Writing Lessons: How Vulnerable To Be When Writing Memoir

HOW VULNERABLE TO BE when writing memoir? Uh oh. Did you just scurry under the couch or pull your sweater over your head? Oh yeah, then this post is definitely for you, since vulnerability is an integral part of the equation you need to prove your authenticity. It’s all about being a reliable narrator, folks, and those who are reliable show us their goods. Meet Theo Pauline Nestor whose book, Writing is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (and a Guide to How You Can Too), is just out this week from Simon & Schuster. Read her take on this, and enter the book giveaway at the end.

Shame, Vulnerability and the Art of Writing Memoir

By Theo Pauline Nestor

The memoirs we find most compelling and evocative are generally the ones in which the writer makes herself vulnerable by exploring topics that carry a certain heft of shame, that discuss those topics we speak of  usually with just the closest of friends. A dramatic example of this vulnerable storytelling, for me, would be Caroline Knapp’s accounts of hiding liquor bottles, drunk driving, and her obsessive relationship with her boyfriend in Drinking: A Love Story. Or, Cheryl Strayed’s portrayal of regret as she reads a Michener novel and remembers how she’d once, as a pretentious teenager, snubbed her now-deceased mother’s affection for Michener in Wild.

These moments of shame that even the boldest memoirist can dread revealing are the very ones that memoir readers come to the page hungry for, not necessarily because they want to know every sordid detail of our lives, but because memoir readers crave the reader/author intimacy that occurs when we selectively share those moments which most of us wish to hide.  Memoir readers, perhaps more than those of any other genre, seek authenticity and companionship. They want you to be their really smart best friend.

In fact, a great deal about writing memoir can be learned from Brené Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability popularized in her two TED talks “The Power of Vulnerability” and “Listening to Shame.” In “The Power of Vulnerability,” Brown describes how our greatest sense of happiness comes from our connection to others and the thing that most often keeps us out of connection is “our fear that we are not worthy of love and belonging,” a fear born out of shame. When we make ourselves vulnerable by writing about our own shame, we give readers what they desire most from memoir—to discover their own essential okay-ness, their own humanity.

All of this sounds mighty scary, I realize, but by tapping into our shame, we can quickly find stories that will eliminate your memoir’s “so what factor.” Try some of these writing activities from the chapter “I Feel So, Uh, Vulnerable” in Writing Is My Drink and see where they take you:

1. Write for ten minutes on whatever comes to mind when you read this quote from Brené Brown: “The one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we’re not worthy of love and belonging.”

2. List times when you felt ashamed.

3. Pick one of these moments of shame and write it up as a scene, ideally with spoken dialogue, internal dialogue, and descriptions.

4. Repeat step three as often as you can stand it.  It’s really excruciating at times, I know, but this is where the gold is.

5. Divide your list into Childhood Shame and Adult Shame.  What do these lists have in common?  How do they differ?  That dividing line might just offer the entrance into your memoir material.

6. Brown refers to truly connected and fulfilled individuals who are willing to be vulnerable, imperfect, and authentic as “the Wholehearted.”  Who are the Wholehearted in your life?  Even if you just know them from a distance, add them to your list.

Writing is My Drink, an excerpt

 And then it was Monday morning. On Monday morning I

wasn’t a writer but a mother dropping her kids off at school in

a stretched-out sweatshirt. But this particular Monday morning

was the first time I would catch the awkward expression of

an acquaintance who’d suddenly learned too much about me. It

was the face of an acquaintance who’d read about my personal

life by pulling the New York Times out of its blue plastic bag and

unfolding the paper in her well-appointed breakfast nook.

“I read your essay yesterday,” she said, blushing. “I wasn’t

sure if I should be reading it—it seemed so personal—but then

it was in the newspaper, so I . . . ,” she said, her voice trailing off.

The way she said “personal,” I instantly understood—

whether this was her intention or not—that “personal” was code

for “wrong.”

 

“Well, yeah, if it’s in the newspaper, it’s pretty much fair

game, right?” I said goofily. Really, why hadn’t I prepared for this

moment? What was the protocol here? How is one supposed to

handle this weird blurring of the public and private lines? Of

course, I should’ve expected that people would read it and react,

and yet somehow I did not anticipate how exposed and vulnerable

I would feel.

 

Often my memoir students will describe themselves as “shy”

or “reserved” or as “private people.” And while that might seem

like a contradiction, I get it. While memoirists might get portrayed

as the brashest sort of exhibitionists—the Auntie Mames

of the literary world, braggarts overeager to share their most intimate

secrets—I’ve come to believe that’s really not the case.

Some—perhaps most—of us are, in fact, drawn to memoir because

we haven’t found another way to express ourselves, because

we’ve never been sure how to come clean about who we

are, a step we intuitively understand to be vital to human connection

and happiness.

