Relatively speaking: Why memoirists can’t guarantee loved ones won’t be hurt

“Sometimes I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face.” 

— All Memoirists/RE:BOOKS

Last week, an old friend who published a heartbreaking memoir on her addiction to meth and her road to recovery reached out. She vented about her mother, who hasn't spoken to her in almost three years all because of ONE sentence my friend had written in her 273-page memoir.

“Are you thinking of going on The Memoirist’s Apology Tour?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

The Memoirist’s Apology Tour may be more emotionally and mentally exhausting than going on an actual non-stop two-week book tour. Place and time TBD. 

Does my friend want to go on The Memoirist’s Apology Tour?

She's on the fence, going back and forth between “Please send your feelings about my sharing my life to info@idontcare.net” and “I can now see how you feel. I suck. I'm sorry.”

“But I’m still so not sorry for the totally truthful things I wrote,” she told me.

So many people reach out to me for advice on writing a memoir but are terrified they’ll hurt a family member in the process — and be forever disowned.

They are right to be worried. And candidly? I didn't realize just how worried until my friend called to vent about her fallout with her mother, who thought that her memoir “aired her dirty laundry.” My memoirist friend respectfully disagrees.

“Is The Memoirists' Apology Tour really necessary?” my friend asked. (Also, she’s just as stubborn as her mother.)

How do memoirists guarantee that relatives’ feelings won’t get hurt? And if they do get hurt, should a memoirist apologize?

My immediate thought was that my friend should go on The Memoirist’s Apology Tour, and not necessarily because she wrote anything offensive or to purposely embarrass her family. 

But because she values her relationship with them.

The problem is, my friend can’t get out of “memoirist mode.” She has been mentally filing apologies to relatives under “pending cases” because she is still not as sorry as certain relatives expect her to be.

Her mother took offence to ONE sentence that shockingly had nothing to do with her daughter’s drug addiction. Instead, her mother was beyond insulted by the line, “I came home to see a pile of laundry still on my mother’s bed.”

Her mother, who takes pride in a tidy house, felt that sentence was quite literally “airing their family’s dirty laundry.” According to her, her daughter was disrespectful and had featured her in a negative light.

Meh, forget about my friend sharing her meth addiction and all the terrible, tear-worthy things she had to do to feed her addiction — it was the mention of “a pile of laundry” that divided her family. 

But how could my friend have any inkling that THAT sentence would be hurtful to the point where her mother still refuses to talk to her, now going on three years?

It’s heartbreaking. There doesn't seem to be any hope for reconciliation unless my friend begins rehearsing for The Memoirist’s Apology Tour. Why?

My friend is coming from a memoirist’s POV. Her mother is coming from the old-school “Don’t shame your family publicly” POV. (Most likely because that’s the era she grew up in.)

Plus, my writer friend argues that HER memoir was about HER, not her mother. That sentence should not have provoked such a harsh reaction. Her mother was missing the entire point of her memoir — to help others cope with addiction.

Relatively speaking — pun intended — it is almost guaranteed that if you write a memoir, someone in your family will see your version entirely differently. 

But their version does NOT make your version untrue.

If memoirs can guarantee anything, it’s that people like to be seen in the best possible light.

The Memoirist's Apology, my friend and I agreed, would likely be, "I'm sorry you feel that way…” when they should be stopping at “I’m sorry.”

But in this case, my friend IS really sorry her mother feels this way. But she's not sure how sorry she is for anything else she’d written, which in her eyes was an accurate depiction of events. 

Also, if she does go on the Memoirist’s Apology Tour, does that imply she won’t repeat what she's apologizing for? In this case, writing about her life, which includes various relatives. It’s not something my friend can guarantee she will never do again.

I love memoirs, both reading and writing them.

It would be super helpful if memoirists, who are known to share their truths, would be just as truthful about what they share on “The Memoirist’s Apology Tour” post-publishing — even if they’re 97% sure they did nothing wrong and are 100% sure they don't care what relatives think.

You never know how relatives will react. They may not get your sarcasm or sense of humour; will probably think you overshared; and will most likely feel that what you wrote was negative. (“You were insulted over THAT? You totally misconstrued what I wrote. It wasn’t even about you!”)

Jeannette Walls, author of the memoir The Glass Castle, was surprised her mother was upset with her for writing that she was a bad driver.

So, my friend is debating between “Maybe I should be more considerate when writing” and “I’m a memoirist! Let’s take the candidness to the next level.”

(You can see how a memoirist's mind works in this brutally honest Q&A with the author of one of the most jaw-dropping memoirs I have ever read!)

When writing a memoir, you’re essentially putting your personal life on display for all to see.

“Writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right,” author Mary Karr writes in The Art of Memoir.

While writing her first memoir, she had to nap every day. The intense emotional aspect that goes into memoir writing caused her actual deep physical exhaustion. (And now we know why I love naps!)

The stakes are much higher writing a memoir than writing a novel: Someone will insist that your version isn’t true. (“I have never in my life left laundry on the bed!”)

(Maybe this is really why friends and family don't read your books, as I write here.)

