Facing the Discomfort of Memoir
When we write memoir, there are a million things we have to think about.
We have to know what story we want to tell, and we have to know how to tell it.
We have to be ready to be vulnerable on the page. And then, we have to be ready to share our vulnerability with all of our readers!
Choosing to write a memoir can be a difficult choice, especially when dealing with serious subject matter as Stephanie Kain’s memoir does.
Despite Stephanie’s initial hesitance at her agent’s suggestion of turning her journaling into a memoir, she went into it with an open mind and came out the other side of the publishing process with a wonderful experimental memoir.
Listen to learn:
- How to become comfortable with being vulnerable in your writing
- How to choose what to include and exclude in your memoir
- About the benefits of writing experimentally
- The value of writing something even if you’re afraid of being judged
Here’s a sneak peek:
[07:17] I think it's possible to improve your craft around it. I don't necessarily think that writing is wrong on any level for people who are beginning and emerging.
[12:19] But at some point, I had to make the decision that putting the memoir out into the world was more important than my personal comfort on this topic. And that the message in it and what I wanted to do with the book had to supersede my own cringe factor.
[18:20] And I recognized I didn't want to leave people in that kind of desolate space of this raw grief that was unprocessed. And so I kept writing over the period of the next year or so.
[20:33] So I think there came a point where I just said, “this personal privacy is now going to be a thing of the past.” And what does that do? How can I kind of live in a state without armour?
[24:42] And I think obviously, I was much more concerned with the quality of it than kind of the mass market issue.
[26:36] I'll go like years without, and then finish something in a couple of months or be really invested in a project, think like, “this is great, why don't I do this all the time?”
[28:18] I'm all about letting go of those ideas that we hold that we don't realize aren't serving us. And one of those is the, “if you don't write every day, you're not a writer,”
Links from today’s episode:
Facing the Discomfort of Memoir, with Stephanie Kain: The Resilient Writers Radio Show -- Full Episode Transcript
Intro:
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
Because—let's face it—the writing life has its ups and downs, and we wanna not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books, and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who wanna learn and grow in their craft, and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books, and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them, writers who wanna spend more time in that flow state, writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community in this crazy roller coaster ride we call “the writing life.”
We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives, and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, writer, I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda Douglas:
Hey writers, welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, and today I'm joined by Stephanie Kain. Stephanie is a creative writing professor at the University of Ottawa. She's twice been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, and she divides her time between Ottawa and Prince Edward Island, where she loves to stroll the Red Sand beaches with her young daughter. She has a PhD from Lancaster University in the UK in creative writing. Welcome, Stephanie.
Stephanie:
Thank you very much for having me.
Rhonda:
I'm so excited to talk to you. So, I love what ECW does with books. I mean, I have the uncorrected galleys, I guess, but I really love it. So this is called Lifeline: An Elegy, and it is a memoir. Can you just say a little bit to intro the book to folks who won't have read it yet?
Stephanie:
Sure. Well, first of all, I'm sorry that you're missing the embossed cover because I think that's half the magic in the actual thing. We'll make sure that you get a real copy in the future. So, Lifeline is an experimental memoir. Essentially, when my students are asking, like, “what is that? What do you do?” It takes the structure of a memoir and breaks it down into experimental pieces. You know, fragmented prose and kind of like lyric poetry, some text messages, put in there—
Rhonda:
Lists.
Stephanie:
Yeah, definitely lists some short essays. But essentially, I think the reason that I came at it from this particular direction was that anything that was more structured felt too difficult, you know, both to write and to have people read.
And, you know, one thing that I kind of tell my students as we're dealing with personal issues, personal essays—because creative non-fiction is all about stories of the self—sometimes a lighter touch is necessary in heavier material. And so as the story gets darker, the writing gets sparser in order to compensate.
Rhonda:
I love how you approached it. I think it's glorious, like, how it all comes together. And did you know that's how you were going to do it? Like, how did you come to write the book? Because it's a book that comes out of a very difficult personal situation with a friend. Did you know you were gonna write the book? How did the book come to be?
