Your vision
will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside; awakens. — Carl Jung.
When someone asks me to write a memoir for them, I have some important questions:
• When did you decide to write this book?
• What is your vision?
• Who is your target audience?
• How do you think I can help you?
These are relatively easy questions to answer, but the following question is a lot more complicated.
Why are you writing this book?
The following answers put me on red alert.
• My agent thinks it’ll be good for my career.
• I want to make a shitload of money.
• I want to get revenge on a bad boyfriend.
These reasons raise red flags.
The following answers make me want to go forward.
• I want to get to know myself better.
• I have a vision and I want to explore it.
• I want to find a way to process my life.
These reasons are creative and encouraging.
But there is one answer that shows up in disguise:
• I want to inspire other people.
It sounds innocent enough, but writing a memoir is a personal experience. You have to do it for yourself first. If it ends up inspiring other people that’s a plus, but writing your life story for someone else or for acknowledgment or compliments doesn’t end well.
When I start a new project, I encourage my client to look at the highlights of her life. Seeing what you’ve accomplished is a rewarding experience. It feels good to talk about your triumphs. Positive outcomes. Shining successes. Great loves and close families. These things are enviable and make you feel proud. You talk about what keeps your relationship sexy. What makes your family root for each other. The experience is a happy one . . . until you get to the lowlights.
Failures. Addictions. Public divorces. Family feuds. You feel depressed and ashamed as things
emerge that you tucked away and forgot about. You have to plow through these life lessons for yourself, not for anyone else. My clients rarely expect to be facing that kind of vulnerability. If you decide to only scratch the surface and leave out the difficulties and challenges, a reader will lose interest. If you decide to dig deep and turn your life inside out for your own growth, a reader will recommend your book to a friend.
I had a famous client who thought that writing a memoir would be a fun thing to do. A walk in the park. During the first meeting, she was enthusiastic. She wanted to show people how talented she was and what a wonderful life she had. We sat on her bed as she told me about the film roles that she did. Her concert tours. Her friends. She loved telling her stories but I became concerned when I asked her about the various people with whom she had worked. “This one was lovely,” she said. “That one was lovely.” They were all lovely. That couldn’t be true and it would be a whitewashed book.
That was a whole lot of “lovely” going on. I was discouraged. It’s not that I wanted her life to be harder and more depressing. I just wanted it to be real. When I asked her about her childhood, I expected her to say it was lovely. She didn’t. She told me that her parents got a divorce when she was young and I asked her what impact that had on her.
“It was really hard on my sister,” she told me. “It was a great disappointment for my mother.”
“You just told me about your sister and your mother. What about you?”
She closed her eyes and her hand flew up to her forehead. “I’m having a migraine,” she said.
She lay down. “Please call Evelyn.” That was her assistant. Evelyn came running. “You better go,” she said to me. “She won’t be able to work anymore today.”
I had another client who was the polar opposite. She looked at her life, not from someone else’s vision of her or how she wanted to be seen. She went deep inside to know and to express herself. She knew how to laugh at herself and the book was successful and a satisfying project for both of us.
Readers want to relate to a real person. Not a Barbie doll. They don’t want someone else’s perfect life to make them feel badly about their own. They want to get to know a multi-faceted person with whom they can relate. A human being with human experiences.
When you do something for someone on the outside and leave yourself out, it will be a meaningless gesture. When you do it for yourself, when you’re being authentic and you have a sense of humor about yourself, you’ll touch a reader’s heart and encourage them to find the courage to tell their own stories.
Whoopi Goldberg said the following about her new memoir, “I think of myself very differently than
other people do. So it’s an opportunity to learn more about me.”
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