Hi! I’m coming to you, in this very irregular blog post, with a few thoughts for writing childhood in a larger memoir, inspired by recent reading. Then there’s a publishing recommendation and a request for a favor! I hope you all find this helpful. And I hope that you’re not snowed in right now, physically or spiritually. As there are far too many reasons to be.
Somehow, over the past year or so, I found myself reading a large number of nonfiction mss. At least a hundred, possibly more, for different presses and award series. I found a surprising number of manuscripts fell short in the first chapters before finding their stride, with a problem I named one day (to my spouse) as Failure to Launch.
I coauthored the nonfiction craft book Tell It Slant and think of myself as pretty good at breaking down why and how nonfiction is or isn’t working. But I found myself at a loss with this Failure to Launch—books that ultimately succeeded but started off rambling and hard to stick with. I also—sheepishly-- saw in that pattern a problem I struggle with myself.
Many books I read started at the author’s childhood and then went deep into it, regardless of where the book was going. The latter was particular—like the story of a divorce, a trip, a coming out. The former felt rather formless. I sensed an assumption that, no matter how tight the later narrative arc of a memoir might be, all of childhood is fair game.
But turns out, it’s not. Some details just feel predictable—things like a future writer loving reading as a child is hardly surprising. Nor is a child feeling jealous as younger siblings come along, or wanting a puppy, or being fiercely attached to said puppy. (Note: no details I share anywhere here are ones I encountered, just ones similar enough.)
Many stories got off track with long bouts of what the author presented as a “wild” adolescence, consisting of things that aren’t that unusual—using substances, sassing parents, maybe sometimes staying out all night. Not only did this behavior feel less surprising than the author seemed to find it, but it wasn’t integrated into the rest of the book.
Childhood is the foundation of life: it can’t be limited only to very relevant episodes. It also can’t be a long stretch that does nothing to help the reader get to where the book is going. Writers like Bernard Cooper even admit leaving siblings out of certain works, to keep the story heading toward its main arc. I’m not sure I’d do that. But writing childhood is tricky, in a way I felt I hadn’t appreciated—including in my own writing.
I think the immersive nature of childhood—in which the world isn’t questioned, just given—can work against the needs of nonfiction. People recall, and feel it’s important to share, what they loved and feared the most. Readers need some signposting and reasons to care.
I found myself wishing authors had stopped, every few pages, and asked themselves how what they were currently describing connected with the rest of the book. And resolving to do this more myself.
A chapter in my last book, The Devil’s Castle, used my life as a timeline of changes in psychiatry. The piece didn’t begin as a timeline, but through my endless drafting I noticed how strangely well my life worked as one. The switch to biological psychiatry happened as I was entering the psych system, I received shock treatment (not good) at the peak of its popularity. And so on. The timeline material ended up replacing a lot of unanchored material I had had in previous drafts, as I went from being a rando kid to something of a living testimonial to what happened around me, good and bad.
Here are a few ideas, for those of you working on memoir (and how does nonfiction avoid being at least somewhat memoir? The word means memory, after all).
1) Chart your childhood material against what was going on in the world at large. We are history writ small, as James Baldwin said, and seeing the connections between your life and the world at large deepens memoir greatly.
2) Do keep the narrative arc loosely in mind. There’s no need for everything to tightly connect but try to be aware of getting too far away. I eventually cut a lot of early material from The Devil’s Castle. What stayed related fairly directly to the mind or one of my subjects.
3) Show your childhood chapters to someone who doesn’t know the story you’re telling. Ask them where they think the book is going. If they’re way way off or say they have no idea, you might need to revise.
4) Be aware of any connections between that young-you and older-you, and freewrite about them as you go. I find this is essential. Digging into why something mattered in a particular way to you, to your family, or talking about its lasting impact can bring things like teenage acting out and trauma to life.
About a wonderful new journal: Nerve to Write: A Magazine for Disabled, Chronically Ill, and Neurodivergent Writers is open to submissions. Its editor-in-chief is the amazing Sarah Fawn Montgomery and it is “an online journal publishing poetry, nonfiction, fiction, hybrid work, and art by disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers. While we welcome work that addresses these experiences, writers do not need to focus solely on these subjects and are encouraged to submit work on any range of topics.”
And a favor: if you’ve read The Devil’s Castle (or plan to), please keep in mind the importance of supporting writers through online reviews, on sites like Goodreads and amazon. Now that it’s been out a few months I’m hoping to build these and it is a free and hugely helpful thing to do, to support books like mine, that quite honestly take some financial investment to write. TIA!
If YOU have a book coming out, let me know! I may start doing Q&As here now and then.