Readers and writers blog

As the 1915 song says, we’re all adrift in our memories, and Jerry Waxler is here to say that writing them down helps us cast a lifeline to other people.

To whose benefit? Well, in the June 23 entry to his weblog, Memory Writers Network, the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites, Waxler says a memoir can benefit people on both ends of the lifeline:

Your wisdom is contained in your life experience. Share it with the world . . . As you go, you’ll discover the sense you’ve made of your past, and then discover the impact your experience has on others. By writing and organizing your story, without even knowing how, you are already beginning to serve. And like any service to others, you’ll be the first to reap the rewards.

Now, not everyone in the writing world takes such a positive view of memoirs — publishers and literary agents, for example. Reputable publishers warn against sleazy operators who bilk would-be memoirists in self-publishing and vanity publishing schemes. And a Denver agent named Kristin, author of the weblog Pub Rants, says a big mistake she sees in query letters about memoirs is “writers who spotlight how cathartic and therapeutic the writing of the work was and how they now need to share it with the world.” Forget it, she says. Successful writers like Frank McCourt and Jeannette Walls understand that a memoir is not therapy — “or shouldn’t be” — but art:

“What these memoirists actually under(stand) is that readers aren’t interested in any one person’s therapeutic story. These readers are interested in an inside look to a world they’ve never seen or have never imagined. A world that is unbelievable but true . . that is unique but resonates with us.”

Not all Kristin’s readers agreed with her June 13 rant: “I have to disagree,” said a blogger named the anti-wife. “Writing a memoir can definitely be therapeutic. The mistake people seem to make is in assuming this form of self-therapy is publishable.”

And Waxler isn’t saying your memoir has to be published, although he has published two books himself and does list a number of methods of publication (June 10). No, his training and experience are as a therapist, and it is the therapist in him that most often speaks in Memory Writers Network. Most of his entries are about getting you started and proceeding as a writer because, well, it’s good for you.

In fact, he sums it all up in one of his most recent entries, July 27:

While we can’t change the past, we can change our relationship to it. By telling the story, we see it from a higher vantage point, see how it fit in with what came before and after, and provide more insights into the other characters and beyond them to the stage they acted on . . .

Putting it on paper lets me get it out of my head, and reduces some of its hold on my unconscious. On paper it doesn’t look as bad, and when I squint, I see it as an interesting story. And the most important benefit of the story is that I can see that even after bad things happen, life goes on.

Waxler discusses why certain memoirs are powerful — black author George Brummell’s life with blindness in Shades of Darkness, Anne Lamott’s unsteady passage to faith in Traveling Mercies, actress Brooke Shields’ struggle with depression in Down Came the Rain — and offers a lot of coaching and encouragement about writing:

• How to avoid ‘loaded words’ — clichés that need description and detail to appeal to those who don’t share them (July 2).

• Breaking down ‘code’ words into scenes and images (June 29).

• Storytelling lessons (June 27).

• The difficulty of remembering and the importance of recreating the sense and feeling of memories (June 6).

• Using story scenes to convey abstract ideas and emotions (April 12).

And if that memoir of yours does get published . . . well, it’s never too late, Waxler tells us in his April 2 entry: Harry Bernstein, an immigrant from England, lost his wife five years ago and decided to write a memoir, his first book, and got it published by Random House. He is 96 years old.

– Sid Leavitt