By Rebecca Morrison
After losing my legal contracting job at the beginning of the pandemic, I put my fears aside and pursued my decades-long dream of writing a memoir. I’d been a lawyer for over twenty years and didn’t know much about creative nonfiction. So, I signed up for an online writing class hoping it would give me the push I needed to pursue this impossible seeming goal.
With each class I took and each story I wrote, the fire that had been burning for years within me to write a memoir grew. Bit by bit, I learned to improve my writing and tell my complicated, sometimes dark, mother-daughter story and the struggle with my weight and body image.
When my first essay was accepted for national publication, I reached out to my mother and told her I wanted to pursue a writing career and my goal was to tell our story in a memoir. We’d spent years working on our relationship, being honest about our heartache and regrets and learning to love each other. I was scared she would see my desire to share our complicated past as an attack. But she didn’t. She said she supported my decision and would stand by me no matter what I wanted to write.
So, I went in full force and started to write my memoir. When I was around 50 pages in, I met Pronoy Sarkar, Senior Editor at Little, Brown, a publishing house, at an author panel. I told him about my memoir and publishing goals. He gave me advice that would change the course of my career. He told me to start publishing essays before writing the memoir. He said publishing essays would do several important things:
1) Help me find my writing voice;
2) Show which stories resonated most with me and my readers; and
3) Make it easier for me to know if I want to dedicate years of my life writing about these parts of my life.
He was adamant about this plan.
In the next twelve months, I published a dozen essays in national publications. They contained important elements of my memoir. Pronoy was right. It helped me fine-tune my voice and figure out which stories connected most with my readers and me.
Then the direction of my writing changed again. I met Joy Peskin, a children’s book publisher, who after reading my essays suggested I write a middle grade novel based on my childhood. I’d never considered writing fiction but was intrigued. I spent the next eight months turning my childhood memories into a novel. The experience was incredibly rewarding. After sending the draft to a group of teen girls and young women, the feedback I got was that the novel had the same depth and gravity as my personal essays.
In the midst of finalizing my middle grade novel, I published a mother-daughter essay on the Today Show website. The title was, “As a Girl, My Mom Taught Me That Being Fat Was the Worse Thing a Woman Could Be.” It went viral.
Friends and family from around the country called my mother asking if she was okay. How could her daughter say those terrible things about her, the woman they knew to be so loving and kind, they asked.
“Everyone thinks I’m a monster,” she said on the phone, struggling to take in a breath between sobs. With my heart twisted and my hands shaking, I explained that if they had read the entire essay they would have seen that I had also written about her love and understanding and our current close relationship.
She said she couldn’t talk about it anymore and hung up.
A few hours later, she called me back. “I don’t care what anyone says. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Go after your dreams. I love you. Keep writing.”
As a tear escaped my eye, I thought what if my son wanted to write about the times I’d been cruel, unfeeling, and dismissive? And my friends and family read those words and judged me, as they surely would. How would I handle it? Surely, not as well as my mother. I told her I’d keep going.
But when it came time to write my memoir proposal, I froze. Every time I sat down to work on it, I broke out in a cold sweat. The thought of writing the memoir was tearing me apart. After many sleepless nights, I decided I wanted to write a novel based on my life instead of a memoir.
Here are the things that convinced me novelizing my memoir was right for me. If you’re struggling between writing a memoir or a novelized version of your life, consider these elements:
1. Writing and publishing personal essays about my life helped me satisfy an itch I’d had for decades to connect with others and make them feel less alone in their struggles. It also helped me heal and release unresolved feelings I’d been carrying.
2. While writing the essays, I’d only thought of the impact on the people in my essays, namely my mother and me. But after publishing them, I understood that the essays brought up difficult feelings for my siblings who had their own relationship with my mother. The pieces also affected our larger family and friend groups. They felt the reverberations of my stories in ways I could have never imagined. I also realized my memoir, which would contain a darkness way beyond the essays, could be used by people that have their own agenda to hurt my mother and to mock her, to take out their feelings of resentment, jealousy, pettiness, on her. That’s not something I wanted to risk, especially now that our relationship had reached such an open and loving place.
3. Writing the children’s novel showed me I could take meaningful parts of my life and turn them into a story that could help others feel seen and empowered while giving me the flexibility to fill in parts I didn’t remember well and enhance elements to create a well-rounded compelling story. The experience also showed me I could get the catharsis I was seeking without having to reveal the details of my family and my trauma.
We can be never be sure of the consequences of writing a memoir – the people we might have helped with our truth or the pain it might have brought for our family and friends. But what we can do is take steps to understand our stories, our relationships and ourselves and make the best decisions based on what we learn. __
Rebecca Morrison is a lawyer and writer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Today Show, Newsweek, NBC News, HuffPost, Salon, Insider and The Independent. She’s completing a middle grade novel based on her childhood as an Iranian immigrant trying to fit into her family, school and new homeland in America. You can find her work and subscribe to her newsletter on www.rebeccakmorrison.com .
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