Besides
social media connections, and having graduated from the same MFA program, Melanie
Brooks and I share a love of reading memoirs that must have cost their authors
an emotional toll—those she covers in her forthcoming book, Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From
Trauma. [We're giving away a copy, too!]
Melanie
works as a freelance writer and teaches at Northeastern University and
Merrimack College in Massachusetts, and at Nashua Community College in New
Hampshire, where she lives with her husband, two children and yellow Lab. Her
work has appeared in the Washington Post,
Bustle, The Manifest-Station, Hippocampus,
Huffington Post, Modern Loss, Solstice
Literary Magazine, Recollectors, Stonecoast Review and Word Riot. Melanie's also working on an almost-completed
memoir that explores the lasting impact of living with the ten-year secret of
her father’s HIV disease before his death in 1995.
Please welcome Melanie Brooks.
The
questions were simple: “What are you writing about and what form is it taking?”
So, why was I finding it harder and harder to breathe as the seminar leader meandered
her way toward me? As she solicited responses from the other students in the crowded
room, why was there a sudden tightness in my chest? It wasn’t as if I didn’t
know the answers.
I’d
started my MFA at the University
of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Creative Writing Program with a clear purpose—space
and time to finally write into a complex family story I’d carried for over twenty
years, a story I recognized was big enough to be a book. But when the leader’s
kind gaze finally fell on me, the words caught in my throat. I mumbled
something about writing about my dead dad, then a strangled sob hijacked
anything else I might say, and a deluge of tears broke through my reserve. I
was sitting at the wall-end of a cramped row, with no possibility of discreet
escape. For the remainder of the ninety-minute seminar, I struggled to stop my
nose from dripping without the benefit of a tissue, and I bit my lip until I
tasted blood, to muffle the hiccupping sobs that fought to surface.
Nothing
in the introductory materials the program coordinators sent out in the months
leading up to that first MFA residency had readied me for this horrifying public
moment of absolute composure meltdown. No neon labels were affixed to the pages
of the orientation handbook broadcasting: WARNING: Writing about vulnerable
material can leave you feeling rawly vulnerable. Be prepared to cry. A lot. At
inconvenient times.
So
when the inconvenient crying first erupted during that seminar, I thought
something was wrong with me. And when it happened again while my workshop group
discussed my manuscript, I felt the need to make excuses to put everyone else
at ease. “I cry all the time,” I said, even though I don’t. “Just call me The Crier from here on out,” I joked,
sidelining my emotions.
The
truth was that, during the residency, and in the following months when I sat in
front of my computer, mired in the very real anguish of trying to shape my
painful memories into words, I felt alone. So alone, I almost quit.
I
needed to find someone to tell me what I was feeling was okay. Normal.
Expected, even. If someone could tell me those things, then maybe I could marshal
up enough courage to keep going.
In
what began as a very personal (and totally selfish) quest, I went looking for
that someone to guide me back to my laptop, someone to tell me those things I
needed to hear about my pain and loneliness and fear. I wrote to authors I admired—those
whose memoirs did not shy away from any of the tough stuff— and told them how
much I was struggling. I asked them if I could sit down with them and talk
about the psychological journeys they had to go on to write their books.
What I
found when I reached out was more than someone.
I found eighteen someones. Eighteen acclaimed writers—including Andre Dubus
III, Mark Doty, Edwidge Danticat, Abigail Thomas, and Richard Blanco— who all
responded to my query and welcomed the opportunity to answer my questions and
offer some hard-earned wisdom. Writers who’d been as terrified as I was when
they began their memoirs. Who’d written into their own hard stories and made it
through. Eighteen writers who’d all experienced, at some point during their
processes, the inconvenient crying.
The
intimate stories these brilliant and generous memoirists told me about their
own struggles to find words for painful and traumatic experiences, their misgivings
along the way, their moments of wanting to quit, and their ultimate relief that
they did not quit, all encouraged me to keep writing and gave me the steadying
I needed.
Instead
of keeping these conversations to myself, I wrote Writing Hard
Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma (forthcoming from
Beacon Press on February 7). Each chapter is an in-depth narrative profile of
my discussion with one of these authors. I share the circumstances of our
meetings – from walking dogs with Mark Doty in the Hamptons; lunch with
Marianne Leone and her husband, Oscar winner Chris Cooper at their home on
Massachusetts’ South Shore; sipping a cup of tea while sprawled across Kate
Bornstein’s bed in her New York City apartment - and the amazing insights I
gain.
Since
my questions are less about craft and more about survival, I tap into some
areas of these authors’ processes that they’ve never shared before. I reflect
on how each of these exchanges moved me away from the place where my memories
were burying me and toward a completed memoir. I was motivated to turn these
experiences into Writing Hard Stories
by a realization that others facing the daunting journey to write into
their long-carried stories, writers who also felt isolated by their particular
circumstances, needed those stories and that steadying, too.
Maybe
if I’d had the gift of these conversations sooner, before I started my MFA even,
I might not have been so thrown by the emotions that surfaced when writing
about my experiences, and when, more often than not, doing so felt like
reliving those traumatic experiences. On that day of the streaming tears and
hiccupping sobs, when all I wanted to do was hightail it out of that seminar room,
I might, instead, have been able to turn to the person sitting next to me,
shrug my shoulders, and simply say, “You know, this is what they told me would
probably happen.”
Note from Lisa: Melanie would like to send one blog reader a signed copy of Writing
Hard Stories. Simply ask her a question here in the comments (and she'll
stop by and answer), and you'll be entered. (U.S. postal address is required.)
Post your comment by Sunday, Feb. 12.
