How to Write Memoir in Essays, with Mary Laura Philpott

MARY LAURA PHILPOTT IS the author of the national bestseller I Miss You When I Blink and the brand new memoir Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives just out from Atria Books. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Atlantic, Paris Review Daily, Garden & Gun, and Lit Hub. Mary Laura is a former book seller and was for several years a co-host of “A Word on Words,” the literary interview program on national public television. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her family. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write a memoir in essays.

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Mary: Hi Marion. Thank you so much for having me.

Marion: It’s just really fun to have you. It’s particularly wonderful after reading your book. I have to tell you, your most recent book, this is a gorgeous book and-

Mary: Oh, thank you.

Marion: It’s so, just joyous to read, and we’re going to get into why. In this gorgeous new book, as well as in an excerpt in the Atlantic, a recent excerpt, you take on the idea of how we cannot protect anyone forever, and you come by this idea naturally: your father worked in a nuclear bomb shelter, an idea that kind of sits over the roof of this entire tale. It’s a fact, it’s true, but relate for us, please, how and when you decided to move that fact into place and write from underneath it.

Mary: Yeah. What a great question. I love how you put that. It is a fact and it is true, although it is not, you know, it doesn’t even come up until halfway through this book and it’s one of the, when you write a memoir in essays, it’s this really fun process where you get to put a lot of small, true stories together to make up one big, true story. So, this is one of the small, true stories, but clearly a very important one. I mean, you know, I ended up naming the book Bomb Shelter. One of the things I’m struggling with in this overall story, in the book itself, which covers about a two-year period, and it’s this two-year period where everything in life is changing. My children have become teenagers who are about to be adults and leave the nest. So I’m grappling with the idea of letting go. My parents are getting older. I have become undeniably middle-aged with all of the, you know, indignities that come with that, and I was feeling very out of control and very much like, “I can’t hold everything in place.”

Then this thing happened that just kicked that feeling into a much higher gear, which is that one morning I woke up at 4:00 AM to a loud boom sound, and it was the sound of my teenage son’s body hitting the bathroom floor. He had gotten up to get a glass of water and had a seizure, and just dropped cold unconscious on the tile. I was hearing this “bang, bang, bang,” and it was the sound of his body hitting the floor again and again and again. Turns out, out of nowhere, we did not see this coming, he had epilepsy. So suddenly, this whole idea of, “Oh, okay. So I’ve got to get used to the idea that my babies are going to leave this nest and go out into this crazy dangerous world,” became, “Wait, but this one, I really need to extra, extra, keep him safe, and how am I going to get him totally okay in time to leave the house?”

So that’s the overall story of Bomb Shelter, and the reason I brought in that memory of my dad is because, first of all, it’s kind of a funny story. I mean, I had no idea that my father had worked in this secret nuclear bunker when I was a toddler until I was like 43 years old. He just dropped it into conversation out of nowhere. So I love to tell that story now, just because it’s like, you know, you think you know the people in your life, but maybe you don’t. It’s sort of beautiful that I didn’t find out about that secret job until I was in my forties and had teenagers because it made me look at parenting and this whole, you know, helpless feeling that you have when your children are about to go into the world in a different way because I thought back to my dad going down into this bunker for these drills. He was a doctor, an army doctor, and he was one of the people who, should there have been an atomic bomb where they rushed the president into a secret bunker, my dad would’ve been one of the people who went in there to help keep people safe, but there were no provisions for families in that plan. So my dad would’ve gone into the bunker and the rest of our family would not, and he knew that and he carried that around.

Marion: Yeah.

Mary: You know? So I just, the very phrase “bomb shelter,” to me, it had to be the title because it contains that awful contradiction of danger and safety and the illusion of safety, you know? We never really have it.

Marion: No, you don’t, and it allows for us to understand this series of essays. As you said, you wrote this as a series of essays and they absolutely stand alone and they absolutely stand together. They snap together to form a whole.

