memoir | ENG 5020: Writing Theory & Practice

Alyssa try not to bring up Edi Giunta or memoir in your blog challenge: failed.

I promise this week’s blog will be shorter, if only because I have some supplemental reading I am providing you all with. I apologize in advance.

The idea of this reading—that writing can be a tool for healing for the body and the soul—is something I am intimately familiar with. Writing has always been an outlet for me. I think you can pick any writer off the street, and nine times out of ten, they would tell you that the writing process is healing for them, too. I love seeing all the way healing comes out of writing, and I love reading Pennebaker and Chung’s explanations as to why it works.

In line with last week’s theme of looking back at our old work and admiring our fluidity, inspired by this week’s theme of writing as healing, I decided to look back at my process essay that I wrote after finishing my memoir for class. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I thought I would share a revised excerpt with you all here:

I did not know where writing this memoir would lead me. I started with a vague idea of what I wanted to write, but I did not know how I would do it. I did not know why I would write it. However, after these four months, I found a common thread between my pieces: these are all moments I know happened. I could tell you what happened, give you a timeline, describe the events on their surface level. I could not tell you what effects these moments had on me, until now.

I write to process. I create, erase, and reshape words until I am once again familiar with the face of my youth. I trace the outline of myself, guided by the writers before me. Louise DeSalvo. Margaux Fragoso. Melida Rodas. Emily Bernard. They hold my hand as I look into the mirror.

If I push too hard, the glass will shatter. I cannot be my younger self again; I cannot fix her problems. I cannot tell her it will be okay. All I can do is look at her through the mirror of memoir, and answer her questions for myself. Who are you? I hope she is fine.

In writing “A Rosary Held So Tight It Leaves Marks”, I see myself through the hundreds of eyes in the mirror. I see myself from the Ikea bookshelf in my childhood room. I see myself from the St. Clare’s bathroom mirror. I see myself in glass, in mugs and phone screens. Memoir surrounds me; I have become comfortable with it.

I would also like to leave you all with another piece of writing that has stuck with me for a long time—the book Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo. DeSalvo, mentioned in my process essay, was a fellow writer of memoir, and recognized the power of writing. I’ve thought a lot about her recently during our class discussions, but I haven’t figured out how to bring her up until now. Quite literally the perfect book for this week! I find that the part of her work that is most relevant to our class discussions so far is her section on the writing process, where she argues that writing must be done in different stages to be effective for healing. She writes, “I’ve come to understand that the most healing way of approaching the writing process is to focus upon the potential and possibilities for growth rather than upon its problems and pitfalls. Knowing what each stage of the process affords us and making explicit our intention for using the process as a healing experience assure us that we will pass through each stage in the most enriching way possible” (DeSalvo, 1999). I am attaching to this blog post a PDF of this chapter for your enjoyment.

Writing as a Way of Healing_Louise Desalvo_Stages of the Writing Process Download

Very short blog post this week, but I just thought that sharing is caring—so, enjoy! (Also, no annotations because I was not printing out 40 pages. Sorry!)

Queer theory posits that identity, much like the act of writing, is fluid. Ever-changing. It requires grappling with boundaries and definitions that might have never been under consideration before. If I had any takeaways from this article (with which I struggled—it just felt so heady at times), it was this. I initially started writing this blog post as some way to connect this lesson with the other realizations I’ve had over the course of our class, but I found myself continuously led back to one idea: writing memoir.

I know I’ve made it a habit of including anecdotes with my blog posts. To be honest: I struggled with this one. It reminded me a bit of our first reading from Lauer—a lot of ideas that I agreed with, but did not know what to do with. I did not want to just write about being queer and being a writer, because that did not feel in line with the spirit of the article. I ended up reflecting on part of the memoir I had written in a class taught by Edi Giunta. While the content was about me being bisexual, I ended up realizing that the act of writing it was in itself pedagogically queer.

no annotations bc i did not get time to print this week </3, so here’s the first line of said memoir

If identity is fluid, memoir is the act of capturing your identity at one point in time. Past that, you must decide which identity you are writing from. You may be writing about your seven year old self, but whose voice are you using? The child version of you, or the version of you now, who has experienced more and knows more? How do those identities live in the same piece? What do you do with the inherent tension between them?

Memoir is also an act of grappling with your perceived identity. When you write memoir, it is your perception of who you are and what you have experienced. However, we cannot discount the fact that you have also been perceived and experienced. It is a constant negotiation of truth, and is just one of the many distinct layers of identity and experience we have. If you remember an experience one way and someone else remembers it differently, you have every right to write it as you remember. However, you must always be prepared to have it seen another way. My parents do not know I am queer. To them, I am as straight and cis as one can be. It does not help that my partner is, in fact, a straight cis man. That is the identity I have chosen to take up around them. While writing this memoir—and subsequently having it published online—I had to reconcile with the fact that there were two different spaces for me and my identities, and that there was a very real possibility that they might cross over. Still, I decided it was worth it.

As a genre, memoir is also well-equipped to discover what is possible in and out of its boundaries. “Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom” pulls from Ki Namaste and their argument that heterosexuality must exist for us to be able to understand queer theory. The boundaries of one form the definition of the other. That means we can, as writers, use queer theory and memoir as a space to play and explore. My favorite memoir, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, is a beautiful example of this. Not only does Machado use its subject matter (confronting the lack of domestic abuse narratives in lesbian stories, even though it is a grim reality) to question what is normal, but she also uses form as a way to push against norm. In the Dream House’s chapters are each based on different styles, genres, and tropes (ie., “Dream House as Horror”, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure”, or “Dream House as Famous Last Words”). By acknowledging what is the norm, writers are given the tools to push against boundaries.

My attempt to write about my queer memoir, in the end, was not just an attempt at inclusivity, thank god. There are also so many ideas that we’ve discussed in class that I see reflected in this article: writing as social commentary, the power of discovery, how shame robs writers. It feels good to be able to have a throughline in places I didn’t expect.