Reframing “Everything Happens for a Reason”
By Brooke Warner
I spent yesterday at an all-day writing event with 15 writers. I loved the intimacy of the day, and the opportunity to spend time talking to each of the participants about their work.
The opening speaker, Tracy Otsuka, shared about how she got a book deal for her nonfiction work, ADHD for Smart Ass Women: How to Fall in Love with Your Neurodivergent Brain—about her process of building a platform, writing the book, finding an agent, and selling her book to a publisher. She got two offers, and took the higher one. The book has been out for two years, and it’s well earned out its six-figure advance. It was an inspiring story of a successful traditional publishing experience.
At one point, Tracy was sharing about some turn in her publishing journey, when she’d met an agent she didn’t end up signing with. She quipped about not going with that agent, “Everything happens for a reason.” But then immediately she pulled back and corrected herself. “Actually, no it doesn’t. But we can always make it seem like it does.”
This made me laugh out loud, and it was a perfect thing to say since 90% of the workshop participants were memoirists, whose primary creative work is to make meaning from lived experience.
One of my favorite craft memoir topics is takeaway, which is writing to find and showcase the universal meaning from a scene or a moment. Memoirists sometimes struggle to find meaning, or make meaning. There was a great interview I once watched with Mary Karr in which she talked about her writing process and her search for the truth as “pulling at taffy.” I love this image. The taffy is an immutable substance, but you can shape it and mold it and make it submit to your will. Mary Karr asserts with this imagery that truth’s essence must remain pure and intact, like taffy; you cannot pass taffy off as roast beef, but you can change what you want the taffy to do, or the form you want it to take.
This kind of molding and shaping applies even better to reflection and takeaway than it does to truth, because meaning is always malleable, and from one given lived moment we can extract multiple meanings. Maybe this is why we have the truism: Things happen for a reason. Because the reason is on the other side of the thing that happened. We often won’t glean its meaning for years—because we need time to metabolize the other outcomes that the original experience set off. If we’d had a different original experience, undoubtedly our lives would have resulted in a different outcome, and different sets of meaning would have been made.
The work of extracting and making meaning is an act of creativity because the meaning we make is true, but it’s ours to play with. Sometimes when an author tells me about a lived experience and they’re struggling to find meaning, the very fact that I know less than they do about what the outcome ended up being gives me room to play.
For instance, what meaning might we extract extract from a scene in which a boy’s childhood dog goes missing for days. Perhaps the meaning was to show how his father expressed emotion in ways he’d never experienced before. Maybe it led to a recognition that the boy loved the dog more than he realized. Perhaps the experience of losing the dog itself tapped into earlier losses and the narrator (who was once that young boy) wants to use this scene to offer more backstory and context for that earlier loss. In other words, there can be a number of reasons this story would *matter* to the reader, but it’s this writer’s work to find his way to the meaning. Otherwise it’s just a story of what happened. The dog was lost for a few days. It only becomes a worthwhile story, one that earns its place in this writer’s memoir, if we understand why it had an impact. Why did it matter to him, and more important than that—what does it have to do with the larger story he’s trying to tell?
Everything happens for a reason. Or not. The dog got lost. There’s no real reason that happened, but the meaning extracted from it may have been even more profound. It might have drawn the boy closer to his dad. Or, a scene like this could have had ripple effects to later in life. For instance, what if the dog had been returned by a local firefighter, and influenced this man’s decision to go into that line of work? Or, what if a neighbor found it, someone this family hadn’t known prior to this, and this neighbor family ends up having an outsized impact on this boy’s life. Perhaps they wouldn’t have met had the dog never gone missing.
Meaning. Connections. Tethers. Insights. Speculation. Musing. I’m sure I could list more words here but you get the picture. Your work will become much more fun when you start to unlock all these ways into your WHY? Why does this matter? What does this moment have to do with anything? Why am I drawn to write about this? Why does this memory stand out so strongly? These are the puzzle pieces of memoir, inviting us to come in and set up shop. To figure it out. To make sense of the bigger picture and the broader meaning.
Have fun with it! Grab that taffy and pull and punch and tear away.