So take us through that process a bit when we have this kind of trauma in our lives and after we get some perspective on it, and we are able to see a series of essays that might live under one roof. Did you sit down and write them with the idea that they were all going to go in this book, or were you sort of testing your material on the public to see the public’s tolerance for your various ideas? In other words, did you say, “I’m going to write a series of essays that live under this one roof of a bomb shelter. I’m going to start with my son’s epileptic seizure,” or did you just start writing and laying it out like a deck of cards to see if it was a tarot deck or a gin and rummy deck, or whatever deck? How did this idea come together?

Mary Laura Philpott: That is such a good question, and it is an idea that I was really obsessed with before I ever undertook writing a book of essays. I was so curious about, how does that happen? What do you do first? Because before my first book I Miss You When I Blink, my first essay collection, I remember thinking, “I just can’t find the front door. Like I can’t find the front door into this project I’m trying to do,” and that book, that first book, when I think of personal essays as well as memoir, I kind of think of them on a spectrum. So on one side of the spectrum, you have personal essay collection, and it’s just a collection of essays that are maybe loosely linked by theme, but it’s really just a collection of individual pieces. And then on the other end, you have memoir, which is more of a start-to-finish whole one story. I would say both my books are what you would call a “memoir in essays,” but I Miss You When I Blink lives over on the side by the essay collections, and Bomb Shelter lives closer to the side of memoir.

So with I Miss You When I Blink, I started out with a stack of essays I had already written, some of which I had published, and like you said, kind of tested them on the public by publishing them one at a time in various magazines and newspapers, some of which I had not published. I had that stack already at the time that I thought, “Hey, I bet if I wrote some more, I could have a book,” and then I wrote some more, and then I kind of did the backwards, like retrofitting, “All right. Now I have this big stack of essays. Let me spread them on my floor and see if I can move them around until they form some sort of arc and they start to sort of cohere,” you know, “to the Jell-o gels”. So that’s how I did I Miss You When I Blink.

Bomb Shelter was very different. Bomb Shelter, I really set out to write a book versus a collection of essays. Now, the chapters feel like essays because that’s what I write. That’s what I know how to do. So each chapter, I call them “essay chapters,” but I knew what story I was telling with Bomb Shelter from the start. I knew where the story would begin. I knew where the story would end. I actually knew the last line of this book well before I wrote most of it. So it was a really different process with Bomb Shelter. It felt more like, “All right, I am working on this journey. I know what I need to tell first, and that I’m just going to reach up into my mind and my memory and pull all these other stories that go into telling this larger story.” To me, it was, although this book is a kind of a tougher book, it’s deeper, it’s a little darker, it grapples with bigger, harder things, it was almost a more comfortable process for me because I knew where I was going. I had a map.

Marion: That’s fascinating. I love this idea, and I am a great believer in spreading things out on the floor and kind of, in the newspaper world, we call it “the slug.”

Mary: Yes.

Marion: You give everything a one-word sort of function-

Mary: Yes.

Marion: What is this thing about?”, right, and then you say, “Huh, look at this. I’ve got this one on vulnerability and this one on transparency and, huh. There”-

Mary: Yeah.

Marion: Yeah. So, let’s talk about vulnerability and transparency a little bit because you seem to be a real expert on these in terms of getting into it and allowing us to have a look at it, and I think transparency on the part of a writer can allow for a consciousness change for the reader, though that consciousness change depends utterly on what moments from life the writer has curated. You know, like if you a data dump on from your date book on me, I learned nothing.

Mary: I would never do that to you. I would never do it. I promise.

Marion: Thank you. We’ll get along great. We’ll be the best friends now. But if you choose carefully and curate the events and select them around a particular argument or roof, as I said before, you can raise my sights on a topic, or in this case, on a number of topics. So you have life’s big and small moments here. You talk about whether we can prevent things by knowing what’s coming, and then in one hilarious essay, you take us into the mind of a meditator, what meditators call “monkey mind,” where you intersperse the words of a guided meditation with where your mind goes, which in your case, is wondering whether the person who wrote the song “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” thought about adding a verse about whether Rudolph wrestles with imposter syndrome, and I spit my tea right onto my copy of the book.

I may send you the book to be signed, just so you can witness the, you know, matcha tea stains on my copy, but this kind of transparency is a kindness, and it allows for the reader to sort of change our minds about things, in this case, about the grip we think we have, and how maybe we need to loosen it up if we’re going to live and not merely just breathe. Like this is an amazingly kind thing to show us. It’s intimate. Hilarious as it is, it’s very intimate. So, talk to us about that comfort with that kind of transparency. How do you get there? So you feel like, “I can actually admit to the world that when I’m listening to a guided meditation on my phone, I’m thinking about the guy who wrote Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.” It’s not the easiest membrane to pass through as a human-

Mary: Right.

Marion: Right?

Mary: Right.

Marion: So how’d you do it?

Mary: Well, I love the way you put that, that it’s generous and kind, because I think that’s so often when I’m reading, that’s one of my favorite compliments to give something I have read is to say, “This author was so generous in giving us this,” and I don’t always mean, in fact, I never really mean, “She was generous because,” you know, “she exposed some private thing.” I don’t think exposure is what anyone is going for.

Marion: Mm-mm (negative).

Mary: But when you say “transparency,” it makes me think about, you know, how I chose what stories to put in here, and you’re right. It’s not my date book. It’s not a journal. That would be the most boring and longest, weirdest book ever. If you’re going to create a work of literature or a work of art out of actual personal truths, you do have to be so careful what you choose to include, and then you have to be careful what order you put them in because the order determines the story. You know, you put down one thing, and then the next thing is responding to it. So that tension is created out of the order you put things in there, and the essay chapter that you mentioned about meditation comes, I want to say it comes about a third of the way through the book.

I put it where I put it because we needed a breath of comic relief. Things had gotten very heavy, but I also wanted to illustrate one of my attempts to cope with feeling out of control because I was feeling very out of control at that point in sort of the emotional plot of the book, and, you know, people say all the time, “Oh, meditation will save you, it’s the best thing,” and I tried it, you know, I tried it a million times by myself, but I could not quiet the monkey brain, and I found that the guided meditations were really helpful because, you know, when someone’s right in your ear talking to you, you have to pay attention.

You have to do what they say if you’re a rule follower like me, but you know, sharing some of the things that popped into my head when I was supposed to be quieting my inner chaos, to me is, I mean it’s very much like you say: it’s a way of kind of reaching out and making friends and being like, “Have you ever tried to do something that’s really hard and you just did a terrible job? I have. I tried to meditate.” You know, it’s a little bit of currency we can pass back and forth to each other in understanding one another, and-

Marion: Yeah, exactly.

Mary: You know, I feel like we all have those things that we’re like, we come into it really high and mighty like, “I am going to quiet my mind,” or whatever it is, and where we land is just not quite there, but you keep trying.

Marion: You keep trying, and you try again when you go into the kitchen, which for me is the absolute place of all family pathology. You know, everything can be reenacted. If you remember, did your grandmother teach you to ice cupcakes-

Mary: Oh my gosh-

Marion: Or did your grandmother teach you to mix martinis? You know, these really, and it’s just one or the other, if you had a grandmother, at least in my WASP-y upbringing, but in this case, you’re going to spatchcock a turkey, and I’ve never been-

Mary: I thought I was.

Marion: Yeah. I’ve never been as humbled in an apron as I was when I attempted this feat. So for those of you who don’t know what a spatchcock is, it means cutting out the backbone of a foul so you can flatten it and roast it or grill it. So, set this up for us. While you’re wrestling the bird, are you putting down the knife and writing the piece? Are you making notes in your head hoping to God you’re going to remember them? Because writers live simultaneously in two worlds. That’s just all there is to it. The one of action and the one of observation, or it feels like that to me most days, and I think for the writers who are listening here, there’s a sort of embarrassment about that. Like, “Can I talk to anybody? Because is that really, can I really carry a notebook with me and write this stuff down?”

