How to Write a Memoir That’s More Than a Memoir
When one story’s not enough to tell the whole story
No one sets out to write a memoir on a whim. This particular form of nonfiction is almost always written in response to a personal experience that burrows so deep, it won’t let go until its whole story is investigated. The memoir, then, becomes that investigation.
The event that triggered my memoir Gaining was my separation after 20 years of marriage. More specifically, it was my response to that separation, which looked a whole lot like my response to adolescence at age 13. I stopped eating. And I started obsessively weighing myself, taking comfort in the declining numbers on the scale, as if my life would somehow get better if there were less of me. I’d clung to that same conviction for seven years while starving myself as a teenager. It hadn’t worked then. In fact, I’d written a book about the many ways it hadn’t worked. Back in 1979, Solitaire was America’s very first memoir about anorexia, and I thought, at the time, that writing it had liberated me from eating disorders forever.
Yet now, more than three decades later, I joked with our therapist that I was on the “divorce diet.” Fortunately, he was not amused. It was his response, really, that arrested this so-called diet and alerted me to the fact that something much more interesting than weight loss was going on.
In fact, I was repeating a pattern whose roots stretched all the way down to my genes. But I didn’t know that yet. I still thought there must be something about my upbringing that had trained me to think erasing myself would solve my problems. Therapy helped me confront and correct that idea, which in turn helped my husband and me build a new relationship to replace our busted one. Our separation ended. Marriage renewed. Therapy concluded.
But my questions about this repeating pattern exposed by the divorce diet only multiplied. So, I decided to write a new book about it.
What if your story isn’t the whole story?
This time, it wasn’t only my own story that interested me. I was still in touch with several high school and college classmates who’d also had eating disorders back in the 1960s and 70s. Most, like me, were perfectionists, introverted A students who’d gone on to substantial, if not stratospheric, careers and secure, if not dazzling, marriages. We trended toward rigidity, were exacting in style and somewhat uptight when it came to sex and intoxicants. We didn’t easily relinquish control. Few of us had been treated for our eating disorders, since little treatment was available when we were young. And, judging by appearances, I wasn’t the only one who had relapsed over the decades.
This group story had never been told. And it wasn’t just a story about eating disorders. It was about behavior as a kind of back door to self-awareness.
There was a reason I’d lurched toward weight loss as a booby prize when I thought my identity as a wife of 20 years was dying. It was the same reason I’d starved myself when I thought my identity as a child was dying. In neither case did I have any idea who I was going to become next, and that not knowing terrified me. This terror was a kind of existential dread. And what better way to act out the fear of ceasing to exist than losing weight? I dubbed it the perfect pantomime.
But I was no behavioral expert. I needed to find out if my theory had any scientific validity. So, I sought out several researchers who, between them, have written hundreds of papers on the latest eating disorders science. They told me that studies were just now confirming exactly what I suspected: deep existential anxiety can trigger eating disorders in certain types of people, and the personality traits those people share are largely genetic. The experts also told me that no one had done what I proposed, which was to connect the dots of personality and behavior to other aspects of life, like career, marriage, parenthood, and old age.
What if your story takes you outside your area of expertise?
It’s incredibly rare, as a writer, to find material that’s fresh and unique, and it’s even rarer when that material is your own. I felt as if I’d discovered the missing link to a problem that radically affects millions of lives.
