And one sentence that will motivate you to start again.
Doubts are familiar territory to memoir authors, and they can occur at any and all points in the process. You’re either hoping to start writing your memoir, in the middle of writing it, or finished and maybe in the editing, publishing or marketing stage. Even if you’re in that final phase, you may be doubting whether anyone will want to read your story, and that uncertainty and insecurity can stop you in your tracks and keep you from completing your memoir. I am going to share the secret sentence that will motivate you to continue, and I’ll try to get you over the one word holding you back from connecting your memoir to readers. Just one word has the power to freeze you mid-project.
Alone or Not?
We live our lives in isolation in the sense that we know only our own truth. Our reality is ours alone; each of us has a separate and distinct existence with experiences that are unique because they happen in a moment at a location with specific people and, most of all, to that one human that we know as “me.”
But how many people are out there in the world? More than 8 billion. They’re all human, all somewhere between birth and death, many living under conditions similar to yours. There’s no reason to feel small; we each account for one important person in that sea of humanity. But there is a reason to pause and think about our uniqueness.
The Birthday Problem
A little math. I’m no math whiz and don’t understand why what I’m about to tell you is true, so hang in there with me. What’s referred to as the “birthday problem” illustrates how coincidences are more likely than we intuitively expect. This first part is easy math: with 365 days in the year, the chances are only 1 in 365 that a random person you meet shares your birthday. And yet it takes only 23 random people in a room to increase those odds to 50 percent that two will have the same birthday. It’s a paradox involving probability and various mathematical concepts too advanced for my little brain. But there it is, just 23 people for it to be 50/50 that you might run into someone with your birthday.
With that in mind, think about whatever is your biggest reveal in your memoir. Is that what’s making you doubt the desirability of your story? It may be a family secret or an avoidable mistake or an embarrassing medical condition. Perhaps your book is the first time you’ve shared your story with anyone, much less everyone. Now think of the 8 billion people and the birthday paradox. Certainly someone out there has been through what you’ve been through.
And that relatability is one reason you’re writing the memoir, right? Because somewhere in your mind you know that people will not only empathize but relate to the way you’ve faced your challenges. That’s the whole point for some memoir authors: to help the next person facing the same difficulties.
Finally, the Reveal
So the sentence that will motivate you to keep writing is this: You are not unique. You are not alone in this. Other people recognize your struggles. They’ve experienced them or know someone who has. And the word that will free you if you neutralize it is: Shame. There is no shame in however you handled a situation. There is no shame in the fact that something terrible happened to you or someone did something offensive to you.
Without making sweeping generalizations, I think the shame can play out differently for men as compared with women. Jordan Ritter Conn’s new book, American Men, follows the stories of four men who hadn’t previously let their guard down to talk about their challenges. Conn concludes that men don’t like feeling, much less showing, vulnerability. They compartmentalize, shove thoughts away from their conscious thinking, never talk about aspects of themselves even to the people they love most. Back to coincidences, actor Andrew McCarthy also has a new book—Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America—that tackles more or less the same topic.
Women have been conditioned to feel ashamed of all sorts of things. If they were sexually assaulted, it can become a big secret and they even can feel responsible for causing the crime by, for example, letting a man in their house. They can feel ashamed of sexual feelings of any variety, or of having ambition, failing as a mother, succeeding in a nontraditional industry, and on and on. Men can have shame around these same issues, and with their fear of vulnerability it can be doubly tough to get past the shame.
In Good Company
Writing a memoir is therapy. It helps you cut through shame. It gets you comfortable with feeling vulnerable. And when readers assure you that you’re not unique in the experiences you describe, you’ll feel a freedom that will be worth every minute you’ve spent writing.