So how about you? You’re spatchcocking this damned turkey, it’s sliding all over the place. You’d have this great desire to put it on the floor and jump on it, and when you don’t do that, do you pick up a notebook or do you just say, “I’ll remember this all later?”

Mary: Well, that’s such a good question. People ask me that all the time like, “How do you remember these details?” The things that I choose to include in a book and the things that I choose to write about typically are the things that sort of obsess me, that I have thought about again and again and again. I was obsessed with spatchcocking a bird because, because it was my first time ever cooking the Thanksgiving meal.

Marion: Yes.

Mary: This was the first Thanksgiving of the pandemic, so it was the first time I had ever not eaten Thanksgiving dinner with either my parents or my in-laws, and I was 40-something years old, and I thought, “I should know how to do this. People are supposed to know how to do this. This is a marker of adulthood”-

Marion: Yeah, it is.

Mary:  “You make the big bird,” and why I thought I had to spatchcock it, I must have read that somewhere, that like, “This makes more even cooking. It will be easy.” So I had put a lot of weight even going into it on this idea that, “If I can do this, I am an adult. I am an adult woman. I am a mother. I am a cook. I can do it.”

Mary: So as I was doing it, it was, even though I didn’t have a notebook out, I wasn’t making notes, those details were kind of laying tracks down in my brain because I had already set up this space to hold the importance of this moment, and as I failed at it in a million different gross ways, that was laying down tracks too. Like it was very memorable even without my writing it down, because as soon as I had to just let go and have my husband come in and finish the job and take the bird out to the grill, because then it didn’t fit in the oven, you know, once I had a moment to wash my hands, I was replaying the whole thing in my head.

Marion: Yeah.

Mary: I was like, “I should have gotten a bigger knife. No, I, you know what? I should have gotten the whole family on board with being vegetarians like me, because this is just terrible.” You know, it was very vivid in my head, even without writing it down immediately. I do think generally, it’s great to carry a notebook or to send yourself emails or send yourself texts or whatever out in the world. There’s nothing embarrassing about that if you’re a writer; that’s just like going to the grocery store to get groceries to make something. You’re just collecting the ingredients you’re going to need later, but for that particular instance, it unfortunately was a very vivid snapshot in my head. So I could remember the green apron smeared with turkey guts and my hair being up on my head, because I had put it up because I thought, “Oh, when you’re a real chef, you get your hair out of the way and”-

Marion: Yes.

Mary: You know, all those details kind of stuck with me.

Marion: Oh, that’s gorgeous. I love that. So in all of your pieces, you have a voice that tends rather lovingly toward the absurd, and so let’s talk about voice. Just off the top of your head, tell me the story of developing yours.

Mary: I mean, I think I’ve had it always. I grew up with, my mom is very funny. She’s very naturally funny, and she’s very observant, and she observes out loud. So I grew up with this mom who would sort of narrate what she was seeing and who she was seeing and what they were doing in this very colorful language, and I think that’s a lot of where my sense of humor comes from. Sometimes I will describe something in that way that I’m used to describing it that I grew up with, and I’m not joking. I’m just describing the way, I’m calling it like I see it, and people will laugh and go, “Oh, that’s such a good joke,” and I’ll think, “Well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t kidding. I really think that’s what that thing looks like.” So that’s a big part of my voice, is humor.

I think are part of what makes my voice my voice is having grown up in the south and having a sense of manners and, almost like party hostess kind of manners where you want to make people feel comfortable and you want to put them at ease, and maybe you start with a little joke, but then you reach out as a friend, and you kind of, modulating between funny and serious and emotional connection. That is something, I know it doesn’t only belong to the south, but that is something that I think southerners kind of develop as part of this friendly, welcoming thing that we do.

Then I would say maybe the other parts of my voice are just my own personality filtered through a million different books I’ve read. I mean, I’ve read so many books by great writers who have found their voices and have found a way to say what’s in their head in their own special way. So I think I always sort of felt this encouragement, like, “Keep trying to find your way and your way of expressing what you’re thinking.”