 

I’ve always been something of a hider—a hider who can appear

to be very confiding and open, at times even confessional,

but who’s still keeping a few of the key cards tucked away. A

hider who’s longed to come finally out of hiding.

I’m convinced that every writer has a genre that is her match,

a form that is her objective correlative, the literary equivalent of

the way she needs to be in the world. Of course, there are writers

who can work skillfully in many genres, but I still think there’s

one genre that matches the note that hums out from a writer’s

center. Before I found memoir, I wrote autobiographical fiction

and autobiographical poems. I longed for memoir before I re-

ally understood that it was an option available to me—that I really

could write about my own experience without the burden of

pretending I was making some or all of it up. I think what I’ve

most wanted from writing all along was, in fact, the very thing

that set me on edge that Monday morning: the vulnerability that

exposure creates, the “Olly olly oxen free” that calls me out of

hiding. And the longer I teach memoir, the more I’m convinced

that this yearning to come out is a widely experienced one—that

many of us find that the pretense that ordinary life seems to require

is one that keeps us isolated.

 

In the fall of 2005—two years after the demise of Light

Sleeper—I got my chance to decide how clean I really wanted to

come in the world. I got another e-mail from the Brain, Child

editor who’d interviewed me for the article on the “momoir”

publishing trend, this time suggesting that if I ever wanted to

send the book out again that I might try her agent, a young upand-

comer.

 

After a bit of hesitation over the prospect of more rejection,

I nudged myself forward. I might as well try, I thought, and sent

him the manuscript. He replied quickly that he wasn’t interested

in Light Sleeper (yeah, yeah) but wanted to know what else I had.

He really thought I’d have all these manuscripts lying around the

house? I told him I just had a few chapters of a memoir about my

divorce. The truth was after the first grief-fueled months and the

high of the New York Times article, my writing had ground to a

halt as the idea of churning out another manuscript that would

meet who-knows-what fate while trying to make a living and

parenting two youngish kids was less than inspiring.

The agent wanted to see the chapters. I sent them. He got

back to me within a day and said that if I wrote up a proposal,

he’d have no problem selling it. A proposal for a memoir? That

was possible? It was. I wrote it. And ten days later, he sold the

proposal in an auction.

 

Uh.

 

Because I didn’t fully believe the proposal would sell and it

all happened so fast, I was stunned to find a book contract in

my hand for a book that would be named How to Sleep Alone

in a King-Size Bed. Even the title seemed crazy personal. Bed?

Sleeping alone in my bed was the topic for my book? Dear God,

what had I done? Yes, I suddenly had the type of success I’d

barely dared to hope for, but now I was as terrified as I was

excited.

 

I guess I’ll be writing about my divorce then and people will

be reading about it, I thought to myself, dread rising. I guess all

this was the obvious consequence of writing said proposal and

sending it off to an agent, but I wasn’t prepared for the book to

actually sell. I certainly hadn’t been prepared by my experience

with Light Sleeper, the lesson of which I had presumed to be:

Sure, you will toil away writing a very personal book, but never

fear—it will never be read by anyone other than a few editors

in New York who will skim its opening pages to determine its

unworthiness.

 

But after spending a yummy chunk of the advance—my first

purchases were a handheld immersion blender and a nutmeg

grinder, which seemed like madcap indulgences—I was able

somehow to forget that others would be reading what I wrote

and just got busy with the work of writing the book. Over the

next year and a half, I kept myself so occupied with writing and

editing the book that I was able to ignore the idea that strangers

and—worse—people I knew would be reading about some of

the most personal and private moments of my life.

Finally, though, the publication loomed. Now every story

of people who got in way over their heads—from Double Indemnity

to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—seemed to be

telling my story. I’d once wondered why people who committed

major crimes didn’t seem to be fully cognizant of the horrific

consequences that could befall them. Now it made sense.

So this is how it happens, I thought almost philosophically, as I

shook with fear.

.

On the first day of my memoir class every September I pass out

a sign-up sheet for the workshops. Without fail, the students fall

all over themselves to sign up for the last day of the quarter.

And no matter what they claim, it’s not really because they want

more time to work on their pieces. Whenever they workshop,

they—being the mortals that they are—will likely still spend approximately

the same amount of time on their pieces.

 

No, the true reason for wanting a delay is terror of exposure

and the vulnerability that exposure inevitably forces into bloom.

Sometimes I forget their terror, having sat in the safe seat

of the teacher for a few years; but then I remind myself of the

workshops in the MFA program, the sensation of exposure that

inevitably accompanied the sharing of a story. I felt like a turtle

with its shell pried off. During the week in between the distribution

of the piece and the workshop, I would obsess over what my

professor and classmates must be thinking as they read it.

That feeling of exposure was identical to what I felt on the

eve of King-Size’s publication. It doesn’t matter if the audience

is twenty or a few thousand or more. The lizard part of us that

holds the fear doesn’t bother calibrating the fear based on the

number of readers. For Lizard, exposure is exposure: a plain and

simple threat to our survival, to the social façade that allows us

to hold professional jobs and glide in and out of PTA meetings.

