I’m grappling with a writing dilemma I want to share with you. I’m in the early stages of writing a memoir. By “early” I mean I haven’t written a dang word yet. Currently, I’m brainstorming the outline but already I can see a challenge.

I’ll use one principle from philosophy and two concepts from psychology to help explain the struggle.

From psychology, we get ‘depersonalize’ which means to divest someone of human characteristics or individuality. The more extreme concept in the same vain is ‘demonize’ where we not only divest others of characteristics but exaggerate the negative ones or make-up evil ones.

We can be prone to do this in the heat of an argument, “You ALWAYS forget my birthday. It’s clear you don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

We tell others what an evil S.O.B. our ex was or gossip about the busy-body neighbor employing descriptions that may fall short of fair.

During war time or a political campaign, we’re liable to go further.

One of the principles taught in college Ethics classes, developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, is that one should always treat others as an end in themselves, and never merely as a means.

A simple way of understanding this is that you can’t use people; you must respect their rights and needs. So slavery is immoral because you are using people to get work done without consideration of the rights of the people you make slaves.

The dilemma I face is how to write a memoir that deals with difficult themes—alcohol addiction, drug abuse, pedophilia, incest—without depersonalizing or demonizing any of the characters. Every “character” is also a “person.”

I can’t use them simply as a means of telling my story. How do I treat them as an end in themselves?

I may be hyper-sensitive to this concern because I saw my older sister treated as a means by a writer in the Detroit Free Press (I think her name was Robin).

After coming out of rehab for crack addiction, my sister worked hard to avoid temptation. She didn’t see former friends who used or hang out in neighborhoods where a crack dealer manned the corner.

At the same time she left rehab, the state of Michigan was running anti-drug ads on television that featured a scene where someone lit a crack pipe, with a close up of the pipe and flame.
The state’s intent was to discourage drug use, but when my sister saw this image, it triggered a craving for the drug more than anything else in her day.

She doubted she was the only recovering addict experiencing this reaction.

My sister felt images of the dark side effects of crack addiction rather than the pipe would be more effective.

She reached out to the Robin in an effort to get someone to listen. Robin did listen. She came to my sister’s house and interviewed her. She then wrote a story featuring aspects of my sister’s story, but the point of Robin’s article was how drug addicts shouldn’t be weak, that they had to learn to face temptations. (No duh.)

Robin never mentioned my sister’s argument about which images in an anti-drug commercial might produce better results.

Robin used my sister as a *means* to argue her own point. If she had honored my sister’s argument as well, she could have treated my sister *as an end in herself,* not merely as a *means*.

I think Robin didn’t include my sister’s concern for fear it would undermine her point. Instead, she used my sister as an example of *how not to be*.
I want to believe that Robin hoped to empower recovering addicts with her column.
Sadly, she left one of them feeling diminished and dehumanized.

I recently found some writing encouragement in a quote from Patricia Hampl, shared by fellow blogger Helen at agelesspossibilities.org (emphasis added):

Memoir is not what happened (if we’re lucky, that’s the best journalism). It is what has happened over time, in the mind, in the life as it attends to these tantalizing, dismaying, broken bits of life history. Such personal writing is, as the essay is, ‘an attempt.’ It is a try at the truth. The truth of a self in the world.

The encouragement comes from the hope that readers of memoirs have this idea in the back of their minds as they read—that my words are “a try” at truth.

If a writer misses the mark and ends up demonizing any of her ‘characters,’ readers know that the writer relates past events from one point-of-view, skewed by perceptions and the vagaries of memory. The readers themselves won’t demonize the person just because the writer did.
Megan O’Grady recently wrote in the New York Times Magazine:

Now that self-authorship is a form of digital hobby, we’re savvy to the fact that our versions of events tend to be freighted with self-interest (“my truth,” “my journey”), that there’s a power dynamic at play in who owns the narrative and that our experiences don’t generally have a clear takeaway unless we frame them just so…There’s an art to memory, and our personal stories become symbolic over time, the juicy onions and ghostly, maternal arachnids emblematic of a more complex whole.

Despite the comforting notion that it’s okay if I mess up because of my readers’ awareness, I mean to be as diligent as I can. Even when the sins of characters are significant, I don’t want to turn the sinner into a caricature. Adding depth to their part of the story—their histories, stories, challenges—will go some distance to treating the other people in the memoir as ends in themselves.

In Writing About Your Life, William Zinsser explains how Mary Karr, in The Liar’s Club and Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life handled the ‘sinners’ in their memoirs:

[T]hey look back with compassion…they were written with love. They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various states of brokenness. There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge; the authors are as honest about their own young selves as they are about the sins of their elders.

While I’ve focused on my duties as a writer, honoring the whole person, not just presenting some caricature version of them to ourselves and others, is a moral obligation all the time. I’ll try to remember that the next time hubby shrinks my cashmere in the dryer. That man NEVER reads a laundry label!

Through a Mirror, Darkly

December Book Diary

Thoughts Across Time and Space