Why Write Memoirs?

Abstract

This is a report and a personal reflection on a memoir-writing group that has been meeting monthly for the last 15 years. Writing and then reading a memoir aloud bring the profoundly personal to a communal space. Whenever this experience of the personal and the universal meet in public, a certain kind of integration takes place within the individual. When I write on the specificity of my journey at its beginning, detours in the middle, and struggles of my current phase of life, I feel released from a sense of a solitary confinement in the memory of the event. Then comes a feeling of satisfaction once I have shared the words with others. Each memoir tends to find a place in the universality of human life, while simultaneously it is like no other.What is personal finds commonality among those who write and share memoirs. Sometimes sharing what is private leads to the unlocking of certain forces that want and need to live through me. A memoir-writing group is different from a one-on-one psychotherapy or analytic session or a writing group because there is no interpretation, no critiquing of the writing, and very little transferential experience. The memoir tends to open itself up and out as it is being written and, as importantly, when it is heard, explored, and reflected upon.