Forgive me if I have written about this before, but it deserves repeating. This past week in my Self-Adaptation course we looked at memoir as political, and read Melissa Febos’s inspirational article about Writing about Trauma as a Subversive Act. which triggered a fascinating discussion on why so often we shy away from being direct, from standing by our stories, those things that matter to us. It was suggested that part of the reason is shame – shame we may not even be aware of because it permeates the world we live in. Shame that is designed to suppress, and to prevent us from engaging with our power, and that strength we gain when we connect with our true emotions. Writing memoir demands that we go deep into our psyches and engage with what makes us who we are, which means understanding those emotions and finding our truth. What if this is a threat; that if those voices come together and gain momentum, they cause trouble, they disrupt what we are led to believe to be the greater truth? Shame as culture’s way of repressing those whose subversive views might disrupt the status quo. It reminds me of the following James Baldwin’s quote:

“Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos.”

Memoir is a popular form for those who are marginalised in our society. It acts as a platform for voices that might not have had the space to speak. And this is what makes it such a powerful and transgressive form. But there is a chasm between knowing this and overcoming the fear that is instilled in many of us that our truth is is not important enough, that we are self indulgent for even writing this stuff. Or that our truth will upset other people, so we should not go there at all.

But these fears only act to silence us. What Melissa Febos points out so clearly is that so often the criticisms of writing personal narrative are gendered. It is women more than men who are accused of naval- gazing, embodied even in the etymology of the language – as Febos points out, it is not difficult to see the naval’s associations with birth, the body, with being female.

So if we overcome this first hurdle understanding the nuanced meaning in the criticisms that might be thrown at us, how do we go about feeling the fear of putting ourselves on the page and doing it anyway?

Here are two opinions to leave you with, both by writers I admire. The first is Patricia Hampl who states that true memoir is an attempt to find not only the self but the world. Writing about self is not self absorption, but more a ‘hunger for a world, one gone or lost, effaced by time or a more sudden brutality.’ She goes on to write, ‘in the act of remembering, the personal environment expands, resonates beyond itself, beyond it’s “subject”, into the endless and tragic recollection that is history‘ and that no one owns the past, but it is a grave mistake to not inhabit memory, as memory gives us authority, and ‘it is necessary to have authority in order to Question Authority.’

And what about our fear of hurting other people? Read this wonderful quote by Annie Ernaux that I came across this weekend in an article about her in The New Yorker,

‘Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written—when only I can see them—from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love without contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences.’

We must write our stories, our histories, before they are lost, or someone else writes them for us.