From The Archives | Dear Scared to Know: Writing About Our Lives *IS* Scary, But Not For The Reasons You Might Think
Lit Salon addresses the scariest part of writing about our lives + the riches to be found at the intersection of memory & imagination + how to soften when the going gets rough
Real quick, a HUGE thanks to the hundreds of new subscribers who’ve joined us since my two-part series on what I’ve learned since starting my Substack, and how it grew from zero to $40K in just 12 months. You can find those posts here and here if you missed them. They were my labors of love in gratitude to you all, for making this possible.
Also, the first week of Story Challenge is AMAZING!! Here’s what people have been saying about it (just the tip of the iceberg):
This is the most excited I’ve been about a writing exercise in FOREVER … You are, in a matter of, what, days? 48 hours? a gift … an absolute gift … Reading these is so much fun, and I literally have never done anything like this … The amount of creativity and different perspectives on such a specific story line … I knew but didn't know this could be done … Reading all of these possibilities is just so freaking juicy … These are so much fun to read and write …Such a fun opening exercise … Wow, so good, scared the hell out of me … That was fun … You made my day, I’ll keep writing … Man these are good … I am very happy to be playing in this sandbox … Wow, these are all soooooo good … Oh, I’m loving this….
If you’ve been on the fence about participating, why not check it out? Jump in here! And yes, you can totally lurk if you want, the comments are an absolute goldmine to just to read whether or not you get your own feet wet—and I am there giving feedback, answering questions, and cheering you on. It’s so fun (but also rigorous—you can’t help but learn about how stories & cnf work if you hang out with us; the craft is in the DNA of Story Challenge). Oh, and if you aren’t a paid subscriber yet, you can manage your subscription here.
Otherwise, just thank you thank you, thank you. And now for our Friday From the Archive post, originally published October, 2023.
Have you ever been afraid of uncovering distressing truths about others while writing about your own life?
This is the question of today’s Lit Salon post, and it’s timely for me—and not because of anything to do with others (a topic I’ve spoken and written lots about, including this in-depth conversation, “Family Matters: The Ethics, Challenges & Rewards of Writing About Family,” with Laura Davis for Writer’s Center last year: ).
It’s timely because when it comes to fear of discovery, I’m more interested in another angle, an angle related to a Mary Ruefle quote that came up on my feed just yesterday. Ruefle said:
I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, “I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say”; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.
I love this quote, I love Mary Ruefle, and I love her book Madness, Rack, and Honey, which is where the quote originates.
Something about it hits me hard, this idea that what we’re really doing when we’re writing is not “saying something,” or “finishing the work of saying something,” but, rather, doing the hard work of listening.
I loved the quote so much that I started digging around a little and fell into one of those rabbit holes that swallow us when our curiosity takes over, and I found a fantastic blog called, A Working Library, which is about work, reading, and technology. It’s written by Mandy Brown, who says this about that Ruefle quote:
I’m not sure where the advice to “write what you know” originates. If I could locate it, I would pull it out at the root and then poison the ground from which it grew. You cannot know what you know until you’ve written it. As you write, you learn what you know—or, more likely, what you don’t know, which, let’s face it, is most everything. Ruefle’s distinction—“write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to” gets at the crux of it: you can listen even without hearing. That is, you can pay attention to something without apprehending it; you can vibrate with a sound without recognizing what that sound is. The distance between the listening and the hearing is traversed by the words you haven’t yet written.
God, what a beautiful statement—I must repeat it:
The distance between the listening and the hearing is traversed by the words you haven’t yet written.
This is why I always say that if I write the story I set out to write, I have failed. It cannot be otherwise, because I simply cannot know the story before I write it, even if it is a story about my lived experience. Memoir happens, as Rebecca Carroll said recently in Brooke Warner’s and Linda Joy Myers Craft Essential Series, that “at the cross section of memory and imagination.” That, too, is beautiful—and for me, the imagination aspect has nothing at all to do with “making things up.”
It has to do with the wild terrain of the memory body, and the secrets contained there, which I’ll explain in my response to “Scared to Know,” who asks for my thoughts on this topic this week.
Lit Salon
Dear Scared To Know: Writing About Our Lives IS Scary, But Not For The Reasons You Might Think
Dear Jeannine,
You write gripping personal stories about your life. I know you’ve already answered a lot of questions about the costs of writing about family and trauma, and I am grateful to you, more than you know.
Still, though, I wonder if you are ever, even now, afraid of what you might learn as you go deeper and deeper into the catacombs of memory? Afraid about what you might still uncover about the people in your life—who they really are, and what they’ve done?
I would be deeply grateful for anything you can say about this.
Love,
Scared To Know
Dear Scared To Know,
I want to start with this idea of memoir as the intersection of memory and imagination—an idea I love. Even just that mental image, “the intersection of memory and imagination,” is beautiful. And, as I said, I do not see, in this instance, imagination as related to untruths.
To the contrary.
I. see the power of the imagination as this: the intentional act of bringing the full force of my imagination to bear on the task of uncovering the greatest, richest totality of a story in all its vivid and revelatory details.
Those details will, if I am imagining with all my might—and what a lovely word, might, in the way its meaning can be so elastic as to stretch between strength and possibility—those details will reveal truths to me that I could never have otherwise known, truths that may be in addition to or even in contradiction to what I thought I knew.
Is this scary?
Of course it’s scary! That’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? That we soften into that very fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the unseen, unheard, the fear of the story under the story.
The scariest part, though, may come as a surprise—because it has nothing to do with what I will learn about other people. The scariest part of writing about my life cuts much, much closer to the bone, and that’s what I want to share with you here.
Awhile back—seven or eight years ago now—I was invited to appear on one of those “after the show” discussion panels at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. The show was “Only One Sophie,” a premiere written by Illusion Theater’s then artistic director Michael Robins. Based on the life of Robins’s grandmother, the musical told a very specific story about an American family centered around a strong, independent, loving Russian Jewish immigrant woman. Thanks to the autobiographical nature of the play, the post-show panel focused in part on the joys and pitfalls of telling stories of our lives.
The audience question I remember most vividly was very similar to yours—the person phrased it something like this: “When you’re writing your life stories, are you ever afraid of what you might might learn about the people in your life?”
The instant I heard that question, I knew exactly what I would say when the moderator passed me the mic.