Stephanie:
No, this is what we call an accidental memoir. I mean, prior to this, I was a novelist. I had done exclusively fiction. And even though I have an interest in creative nonfiction, had done my masters in it, I hadn't had any kind of purposeful direction toward it. However, when this person that I was very close to was clearly descending into this depression that I realized at some point was not going to get better, I think I started writing, more journaling, as a coping mechanism.
And at some stage, kind of during the final month of her life, I began more purposely writing essays about mental health and about our experience together with it, about reaching out for help and recognizing that either the help is not available in the way that it's needed, or the treatments are just not up to the level of depression and illness that people have. It wasn't a case of this person not understanding that she was mentally ill. We all knew. And it was this incredible journey in and out of psychiatric facilities and medications, all sorts of things to try and help and just realizing toward the end of this that we were not gonna win.
Rhonda:
It's funny, reading the book, and you reference movies, Girl Interrupted, and different movies, Shirley MacLaine, I love how you talk about people, Shirley MacLaine-ing, from Steel Magnolias, but it struck me that the psych ward imagery is the same as it's been for like 40, 50 years, or longer. It feels like it's treatment captured in amber, or something. It just hasn't moved on.
Stephanie:
Yeah, it's how it feels almost in it as well. I talk about not realizing that the psych ward was kind of adjacent to the maternity ward where I delivered my daughter. And I did not have this kind of anachronistic experience of the maternity ward, right? It was a hospital, it's functional, it's utilitarian, but there's something about the psychiatric ward in there that it was just almost outdated, but I think some of those medical practices that people think have kind of gone the way of the dodo, like electric convulsive therapy, they haven't. They're absolutely still utilized. They may be more precise and they may be a little bit higher tech, but when all else fails, they are still used.
Rhonda:
It's astonishing, really, when you think about it. And it is so hard to get support. And the memoir just kind of traces the constant banging up against the system. So can I ask you, one of the things I often talk to folks about when people raise with me when they're writing a memoir, I often hear from writers who are still in the thick of it, and they have a story from their personal life they wanna tell. And they often think that they're doing memoir wrong. Do you think it's possible to do memoir wrong?
Stephanie:
I think it's possible to improve your craft around it. I don't necessarily think that writing is wrong on any level for people who are beginning and emerging. I think that the more that writers find their own way and their own voice, the better the work becomes. I think sometimes people confuse autobiography with memoir. I think that's one thing that writers can get bogged down in, is this idea that they need to tell their story chronologically from the moment of their birth up until the present. And this in memoir is not necessary.
You can obviously choose kind of a cross sample of life or a theme or some particular point that means a lot to you and extrapolate everything from there. I think maybe letting go of some of the preconceptions of memoir and researching what it can actually be as a starting point might be very freeing for some people. But, I mean, people might look at my memoir and be like, “what is that?” We put a label on it and make it fine.
Rhonda:
Yeah, exactly. It's an experimental memoir.
Stephanie:
That’s right.
Rhonda:
But it works so well in all the different fragments because I think it captures the… I don't know if I have the words right exactly, but like, the frenetic energy of trying to understand, cope with, and in some way save the person that was struggling so much. I wanted also to, I'm on page 66 in my copy and you have…
Stephanie:
You’ll have to remind me.
Rhonda:
Yeah, I will. You have few series. So, this one's called 12 Days on the Psych Ward, and it's poetry. I'm in day six. And so it says, “I find out you've got grounds privileges and phone your stepmother. She's only 10 years older than you, but she's the wisest and sanest one. So we let her play the mother role.” And then there's a line break. And then it says, “until it goes to her head,” and that line is crossed out. We can still read it, but it's struck through.
You do that a couple of times, not a lot, but you do it a few times. Can you just talk about those kinds of choices at a line level in the strike through? It's like you're saying something, but you're taking it back or you’re saying something you don't want said.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I think those are maybe a nod to the thoughts that you have that you recognize are not fair.
Rhonda:
Not fair, okay.
Stephanie:
I think that there's a lot of exhaustion that goes into taking care of somebody who has a very serious mental health condition, right? And I mean, reading the story, you'll understand that for a long time, there were just a few of us doing it. And I think that it's more of those, you know, “all thoughts are okay, all feelings are okay.” But upon revision, I think that it's not fair. It's not even necessarily a take back, but a rethink.
