There is so much build up before publishing a book – writing, getting edited, re-writing, anguishing over whether it is good enough - whether it has told the story you wanted to tell.  Nervous self-questioning sets in. Will people want to read it? Will it be a best seller? Was that the goal? Will people review it enthusiastically? Will they be critical? Will others understand what I was trying to say? Can I handle all the marketing that is required? All these concerns and more were front and centre for me when my book, The Full Catastrophe was published in April, 2016.

But perhaps the one question that haunts the memoir writer the most is “Will my single voice make a difference?” either to me or to others? And what I found was surprising.

C. G. Jung said, “We cannot change anything unless we accept it.” I believe we cannot accept anything until we uncover it, acknowledge it and talk about it. Depending on the topic, a memoir can be part of the current worldwide “uncovering.” There is a growing movement to open up and talk about wrongs in order to heal. Things like sexual abuse, child neglect, racism, forced marriage, corrupt government, domestic abuse, the position of women in society, the treatment of First Nations people, are being talked about more. Some are being handled more effectively by the court systems and if not, there is a greater public outcry to change the systems that keep injustices in place. There is still much to do to understand and right wrongs, but there is movement in that direction and memoir plays an important role in telling stories that people in the past might have swept aside, never admitted and never dealt with. Many people die with their stories locked inside them. As memoirists, we can take our place, with pride, in this “uncovering” and the movement of society at large toward greater human understanding.

I started writing my memoir to answer a question - how did an intelligent, well-educated woman end up with two controlling and ultimately abusive husbands?  I had some idea that my parents and my upbringing, and the fact that I had a pedophile for a teacher for five years, contributed to it - but I didn’t realise exactly what had happened. Writing my memoir helped me sort out and uncover many of the things in my life that I hadn’t understood, but it wasn’t until after my memoir had been out for about ten months that I made a huge discovery.

In November 2016, I went to a lecture given by Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN forces during the Rwanda massacre in 1994. He has recently written a book about his battle with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD called Waiting for First Light. As he described his symptoms, I could feel myself go cold. Nightmares, fear, anger, anxiety, an inability to sleep or concentrate had plagued me from the time I was seventeen – my god, he was talking about me! How could this have slipped the notice of all the doctors, counselors, analysts and therapists I had gone to for help over the years? Easy – PTSD has only more recently been acknowledged as something that can affect people who have gone through sexual or domestic abuse. No one, including me, knew what I was suffering from – and that it is treatable. Now that it was uncovered, I could do something about it. This was a completely unexpected result of writing my memoir.

From the time my memoir was published, I have “come out” through the written word but I have also been invited to do public speaking engagements, TV and radio interviews, to contribute to not for profit organisations that help domestic abuse victims, and to help devise better organisational responses for women exiting domestic abuse. In addition, one of the greatest pleasures for me has been teaching memoir writing to those who have difficult stories to tell – in fact, that is the name of the course. Through their memoirs, new voices will continue to uncover and record stories that matter and add to the collective knowledge of humankind. A lofty feat indeed.

If each of our individual identities is the sum of our personal memories, then the identity of human kind is documented in the collective memories of its members. Memoirists each contribute a puzzle piece to the jigsaw of collective memory, one memoir at a time.