What it Really Takes to Write a Memoir

and why memoir writers are a bit cross right now

Quick News

Summer at Notes from the Margin

My memoir, The Ghost Lake

My poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk

A note on the upcoming paid subscriber Write Along:

I’ve had to move the date from the 24th to the 25th as I’d forgotten the 24th is my husband’s birthday and we have plans. Apologies, I am both a terrible planner snd a terrible wife.

What it Takes to Write a Memoir

There’s been quite a lot in the news recently about memoir and factual correctness versus the literary art of telling a story through memoir. I’m not here to bash anyone, but I wanted to tell you what it actually takes to write memoir.

I am heading towards the first anniversary of the publication of my memoir, The Ghost Lake, which came out in August 2024. I’m at a point in my publication journey where all of the major milestones have been met - hardback publication, publicity tour, paperback publication, and I have now had the last of the advance instalments. Whoosh. What a journey!

What happens now is that I continue to plug and push The Ghost Lake where I can - festivals, podcasts, events, workshops, (Please do get in touch if you’d like me to come and speak about The Ghost Lake at your event) and I also begin turning my face, like a sunflower, towards the sun of a new project. This week I was delighted to be able to tell people that I have been selected as a Folger Artistic Fellow for 2025-26, to work on my first literary historical fiction novel. This is a huge milestone for me on a personal level, a career level and as a kind of validation of my writing and my ideas. Now I just have to write the novel. Yikes.

This has been a lovely way of marking a transition into the next project, a kind of official permission to turn away from memoir for a while, and I am finding the space away from The Ghost Lake, which has dominated my life for the last five ish years, refreshing. To be writing something that isn’t about myself is a kind of relief.

I can only speak for myself when I talk about writing memoir, as not everyone’s memoir will cover trauma as mine did. Not everyone will have the worm-holes to traumatic experience that I did. Do. But if you are writing a memoir that touches on your trauma, I want to tell you to be careful, be careful with your bruisable heart, because it will get bruised. It’s inevitable. If you are writing about pain, then you re-open the wound.

The Ghost Lake is a memoir in which I take a series of pilgrimages around the landscape I grew up on - the site of an ancient extinct lake and the site of some incredible archaeology - in order to find a way of accepting myself and my life experiences, and finding a way to belong. It’s about reconnecting to the landscape around me as a way to reconnect to myself after finding myself not really knowing who I was. I was feeling lost, after years of grief around the death of my baby daughter, failed IVF, miscarriages, and the grief of accepting childlessness as part of my life story. I did not actually set out to write about that, I actually set out to write about landscape and working class heritage, the difficulties of finding a platform for your voice as a working class person, what it meant to be rural working class. What came out at the end of the writing process was a memoir that explores the interconnectedness of places of belonging, and not belonging, a memoir that compares the internal sense of belonging with the way that society categorises belonging, and how, for me, to reconnect to an ancient landscape, and the people who lived before me on that landscape, was a way to find out who I was.

It’s complex. I like to think it’s nuanced. And there is no sunset redemption or cure to ride into at the end. Rather, the story continues, out of frame, where I continue: finding the same astonishment in nature, history, the landscape, the interconnectedness in life, the wonder of the human experience, the compulsion to create. Even now, after years of writing and promotion, I find it difficult to explain to people what the book is about, because it does not fit neatly into one category.

But Life does not fit into one category, it’s not neatly boxed up, recovery is not a tidy experience, and when readers who may be seeking connection for their own trauma read memoirs of overcoming through nature, or curing through nature or landscape, or conquering themselves, I can’t help but feel that that is a bit misleading.

Of course, in the nuanced complex way that life lays itself out for me, I am able to also say that this is possibly my interpretation as a neurodivergent who hates lying and hates being lied to. Sometimes what I perceive as an untruth is actually the way that the normals work, they don’t see it as a lie, rather just a part of the human way of being. Endless confusion. How do they cope?

Writing memoir is rewarding, but it is also painful.

