From The Wall Street Journal:
Is it worth writing a memoir if no one will ever read it?
Millions dream about spinning their life story into a best-seller. Most never get past the dreaming part, much less the first chapter.
But there are potential rewards other than riches and fame for those who try. According to psychologists and researchers, writing a memoir—even just for personal consumption—can help the author review and make sense of his or her life, come to terms with traumatic events and foster personal growth.
In fact, some of the therapeutic benefits may be lost if the writer thinks about too large an audience—or even a readership greater than one. The story can become less authentic. And there are other potential pitfalls to writing your life story. Writers can be thrown into despair if they have trouble reconciling past failures or placing traumatic events into a larger context.
“It really depends on the type of stories people tell to make sense of their lives,” says Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. People who can construct cohesive life narratives—where there are common threads and one event leads to the next—are likely to benefit from writing a memoir, he says, while those who view their lives as a series of random, unrelated events are not. His research has found that life narratives are especially beneficial if they focus on redemption and overcoming adversity.
. . . .
The act of writing about traumatic or difficult events can reduce stress, lessen depression and improve cognitive functioning, according to researchers. Several studies have even shown such writing to improve the function of the immune system.
Psychologists believe that by converting emotions and images into words, the author starts to organize and structure memories, particularly memories that may be difficult to comprehend and accept.
“You can’t simply dump an entire experience on a piece of paper,” says Joshua Smyth, distinguished professor of biobehavioral health and medicine at Pennsylvania State University. Through writing, he says, the memory of the experience can be broken down into small parts, allowing the event to be more easily processed and then laid to rest.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
Interesting. That’s how Guy Sajer’s devastating biography of WW2 on the Eastern front happened. He couldn’t sleep at night because of his memories (PTSD), and being awake, just started writing everything down. Getting it out on paper seemed to help. (He was a Frenchman from Alsace who served in the German army from the time of Stalingrad to the final surrender.)
Nah. Making sense of tragedies and recurring patterns is what a journal is good for. Why not just do that?
Memoirs are for people who have exciting lives and/or lived through exciting times. Even the inspirational ones about overcoming a tragedy tend to have exciting tragedies.
But I notice biographies/memoirs tend to have narrative arcs, a throughline that accounts for events or the character (virtues, vices, fears) of the subject of the bio/memoir. You can’t just tell your life story, there has to be a point to it. Remember the voice of Keith David in the Navy recruitment commercials: “If you wrote a book about your life, would anyone want to read it?”
Agreed.
How interesting can:
“Woke up, meant to do X, but got distracted by novel Y…”
be? Even I don’t find it absorbing.
I won’t write a memoir simply because I don’t want to examine how dull my life was for years (decades?) at a time.
My brother was in a car accident 30 years ago, resulting in severe brain damage. After 5 or 10 years, he recovered enough to start writing his “autobiography”, which is really a disjointed set of short memories and dreams. He worked on it for over 20 years, and his only expectation from it was making money. Lots of money. He can’t understand why publishers didn’t grab it up.
By his request, I put it on Amazon a couple of years ago. Now he can’t understand why he’s not a millionaire today.