Sue William Silverman

FOR WOMEN ONLY: WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE A MEMOIR, WHAT TO EXPECT, AND TIPS ON MARKETING YOUR STORY

by Sue William Silverman

CHAPTER 1: I Want to Write a Best-selling Novel

Back in the early 1980s, shortly after I began to write, I met a woman I'll call Lisa at a writers' conference in Houston. She had recently published an autobiographical novel about her autistic son. I was in awe of her. And, never mind that I had not a clue how to actually craft a novel, I still had grandiose fantasies of cocktail parties with agents and reviews in the New York Times. After all, I was putting in four solid hours a day on an old Smith-Corona portable typewriter. But how quickly I was disillusioned when I learned Lisa's book had not received a "Times" review. She had not flown to New York City to meet the literati. Instead, she described giving a reading at a conference on autism. How touched she was, she told me, to share her experience with other parents of autistic children, touched because she'd given voice to their hopes and fears.

What a failure, I thought. Why bother writing if your highest achievement is only to offer meaning and hope to struggling families. There's no point to literature if your sole success is to give a voice to those who don't have one. Why would anyone want to give a reading to people who aren't even writers, who can't appreciate this delicate metaphor, that exquisitely crafted sentence? I went off to schmooze with an agent, determined Lisa's fate would not be my own.

CHAPTER 2: Two Memoirs Later

Now, 2001, I have driven from my home in Michigan to New England, a box of books in the trunk of my car. I am presenting a speech entitled "The Silent Language of Sexual Abuse and Addictions" to a conference of mental health professionals. The speech includes sections of my two memoirs, one about incest, the other about sex addiction. There is not another writer in the auditorium.

After the speech, as always, I offer time for questions and answers. No one mentions metaphor or craft. No one wants the phone number of my agent. Rather, I am asked: Did your mother know your father was sexually molesting you? What were techniques used by your therapist that most helped you in recovery? The audience cares about my answers, because the answers will help women struggling with their own damaged backgrounds. The answers will—I hope—assist therapists to better understand the world of an abused child, better understand the life of an addict.

I am thrilled to be here.

Exposition

From 1980 to 1992, I wrote five (or six) bad novels. I received a MFA degree in creative writing. I published a handful of short stories. Nevertheless, with every bad novel I churned out, I knew I was learning how to write...as much as I feared I didn't have a voice with which to tell my stories. None of my writing teachers, none of my peers in workshops, suggested I try nonfiction. Back then, no one even mentioned the word "memoir." I never considered that my own truths could be heard, that my real life was important, that a woman's story could be art.

So how did I end up with not one but two memoirs? My therapist. A down-to-earth man who, I'm sure, has never once considered the finer points of literature. He was the one, over the years, who kept encouraging me to write my own story, even though I explained: please, I am a fiction writer. But then my parents died. I felt emotionally safer. I began to see myself more clearly. Like a mantra, my therapist repeated: tell your own story, tell your own story. Finally, just to humor him (I told myself), I acquiesced, even though I firmly believed I'd only be able to write a paragraph at the most. Well, surely no more than a short essay. What could I possibly say about myself?

But then, amazingly, the moment I began to write I heard my real voice. I felt as if I'd just learned to speak. I completed Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You in about three months. And even though it took several years to finish Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction, still, I was finally writing what I knew, telling the stories I most needed to tell. Only after publication did I learn...

CHAPTER 3: The Bad News for Women

When men write their stories, stories of war or political persecution, for example, no one denigrates them. Indeed, their memoirs are read as literature. When several of the men held hostage by Iranian terrorists wrote of their ordeals, they were called "heroes" by society and the media. Jacobo Timerman's memoir about his imprisonment during Argentina's reign of terror, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, was also, rightfully, praised.

