What is the difference between memoir and autobiography? What is the actual point of sharing our experience? What happens when that experience is difficult or dark?
This episode of the podcast talks about all of these questions but mostly focuses on my experience with difficult material. So I wanted to answer the first couple of questions, below, in text format.
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Memoir vs. Autobiography
An autobiography and a memoir are not the same thing.
An autobiography focuses on a person’s entire life. Memoir covers a slice of life in a topical way. While that slice can span decades, it should reflect the memoir’s overarching topic or theme. What doesn’t reflect the theme is extraneous.
For me, this was the first sticking point (more about that in the podcast), because even though I was writing an autism memoir, I found it impossible to talk about autism in isolation.
Knowing what did and didn’t relate to the autism theme was tricky. In some instances (like trauma) the relationship was clear, in others (like supernatural experience) it was not.
I had trouble figuring out what was relevant and what wasn’t, so I just decided to write the thing.
Then I got stuck again.
Sharing Our Experience
According to NYT’s journalist and memoirist, Marion Roach, there’s a reason why we share our personal experience in memoir. And that reason isn’t catharsis or getting even with people or even making sense of things.
It’s illustrating a point.
In memoir our life experience, per Roach, is an anecdote that helps explain the theme. While I’m not sure I agree with that completely, there is no doubt that Roach knows how to make her life experience work that way.
Roach’s book The Memoir Project contains some lovely examples of transcendence in writing. There is reason she is successful.
It’s worth stressing, however, that Roach isn’t an amateur and while writing examples of the type that she shares in The Memoir Project that can illustrate a point than also make us feel a little outclassed.
My writing is sloppy, compared to someone who writes for the NYT, but I do find meaning through doing it. I feel that has worth, even when—or probably especially when—it’s difficult.
Whether or not, I can produce a readable memoir remains to be seen.
For more on this topic, please check out the podcast! It is a separate thing, not a rehash of what you just read :)
Listen to my Sharing Our Story podcast here: https://barbaragraver.substack.com/p/sharing-our-autism-story-ep-6-7fb
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barbaragraver.substack.com
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