Good memoir requires pain, (really?) and other things I disagree with

does making sense of of who we are require trauma to be memoir-able?

It was one question, which I meant so sincerely, and Emma Donaghue’s reply has had me alternating between angst and deep consideration for days.

Appearing at an event for the college where I teach, Emma Donaghue, (novelist, screenwriter, playwright, historian) was discussing much about her writing choices, projects that became books, and while not her life, per se, her writing path. I couldn’t help wondering if she would consider memoir. There was much to say about her multi decade relationship, growing up Irish, living in Canada, having her fiction made into films, the writing fascination around Anne Lister.) What a memoir, I was envisioning.

I posted the question, “Would you consider crossing the genre to non-fiction or memoir?”

Her reply was a wall-like slam. Paraphrasing liberally…No, she said, my life has been too happy. She continued an inch or so to say she wouldn’t have content because her life has been so stable and positive.

…insert me with my dog-like tilty head…

[While I want to unpick this, I really want your thoughts on it. ]

Let me give you another opinion from a once dear friend who I’ve lost touch with. I asked her memoir and her writing intentions, assuming that because she had a journalism background, she might have a longer form non-fiction interest. No, she said, I would feel ridiculously self-conscious writing about my life, and (she added) I don’t hate my mother.

…dog tilting head me…

Memoir, is about the meaning we make of an experience…it is crafting a narrator of how we came to understand that what we have done, said, lived, felt, known are layers of the self we know today as we write.

I’ll lean into Vivian Gornick and Dani Shapiro here who I believe would agree with me.

Memoir is the craft of learning that everything in our life contributed to the now. I wish everyone was reading more memoir, period. We would all have more empathy, in my humble opinion, and the world needs that more than ever.

Still sitting with this…

For more musings on memoir, writing and the writing life…