In contrast, women who survive their "hostage" years with abusive parents or partners are considered victims—not heroes. When women write about their wars, wars that happen to be closer to home, or even in the home, we are labeled "confessional." Whiny. Michael Skube, for example, writes particularly hostile book reviews, calling incest memoirs, such as Linda Katherine Cutting's Memory Slips, "awfully tiresome" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/9/97). These memoirs are "nonliterary and faddish," he writes. "People are spilling their guts out, confessing the unimaginable and sometimes the purely imaginary" (AJC, 4/20/97). Newsweek manages to denigrate both memoirs and novels about incest, headlining one review, that focuses on Marilyn French's Our Father, "They're Daddy's Little Girls" (1/24/94). The article goes on to disparage Dani Shapiro, Kathryn Harrison, and Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn.

I experienced this insensitivity directly when the April 2001 issue of Esquire excerpted Love Sick, labeling it "The Least Successful Attempt at Prurience." The editors failed to recognize that the point of the passage is not to arouse, but rather to show sex addiction as emotional and spiritual suicide. Consistently, the media simplifies and debases women's stories. While I attempted a serious discussion about repercussions of sexual addiction on a radio talk show in the Denver area, the male host wanted to know: "Where's the kinkiest place you ever had sex?" Another (male) talk-show host began an interview by claiming the first chapter of Love Sick reads like a "Romance novel on crack."

In their belief that "confessional" memoirists are not creating art, the media gives us one of two options: to be either maligned or ignored.

According to Tom Payton, publisher of Hill Street Press, who has marketed several memoirs that challenge the social preconceptions about women and sexuality, there are "hypocritical and unjustified stigmas attached to books such as Rosemary Daniell's Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the Deep South—and those about child abuse—within the mainstream media." Payton believes that book reviewers need to realize that "while their mission is not one of social activism (arguably, that is the author's role), nevertheless, burying these important stories is a life and death matter." Payton goes on to explain that "writing can save lives, a message the mainstream media tends to ignore." A publicist at a major New York publisher confides that, on the whole, the (mostly male) book review editors at the large city newspapers are indeed "nervous" about books that deal honestly with women and sexuality.

This dismissive attitude toward "confessional" memoirs isn't restricted to book reviewers. Many of our own writing colleagues, especially in the academy, share it. A Grand Valley State University professor wrote an unfortunate article that tries to persuade English professors not to allow their students to write personal essays about abuse they experienced in childhood (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/17/93). According to Sandra Johnson, Marketing Manager of the University of Nebraska Press, literary journals are no exception. "Many seem to be interested in creative writing as fiction or poetry only," she says. Indeed, even Poets & Writers claims to represent only poets and fiction writers.

Dr. Gail Griffin, Professor of English at Kalamazoo College and author of Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue (Trilogy Books), offers a welcome alternative to this narrow-minded stance as to what is, and isn't, considered "acceptable" literature. Griffin claims that "whether it be student papers or professional writing, good autobiography is the opposite of navel-gazing and narcissism"—James Wolcott's accusation in Vanity Fair (10/97). "It draws the path from the self to the world and describes the constant circle of energy between the self and its contexts—family, culture, society, history," Griffin says. Indeed, if we looked inward first, instead of outward, we'd have a healthier national dialogue about such social problems as addiction, child abuse, domestic violence, teen suicide, school violence, divorce, and rape.

Why do so many both in the media and in the academy fear women's stories? Perhaps because of their own fears. After all, if I confront my demons, am I not (covertly) asking you to confront yours?

CHAPTER 4: The Hard Work News

One reason for this healthy explosion of women's memoirs is because we've been silenced for so long. We must continue to tell our stories. After all, real people, real women, not book reviewers, not the media, but real people want to read women's stories. People with autistic kids want to read our stories. Women with shattered lives, who have no voice of their own, want to read our stories. One out of four women is sexually molested by the time she is eighteen. Every fifteen minutes a woman is battered. Five thousand women died within a seventeen-month period preceding the terrorist attacks of 9/11—a result of domestic violence. The question, though, is how, in this media-driven society, do we let each other know about our stories?

