Writing your memoir isn’t easy. Ask anyone who has written their personal story. Author and memoirist Mary Karr in an interview about her best-selling book The Art of Memoir went so far as to advise against it, saying it’s like a living hell to remember events from your life and write about them. Yet, more people than ever are penning their memoirs as any bookstore’s bulging memoir section proves.
During my years of teaching memoir writing I’ve witnessed both the agony and eventual ecstasy that writers go through when setting out on the very special journey of remembering their lives and writing about them. I compare this journey of remembering and writing about it to the classic heroine’s journey as detailed in two books: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness.
Both books detail the stages of the hero/heroine’s journey, often building on the work of author-mythologist Joseph Campbell. As it turns out, the various stages of the heroine’s journey can be used to create a narrative arc for your story. Vogler, a screenwriter for Disney, has used the stages of the hero’s journey to create the storyline and narrative arc for numerous movies, including The Lion King, among others. Murdock’s book, on the other hand, is especially valuable for women to tell their life stories as she compares the heroine’s journey to a spiral rather than a linear timeline.
Like all stories whether of heroes or heroines, however, first there is a call to adventure in which the individual sets out from their ordinary world, embarking on a journey into the unknown, which Vogler calls the non-ordinary world. Deciding to write your life story is a call to adventure requiring strength and bravery like a mighty warrior because once you start to recall your past, you will once again meet the dark villains that live there and who will rise up as immense obstacles to prevent you, the heroine, from writing your story. Having the courage of a heroine…and you must get used to seeing yourself as that person…when confronting the darkness from your past experiences is necessary in writing your story and bringing it to birth. The strength it took for you to overcome the obstacles along your life’s path in the first place is what gives your story its heart and soul and makes you a heroine.
To paraphrase Mary Karr, writing your memoir is not necessarily a fun journey but in the end, a very worthwhile one for you and the readers waiting to read what you have to say.