How Journaling Helped Me Write A Memoir
Posted by Mari L. McCarthy on Tue, Jan 24, 2012 @ 01:30 PM
Guest Post by Jane Rowan
I’d already been a passionate journal writer for twenty years when I first got an inkling that I might have been sexually abused as a child. It turned my world upside down. I had a wonderful therapist, but I needed an everyday friend to hear my ramblings. I’d sit at my kitchen table and scrawl, no structure, no cohesion, just the outpouring of doubt and pain.
I followed Peter Elbow’s advice of “freewriting,” letting it come uncensored, pen flying, words repeating. Over and over I told myself, “It’s just for me. No one will ever read it.” I’d been censored for fifty years, repressed memories kept under the lid, so I needed to pour out unrestrained the pain, shame, and incoherence that had belonged to the little girl of long ago.
At times the journaling would soar into poetry, either the poetry of desperation or of joy, but I had to keep the clear intention that it was just for me, to allow the purity of expression. Through the act of writing I learned a lot about self-expression.
After six years of this inner work I got the inspiration to write a memoir, the idea arising from gratitude for the process and joy at my new freedom. The new writing was clearly, startlingly, different. Having an audience in mind gave me responsibility for making a narrative thread, finding a clear voice to address the reader, and honing the craft to carry the story forward. It was hard, often frightening, work to bring the innermost feelings to the surface in this new way and articulate them for unseen others. It was delightful work to find dialogue, and difficult to pare and cut my burgeoning prose to shape the book with the help of editorial readers.
The result is my memoir The River of Forgetting: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse. I drew on my journals all through the writing process to refresh my memory and find vivid scenes and pieces of dialogue. I also incorporated pieces of my journals into the book as quotations to give a sense of the inner turmoil, but I embedded them in narrative to give the reader the security of a story with beginning, middle, and end.
Now that the book is published I can see how writing it also served a therapeutic purpose, even though that was not my aim. Through the crafting process, I had to clarify, condense, and name the main themes of self-doubt, grief, mistrust, anger, and then trust, love, and letting go. Paradoxically, delineating and describing my intense confusion for others gave me confidence in myself and belief in my story.
To me the difference between journaling and writing for others is sometimes clear and sometimes blurry. However, I have tried to read some memoirs of trauma that are formed entirely of journal entries, and they felt frightening, swirling, dense, and unreadable. I believe that when writing for others about difficult material, the writer has a responsibility to create a structure, a boat, that will hold the reader and bring her safely across the choppy seas. You could call it the ark of the story.
About the Author
Jane Rowan taught science for three decades in a private college, then retired to pursue the creative life. Her memoir, The River of Forgetting: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse (Booksmyth Press 2010) was called “brave and inspirational” by Ellen Bass, co-author of The Courage to Heal. An excerpt appeared in Women Reinvented: True Stories of Empowerment and Change. Jane has published numerous articles and the self-help booklet Caring for the Child Within—A Manual for Grownups, available through her website (www.janerowan.com).
Visit Jane at www.janerowan.com or find her on Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/riverforgetting . The River of Forgetting can be purchased at www.riverofforgetting.com or at Amazon