Community and Humor in Memoir

Last night, I hosted another zoom like call, although it's on Google, meet, where we writers, we memoirists, got to look at each other and talk about our work.

And it really dawned on me. I've done several of these, but last night, for some reason, it just really started to dawn on me that we writers need each other. We need to be in community. Because everyone there gets it. They get the idea of going deep and examining their life experiences and their responses to it and other people's responses to the experience that they share with them, and creating story.

There's something deep and intuitive about the idea that a human life is a story, and all of our stories interact and cross paths along the way. And we really are all walking this journey of life together, and we're all stunned and surprised by the things that happen, by how hard life can be, but we also, as memoirists, we understand that we don't have to stay there in our trauma. We can use our trauma to go forth and to become better people and to see the world through new eyes, eyes that look for the beauty, hiding amongst the difficulties. And if you can do that, if you can find those shimmering Points of Light and beauty shining like a gem underneath the bloodiest, most heartbreaking scenario. That's a win that is winning life, that is taking trauma and turning it into gold, which is alchemy. Memoirists are the alchemists, the true alchemists. And we need to help each other in that endeavor, because the rest of the world doesn't always understand. They don't understand why we feel compelled to do this, why we feel compelled to tell our stories, to dive into our pain, to pick it up like a fallen leaf and look underneath to see what is there? They say to us kindly many times, don't go there. Don't do that. Don't look into your past pain. It's it's the Balrog. It's going to hurt you, it's going to pull you in, it's going to kill you. And we don't, it's not that we don't care, but we are compelled. We must. This is who we are. So I have found, I really realized this last night. I found that all this time I have been spending and it's virtual. It's true. It's not actual face to face encounters, but all of this time I have been spending building this community of memoir writers in the Facebook group, the memoir Writers Group, at my sub stack and at these zoom meetings, especially it has supported me, it has girded me, it has bolstered me, and it has made me feel more secure in my pursuit of crafting a memoir that I can share with The world. And that changes me, but also can bring change to other people and help other people see their journey more clearly because of the universal themes that we have in our stories.

And I just think that's wonderful.

Another thing I've been thinking about is the notion of humor in memoirs. And part of the reason for that is because I am a Toastmasters member, which is the public speaking club education organization, whatever you want to call it, and our local. Club is having a humorous speech contest coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have been writing a humorous story from my life, and it got me thinking how humor helps us engage with people emotionally, because when you can laugh at yourself and let other people laugh at you, their walls come down, and they're open, and then you can inject some meaning, something harder, something That is a life lesson, you have an opening for it, because people let their guard down through laughter, and then, boom, you can put that nugget right in there, and they'll take it. They won't have their walls up to push it away. So I started thinking about that idea of using humor in memoirs, and it's true that the mainstream even believes that humor and using humor to look at your life can be therapeutic for you. Comedian Noah Trevor Noah, he wrote a book called Born a Crime, and he used humor to make his trauma more approachable.

It's a it's an emotional connection

that walks in parallel to pain. Yes, we all have pain, but we can all have humor and light moments and funny moments, and we can even take our dark moments and find the humor in those and in that we make connections with people and we become more relatable. There's inspiration and wisdom in things that are funny. We talk about that, how the reason things are funny is because they're true. I don't understand that really, but I see it in play. The jokes that are the funniest are funny because they have a thread of truth in them. We've done studies that found that writing about traumatic memories can be therapeutic, and then humor can amplify it by reducing those emotional barriers, so something to think about, and I think I have a few funny stories that I can work into my draft. What about you? What are you working on right now in your memoir, journey and what are you learning? What are you discovering? Send me a note and talk to me about it, because I want to make a connection with my fel