Rhonda:
That's fascinating. Often what comes up for memoir is, “I want to write this story and tell it the way I want to tell it. But I'm really afraid of people judging me for it or getting to know this very personal raw side of my life.” And part of what comes up in the book is, you're living in PEI and then there's small town Ontario and the dynamics of those tabs.
Stephanie:
So many parallels.
Rhonda: How do you reconcile that while writing? What did you do while writing to kind of deal with that?
Stephanie:
I don't live there anymore. I realize that there are certain impossibilities in one's geographical place. I think recognizing that I have the privilege of being able to write a memoir like this because I have a work environment that supports it. As a creative writing professor, writing something experimental and somewhat controversial is fine. If I were the executive director of a college or something like that, it would be much less fine.
There is a certain amount of discomfort in knowing that all of my students would have had the opportunity to read so much of my life. And they asked me, when I demonstrate reading, because part of our classes, you know, you will write a personal essay, you'll have the opportunity to do a reading mostly because I hate it so much as a professional that I want to encourage them to learn early.
But they say, “how are you so comfortable with doing this?” And I respond like, “I am in no way comfortable, I am deeply uncomfortable doing it.” But at some point, I had to make the decision that putting the memoir out into the world was more important than my personal comfort on this topic, and that the message in it and what I wanted to do with the book had to supersede my own cringe factor.
It is definitely not easy. When people ask me questions that I'm not prepared for, I kind of have to take a second. But I think that's the decision. Surround yourself with people who can support you, and then make peace with the fact that you are going to be uncomfortable daily.
Rhonda:
Mm-hmm. So, the book has got a couple of things happening. The overriding story is the story of two friends in a profoundly deep relationship. One of them is experiencing very severe depression that eventually just takes them. And also, it's sort of in parallel, there's your marriage and the dissolution of marriage.
And also, like just a really big F-U to a lot of the conventions that maybe keep us in relationships and choices, I think particularly as women, that otherwise, there might be healthier choices for us. So how did you make some of the decisions around the interweaving of themes? Was there a point where you had to make decisions? Just, talk to me about decisions about what to include and not to include and how to explore all three of those things.
Stephanie:
Right, yeah, okay, those are some big questions. I will back up to what to include and what to exclude. Through that process of journaling, there was a lot of material. At some point when I recognized that this might actually be a book, I started thinking about it thematically, as a writer, before I had just been thinking of it as an in situ grieving process. So once I kind of recognized, “all right, I want to talk about this relationship from kind of beginning to end,” realizing there are a lot of other influencing factors, you know, I'm a parent, I was also married to another woman, but being as honest as possible about those relationships, while also not deviating too far from the central theme. Like in the way that the marriage influenced these particular topics, I wanted to talk about it.
Also wanted to talk about my views and experiences as a person in a relationship that had undergone many different changes and things are not what you expect them to be, and that's okay. And I think one of the most difficult parts about these relationships that I have had is not having ever found any references to such a thing. I think I wanted to really explore what happens when you're married to someone and you're not soulmates and you know it, and you have this intense relationship with somebody else that you don't want to be with in that way, or wouldn't work in that way. How do you coalesce all of these things in your life?
And then, you know, the decision. Like, I am grieving for this person in a way that makes me realize that this marriage that I'm in can't work anymore. And just, okay, what do you do? You've got to let it go. And you know that kind of ending of the book where everything gets let go. The friendship is gone because the person is dead and the marriage is gone because the person is dead and you know and we kind of move through this, and then this very surprising new relationship coming in at the heels of it all.
When my students are struggling with personal essays and they say like, “what do you write about?” I wanna say like, “you pick something that occurs to you that doesn't seem to occur to others or that other people are too afraid to talk about, and then you find a way to talk about it.”
Rhonda:
And so in this book, you've found a way to talk about it in a way that is also fragmented in time, right? Like it's not entirely a, “we begin at the beginning and we go to the end.” It's not chronological in that way. So, in addition to being different forms of writing together, it's also back and forth in time. Was that a choice upfront or did you make that structural decision like when you had a draft or somewhere in the middle? And can you just talk a little bit about your process for making that decision?
