Memoirs
Essays, Featured — By Stephen Watson on September 26, 2012 at 5:18 am
As a lover of books, bookstores, and libraries, I’ve noticed a recent trend. Everyone is writing memoirs! I mean everyone. Name a type of person and I bet you can find a memoir to fit. Memoirs used to be just a slightly more artistic way of saying autobiography, but that seems to have changed. Now memoirs are a way for people to tell a story, or a series of stories, that they have always wanted to tell and to tell it the way they have always wanted to tell it. Not necessarily factual, (although the person telling it will almost always claim it is completely factual) but just as interesting and maybe just a little bit more so.
I started to think about why so many people are writing memoirs. Why is this becoming so popular now? The reality is that people are not really living lives that are that much more interesting than they have been in the past, yet they are so much more popular now. Memoirs are about telling a story, and it seems like people have stories they really want to tell. The interesting part is that these stories are not that pretty, they aren’t the “found the girl, had the kids, lived in a castle for ever and ever” type of stories. Many of these stories are a bit rougher.
I have a story. I have a few stories, to be honest. I’m sure part of my fascination with memoirs lies in my own desire to tell my own stories, to put out there what I feel like I can’t tell others. The interesting thing about these “untellable” stories is that I really want them to be tellable. I want people to hear them. I need people to hear my story.
I’m going to take a guess and say that you probably aren’t that different from me. I’ll bet that you have some stories that you’ve never told anyone, or maybe just one person who you assume has forgotten it by now, but that you really want someone to hear.
We don’t do well with telling people our stories today. We tell them the boring stories about the weather, our jobs, the score of a football game, the latest book we’ve read. We tell lots of stories about other people. Maybe even a few stories that those other people would not like to know that we told. But we tend to not tell our own real stories. The stories that make us who we are. The stories that have set us on the paths we are on. The stories that guide what we do when it’s just us. Those are the kinds of stories we want to tell. At least I think so.
I recently read a story of a well known Christian author which fit the above description. He told the things he had never wanted to tell but that he knew he needed to tell. He told them he was older when the effects of his story had taken quite a beating on his health. But he still told it and his story was not pretty. It was hard and must have cut like a knife to write down, but he told it.
At the very back of this book, there was a section where some of his dearest and closest friends wrote letters, letters that they knew strangers like me would read, saying what this man meant to them. They said that they’ve known his story for many years and they’ve seen the ugliness of his story but that they loved him and that they saw the truth of his story. That they loved his story because it showed them more of him.
Our stories show others who we really are. That is what scares us about telling our stories, that when others hear our stories they’ll define us as what we always feared. We are worried of our stories giving others a clue to the real monster behind them, so instead, we live lives telling half-stories, boring stories, or no stories. But it’s beautiful what happens when we tell our stories, the real ones. More often than not, people start to love the person that they see because of the story. The things that confused them about us, suddenly make sense and become things that they can love. We become things that they, and we, can love.
When was the last time that you told your story? The real one? Maybe it’s time to take a risk and tell people you love the real story of you, the story that you see when you look in the mirror. When you give people a chance to hear your story, you are taking a risk. That’s always going to be true. But more than that, you are inviting beauty to enter your story and you are inviting others to love.
Invite others in. Give beauty and love a chance. Write a memoir, and tell it the way you’ve always wanted to tell it.
Tags: Fiction, honesty, Memoirs, Stories, Story, truth
5 Comments
Thanks for this. I’ve started trying to write down my story, the real one. Sometimes it’s painful and I wonder if I should write about something more beautiful. And yet, there is beauty in the pain. In the healing. I’m writing my story down bit by bit on my blog. It’s a little disjointed, but it’s the best way I know how to do it, to have it all in one place, accessible anywhere. Sometimes, like just this morning, I wonder if my blog readers (all 17 of them) are tired of hearing about my story and so I think I should maybe write about the beautiful fall weather. And maybe I will. But this post reminded me that I am not writing my blog for readers, I am writing it to tell my story. The real one. For me to look back on how God worked in my life. And for my family to have some of their history in words. And for any friends who care to read it to know me better. Thanks for the reminder.
I have also written a memoir, and the process provided me with a lot of spiritual healing. I am thakful for that time, and I’m thankful to have my stories documented. If nothing else, my children will have the stories to remember our time together.
The hardest part is trying to get the damn thing published!!
I read something very interesting on Chip MacGregor’s blog about the reason for that. He said that since so many people are sharing their stories online, and for free, it’s hard to convince people to actually buy personal stories in book form when they can just go online and read something similar.
I would gather that we are seeing a boost in their popularity right now because of the increasingly inward focus of ourselves. Wasn’t it Time magazine that a few years ago had a blank cut out of a head on its cover and named you – meaning each and every one of us – the Person of the Year? We also see this self-focus with social media sites where we tell people a version of ourselves.
I want to agree that we should be honest and open, but I think it’s important to remember there is a reason why we have learned to be quiet and private. It would be great if everyone loved hearing our stories, but, as evidenced by the memoir craze, people sometimes love telling their stories more than hearing other peoples, so even if you tell your story, no one may be interested. And if no one listens to or reads your story, if you go ignored, you may feel more alone, not beautiful, for telling your story. Or, friends and family may listen to the story you tell them or others may read your memoir and criticize it/you or it may create awkwardness because others don’t know how to deal with your vulnerability.
It’s incredibly important to have people we can really share ourselves with unabashedly, as this article suggests. But I don’t think we can expect everyone else in the world to want to hear our story or to agree with our story, and I think that if we choose to expose our real story to the world we may need a thick skin. There are certainly moments when people share stories and others come out of the woodworks to rally around the memoirist and to validate him/her because vulnerability is beautiful and being honest allows other people to be honest as well. I think that’s why we enjoy reading memoirs. We can read about other people’s hard times and feel encouraged that we are not alone in our struggles.