Writing Memoir: Touch the Love

Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash

So often, memoir includes writing about other people in our lives. How do we make those others come alive to readers?

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that in writing memoir, we should try to see ourselves as characters who have strengths, weaknesses, motivations. And that’s true for writing about others in our lives, too.

But if you’re like me, not everyone you write about in your memoir is a person you have only good feelings toward. In fact, we might feel resentment, rage, disappointment or even hate toward certain people who appear in our stories.

In my experience, it’s difficult to write well while experiencing negative emotions.

Also, if we write our negative feelings into these unpleasant other characters, two unfortunate things can happen to the memoir:

• We, the writers, begin to sound unpleasant at best, or full of resentment at worst, both of which will turn most readers off.
• The unpleasant others come across as one-dimensional, which is boring, especially if they occupy more than a very minor role in the story.

One solution to this difficulty of writing about unpleasant, disappointing, or toxic people is simply this: do not write about them. Cut them out of your story, just as you may have wished to cut them out of your life. You have…