Truth and Secrets in Memoir Writing

When you’re nine years old, Aunt Jessie presses her powdered face to yours and whispers, “Now don’t you ever tell anyone what you saw. Your mother would just die.”

This is a scary thing to a child—to be entrusted with a secret that has so much power if could kill someone. Aunt Jessie probably didn’t mean to scare you like that, but words have power. Silence in the face of wrong has power. And when we begin to write our memoirs, we can get caught up in the webs of the past. Sometimes these webs are so tangled that we stop writing.

Memoirists struggle with the issue of revealing secrets as they search how to tell their own powerful, and sometimes shameful, truths. Secrets maintain a great power over us, and we are diminished by them. We become co-conspirators to the family dynamics that we don’t agree with and want to break away from. So we get caught in a conflict—to speak or not to speak. To remain closed and complicit, or to open up and take the risk of losing friends and family or shamed once again into submission. These conflicts haunt people all their lives, solidifying the silence. The way out of being trapped in the past is to write our own truths, but first it helps to get clear about the program that lives in our head. Read the Rest of This Article »