Marion: Beautiful answer, and there’s so much annotation in that, of who we are and acknowledging the southern hospitality, which I do believe when we talk about southern writers, we’re acknowledging something about that sense of hospitality, and also that the lovely nod to your mother. I do believe we are collections of so much of what we’ve witnessed.

And another question I have about that, you know, writers are sort of like the magpies and bowerbird of professionals. You know, we collect things and-

Mary: Right.

Marion: You were listening to Terry Gross one day on Fresh Air when you heard an interview with Charlize Theron who retold the tale of the death of her dad after he came home drunk and shot with a gun at her and her mother behind a closed door, and her father died through the actions by her mother, and Theron says in the interview, “She ended the threat.”

Mary: Yeah.

Marion: And you used that line beautifully in this book about how you wanted to end the threat. So, did you know in that instant it was something you would use, or did you, you know, we write it down, we keep it in mind. It is placed perfectly in this book as a moment of real recognition of where this book turns, but how long did you have that in your pocket, your head, your notebook, and when you play it, you know, just give us a sense of that kind of magpie/bowerbird kind of mentality that writers are allowed to have.

Mary: Sure. I actually didn’t carry that around very long before I used it. I was in the process of writing Bomb Shelter when I heard that interview, and I had been working on a chapter, an essay chapter that comes maybe two-thirds of the way through the book, and it’s kind of at the height of the tension where you really kind of see my character, the me character, almost reaching a state of panic in wanting to protect everyone in my life, and multiple things are happening in this chapter. I am creating the little “go bag” that will go with my son to school and to sports and everywhere else that has his seizure rescue kit in it. So I’m putting together these syringes and medicine and instructions that anyone who was with him would be able to use, and at the same time I’m creating the same thing, my daughter has asthma. So I’m creating her asthma rescue kit that has the inhaler.

I’m creating these rescue kits, and while I’m creating the rescue kits, I hear a ping in my email and I’ve got an email from school. At the time they, they went to the same high school, and it says, “Just FYI to parents today, we are doing an intruder drill,” and I know, you know, the intruder drill is the drill they do to practice for “what would you do in a shooting?” So I had just this awful thought of, “Here, I am preparing this rescue kit, and they’re at school practicing how to rescue each other, and there are just threats coming at them and at all of us from every single direction.” So I was writing that chapter, and I went out on my walk for the afternoon. I walk every day, all around my neighborhood, and I usually listen to a podcast while I walk, or sometimes a guided meditation. And I was listening to Terry Gross and I heard that interview where she tells that story.

I mean, I hustled, like I picked up step a little bit. I walked faster to get home because I was like, “I got to go put this, I know exactly where this is going.” So that was just a sort of a miracle of timing that I heard that at the time I was working on that particular piece.

Marion: That’s wonderful, and you knew to use it. I tend to ask this question of every memoir writer that I interview, and I want to ask it of you. In terms of what are we asking a writer to do when we go back and look at a trauma, and there are a series of traumas in this book, but this one with your son absolutely continues on through, but the book is in no way about his illness. It’s-

Mary: Right.

Marion: Fascinatingly not about that, and what are we asking? Are we asking a writer to reanimate it? Relive it? Look at it from here with perspective and keep their hands off of it? A lot of people tend not to want to write from trauma because they don’t want to “re-experience it.” So, how do you answer that question?

Mary: I get that. I get the not wanting to re-experience it. You know, I can’t speak for every writer, but I can say what I was trying to do with Bomb Shelter, which was, I think of, and I’ve said this before and different people like connect with it and some don’t, but I think of myself almost like a show runner on a TV show. Like I’m the director, I’m the producer, I’m the writer. Any feeling or thought or experience you have while reading my book, I’ve got to set up whatever’s going to give you that feeling. Like I’m the only one who can control all that stuff. So, you know, if I want you to feel that you have gone on a journey and you’ve gotten a really good story, and you have been both entertained and enlightened, and you have had all your emotional circuits lit up and you’ve had a good cry and you’ve had a good laugh, then I’ve got to figure out what ingredients to use out of what I have and how to use them.

