Books to Learn From - Part 1

Memoir Edition!

A group of memoirists sits down at a bar. Heard this one before?

It sounds like the opening for a dumb joke, but in my case, it was real life, and it was last week in Santa Monica (in case you missed it, I surprised my dear friend Julie Chavez at the book launch for her debut memoir, EVERYONE BUT MYSELF). Seated beside me at that bar were two women I deeply admire: Reema Zaman, author of the exquisite memoir, I AM YOURS, and Claire Bidwell Smith, a renowned grief therapist and the memoir of the memoir, THE RULES OF INHERITANCE.

(Disclaimer: if it sounds like I have cool friends, I humbly admit it’s true. These women are role models, teachers, muses, you name it.)

I guess it’s no surprise I’ve landed in this group. Even as a kid, I was fascinated with real people’s stories. People magazine was my jam and so were biographies (namely, Shirley Temple’s and Oprah’s). Simply put, people are interesting. I like to know what makes them tick; I’m always seeking to understand the blueprint that fuels a person’s resilience.

But reading someone’s life story and learning how to write one are two very different tasks. A few months back, I published a list of tips about memoir writing. Today I thought I would get into the nitty-gritty of a few memoirs worth studying and the writing problems they helped me resolve.

So, without further ado, a list of books to learn from (memoir edition)!

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How to tell a forward-moving story while sharing all the necessary backstory?

Although the first page of Cheryl Strayed’s famous memoir, WILD, puts us squarely in the action of her solo hike on the Pacific Coast Trail, we cannot possibly appreciate her trek through the wilderness without understanding the trauma and grief she experienced following the death of her mother. Figuring out how to keep a story in the present while also filling in the past was my biggest challenge as a memoirist and I experimented with how to do it a hundred different ways (alternating chapters, starting in a different place, etc.). In the end, I read and re-read WILD and studied the way Cheryl seamlessly wove backstory into a present-moment story.

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How to write about hard things without eliciting pity?

The reality of life is that it’s rarely defined by one challenging/traumatic event, but typically by chapters of them. How to write about a series of events so deeply unfortunate it runs the risk of reading like trauma porn? This was the question I sought to answer as I attempted to guide readers through a period of profound and successive loss without injuring their senses along the way. Joan Didion deftly manages the task in THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, in which she reflects on the dual losses of her husband and daughter. Here, she relies on her journalistic style of storytelling, reliving her experience as though observing herself from a distance. For me, the magic of this book is the plainness with which Joan tells it. I could especially relate to those trite and simple memories our brains replay, the ones most proximal to the moment of our trauma. Joan lived a big and interesting life, but her memoir reminds us that grief is an equalizer. It reduces us to our most primal selves.

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How to write a memoir that’s bigger than your own life?

I deeply believe that great memoirs are about something more than the life of the author. They expose the connective tissue that binds all humans. And perhaps it’s true that underlying all memoirs (serious and light) is a message about mortality: the ways we spend our days. In the case of WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR, mortality is at the forefront. As Paul Kalanithi deals with a terminal cancer diagnosis (he died in the process of writing), he also reflects on his work as a neurosurgeon - the brains he held in his hands, the lives impacted during his career as a physician. For me, Paul’s writing about the brain was among the book’s most potent material; it speaks to our universal vulnerability (for who are we without a brain we can recognize?). I finished this book weeping at the loss of a remarkable person and at Paul’s ability to place himself within the greater context of the human story. It taught me that the job of a memoirist is not only to go inward, to better understand ourselves as individuals, but also outward, to recognize ourselves in the shared experiences of others.

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A note of explanation: These are memoirs I read at the time I was writing my own, and unfortunately, they reflect limited diversity in their scope and authorship. As a teacher, I refer to them as “mirror books” (stories that reflect our own lives). Equally important are “window books” (stories that teach us about others). I needed mirror books to help me write my own, but as a reader, I am forever interested in and grateful for window books for challenging and expanding my worldview. More on those soon.

I’d love to know what books have served as great teachers in your life, whether as mirrors or windows. Please share below!