Understanding Audience while Writing a Memoir

Since May, I’ve been trying to finish two projects, a collection of poems and a memoir. The poems are almost done. However, the memoir has been stuck in a certain place for over two years now, and I’ve been trying to understand some of the headwinds I’ve faced with it.

This is all deeply personal stuff. But the headwinds have seemed spiritual. They seem to have had something to do with the way that grief changed for me between October, 2017, and this summer. They have also involved how I’ve been thinking about audience.

The truth is, I rarely write fluently when thinking about who is going to read my writing. This is why I think I like first drafts; I don’t think much about audience at that point. At the start, it is usually enough to simply get ideas on paper. Some people will say that the first draft is the most authentic expression, but I doubt that. It’s not even the most revealing.

To be honest, this memoir I’m currently trying to finish didn’t actually start as a memoir, or a “project,” as I call it in the first paragraph. It started as a series of journal entries on everything I could remember about our son. I made lists and even dwelled on the peanut butter I’d used to make his lunches. Then one night in the first year of our loss, a shift happened. I began to call it “the memoir.” I shifted to working on the computer. I was telling Michael’s story. The night I began this writing, I went to bed and experienced a dream about him that made me think that I should keep working on it.

At this point, as I told a few friends about the dream and what I was doing, my only thought about audience was that I was writing about my own journey through loss. People also going through this loss were my main focus and interest. I was also having grief memoirs recommended to me through the Survivors group I attended.

Again, this all got more complicated two years ago. In addition to writing for others who were suicide survivors, I began to understand, as I was writing, that I was also writing for people who had not experienced loss to suicide but who might want to know more about it so that they might help others.

This left room for doubt. Who was I to write about that? I have no expertise in the psychology of grieving. I only know what I have been through.

At this point, I admitted that I was beginning to struggle a bit with the whole thing, and the difficulty mainly concerned who my reader was. I was also not sure how the memoir was going to end. What was the end of it? This made sense, of course, since I was still in the process, still going through grief.

One friend in a prayer group I attend, another writer, suggested that I had to write my memoir as honestly as possible and not worry about what others, even editors, might say. We were and are both aware of how editors are concerned with sales and markets as much as they are with a writer’s style. I listened to my friend, agreed, and did the work as suggested. I wrote over 200 pages of my own, honest pain. I included poems in it.

This account might all seem overblown. A clearer thinker would not have this difficulty. I tend to agree. When I get into the middle of a “project,” I have to create distance. I have to get out of the muddle and think clearly and make hard decisions that others would have no trouble with.

This work stayed in this shape and length, an account of three years of grieving, for two more years until this spring, when I cut about sixty pages from it during spring break this year. Then, this summer, as I returned to work on it, I simply read through it. And I started to see a definite narrative pattern emerging. And I also heard a new voice emerging to comment on and revise the experiences after six years of grieving, the voice that seemed more appropriate to the material.

The patterns in the earlier draft included some experiences that I’d forgotten I’d written down, which included prayers people had prayed for me and how they were answered. Though I wasn’t able to see this pattern at the time I wrote it, I could see that there were passages about my doubts and questions, and these all seemed to fit into the larger pattern of what I was writing about. My goal, to write a grief memoir that had a spiritual arc—an honest spiritual arc to it—as well as an emotional arc, seems almost within reach. And personally, as I’ve continued to work on this, I’ve noticed how my grief has changed.

Some will argue of course that I’m no longer being authentic, and the best memoirs are authentic and raw. I’m not so sure that is the case. In the work done this summer, I can actually look at this current draft I’m working on and see the layers in it that have formed over the different periods since the loss. I’m aware now that early in the process, I did think about God, and I thought about theology, but it seemed that God was silent during this period. At the same time, people around us, in church or at work, often gave us scriptures, and these were always very well-meaning, certainly meant to help or inspire us. But most of these had the same effect that a wind tunnel has on broken wings. I often found myself being whipped around by wind and smashing up against the walls of the tunnel. I found myself less and less inclined to go to the scriptures of my tradition when all they showed me was my own failure. The layers of feeling rejected by others over our loss, of hearing trite, comforting sayings from others, and the layers of an emerging understanding and more insight, these are all there.

This has taken, all told, almost six and a half years, and I am at the point of writing about the Jewish practice of Sitting Shivah—silence with the grieving for seven days. The final result, I’m hoping, will be readable and even have a story arc to it, and even include some useful information for this part of existence that most of us prefer to avoid, if we are at all smart.

I’ve noticed this pattern of time and timing with other memoirs. Ann Hood’s powerful memoir Comfort, written after the loss of her five year old daughter, and Ivan Maisel’s I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye, after his son’s suicide, both took six to seven years to finish. Both are wrenching, powerful, and helpful.

I have gone through different periods of anxiety about this project, but now I’m feeling more or less on time with it.

Thank you for reading.

The name of my poetry collection, as of right now, is Poems for a Coming Shore. The memoir is titled Notes from Banishment: Surviving my Son’s Suicide.

Both titles are tentative. I’m open to further suggestions.

Please have a good month. Stay cool. In most of the country, I’m noticing, high temperatures are setting new records.

Memoiring a Dream

I will never see you as a thirty-year-old man.

But why this appearance

in a dream where you are eight,

and not as we knew you

months ago, at 17?

The first dream came

after I wrote one night

first lines spoken to the land.

Then I dreamed

there were trees and a road

and out of the forest the house

appeared, and out front where there was

no lawn, only forest flat dirt, you were

standing outside, now for us, as though

waiting for us to pick you up, you at ten,

or eight or nine, waiting for your ride.

We spoke, you about why you didn’t

work out and I, that I refused to lose you

again

before the trees covered

with their darkness.