How To Write About Your Spouse Without Wrecking Your Marriage

What I learned from Kate Swenson’s memoir

I’ve struggled with this question for ten years.

How do you write a memoir or, for that matter, a simple story with your spouse as a character without causing any damage to your marriage?

On the surface, the answer seems easy. You just write honestly about what has happened in your life and share your emotions about key events.

But you know it’s not that easy. What if you’re married to a sensitive spouse who takes issue with how you perceive the events in your story?

Or what if your spouse objects to how they are portrayed? What if your spouse is against key scenes to your plot being included in your memoir?

There are hundreds of what-ifs if you’re writing a memoir — mine is three-fourths complete — and my hope is my wife changes her attitude to some of these challenges in writing a memoir.

But I found some good ideas recently on how to write about your spouse without wrecking your marriage by reading a memoir by Kate Swenson where the husband-and-wife relationship was a major theme in the book.

Help from a memoirist

I was excited when a publicist contacted me to do a review of Swenson’s memoir Forever Boy because I could examine these issues within her story. Her memoir is will be out April 5th and available in bookstores everywhere.

What I noticed in her writing about her husband, Jaime, is she tries to just let her story tell itself, and I think this is good advice in writing about a spouse because your struggle in your relationship can be helpful to another couple.

She writes descriptive scenes where she “shows, not tells” and allows the reader to form their own conclusions about herself and her husband. And I think readers will have strong reactions to she describes their relationship.

One example is when she and her husband, Jaime, receive an autism diagnosis for their three-year-old son, Cooper, and she describes how they reacted differently to this key event.

“I looked at my husband as he entered our destination into the GPS. I looked for signs of sadness on his face. A reaction. Anything, I guess. He had been silent since we left the observation room.”

“How do you feel?” I said, trying to pull something out.

His response was nonchalant, his focus on the road.

“Sad, I guess. At least it’s over now. But it’s probably not as serious as they make it out to be.”

Then her job gets tricky because she feels angry about her husband’s lack of emotion, but I like how Swenson shares her emotion because this is one of her main themes: Two people having different responses to a life-changing event.

But for the most part, she sticks to showing, not telling, and letting readers to see how their different attitudes towards autism affects their relationship.

Handling the tricky parts

I’ve noticed the key to writing difficult scenes in a memoir is to just try to write through them by focusing on the heart of the issue, and Swenson does a great job at this in writing about the most difficult scenes in her life.

And I like how she doesn’t hold back in what she felt about her husband. It would be a different, not-as-good book if she didn’t write with this honesty:

“I felt alone as we navigated through the city. Who is this man? I thought. He felt like a stranger to me. We had just gone through this huge, exhausting, life-changing thing together.

I felt as if I had been to war, yet he looked unfazed.”

“His lack of emotion towards everything — autism, me, life — was a big problem for me.

How could have nothing more to say about what we’d just experienced.”

“I wanted him to pull the car over. I wanted him to say he was sad and scared. I wanted him to hug me and for both of us to cry, if only for a few minutes, before taking our first step into our new roles as autism parents.”

What this scene shows is how a crack occurs in a marriage when two parents react differently to a life-changing event, and there is no way to cut this scene out. It is an essential part of telling their story that can be helpful to readers.

Nor can she cut out the rest of the scene. The husband sleeping on the sofa to avoid the big emotions of his wife and pulling away at a key moment in their marriage — because then she wouldn’t be telling the story with any fidelity.

Being a male and a parent of an autistic child I understand how the husband felt at this moment because he was overwhelmed by their news. And I think female readers will also understand his difficulty being there for his wife.

Relationship over story

I’m sure what enabled Swenson’s husband to be okay with scenes like this is they have worked through the issues in their marriage before she wrote the book or scenes like the one above would create issues by including them.

She could write sentences like this one only if they’d worked out their issues:

“He expected me to cry my tears, dust myself off, and keep living. He didn’t understand that I couldn’t do that. My heart was broken. And his wasn’t.”

— Kate Swenson, Finding Cooper’s Voice Blog

They had to work through the resentment she felt at carrying the weight of parenting and her frustration that he didn’t accept their son’s autism — or these issues, if not resolved, would create more problems in their marriage.

So the writing advice I took away is to put my relationship with my wife over writing our story, and I’ve sometimes been guilty of reversing this priority. I sometimes focus on writing rather than working out our issues.

While there is a place for honesty in a memoir, there should be a place for honesty first in your relationship to let healing occur in your marriage — that’s the key I learned to writing about a spouse and not wrecking your marriage.

Write honestly

Once you heal your relationship, then you can just tell your story without having any problems because all of the main issues have been resolved.

And then you can say things like: “I felt like I was on the roller coaster alone. I’d send Jamie blog posts about autism, links to YouTube videos, even tag him in articles n Facebook. He’d barely give them a glance and I didn’t know why.”

And you can tell how you used each other for emotional punching bags while adjusting to becoming parents of a nonverbal autistic child: “He called me a martyr. And probably much worse. I called him lazy and devoid of emotion.”

You can say all these things because they are in the past, and now you’re are writing from the standpoint of telling others the truth of your experience to help them to better see where pitfalls lay in the journey as autism parents.

And you can take your readers on the same roller coaster ride you’ve been on for the past eleven years as parents of an autistic son.

But if you try to work things out with your spouse and it goes nowhere, well, then my suggestion is to write your story and figure out what to do later.

Thanks for reading my story.

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Or check out my YouTube video on 10 great Medium publications to write for. Or if you simply want to buy me a cup of coffee, I’d greatly appreciate it : )