Initially, my goal had been to write the story of my entering and leaving priesthood. After all, it had been a big part of my life; eight years preparing in a seminary and school of theology followed by ten years serving in a number of assignments. The workshops and courses I took and the books I read introduced me to life writing, a genre that includes autobiography, memoir, diary and journal. I liked the sound of it given that my first teachers of English composition in elementary school had encouraged us to write about what we knew. That was my first mistake. How presumptuous it was of me to assume I knew my own life. It took the discipline of writing draft after draft to shatter that myth.
It had indeed seemed simple enough at first, like an invigorating hike up a hill on a pleasant spring day. Get up an hour or two earlier every morning and tap away at the keyboard; I’d have a book-length manuscript in no time. But it wasn’t a hill and the spring day thing wouldn’t last. Quickly the terrain became more rugged. The wind shifted; darkness settled and the temperature dropped. I found myself out of my element, alone on the mountain with no protection from my memories, my failures and my repressed emotions, naked and exposed to the questions I had long dodged about the entirety of my life. Who had I wanted to become and how had I become the person I did?
Three challenges in particular haunted me throughout the course of various drafts and rewrites. The first involved the memories themselves, those that came with painful emotions attached. I tried and tried to write around them as if they didn’t exist, but they would not go away. The second challenge came from the cast of characters, from the real people who populated my work of nonfiction. It was one thing to expose myself to scrutiny, but what right did I have to drag others into the public eye? The third and most difficult challenge was that of truthfulness. Did I have to approach the task with the sort of fundamentalism some impose on sacred scripture? Was I bound to journalistic literalness or was there room for imaginative freedom?
On the first two problems, a Toronto editor, Brian Henry, provided consultation and manuscript evaluation. He drummed it into me that it was precisely my painful emotions that were the story. He gave me permission to change names and settings to let my characters retain some anonymity. On the third challenge, two other guides also crossed my path. The first, my instructor in a summer writing program, was Beth Kephart who went on to author Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir (New York, Gotham Books, 2013.) The second was George Fetherling, the editor of an anthology entitled The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs (Toronto, Random House, 2001.) In his preface to the book he wrote that memoirists were “not morally bound to remember details exactly as they were or to record events in precisely their true order. They answer to a higher, more impressionistic, more fictive type of truth… (They) create from actual experience but allow themselves the fiction writer’s freedom of rearranging and telescoping in order to make what happened worthy of being called a tale.”
Good reads: George Fetherling. The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs. Toronto, Random House, 2001. Frank McCourt. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. New York, Touchstone, 1999. Alice Munro. The View From Castle Rock. New York, Vintage, 2006. Michael Ondaatje. Running in the Family. New York, Vintage, 1982. Jill Bolte Taylor. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. New York, Plume, 2006.