Stephanie:
Yes, I feel like a lot of my process is staring at the screen until something falls into place and makes sense. Like, “I'm going to move this over here and see how that reads,” like get periods of like really intense concentration. But no, it wasn't until I was talking to my agent and I was like, “I'm sorry, you know, this fiction thing that I'm supposed to be doing, I'm not doing that right now because I'm doing this instead.” And I sent it to her. She's like, “yeah, I think I want to make this a book.” And at first I was like, “I don’t think so. That seems like maybe not a great idea.”
But then as we move toward it, okay, fine. So, how are we going to tell this story in a way that makes enough sense to the reader, so has enough chronology in it, but also breaks up those intense periods of heaviness and sadness with meditations on relationships and with humor and with other elements of backstory that is going to make this ending make sense.
At one point, the draft ended much sooner. And I recognized I didn't want to leave people in that kind of desolate space of this raw grief that was unprocessed. And so I kept writing over the period of the next year or so, and then ended, you know, with some sort of resolution.
Rhonda:
Yeah, there's a sense of the kind of hope that comes from the inexorable continuation of life, it's just life going on.
Stephanie:
Yeah, yeah. It was someone shaking you by the shoulders being like, “okay, you've got to stop. It's sad we know, but you can't sit here staring at the wall. You've got to go on with this.” And you know, it took someone driving from Ontario and picking me up and being like, “we need to keep going here.”
Rhonda:
When we're working in memoir and we're sharing so much, consciously, in order to make the story work, you realize, “oh, I also have to say this other thing that I don't want to say.” And then you're out in the world with a book. What's your experience like now? I mean, here you are talking to me, right?
And so, what's your experience like now of being in the world and needing to talk to people about this book that is very raw and vulnerable in so many ways? It's grief, but it's also, there's just so much in there of you and your thoughts and how you see the world. How are you experiencing that?
Stephanie:
I think that as a person who generally processes things out loud, I don't necessarily experience a big difference. Only, people pop into my office like, “I read your book.” “Okay, what part are you on?” It's just those types of questions, like, do you want to have a conversation about this?
But I just inherently feel that those types of conversations are important. Before I was a professor, I had studied to be a therapist. I had thought that having deep conversations with people for a living would kind of be my path. So I think there came a point where I just said, “this personal privacy is now going to be a thing of the past.” And what does that do? How can I kind of live in a state without armour?
And I've read a lot of Brené Brown, to kind of prepare me for this state of being, right? And recognizing that that vulnerability makes me a stronger person. It makes people trust me. And, you know, people will come to me with things that they may not come to others with. This has been the case for my whole life. It's just, I think, my way of being in the world.
I do value my own space. I value my own relationships. I value my thoughts and I'll share them. But there are certain things where I would just say, “I'm not ready to talk about that right now,” or, “I'm still processing that” and I'm okay with using that kind of language.
Rhonda:
Great, yeah, I love that as a way to navigate the profoundly personal and the public when talking about work. And you are still having deep conversations with people, you're just doing it on the page, right?
Stephanie:
Yeah, yeah. Or on a podcast.
Rhonda:
Right? So what's your hope for the book? Like, what are you hoping someone not knowing you, they're in a bookstore, they see the book, they pick it up. What are you hoping that when they're done reading, they take away?
Stephanie:
I think first of all, I hope it gets to people who need it. So, people who are struggling, not only with mental health issues or loving someone with a mental health issue, but being in unconventional relationships or facing a problem that they are compelled to solve, but know that it might be impossible to do, right?
All of the kind of those elements of human experience where you're up against things that may in fact be intractable. You know, that can be demoralizing, it can be really, really hard for people. And I think reading about someone who has gone kind of straight down into it and then lost, and then come back up the other side and found something else, I hope that will kind of be one of those guiding lights for people.
Rhonda:
Can I ask about the impact of artistic choices on the commercial options for the book? We write a book, it's the book that we know we need to write, but you don't see a lot of fragmented experimental memoir in the like big four, big five, you know, in like airport kiosks right out front, Heather's Picks, that kind of stuff.
Stephanie:
Right, right. Yeah, I did find it on the shelf at Chapters the other day, like in the wild, so we took a little picture.