Of course relatives are entitled to their reaction, but I actually think it's very important to understand how and why memoirists do what they do (again, as you’ll also see here). Also, let’s be real: we can't pretend that memoirists are going to hurt other people. 

Sure, my friend’s mother is allowed to be upset, but not only do I think all that pent-up anger, on both sides, is unhealthy and exhausting, I also think relatives or loved ones should recognize what it’s like to bare it all in the hopes that it will resonate with readers looking to validate and articulate their feelings.

“If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write … remember this: you’re not doing it right,” says the writing tutor Sarah in Elizabeth’s Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton.

Patricia Hample knows what it feels like when people feel betrayed by her writing. “The outrage, the disgust, the wounded astonishment, the quiet dismay, the cold dismissal.” 

Her memoir, I Could Tell You Stories recounts how her first book, a collection of poems, revealed that her mother had epilepsy; she was adamant that her daughter not publish that poem because she hadn’t told anyone. She eventually gave in.

“Just who did I think I was? A writer, of course.” We get to do this — tell secrets and get away with it. Years later, she tried to remember if she cared or not about her mother's feelings at all. “It was all, as I told her, no big deal. Couldn't she see that?”

But Hample has hurt people. “I've lost quite a few people along the way. And not to death. I lose them to writing…” 

One was appalled by her description of his shoes, another said he thought she understood what a "private conversation” meant. “Gone. Gone. Their fading faces haven’t faded at all, just receded, turned abruptly away from me, as is their right.”

Author Joy Castro shares that her family's responses were “as multiple and varied as their personalities.” She was pleasantly surprised her stepmother was “accepting.” It was her adoptive mother who stopped talking to her. "She sent only a brief e-mail: I can't deal with you right now. Several years later, she still hasn’t,” Castro writes.  

Personally, I never considered — or totally forget — that some of my readers include relatives, and now I'm trying to think of relatives I may have possibly angered or hurt in my memoirs and whether I should be the opening act on The Memoirist’s Apology Tour.

Some memoirists send drafts to their relatives (or wait until they’re dead to publish) and will alter their writing, at times taking out entire sections if a relative gets upset…which means readers aren’t getting the entire truth.

Others, like my friend (and myself), see no need for consultation. Why should memoirists be inhibited in their writing? It’s their experience, their truth, and they have every right to share it and bear it as they see fit. 

If I had sent drafts of my memoir Blissfully Blended Bullshit to every relative I think I might have possibly offended or embarrassed, I would still come to the conclusion, "Meh. This memoir just isn't for you,” and leave everything in they would surely prefer I left out.

“If someone else disagrees with your memoir, they can go write their own goddamn memoir,” I said to my memoirist friend.

No one can change another person's memory or alter their memories of certain experiences.

Of course we shouldn't write to offend people, but if all memoirists worried about upsetting all their relatives, there would be no memoirs to read.

If you’re going to be completely honest, there will be unpleasant events you need to divulge to your relatives or close friends, which may hurt them. (This memoirist turned down a lucrative offer to publish her book in Polish to prevent her mother from reading it — she lives in Poland and doesn’t read English.)

My friend can’t manage her mother's emotional reactions, just like her mother can’t manage hers. See the balancing act here?

Writing memoirs, I believe, is one of the most self-sacrificial things anyone can do. They put themselves out there for the benefit of others — so that readers feel less alone knowing others have been through the same experiences.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, has said that the confessional memoir creates dialogue. It elicits responses. That’s the beauty of them. And they do start much-needed conversations.

By sharing your experiences in a memoir, you become more open as a human in the process, not to mention a helpful participant in the culture and society we live in.

My friend is also debating whether to go on The Memoirist's Apology Tour because, as she argues, her mother doesn’t understand the profound psychological effect writing a memoir has had on her.

Do you think she wanted to relive, for example, all the disturbing things she had done to make enough money to feed her meth addiction — not just once during the writing process but also during the editing phases and interviews that followed? 

No, she didn’t. In fact, she needed therapy after re-living everything she had been through, often tearing up during interviews.

Even still, my friend feels that the importance of talking openly about addiction outweighs hurting any relative’s feelings, including her mother’s.

Keep in mind memoirs don’t tell the entire story of an author’s life. My friend’s memoir, for instance, covered about five years of a difficult period. Now that it’s been years since its release, I do think either she or her mother should reach out — maybe her mother isn’t that upset anymore. Also, my friend has grown and matured immensely since.

In the end, if you want to write a memoir, what you include is your choice. You have the right to tell your story. Be confident. Own your memoir. 

And when it comes to relatives’ hurt feelings? If you want to write your truth, you can’t worry about what every single one of your relatives, or anyone for that matter, thinks. Their opinion is irrelevant because you can’t write your story if you’re not putting yourself first.

If you are super worried and you can’t eat or sleep, then it may not be the best idea to write a memoir. But as most memoirists would argue, and as Mary Karr writes in The Art of the Memoir, “For most, knowing the truth matters more than how they come off telling it.”

Have you thought about writing a memoir but are worried about your family or loved ones’ reactions? Are you an author who has been disowned after something you’ve written? Tell me here!

Until next time, flip your hair and flip the page (of a memoir that’s not about you)!

xoxo,

Rebecca