring inutitively true. I've been struggling with what I think may be a misery memoir for a while so this advice is welcome! I wanted to add that Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" is a really good misery memoir, in part because it reads so dispassionately and at the same time she conveys both insight and agony. And, her writing is so tightly structured...the opposite of "messy."
Finally, sounds like Susan Shapiro's class would be an invaluable one to take when I return to New York!!
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Comment by Carole Spearin McCauley on January 9, 2013 at 2:14pm -
I have another view of super-traumatic scribblers. They resemble hypochondriacs who complain constantly as their major way to get attention until, like the boy who cried wolf, people just tune them out. I prefer fiction and memoir that reach some resolution or conclusion useful to other people
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Comment by Susan Shapiro on January 9, 2013 at 11:04am
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Let me know what you think of the pieces. So far from what I've heard, Aspen, Gisselle, Alex and Lavanya have been contacted by agents and book editors. "The Reckoning," the first piece Kenan ever wrote, was the NYT Magazine and Best American Travel Writing 2012. Since English isn't his first language I agreed to help him coauthor his memoir THE BOSNIA LIST, which a WME agent sold to Viking, coming out next year...
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Comment by Brooke Warner on January 9, 2013 at 10:59am
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Ha ha. Thanks, Sue!
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