Rhonda:
Yes. That's great. I love that. Love those moments. And ECW does a lovely book and they do a really great job of getting them out there. But you mentioned talking to your agent, was that ever a consideration of, you know, “having made the choices that I've made, we're now wondering how to place the book”?
Stephanie:
Yeah, I think Meg is really good about understanding where I come from as a writer. Knowing that kind of high degree of commercialism wouldn't be something that I would be comfortable with. We were really focused on having a quality product with really sensitive handling. That was kind of our choice. ECW really wanted the book, and I worked with a really great team over there from start to finish.
Everybody was really sensitive about the text, good about feedback for the cover, you know, “we're going with this, but this one looks a little bit too medical,” like it was white with a red line at first, that kind of thing. We really want to be sure to hit all the right notes on this. And I think obviously, I was much more concerned with the quality of it than kind of the mass market issue.
Rhonda:
And I love working with smaller presses for that reason. You know, like that partnership around the object, as well as the object that is the book, as well as everything else. They've done a lovely job. And one of the things I think works so well in the book is the different fonts, right? So you have like the text fonts, and then—
Stephanie:
Yeah, that was cut back a fair bit. They told me I couldn't have as many fonts as I wanted. A little more streamlined.
Rhonda:
Okay, but it works really well at the level it's at. Okay, cool. Interesting.
Stephanie:
Well, I think because there were so many elements of second person in there, and it wasn't always the same second person that the narrator was addressing. And so, who are you speaking to exactly? The reader needs some visual cues. Okay, this is a text message versus this is some exposition here versus this is a different conversation with a different person who has their own font. So, it was kind of just signposting for the reader, more or less.
Rhonda:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's working really well, I think. So, I wanted to just ask you a general question about your writing practice. What does it look like now, for example? I mean, we're always in a different phase when a book is out, you know, it's always, it's like, “what writing? I'm just doing podcast interviews and whatever.” But in a general sense, what's your writing practice like?
Stephanie:
It's funny, I mean, at the moment, I would just say it's non-existent and has been since I finished this book. And I mean, typically I would be working on something. I have books published because I write, but I don't write every day, even though I know writers say that they do.
I'll go like years without, and then finish something in a couple of months or be really invested in a project, think like, “this is great, why don't I do this all the time?” And be determined to finish something and go immediately onto the next thing. And then the bottom drops out and I need to do something else for a while. So I think at the moment, my focus has really been on teaching and all of the different things that come with returning to in-person learning after COVID and all of those things that have kind of come up.
I'm loving my position as a professor, I really lean into that because it feeds kind of a different part of that writing process for me. And I love seeing my students and watching them emerge as writers. And that's a different thing for me at the moment. But at the back of my head I know I have this book that needs to be finished. There's not as much time at the moment. But luckily, professors don't teach all year most of the time. We finish in April and I kind of dedicate some time at that point.
Rhonda:
I think I'm very anti this whole write every day idea.
Stephanie:
Very good, okay.
Rhonda:
I mean, we have full lives, don't we? But also sometimes you need some fallow time for the next thing to take root. Yeah.
So, just as the last question, I talk a lot about having a resilient writing life, and this is The Resilient Writers Radio Show. What does it mean to you to be a resilient writer?
Stephanie:
Hmm. Well, I mean, I think it can mean resilience in your personal life, but also your practice. Again, I'm all about letting go of those ideas that we hold that we don't realize aren't serving us. And one of those is the, “if you don't write every day, you're not a writer,” and the idea that you can in fact, go back into it after, a year or two years and continue to look critically at your work, and continue to kind of get back up after bad reviews, and engage in the process and learn from those things, and kind of think about writing as that continual job.
You know, that whole Margaret Lawrence thing, “when I say work, I only mean the writing, everything else is just odd jobs.” I used to have that plastered up there. And I think it's a matter of just being committed to continuing to evolve and learn from everything that goes wrong along the way.
Rhonda:
Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for this. And thanks for the book. I really, really enjoyed it. It's a gorgeous book. So it's called Lifeline: An Elegy by Stephanie Kain. And you can get it absolutely everywhere that beautiful books are sold. Thank you, Stephanie.
Stephanie:
Thanks for having me.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that “yes, this is a great show. Definitely recommend it to other writers.” And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it, and I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.
