10 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
pathway that leads toward an explora-
tion of spiritual and existential truths.
This body of work feels heroically
boundaryless, open-hearted, and
searching, as each writer stands before
us, a unique version of “the thing
itself,” inviting us to observe, admire,
and inquire, without ever feeling
promiscuous or causing a sense of
embarrassment in the reader. They
reveal not only the wrongness of any
prejudice we harbor, but also what
we are missing by failing to embrace
the full expression of who we are
and might be in our own lives and
writing. In this sense, these works
function like a Saint Hildegard or
the Song of Solomon—the sacred
becomes erotic; the erotic, sacred.but what if it hurts?
Since personal narrative comes from
remembered experience and our
reflections on it, we enter and inhabit
our story in a peculiarly intimate way.
This can be an emotionally trying,
even painful, process, but there’s
pleasure in putting yourself there in
the moment, staring out at the words
that articulate the very matter of your
life. As so many have attested^8 , the
writing space is ultimately a heal-
ing one, in which stuff that needs to
come out gets out (the oft-maligned
therapeutic aspect of the memoirist’s
practice). Experience gets concretized
so that we, and the reader, can look at
a lived experience more objectively,
even dispassionately. We nudge the
traumatic memory out from where it
sits, trapped in the amygdala, and send8 The late Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing and John Fox’s Finding What You Didn’t Lose are both excellent texts that explore this
connection.9 A therapist might begin her cure by taking us out of our body: “Name five shades of blue in the room,” and you do and are thus able to
turn away from the distractions of the past and return to the concrete moment.10 I’ve written for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies (3.2) about the uses of spiraling in and out of the difficult moment when writing
about trauma.it over to the place or places in the
brain where events can be more coolly
interpreted and put into context;
we restore the broken circuitry and
connect the dots, and the result is flow:
the release of our traumatic memory
along with our narrative.^9
The free-diving in and out of deep
experience is central to the writing
of memoir, since such composition is
profoundly sensual, the writer coming
at his or her experience from somatic
experience, similar to what the best
fictional imagining achieves.^10 I thinkthat’s the timeless attraction of the
true story and why it thrives. Such
stories are born from the writer dedi-
cating herself to profoundly authentic,
quality “alone time,” into whose
hallowed space she graciously, coura-
geously invites the reader. Moreover,
a healthy or healing connection of
the self to the body allows the expres-
sion of that experience to become a
celebration rather than a lament: a
full-throated, uninhibited Shagadelic,
Baby! as we print out that final, shin-
ing, unashamedly sexy draft.http://www.newworldlibrary.com | Also available as an ebookBE THE BEST
WRITER YOU CAN BE
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bestselling author of
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