Reclaiming your story
Hell is other people’s stories (or mis-stories) about us.
“The definition of trauma is being trapped in another person’s story of you.”
Amanda Knox said this in a recent episode of the Memoir Nation podcast, and I’ve been thinking about the nature of being trapped in another’s story ever since. We’ve all experienced this on some level. It is one of the primary reasons to write memoir: To claim—and reclaim—your story.
None of us will ever endure the public damnation and the loss of self and story that Amanda did, yet we all face others’ stories about us—stories that can feel equally as damning and unfair.
Another’s misunderstanding of us is painful because we have a fundamental (and perhaps even primal) human desire to be seen and understood.
I often think of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit, and the character who says, “Hell is other people.” Hell is other people’s judgements—the confining stories they impose upon us. This is why we need art—to help us deconstruct our stories and find the freedom Amanda searches for in her new memoir.
Amanda’s imprisonment—literally and figuratively
Amanda wasn’t only traumatized by being trapped in another’s story, she was literally imprisoned by that story, and then she has had to live under the dark cloud (or circus) of a global scandal since the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student with whom Amanda shared an apartment in Perugia, Italy.
Imagine being just 20 years old and to suddenly be known only within a vicious narrative that has been painted of you by others. She was not only accused of murder, but she was portrayed as sadistic, jealous, and deviant.
When I’ve told people that I interviewed Amanda, I find they often still don’t let her off the hook—even after I tell them she’s innocent and has been acquitted.
It’s a lesson: once people decide on our story, once they see us a certain way, there’s rarely a way to reset that story. One definition of life: it’s a “reclamation project” of sorts. Amanda will have to navigate a damning narrative the rest of her life.
Reclaiming your story = freedom
Except that Amanda essentially “un-damns” herself through telling her story.
Amanda has written two memoirs now, Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir and Free: My Search for Meaning. Amanda’s new memoir is appropriately called Free because it examines freedom from multiple angles: it’s not only the freedom that comes from the aftermath of her release from prison; it’s also about finding freedom within.
I found her to be such a wise and balanced soul, and her book glows with insight and equipoise. She somehow manages to tell the story of her wrongful conviction and the fallout from everything she’s gone through without casting blame, without putting herself in the role of victim.
It’s a thin line to walk—to balance the telling of her story to address skeptics and naysayers and trolls’ judgements without defensiveness, but as a genuine search for her truth and a reclaiming of that truth.
This is the strange therapeutic quality of writing. I have always flinched at the word therapy when it comes to writing, and I don’t technically write for therapy, but I do write to understand, and in understanding we cope, we move forward.
The “reclamation memoir”—a genre unto itself
There are two phrases that I keep hearing that are very much of our moment: “I felt seen” or “I didn’t feel seen.”
It can be a horror to not feel seen. I recently had a day that glowed with all of my good fortune of love from friends and family, and yet … there was one person who very clearly “didn’t see me,” or didn’t care to try to see me, and I found myself all in a knot as a result. A knot that knotted out all of the other love.
We write to feel seen and understood—by ourselves, if not others. The topic of reclaiming reminds me of our interview with
on Memoir Nation. Lidia goes back to the pains she’s carried in her body for years and then “re-stories” them.“How do any of us lay down the stories of our past selves and what we have carried for far too long?” she asks.
We’ve made up the stories of our lives, after all. Things have happened to us, but we’ve also happened to things. “Memories are conjurings,” she says. Which means they can be re-conjured.
Correcting the “mis-story”
So often our narratives of other are wrong. I recently talked to a wise teenager who told me how break-ups tend to work. She told me how she’d started to imagine her former boyfriend as monstrous and cold, and that the story grew bigger and bigger the longer they didn’t talk (because that’s what our brains are wired to do: project negative stories).
When they talked after months of silence, it turned out he’d also imagined her as monstrous and cold in a similar way, so they acknowledged their “mis-storying” and laughed about it and became friends again.
Few of us are monstrous or cold, it turns out, and if we are, I like to think everyone can ask for grace and receive grace and create a new story, gracefully.
Sometimes we don’t have to write an entire memoir to reclaim our story. We can just reach out and ask a simple question, tell our truth.
We are the authors of our life stories. We always have the power to write a new chapter. And in writing a new chapter, we transform ourselves into the people we feel ourselves to be.
This week’s prompt
“In The Art of Repair,” my wonderful
partner, , shares a personal story of repair, and invites you to think about repair, what it takes—and the ways in which you’ve been an instigator of repair, or a receiver of repair, or both.Read Brooke’s full post here!
Please become a paid subscriber …
A subscription guarantees reclaiming karma.
Because a quote
“What if we could stand in different relation to our experiences? Could the stories we carry about our experiences … loosen? Fall away and become sediment? Rearrange themselves? Change form?”
—Lidia Yuknavitch from Reading the Waves: A Memoir
Listen to Amanda Knox on Memoir Nation!
Write with me!
Upcoming events
Free Open House on July 7!!!!!!
I try to make writing a little bit easier through a weekly accountability write-in I host with Left Margin Lit.
The goal: to create a supportive space where writers can churn out words, meet their goals and deadlines, and build creative connections with others.
Our sessions occur on Zoom, so you can sign up no matter where you are.
July 12: I’m teaching The Art of Brevity at the Mill Valley Library from 12:30 - 1:30 Pacific. Find out more.
July 15: The San Francisco Writers Foundation is hosting me for their Ask-Me-ANYTHING series of monthly interactive video meetings from 12-1 Pacific. The topic? Flash fiction. Come with questions!
July 19: Holy bajoley! I’m doing a live storytelling event: Six Words Live Story Show - Where Do We Go From Here? Six storytellers will kick off their story with a Six-Word Memoir, then dive into the fuller tale behind it. Find out more.
July 24-27: I’ll be teaching at the new Understory Conference in Park City, Utah, with a bunch of other great teachers, including Dani Shapiro and my Memoir Nation partner Brooke Warner. Find out more.
August 30: The Art of Brevity with Catamaran from 10:30 - 1:30 Pacific. Online—so you can attend from anywhere! Find out more.
September 28-October 1: One of the highlights of my year is teaching at the one-of-a-kind Okoboji Writers' & Songwriters' Retreat V News at Lake Okoboji in Iowa. This will be my third year, and the roster of faculty includes great writers, songwriters, and journalists. Early bird registration is still open! Find out more.
Contact me about my one-on-one work with writers
Because a photo
Because I love graffiti. And vacant lots.
Great post. I know this topic has been top of mind lately, and it's such a good reason to write memoir in the first place. Thanks for the shoutout for The Art of Repair, too.
A very insightful post. Your podcast episode with Amanda Knox was fascinating, and prompted me to buy her memoir. As a psychotherapist and writer, I’m drawn to the idea of people reclaiming their stories, not as therapy per se, but as an act of liberation. I also loved the recent post by Brooke Warner you cited, The Art of Repair, which discussed her apology to author Gina Frangello, after initially dismissing her memoir, Blow Your House Down, due to an unfavorable review in the NYT. I was similarly turned off from reading Frangello’s book after seeing that review, but Brooke’s post caused me to reconsider, and I sought out the memoir. I was dazzled by the story and the powerful writing. A big YES to Memoir Nation!