Since my first memoir was published in 1996, I've given over a hundred readings and speeches. I've traveled across the country speaking at organizations and conferences such as the Michigan Statewide Conference on Child Abuse, the Nebraska Commission on Crime, Children's Assessment Centers in New York, and Jewish Family & Career Services in Atlanta. In addition, while quite a few university writing programs have invited me to speak, I don't rely on them as my only venue. I contact the departments of psychology, sociology, Schools of Social Work, Women's Studies programs as well.

In other words, be indefatigable. Contact associations for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, family counselors. Tell them you are available to conduct a seminar to better help their clients deal with child abuse, addiction, grief, dysfunctional families, women's issues, spirituality—whatever your experience might be.

If you lack the inclination to travel or speak, find alternate review sources. My first memoir received over forty reviews in local and non-mainstream journals and Web sites. I contact places such as Contemporary Psychology, Counseling Today, Family Therapy News, The Healing Woman. A few web sites particularly geared to women writers are feminista.com, recoveryworld.com, idealist.com/bookstore, the International Women's Writing Guild (iwwg.com), and the National Association of Women Writers (naww.org). Also, check out newpages.com as a source for reviews and alternative magazines. Get a web site for your books. I highly recommend M.J. Rose's book How to Publish and Promote Online (St. Martin's Griffin) as well as her new web site buzzyour.com for virtually hundreds of ideas on how and why to by-pass the stale status quo.

Epilogue

Adrienne Rich writes, "Women have been driven mad...for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience." Not only have we been driven mad, but I think we should also be mad...angry. While the media is fully engaged with international stories where human rights violations exist, they are unable to see domestic violence, which might be occurring next door to them, as a human rights issue. As book review editors laud the politically charged work by writers such as Timerman and Salman Rushdie, these same reviewers refuse to see the degradation of a child sexually molested by her father as worthy of literary notice.

The death threats against Rushdie are horrifying, but why are we not equally outraged by the fact that for decades women, even here in America, have lived behind veils—voiceless, silenced, battered? Of course it was tragic that Timerman was imprisoned and tortured. But aren't children who are raped and beaten by parents also held captive, also tortured? Aren't their stories equally important? Shouldn't their lives be written? Their stories told? Their books taken seriously and not belittled or silenced? Aren't our hearts big enough to recognize that all these injustices are worthy of our concern and attention? If we learn more about the human heart in all its complexity, we will better understand the world.

While women memoirists wait for our metaphors to be appreciated, for our work to be judged on literary merit, for our stories to be taken seriously, we must never overlook our equally important and much more heartfelt reviews. I receive reviews in whispered phone calls from women who have read my books and need to make a connection. I receive reviews in handwritten notes from women barely holding on, thanking me for giving a voice to their own stories. After I finished a reading at a library in Athens, Georgia, one woman waited until everyone else had departed. Approaching me, she was so scared she began to cry. She confided that I was the first person she'd told that her father had molested her. She was too traumatized even to tell a therapist. If this is what it means to be a confessional writer, I'm proud to be one. For to be a confessional writer means to write both from and to the human heart.

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"Published in multiple editions in North America and Japan, Sue William Silverman’s first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, is the most widely read and successful book in the Associated Writing Programs Award Series (AWP). It was also one of the most controversial. It was one of the few nonfiction books in our series to be snubbed by Publisher’s Weekly and other periodicals that had regularly reviewed Award Series titles. In 1996, when the book was published, critics seemed to relish writing caustic reviews of personal nonfiction. Kathryn Harrison’s book The Kiss, for example, received many rabid notices as the literary pundits mounted a backlash against the popularity of the memoir, especially memoirs by women. AWP initiated the Award Series in Nonfiction in 1984." ~~ AWP


(This article originally appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Special Commemorative Issue, 2002, published by the AWP.)