So, if it’s a threat, why on earth do we do it?

Because sometimes the safe thing is what’s dangerous; sometimes

the safe thing puts our happiness at risk. Sometimes the

safe thing is suffocating. Sometimes the reward of self-expression

is worth the cost of vulnerability.

 

In the TED lecture “The Power of Vulnerability,” researcher

and author Brené Brown explains how our happiness, in fact,

depends on our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable. Even

though we might imagine fame, glory, and praise are the tickets

to happiness, Brown asserts that the true source of happiness

in life lies in our connection to other people. But in order to

have that connection, we must be willing to reveal our authentic

selves to others. People who believe they are worthy of connection

tend to be willing to routinely take that risk and are, as a

result of that risk taking, continually reestablishing their connection

to others.

 

So what unravels the connection for so many others? Shame,

Brown says. “The one thing that keeps us out of connection is

our fear that we’re not worthy of love and belonging.” She goes

on to explain that many of us struggle with the very idea of worthiness.

We tend to avoid feeling vulnerable and choose to duck

away from opportunities that might reveal our authentic selves.

Truly connected and fulfilled individuals—a group whom

Brown refers to as “the Wholehearted”—are characterized by

a willingness to “fully embrace their vulnerability” and possess

“the courage to be imperfect” and therefore are able to experience

“connection as a result of authenticity.”

 

Yet, as Tom Petty once said, “even the losers get lucky sometimes.”

I wouldn’t say I’d been living the life of the wholehearted

who “fully embraced their vulnerability,” but I did back into my

vulnerability, and suddenly I was risking more than I ever would

have sanely and soberly chosen to risk.

 

Brown was right. Shame had been keeping me in hiding and

it had been doing so all my life. When I was a kid, I was ashamed

that I didn’t have a dad who saw me more than once a year, and

when he did, he greeted me with a casualness that suggested I

was a distant relative. Everyone’s shame starts somewhere, and

mine started with being the dadless girl, no man’s special one.

My adult life’s shame has been that I’ve been the special one to

too many men, that I often picked the wrong partners, and that

I’ve felt like I’m missing the mysterious and essential X factor

that makes a relationship endure. Obviously, the child’s shame

and the adult’s shame are connected, but in its grasp, the logic

of our shame’s origin is of little or no consolation; in the end, we

just feel the erosion from the two rivers that have come together

to form one.

 

My shame about my relationship history has kept me out of

some important conversations and at one time made me believe

there was something essentially flawed about me, something

to which I had best not draw too much attention. Tracing this

back, I can see that it forced me to miss out on closeness, as I was

convinced I wasn’t as good or as worthy as some of my friends

and acquaintances. Keeping my distance was supposed to pro-

tect me from judgment. At a distance, I hoped I would appear as

more together than I actually was.

 

But, for better or for worse, King-Size collapsed that distance

and forced me out of hiding. Even though most people in the

Western world did not read this book about my divorce, it felt

to me as if they had, which meant I could no longer cling to

the delusion that people think I have it together. My image of

my social self abruptly changed. There were many moments of

awkwardness, including a number of radio interviews in which

I was asked to reenact blow by blow the moments that led up to

my divorce, as well as clumsy conversations with acquaintances

who’d share what point they’d read up to (“Oh, you’re just getting

back together with your childhood sweetheart!”).

 

Overall, the impact of talking about my divorce publicly

was sort of a shock therapy that rearranged the molecules in the

place where my shame is stored. The shame that I was a relationship

mess case began to diminish, and in what felt like irony to

me, this allowed me to feel more connected to more people. I

had to admit that my loss looked much like that of others, that

my mistakes weren’t that special, that my shame was, in fact,

sadly ordinary. I might still consider myself an outsider, but now

I was suddenly aware of how very few of us consider ourselves

insiders. Alienation, it turns out, is the new black.

 

Author bio

Theo Pauline Nestor is the author of Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too) (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over (Crown, 2008), which was selected by Kirkus Reviews as a 2008 Top Pick for Reading Groups and as a Target “Breakout Book.” An award-winning instructor, Nestor has taught the memoir certificate course for the University of Washington’s Professional & Continuing Education program since 2006. Nestor also produces events for writers such as the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat, Bird by Bird & Beyond, and the Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive, featuring talks by literary leaders such as Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Julia Cameron, and Natalie Goldberg. Her blog lives at http://writingismydrink.com/.

 

AND THE WINNER IS…

I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each installment of the series will take on one short topic that addresses how to write memoir, and will include a great big book giveaway.

It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by.

The contest for this book is now closed. Please see the next installment of Writing Lessons.

The winner of the book is Joan Rough. Congratulations, Joan! I’ll be in touch to send your book.