What Was She Thinking?
An Exercise to Connect With Your Cringe-Worthy Self.
The key to a good memoir or personal essay is that your present day self collides with your past self on the page. The older, hopefully wiser you gets to look back at younger you and wonder: what was she thinking?
Sometimes this happens subtly as in Julia Leigh’s gorgeous memoir Avalanche: A Love Story about her heart wrenching decision to stop IVF treatment. “And I also said–it pains me now–that I needed to safeguard ‘my hard-won creative life.’ Why was I so quick to add any sort of caveat? Why did I set the two ways of being-motherhood, writing-at odds?”
It pains me now is present-day Julia, the writer, cringing at her younger self. It pains me now is her, all these years later, with the knowledge of how her life turned out, reflecting on her decisions of the past.
Another example is Mary Karr’s memoir Lit, which opens with a letter to her son in two parts: Now and Then. “Now” is the writer-version of herself wrestling the words on the page. “Then” is the scene she’s looking back on, the subject matter she’s tackling, the narrator of her memory. Both narrators are Mary Karr. Both have a story to tell. But only one can impart the lessons learned, the reflection, the takeaway: the Mary that lived her life and came out the other side.
Memoir isn’t what happened to you. It’s what you did with what happened to you.
So, here’s an exercise to let your present day self and your past self duke it out on the page:
It’s called “Now and Then.”
Time yourself for 20 minutes and write about a moment when your past self was at an impasse and didn’t know what to do.
If you can, try to write longhand in a notebook. Your brain slows down. You may notice different memories popping up.
When the 20 minutes are up, turn the page.
Now time yourself for another 20 minutes and write about how your present day self views that moment from your past. How did your past self resolve the conflict? Would your present day self do something different now? Do you have any regrets? What ifs? Ask yourself: What was your past self thinking?
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