Exploring the Inner Self in Memoir

Santa puts the tinsel on the tree!

I need to show my hard-won epiphanies through self-reflection.  I need to present my memoir in ways to allow readers to enter upon the college journey.  I went to college as a mother of five, but that journey needs to be more than just a collection of experiences at college and at home with my family as I struggled to keep up with my studies, struggled to comprehend new subject material, struggled to discover a new Victoria Marie.

I must explore the inner self, reflect upon it, so that my reader can identify with me.  This sounds like the inner dialogue, which I’m incorporating into my memoir manuscript.  But through inner dialogue, the memoirist needs to discover something about herself, through reliving the experiences, the struggles.

In the throes of my second revision of the college memoir, I discover courage.  It took courage to attend each class.  Courage to believe in myself though surrounded with doubts and inadequacy, embarrassment.  Courage to face my fear of failure.  Courage to face the fear of success, for in success comes opportunity.  Opportunity changes lives. 

I would never be the same after my adventures through college.  And neither would my family.  It took a whole family to get this mother through college.     

I need to craft these discoveries into well-stated epiphanies/themes and then be sure that they resonate throughout the memoir.  Through specific details, the memoirist can achieve universality. 

There’s my timer again.  My home smells of cinnamon and honey.  Time to take the Amish friendship breads out of the oven.  Time to share the smells of Christmas with family, neighbors and friends.  May your Christmas be filled with the treasure of family and friends and may you all achieve success in 2015.  Thanks for stopping by Adventures in Writing.

What to Include in Memoir

Hard-working mother in college

Memoir isn’t a life story.  That is autobiography.  Memoir is one particular period in a person’s life, one instance or one experience in which the memoirist has come to an epiphany or several epiphanies from that experience and wishes to share that insight with the reader.  Memoir provides insight not merely facts of the experience. 

 

It is not necessary to include everything that happened in the particular period which the memoirist wishes to share and elucidate to the reader.  The memoir would be too long and rambling if I included every class taken.  After taking over 40 college courses, I decided to write about my experiences in approximately 25 of them.  Of course that’s not all I wrote about.  I focused on the trials and tribulations of raising a family of five children while attending college for ten years, ten of my children’s growing-up years, ten years of assisting my special needs child to achieve her educational goals.

 

Memoirs encapsulate the important moments, the “aha” moments in the slice of life the memoirist decides to share.  The general, the sameness in experience has no place in memoir.  Memoir needs to be poignant and full of meaning, and in my case, humorous.  For that was a way to cope in the daily grind of going to college as a mother of five.

 

Has anyone read a good memoir lately that I could add to my reading list?