I am currently teaching a course called Self Adaptation: Making the Personal Publishable, and I do love this course. It’s a design that Zoe Gilbert masterminded which involves close reading of specific texts in the first five weeks, and then turns into a writing group in the last five weeks, when students bring together what has been learned. It’s a weekly meet on Zoom, and this is the second time I have taught it. It’s been the most enjoyable course I’ve taught so far because it relies so much on group discussion, where new ideas are formed and revelations made.

You know when you say something, and it takes you by surprise because you hadn’t found a way to articulate what you felt before that moment? This is what happened last night. We were talking about slipping in and out of different tenses in our writing and why we did it and for what purpose and one of the students said, I don’t know why I do it, it just feels right. This is such a simple statement, but it feels really important to bring it up in relation to writing memoir because so much about memoir is finding that authentic voice. The voice that the reader trusts, that will carry them through the duration of the story…  and last night I articulated something I knew, but perhaps hadn’t really expressed before: that in order to be that voice, that person, the writer needs to have a trusting relationship with the self. We must trust ourselves to make the right decisions when we are writing, and in order to do that we must know what it feels like to tell the truth and what it feels like when we are parodying, or have lost our way (baggy, distracted prose) or are taking a chance. Of course, novelists and straight nonfiction writers need to do this too, but in memoir this relational relationship – if that makes sense – the relationship with self – feels even more important.

I have written about this before, but it’s almost like you need to have a split self when writing memoir. The feeling person who enters back into those pertinent memories that defined him or her, and the wiser, more grown up, more authoritative, self who digs into those memories and attempts to understand, to find meaning.

We were looking at Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, and her definition of the persona and the ‘unsurrogated self’– this extract here: ‘To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly – inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires – but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defences and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from. It’s like lying down on the couch in public – and while a writer may be willing to do just that, it is a strategy that most often simply doesn’t work. Think of how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without all the whining and complaining, the self-hatred and self-justification that make the analysand a bore to all the world by the analyst. The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.’

Yes, it is a monumental task to know what it is you want to write about, to engage fully with that experience in a direct way, but also create something that is processed and articulate and artful. I suggested to the group that it’s almost as if the memoirist needs to be both the analyst and the analysand. To strike up a relationship with the self that enables that third space of transformation. Academic, Celia Hunt, calls it reflexivity, where raw experience has been transformed into something new and meaningful. Experience transmuted into art. It’s only then that we offer it as a gift to our reader, because it it only then that it will hold that transformative power for them as well.

Those of us who have been through therapy know that it’s when you find trust in your analyst that the real work begins. If we think of the memoirist as both analyst and analysand, trusting in the self, in voice, in associations made, will lead to self knowledge, but also great writing. Once you find yourself, your voice and your trust in the process, the book will start to fly. There is little that we creative writing teachers can do at the end of the day, other than create a space where this can happen.

I am running another Self Adaptation course in the autumn – details here: