Putting our people on the page

One hard truth I learned along my bumpy path as a published memoirist is that people-pleasing is not exactly part of the equation. Despite my best efforts to write with multidimensionality, love, and integrity, I still received pushback from some of my favorite people. 

I couldn’t figure out where I went wrong. 

I did the ethical inventory: I wrote an author’s note on the fallibility of memory and how, inherent to the genre, a memoir speaks to only the author’s “truth.” I gave everyone the choice to change their names and identifying details. I even drew on my 20-plus years of yoga and spiritual study as a compass for editing, removing all passages that felt too critical or one-sided. 

Still, I managed to break the very first tenet of my spiritual practice: Ahimsa, “non-harming.” I hurt some of the people I love the most.

Writing our stories can be healing, transformational, and liberating. As we move memories from our bodies into creative scenes on the page, we are given a unique opportunity to process our lives from a renewed perspective. In remembering the past, we re-member — we take what once felt like broken pieces of ourselves and write them into one whole again. Along the way, we are rewiring our beliefs about our life story, rediscovering parts of ourselves we have split apart from, repairing ideas about our relationships, and so much more. If done bravely and with self-care, it can be an exhilarating and deeply healing integration of body, mind, and soul. We better understand the “messages in our messes” and transmute old wounds to new wisdom.

But equal to the elation that comes with writing a memoir is the very real fear of sharing what we’ve written. There is age-old impostor syndrome, the vulnerability that comes with exposing our truth, pushback from family and friends, and even worse, the possibility of being “canceled” by the people we love and losing them. It is enough to paralyze any memoirist from finishing what they’ve started, let alone publishing a book. As Mary Karr wrote in “The Art of Memoir,” “In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.”

She was not kidding.

Fact: Some of your loved ones will be upset about being in your memoir or how they were portrayed. Others will be upset that they aren’t in your memoir enough. Many will argue with your version of the story or deny your truth. As we know, two people can be in the same place and time and have completely different memories of that experience. While we can’t control people’s responses, we can lean on the craft and write with, as author Steve Almond suggests, “truth as the arrow, mercy as the bow.”

Odd as it might sound, memoir ultimately isn’t about the author, their family and friends, or even what happened to them. Memoir reveals something about human nature, and the author illustrates episodes in their life that speak to that something. Always more interesting than what happened, is: Why did it happen? What were the circumstances that led to dynamics playing out this way? What might the characters have been hiding that is revealing another story than the one written on the page? What fears, worries, hurts, or past traumas might have motivated their behavior? In other words, what is the story under the story? And why does it matter to the reader?

Stories teach us how to be more human, to discover what nudges us, to solve what is unresolved within us, and to understand the heart of humanity better. Our personal experiences are merely a doorway for insight, reflections, less aloneness, and universal connection. Written well, a memoir will pull the reader so close to the characters’ bones that the line between character and reader disappears. My story becomes your story, and your story becomes mine. We become one.

Relationships are complicated, and writing about them is even more so! Much of what happens between people occurs below the surface. It is a sometimes combustible interweaving of what is actually happening in real time, mixed with our background, subconscious reactions, what we carry from the past, and what we want in a situation versus what we are getting.

As memoirists, we must write our truth as we experienced it, without sugarcoating or watering down our experiences. We write about how we were hurt, loved, harmed, celebrated, or frightened by the people in our life, yes. But a memoirist never stops there, and neither does their story. We have all been victim, villain, and heroine in some part of someone’s story. We write from this perspective: That at our core, all of us behave out of a desire for connection or react to the threat of non-connection. Relationships on the page simply illuminate our need for love, validation, and safety, and how we act when there is a threat to them.

We turn the pen back onto ourselves and own our part. We write our flaws, our secrets, our sore spots. We take moral inventory and ask ourselves: Are we revenge writing? Are we trying to prove our rightness? Are we being self-serving? 

As challenging as it was to face the loved ones who were unhappy with my book, I knew I had to have the hard conversations. I had to hear them out and give them space to express how my writing hurt them. To apologize, when necessary, to take accountability for my own possible blind spots, and to understand their side of our story. Each talk offered new layers to these relationships. We evolved, deepened, and matured through them. We explored topics and shared parts of ourselves we would never have shared had I not written and published my book. It was tough, but profound, and in the end, so worthy to the authenticity of our relationship. 

So, I’ll leave you with this: Despite the nature of your relationships and how you choose to portray others in your story, or how they may respond to it, you will gain insight for the people in your life through writing about them. Writing about your people is an act of love. As a memoirist, you are choosing to spend your writing time with, energy on, and a desire to understand them. Your feelings about the relationships will likely evolve due to the experience, whether these people are still in your life or not, and even with those who have passed. If given the opportunity, perhaps you’ll be inspired to communicate more vulnerably with them. Maybe the relationships will even deepen. Be open to the ongoing evolution. Your book will end, but your relationships will keep living.

As the teaching goes: “If you want to know how your spiritual practice is evolving, take a look at your relationships.”

Sherry Sidoti is the author of the memoir “A Smoke and a Song.” To dive deeper into this topic and explore practical craft tips, join Sherry at Islanders Write on August 18.