What I learned about writing a memoir by writing a memoir

Apr 12, 2023

Hello!

It’s been a little while, friends. How are you?

I took a little break from this newsletter to concentrate on the book and I am pleased (relieved) to say the first draft is finished. It is done. There are 55,000 words on the page and at least some of them are good. A triumph. Now there is just the small matter of editing them all before the Big Final Deadline on the 24th. No pressure.

Anyway. It feels quite strange to have written a book. Especially this book, which is about me, and about disability and womanhood, and about belonging and not belonging, and about lots of other stuff, too. I spent a good few years swearing I absolutely would not be writing a book under any circumstances and then, whoops, I wrote one. I’m honestly not quite sure how that happened, but here we are.

So, as by virtue of being a subscriber to this newsletter you are likely to be at least vaguely interested in writing about disability, I thought I’d share some things I’ve learned along the way.

The thing you think will be hard won’t be what’s hard. As a person who has consistently struggled to meet word counts her entire life, I resisted writing a book because I thought I wouldn’t have enough to say. Well, I was wrong. I had plenty to say. The difficult thing was working out what order to say it in. Unlike with a short article, there are so many possible ways to order a book that at times I felt something akin to decision fatigue. I’m still not convinced that everything is in exactly the right order but I have belatedly come to accept that maybe the right order doesn’t exist
You think you’re emotionally prepared, but you are not. I have been writing about my disabled life for… a decade. I have gone viral on Twitter with a thread about dating, for crying out loud. I talk about this stuff all the time. And yet. A memoir hits different. You can’t leave out the hard stuff (well, you could, but that’d defeat the point). You can’t turn everything into a joke. Some stuff just isn’t funny. As I’ve written here before, writing 8,500 words about disabled motherhood was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done but I knew it would be. What came as a bit of a surprise was how hard it was to write about stuff I’ve already processed and dealt with. The old adage is a lie, kids: writing isn’t actually free therapy
Putting the unsaid into words is a tricky business. So much of ableism is in the absences - opportunities not given, connections not made, things left unsaid - that it can be hard to tease it out, to explain exactly what is happening when, really, there is no hard evidence to point to. I realised that trying to elaborate on specific instances wasn’t really going to work; after all, they’re often over in a matter of seconds. Instead, all I can give is a sense of the accumulated weight of it all. I hope I have managed it, but it’s infuriating that such a powerful force hides itself so well
A memoir is not just fifty-odd articles. You need time to think. As well as presenting so many more options, the actual process of writing a book is very different to that of a feature. It involves a lot more pondering. I can usually bash out a thousand words a day if I’m doing newspaper work, but for the book it ranged between 400 and 800, with a few really good days when I did a thousand or so. I spent a lot of time feeling incredibly unproductive. The thing I completely hadn’t bargained for was how many days would be spent just thinking about the book without writing a single word, something that would be inconceivable in my journalism roles. I always felt like I hadn’t done anything at all, which would stress me out, but now I can see that I couldn’t have come close to finished the book without thinking about it on the walk to and from M&S
We need to talk about this stuff a whole lot more. Naturally, I have been talking to my friends about all the things I’ve been writing about (especially the very patient PAs who I’ve used as sounding boards for particularly thorny ideas). In the past few weeks, a few very trusted pals have even read bits and pieces of the book, which has been equal parts terrifying and gratifying. What I’ve realised, though, is that despite feeling like I talk about disability all the sodding time, there’s a lot of stuff in the book that even my friends didn’t know about. Which, like, is pretty good evidence that this book needs to exist. So that’s good.