I’m not here to warn you not to write memoir, I’m here to tell you to write the memoir, to use your authentic voice and to tell your story. But I’m also here to tell you that the reality of writing authentic memoir is that there is a certain level of retraumatising that goes on every time you step in front of an audience. This retraumatising will be better or worse depending on what is happening in your life. For example, my dad died at the beginning of the writing of the book. The book came out around the anniversary of his death and I genuinely felt ok, happy to write, happy to talk, happy to keep placing myself in situations that I found a bit stressful - travel, peopling - all the things you do as an author promoting their book. I was happy to talk about the loss of my daughter too, I have been doing this since she died, have written about it, talked about it, even led small level campaigns around stopping what happened to her happening to other families. But then my mum got cancer when the paperback was due out and we, as a family, were back at the hospital where we’d switched my dad’s life support off, and facing losing the other half of our parents, and I ground to a stop. My armour no longer existed. The cancer treatment took up an enormous amount of time - an eighty mile round trip to the hospital every day for weeks, with awful complications because of my mum’s autoimmune conditions. I couldn’t have found the time to work, and instead I shuffled work around, found other ways of paying my bills etc. But I felt terrible that it was all happening when not only the paperback of The Ghost Lake was coming out, but also my poetry collection. I still feel bad about it. Everyone at Nine Arches, and everyone at The Borough Press were very supportive and kind about it. Even without the time constraints of caring for someone going through intense cancer treatment, there is absolutely no way that I would have been able to step in front of an audience and talk about the trauma in the book, or to even read poems from my collection.

I’m incredibly lucky to have had a really really good team working with me on The Ghost Lake, my agent

Caro Clarke

is someone who I can be honest with about whether I can cope with certain aspects of promotion. The team of publicists and agents at The Borough press similarly looked after me, were aware of the traumatising effect of this sort of memoir and they cared for my wellbeing, are still doing so. I am very lucky in that respect, I have heard horror stories from other authors about other agents and publishers.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that authentic stories absolutely should be on the shelves of bookshops. That this is the human condition. You are very lucky if you get through life without some element of life trauma that you will have to find a way to cope with if you are going to survive, and one of those ways of coping for a lot of people is to search for other stories - art, books, television, film - to find their way to belonging with that traumatic life experience. People with a sense that they don’t fit in or don’t belong in the world are seeking ways to accept that non-belonging. One of the most rewarding parts of this experience, the most humbling parts of the experience, are at the end of a reading or event when I get to talk to people about their own experiences. These are often happy experiences as well as trauma experiences, which they feel comfortable enough with me, to share. We talk about history, about growing up with a farming heritage in their family narrative, about what it meant to be wild rural kids about what it means to not fit in, and we talk about infertility and about the loss of children and the alternative universe you exist in after losing a baby. I would not change this for the world. I feel like I have a purpose when this happens.

What I’m also saying is that memoir is not like other genres, and needs to be treated as such. Just because a lot of people write memoir about trauma doesn’t mean it is easy to either write or promote.

This is, I think, also why The Salt Path situation has evoked such a reaction from both readers, and writers of memoir, who know what it takes to write about, and promote books about trauma.

I do not know what the true story of the Salt Path is and I am not going to shit on another writer without all the facts, which we’ll never really have. But my first thought on reading that the true story might have been unauthentic was how unfair it was to those people who have to fight doubly hard to have their stories reach a bookshelf in Waterstones in whatever genre, and also how much of themselves memoir writers have to give of themselves to sit on a bookshelf in Waterstones. How that vulnerability doesn’t stop, you just give a little bit of yourself to everyone who buys it, lends it, listens to it. How brave those people are to share their story, to actively stand in front of people with their wounds on show.

My advice, if you are going to write about trauma, memoir, anything that involves your own painful experiences, is to do it. Absolutely do it. But be prepared. By that I mean know what the boundaries are around your own self care, your own mental health and have a team around you that will help you to put those boundaries in place, who will support you. A team that understands how draining memoir can be, but how necessary it is too.

Thanks for reading.

A last little note about the new project - a massive thank you to all the people who celebrated with me on news of the fellowship. It absolutely Made my day, one of those life/career moments that means the hard work is worth it.

Until next time

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