Memoirs

Creative Nonfiction

I love fiction, and dense nonfiction books that amount to a college course load’s worth of trivia, but memoirs are a special bit of writing. The writer takes the reader on an odyssey through their life with them. The reader experience’s this person’s life story as a phantom witness. It’s a peculiar, deep, one-sided relationship. There’s just something so beautiful about that level of transparency and honesty, not just between the reader and the writer, but between the writer and themselves. Think about how few people actually embrace living with themselves. So many of us either sleepwalk through life — or run as far away from our true selves — as an attempted escape from the crushing despair of our chaotic and often cruel universe.

Embracing one’s memoir is choosing, despite everything there is to loathe about existence, to believe there’s a reason. A reason to be. A reason to love. A reason to reflect and connect with others. To give others guidance from what you learned on your brief stop atop of this spinning rock through space and time. To take stock and find the meaning in it all. These are not just reflections of one’s life, but life and the action of living themselves.

Of course, the inverse could also be true. A memoir can be an act of despair, wallowing in self-pity. An attempt to create meaning out of pain when there is none. It could even be a rewrite of the writer’s uncomfortable, disturbing past. Or a narcissistic, masturbatory display of one’s sense of self. I’d imagine memoirs, like people, are a mixed bag.

All the same, I admire memoirists. I’d like to write one myself sometimes, but it’s too soon to tell.