When I was doing interviews around the time my memoir ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’ was published (serialised as a podcast in this newsletter on Sundays at noon), the most common question I was asked was ‘ did you find the process therapeutic?’. It was, after all, an examination of my experience of acute depression and the suicide of my mother. Was writing the memoir at all curative?
It’s an important question for anyone writing a memoir, because if it’s true, then the whole process doesn’t rely on the hope of being published. Simply laying down a life on the page can be a healing process - or so it is sometimes claimed. It acts as an ordering of otherwise chaotic events, a kind of private confessional which can be an antidote to trauma. And it seems to me that all memoirs rely on trauma as a narrative engine, just as a novel relies on conflict. Certainly, when I have taught residential courses on memoir, I have found them exhausting, after listening to heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story of abuse, neglect, grief and loss.
Of course, it depends why you are writing your memoir. People try and write life stories for different reasons. Some want to write a story that they hope will appeal to the world at large. `Others simply want some kind of testament or family history to leave behind for children or grandchildren.
Personally, the reason I wrote was not with therapy in mind. Writing stories was what I did for a living. It seemed a logical progression to move from short term journalism to something more substantial.
Writing the memoir certainly didn’t stop me experiencing depression occasionally afterwards. In fact, 20 years after it was published one particularly cruel and tasteless interviewer at the BBC pushed me back into a bout of depression after forcing me to go over the facts of the story once again.
But if writing the book wasn’t curative, it did help me make sense of my mood disorders, differently, more completely. It shook the kaleidoscope of my mind into seeing different patterns.
It was satisfying and enjoyable to write. Devoting yourself to any task is therapeutic, if you have the passion to write the story.
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