Readers of my memoir, Swimming with Maya, often approach and say something like, “After reading your story, I feel as if I know you as an intimate friend. Wasn’t it hard to be so open about your life?”

Now, I find myself tested again as I put my marriage under the microscope. I’m writing about love later in life. I was 71 and Alex was 67 when we married in 2019. In my new memoir Better Late, I’ve found that it’s much harder to write about living people and ongoing relationships. Maya was dead when I wrote about her. The writing was difficult because I was grieving, and because writing is hard work. But I did not have to vet the work with her.

In this new book, I’m writing about Alex, about me, and about the glorious struggle of our marriage. It’s a difficult task because I have to take his feelings into account every step of the way. But I also want to be scrupulously honest. The same level of openness required when I wrote Swimming with Maya – and beyond – is what I’m striving for in Better Late. I recently completed a first draft of the manuscript. I’m now revising it based on feedback from beta readers.

Eleanor and Alex in 2019

Why we Read Memoir

We read memoir to experience another human being’s struggles. We want to discover how someone else copes with challenges, and hopefully to learn how to apply the writer’s hard-won wisdom to ourselves. As I work on revising a draft of Better Late I’m balancing the competing imperatives of love for my husband with ruthless honesty. I’m working to sharpen the narrative arc, to make the stakes in our situation clear, and the writing as compelling as possible.

I believe Alex is on the autism spectrum. But he has not been officially diagnosed, even though he exhibits all of the traits of a person with Asperger’s syndrome. This makes the story more fascinating and more challenging. We face all the same issues any couple confronts. However, our communication challenges make dealing with those issues both maddening and hilarious. I’m navigating that mixture of humor and pathos with all the skill I can muster.

Narrator versus Character

The radical openness required to write a compelling memoir is challenging. In Swimming with Maya the striptease of writing an honest account of my daughter’s life and death, and of my grief and ultimate recovery, was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. To the reader who thinks she knows me, I answer that the “me” she’s imagining is a version of myself that I created to serve the story. It’s not the real me.

The distinction is subtle but important. It is what writer Vivian Gornick calls the “narrating persona,” a speaker the writer creates to tease meaning out of her messy life. Gornick’s brief but powerful book on the art of the personal narrative, The Situation and the Story, is an essential tool for any writer wishing to create a page-turning memoir.

I had the difficult job of being both the teller of the tale, and a character in it. Gornick showed me that I needed a way to relate that character’s experiences and reflect upon them with a wisdom born of experience that far exceeded the character’s.

I created a narrating persona, an “Eleanor” that was me but also not me, who knew things I could never have known at the time the scenes I related occurred. Only this “me/not me” voice could hold the tension of the opposites she embodied with enough grace and detachment to tell the story honestly.

Becoming a Lion Tamer

Annie Dillard writes, “A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a. halter, but which you now can’t catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength.”

In her book, The Writing Life, Dillard advises visiting the lion every day to reassert your mastery over it. The trick is to leap over distractions, the obstacles that daily life artfully places in the writer’s path.

Thankfully, I have companions along the way, writers who face similar challenges and find ways to overcome them. My writing communities, The Writers Grotto and Left Margin Lit, offer support and help. In these places, I find a wealth of shared craft knowledge. In moments of discouragement, I turn to my peers, and the long line of writers before me, including Dillard, and send up a prayer for help. Miraculously, the surefooted goddess of determination eventually comes to my aid.

With help from beta readers and from a virtual community I recently joined called Pages and Platforms, I’m hard at work taming the lion. Please wish me good luck and let me know how you are faring in your creative struggles.

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