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To tell the truth in a memoir may seem simple, but in practice it is almost never so.

It is, first of all, not clear what the truth may be: yours or someone else’s? Then also, the truth may be submerged beneath layers of pain that can prompt you to hide it from everyone—and yourself.

The easy truth is —well—easy! The hard truth isn’t.

When I suggest you must tell the truth, I don’t mean the easy truth like “I had a brother and a sister,” but the hard truth that makes you flinch, a truth like “my mother disliked her kids—especially me” or “I was abused as a child.”

While not everyone has painful memories that are difficult to share, many people do. If this is you, I think you know what your hard truth is. Consider those aspects of your life you don’t particularly feel like sharing. That is, those are hard to share, but when you tell the truth of those memories, you are likely to feel so much better later and to have produced a much better memoir.

Truth and Pain

When you tell the truth, you may find yourself immersed in pain. Perhaps you need to read the posts of dealing with pain in memoir writing. I do not believe that you need to hurt yourself when you tell the truth but you must learn to own your  life experience and to be honest about it.

What I have found in my workshops is that other writers almost always pick up when a writer has decided not to tell the truth and writes inaccuracies or “whitewashing” into a text. It somehow stands out… so don’t do it. You won’t get away with it. Most readers will sense there is a problem—even if they don’t know what it is.

In conclusion

If you avoid telling the truth, you may have an easier time in the writing but you won’t be satisfied in the end with the memoir you have written.

Read the posts below, learn some useful techniques and be brave about telling it like it was.

the memoir writing process

Is this really a memoir? You tell me…

I wrote a lengthy reply to Gayle to her question concerning my recent post, “Another Memoir Finished: What Was the Writing Process?” She asked a legitimate question about whether A Sugary Frosting is really a memoir: “Can you call it a memoir when you embellish the writings of your wife and even added stories that […]

publish a book

Telling The Truth In A Memoir

“If you call a book a memoir, the understanding is that to the best of your knowledge the facts, and what can be verifiable, are the truth. …”