Reliving the present in the future
Stuck at home? Got some time on your hands? Want to do something productive? Maybe you should write a memoir.
Every one of us will have a story to tell about our experiences during the coronavirus outbreak. The time to record the events of your life over the last few months, and what conclusions can be drawn from them, is now.
You might think you’ll remember with great clarity each and every challenge encountered since the virus made its unwelcome way to the United States.
You’d be wrong. Memories of such a unrelenting disaster seem like they’ll be etched in our brains forever. But as soon as the virus shows signs of packing up and leaving, and we start regaining some semblance of normality in our lives, the day-to-day coping mechanisms we are so painstakingly adopting will quickly fade from thought, replaced with the joy of feeling those constraints slipping away as we reclaim the freedom and sanity that was abruptly ripped from all of us.
I’m not talking about submitting your memoir to Random House for publication, followed by a meteoric rise on The New York Times’ bestseller list. This memoir is for you, and those who care about you, and those
who may come after you.
Besides, what else do you have to do? Even if you’re working from home, you surely have more spare time than you need since you’re not commuting, not shopping, not going to the movies, not dining with friends and family. You could resort to cleaning out kitchen cabinets and taking on long-dreaded household projects. But you can’t work all the time.
And if you’re like many of us, you’re probably doing a good deal of reflecting on how this unprecedented calamity is affecting you and those around you. So write about it. What have you got to lose?
Need help? That’s what the Internet is for.
The first thing to keep in mind is that this is a record of a specific period in your existence, not an autobiography. An autobiography is about your entire life. A memoir doesn’t require you to delve deep into family photos and records to figure out what Mom used to pack in your lunchbox when you headed off to first grade, or try to recall the names of the mean teenagers next door who threw snowballs at you until your big brother took care of that.
You can be ethereal, or dreamy, or hard-core factual. The goal is to stay in touch with how you felt at each stage of coping with changes in work, home, hobbies, fitness regimens, communications, and attempts to relax.
Your memoir can take the form of a tidy chronology. It can be a series of bullet points. Or free verse. A friend once assembled an excellent cookbook based on family recipes surrounded with stories about those recipes’ relationships with the members of his household.
Being specific matters. What music have you been listening to? What are you wearing every day? What’s become of your personal habits if you’re on lockdown? Are you watching lots of TV; if so, what are you watching and why? Are you a gamer? Getting any exercise? What’s for supper—home cooking, carryout, ramen noodles? Is your alcoholic beverage bill getting out of hand? Are conversations, emails, visits to social media, and text exchanges with others relevant to how you’re getting through every day?
Again, you think you won’t forget these details. But you will. So write them down as they occur. And if they contribute to an overall breakthrough or understanding of what’s going on at the time, say so—even if that breakthrough doesn’t hold up in the long run.
A useful guideline can be found at self-publishingschool.com’s How to Write a Memoir. The website offers suggestions for how to get started, among them: Don’t begin at the beginning, use all your senses, and draw a diagram of your life before and after, so you have an outline of the ground you might want to cover.
As in all things, honesty is good policy. So is determining a point of view and sticking with it.
“A good piece of memoir begins with the author’s perspective but doesn’t end there,” advises website thewritepractice.com. “It leaves the reader—often implicitly—with a decision to make or action to take … Good memoir is powerful. It can change lives, if you make it personal—not just for you, but for the reader.”
Memoirs used to be the purview of the famous, the rich, the notorious. Not so anymore. Just make it interesting, suggests Nashville-based author Jeff Goins. And make it personal. Use powerful language, truthful interactions with others, morsels of thoughts and actions that move the narrative, and just enough backstory to serve as a foundation for the unsettling/uplifting episodes that come next.
One of the best pieces of advice comes from nybookeditors.com: Your memoir is not about you. It’s about lessons you’ve learned and can share with others, in the hope that anyone who reads your story will find it useful in making sense of their own.
Even if your readership is limited to one person—you—forcing yourself to confront the maze of feelings, actions, fears, setbacks, and successes brought about by this crisis will make a difference in coming to grips with what’s happening to all of us now, and will continue.