And one of the types of ingredients is, for this type of book, like you said, these traumas. I’m not going to share them for the sake of sharing. I’m not going to share them in an exploitative way. I’m not sharing them just because it feels good or it feels bad to relive it all. I’m sharing what needs to be shared as part of this story. To do right by the story I’m creating, I’ve got to put in the right ingredients. So, and by the way, thank you for saying, “This is not a story about my son and his illness,” because you’re right. It’s not. I keep seeing it kind of described that way, and I’m like, “That’s only one little piece of it”-

Marion: Nah. No, no.

Mary: But the reason that’s in there is because if I’m going to tell a story about being a human in an uncertain world and trying to figure out a way forward when we have no control over everything, I have to include this moment where things felt the most out of control ever for me.

Marion: Yes.

Mary: But I will draw the boundaries around that scene very, very carefully partially out of, you know, concern for my son’s privacy, but also out of just, you know, I’m the show runner and I’m deciding what the scene needs, and it doesn’t need all that much to do what it needs to do.

Marion: Gorgeous answer. I love that.

So as we wrap this up, let’s talk about how you get out of this book. On the way out of the book, you thank a lot of people, and it’s the line to your husband that caught me. “Most of all,” you write, “this book is for team Philpott. John, my own personal bomb shelter, deserves credit for turning to me on the sofa one night and saying, ‘I hope you’re writing all this down.'” So let’s talk about support. I think that if at all possible, no one should try this writing life alone, and that while community comes in all varieties, you’ve got to have some of it.

So, what do you offer to the writers who are saying, “What do I need most?” I would say they need some people to talk to. I would say they need a writing group. I would say they need the support and community. What do you think?

Mary: I think writing community is so important. Just like in any job that is full of its own weird quirks and challenges, it’s hard to talk to people outside that world and have them get it, you know? Like there’s something comforting about being able to kind of confide in someone else who understands the misery of deleting an entire chapter because it just wasn’t working. You know, you can say that to your regular friend who does a regular job and they’ll be like, “All right, so what?”, but you explain it to another writer like, “Oh, I hate that. That’s so rough.” It’s comforting to not feel lonely in this weird work and to talk to people who also do it, and I know not everybody can be so lucky as to have an in-person writing group because, you know, you might live somewhere where there just aren’t a lot of writers around you or you just haven’t met them yet, but that’s one of the beautiful things about social media.

Social media has some weird dark sides, but it can be a wonderful, you know, if you use it carefully and you kind of cultivate your neighborhood carefully, it can be a wonderful way to connect with other people who do this kind of thing, but we can also just reach out to each other. You know, in those acknowledgements, I have a section where I say, you know, “Thank you to too many friends than I have room to list here but if we’ve been on a group text or we’ve had, you know, wine or diet Coke together, I mean you,” and I was laughing on the phone the other day with a friend of mine, Sarah McCoy, who is a novelist, and I was like, “You’re not just my writer friend. You’re my friend friend, and I can call you and complain about things that nobody else gets.” So, you know, I can call and be like, “Oh, I’m so mad because the font on my back cover is the wrong size,” or whatever. Who cares? Like nobody in the world cares, but other writers are like, “Oh yes, I know that feeling.”

It’s just, it’s nice. It’s always good not to feel lonely, and I think whether you’re a writer or you do any other kind of job, to know someone else who does it helps relieve some of that loneliness.

Marion: Oh, that’s perfect, and I so appreciate that.

Thank you so much, Mary Laura. This has been a joy talking with you, and I wish you the best with this book and all of your work. I so look forward, every time I see your name in The New York Times, The Washington Post or the Atlantic, or, I just, I just smile from earring to earring knowing I’m going to learn something. So thank you. It’s been a joy to talk with you.

Mary: Thank you, Marion, and I enjoyed this so much.

Marion: The writer was Mary Laura Philpott, whose new book Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives is just out from Atria Books. See more on her at mary laura philpott dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com where I offer online classes in how to write memoir, and thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please share it and leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.