Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature

by Meredith Maran

I waited until the book was in galleys to give it to my mother. Here’s what I learned: it was useless to have worried about what would upset her. She was angry about tiny details in the book that I hadn’t even considered, and yet the things I did think would upset her sailed right by. The moral of the story was, We can’t know what is going to impact another person, or why. After I gave my mother the galleys, her therapist called and asked me to meet with her. What can I say? We were all New York Jews. I gave the therapist a set of galleys so she could read it before my mother did. After she read it, she said she didn’t think there was anything that would upset my mother, that it was very fair to her. I had two thoughts. First, that this therapist didn’t know my mother at all, and second, that my mother had been wasting her money for years. Ultimately, though it took a long time to really sink in, my mother was devastated by the memoir. She was a very difficult person, and when people in her life heard that her daughter had written a memoir, they all read it as a way of trying to understand her: her doorman, her lawyer, her dentist, her neighbors. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing happening. It was like she was in The Truman Show. The whole thing was very sad and painful, but not painful enough for me to wish I hadn’t written the book.