5 Reasons Writers Share Secrets in Memoir
by Brooke Warner
Last night, in the accountability group we hold at Memoir Nation, a writer shared that she had considered writing something intimate, a secret, in order to get it out into the world on her terms. The suggestion here was that if she didn’t disclose whatever happened, someone else would.
She didn’t share the specifics of what she was worried about, but any number of scenarios comes to mind: sexual abuse; a child given up for adoption; a betrayal of some sort; an affair. In family systems, we bear witness, and when later a memoirist decides they’re ready to disclose something personal, the fallout and the reckoning are very real.
Our conversation comes on the heels of the public blowback to Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, All the Way to the River. The New York Times noted that Rayya Elias’s sister thinks that the memoir is exploitative. Her sister told The Times: “We all knew from Day 1 that a book was going to be written and money was going to be made out of my sister’s death. To me, Rayya should not be on display.”
Memoirists have to make a lot of calculations when it comes to what they’ll write. Who will they alienate? Who might they hurt? Who might they surprise with their revelations? Telling secrets in memoir is an act of coming clean. It’s an act of honesty and integrity, but it’s also scary as hell.
I’ve witnessed countless memoirists I’ve worked with over the years wrestle with what to share. To share with the world that you’re a rape survivor, or that you grew up in poverty, or that you did a job in your past that you’re not proud of, or that you behaved in ways that don’t align with the person you know yourself to be now. What will the fallout be when people read these truths? And furthermore, why do we feel so compelled to get these intimacies out of ourselves and onto the page?
I have my theories on this that stem from the many memoirs I’ve edited and published over the years, so here they are. I hope you’ll weigh in with your own reasons for putting your truths on the page.
1. We long to be known and seen. This means that we want others to know the full extent of who we are, including who we used to be and the things that have happened to us. This desire to share what we’ve been through is nearly primal. None of us is just one thing, and putting out into the world our full complexity of self is a relief, a way to solidify that you are more than what any given person thinks you are.
2. We want to release a burden. Self-expression is an act of release. Putting onto the page the things we’ve been through—the joy and the suffering alike—supports us to make sense of our own experience. When we release our secrets and intimacies in the form of a memoir, we let go. What was a secret is now known, and there is immense liberation in this very particular act.
3. We crave meaning. When it comes to the hardest human experiences I know, people who’ve suffered such things rarely say they wish whatever it was hadn’t happened. Quite the contrary, we’re aware that our suffering and hardships make us who we are. As such, memoir is a vehicle for us to make meaning out of what we’ve gone through. It’s a vehicle, too, to claim as ours those experiences we didn’t ask for and wouldn’t have wished for.
4. We know we can help others. This drive has to do with opening up our own life experiences to say, Hey, these things happen. You are not alone. The MeToo movement was perhaps the most seismic of these kinds of moments, when all over the world people were coming forward about their own experiences of sexual abuse. Did this help others? Absolutely. It helped survivors to see how tragically common abuse is, and it allowed people who were holding in their self-blame and shame to join a chorus of other voices that said, Me too. You are not alone.
5. We want to own our own story. For those of us who’ve had something taken from us, writing a memoir is about setting the record straight. I don’t mean to imply this should stem from a place of getting vindication, though sometimes it can. But when someone steals your narrative, or changes the trajectory of your story, it’s a normal response to shine a light on what happened, and to reclaim the story of your life. This is a powerful motivation, and it can be deeply meaningful to both the writer and reader alike.
If you’ve been turning over your motivations to tell something private, something hot to the touch, something you’re not sure you can or want to share with the wider world, give yourself permission to write it. Just because you write something doesn’t mean you eventually have to publish it. Put it on the page. See how it feels. Check the sizzle factor. Sit with it for a while. See how you feel about it in another few months. Give yourself the space to be with it and to make a decision later about whether it belongs in your book.
Confession and coming clean and sharing things that have previously been held secret is part of the tradition of writing memoir, and yet, it’s not uncommon to feel like we’re wrong for our impulse to get these things out there. We fear the ramifications, for good reason. Which is why it’s essential to spend time with the thing you’re going to disclose, to write it out and mull it over. Take time with it. And then decide, for yourself and only yourself, what you’ll include in your eventual published book. Yours is your story to tell, and we’d love to hear other drives you might have to get your story—or your secrets—into the world.
Brooke & Grant talk cover some of these topics in this 5-minute video chat: “On boundaries, oversharing, and telling your story your way”:
