The Trauma Memoir

On Being Funny/Not Funny

I met with a couple agents recently to talk about doing some business together (in the form of HPE editing and scouting for them), and they told me that very few publishers are interested in trauma memoirs these days. I both understood and recoiled at this. What other kind of memoir is there? The most comic memoirs—Running With Scissors, Angela’s Ashes, Fun Home, Hyerbole and a Half, hell even Bossypants—are at least threaded through with trauma. In the latter, Tina Fey turns a life of enduring sexism into a very funny episodic narrative. She mentions an incident during which a stranger slashed her face with a knife when she was just in kindergarten. Afterward, adults bathed her in special treatment: “I accepted all the attention at face value and proceeded through life as if I really were extraordinary.” (Behold the funny/not funny sentence.)

We live in a time that offers daily traumas or reminders of potential trauma. I do not need to list them. If you don’t know, you are better at compartmentalizing than I am. And you need to read more news.

After that agent meeting, I thought of my clients, some who want to tell their stories that involve painful losses and traumatic episodes. I thought of the publishing business, which in its rapid consolidation, leans more toward entertainment and less toward art. There is, of course, nothing wrong with entertainment. I too lean more toward it than I used to. I have a guilty, very guilty pleasure and it is romantic reality TV. Utter crap like Love is Blind and 90 Day Fiancé. I felt marginally less guilty when I heard an interview with Greta Gerwig the other day—apparently she loves this stuff too. She said something like, “It lets you witness actual love.” Who wouldn’t want this? Who wouldn’t rather watch love than trauma right now, when the news offers so much heartache?

I meant to sit down and write more of Life Book, which is essentially my own trauma memoir about mother loss and pregnancy loss and divorce, as well as the trauma of our country’s splintering. It’s been a longish minute since I last wrote anything new for it, and I found myself resisting getting back into it, not because the market is no longer interested in trauma, but because I may no longer be.

A friend who is working on her memoir takes part in a writing group. She told me about the devastating memoirs the others have written: they’ve described in vivid detail rape, incest, war, molestation. Is it ok to write about these things? she wondered aloud. Is it ok not to want to read about them? I asked in reply.

You must write whatever you want to write, but it doesn’t hurt to realize that readers might choose to pick up something more entertaining or healing or just plain soothing right now. There’s writing and there’s publishing. There’s confession and there’s storytelling, and one is for you, and one is for someone else. It is possible to incorporate trauma into your memoir, to sit beside this trauma, and then to write toward other places. In Emily Dickinson’s words, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” I think it is the retraumatizing of the reader that we’d do well to try to avoid now.

In memoir, the writer is usually a character and a god at the same time, the subject and the director. In my editing, I find myself focusing more on teaching writers to manipulate their prose and narratives, to exert more control and serve less as a cameraperson.  

The terrific Parul Sehgal wrote in The New Yorker of the trauma plot in fiction: “It flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority.” 

Energy can come from the power derived from a change. If we change our vantage point of trauma, we may be able to capture energy there. If you feel bored with what you are writing, the reader will also. Life Book isn’t just about trauma, of course. It’s also about joy and politics, friendship and collaboration and imperfectly surviving and the importance of dependence and the history of independence. I’ll keep this mind as I dive back in.

I began this post at my friend’s house on the Cape. Three of us were there, and all three have endured incredibly trying things in the past four years, my divorce paling in comparison with their losses, sadly. We each have and brought a dog, and to our horror, within minutes of meeting each other, the dogs formed a vibrant humping line. We realized that we all had alphas. “Cookie’s an asshole,” said Cookie’s owner, yanking the spaniel away from my chihuahua mix’s hindquarters while Gabriel the recent rescue from Mexico remained attached to Cookie. It was mortifying, and then funny, really, and overshadowed everything sad and wrong in our lives and the world at large, and maybe this is the point of writing: to distract your reader. Not with dogs humping, of course, but with something that lends perspective and dimension. If not something funny, then something absurd, beautiful, strange, something that allows both you and the reader a form of release. Aristotle described catharsis as the effect of tragedy on the audience. If the point of tragedy is, as he stated, to evoke “terror and pity,” then the writer’s fabricated world serves as a safe place to receive the audience’s fear and anxiety.

I believe that as writers now, we owe it to readers to create thoughtfully considered worlds, to manipulate our storytelling so as not to add to the trauma of our age. I do not mean to minimize anyone’s trauma. In contrast, I mean to encourage writers to think of ways to recount their own traumas with less reliance on straight reportage and more on fractured narrative, humor, inspiration, genre-blending, and whatever else draws the reader toward absorption and enjoyment.