Mining your own life for stories?

“Never invite a writer to dinner if you don’t want them to write about it.”

There is a point in many writers’ lives when they learn to find a certain (novelistic?) distance to their own experiences. This happens when they start to look at some of their lives as “material,” which in some cases might simply just be the way of coping with traumatic or significant events. Often it’s easier to admit that what you’re going through is just fodder for your artistic endeavour rather than something that has to do with you because of your shitty behaviour or a shitty thing that is happening.

For me, it happened early on in my writing career, when I went to my first in-patient facility to help me get a handle on my addiction. I told myself I was going to rehab to “do research,” because I had a hard time admitting I was going there simply because I was an alcoholic who could not stop drinking. That was too shameful of an admission so I brought a notebook and a pen and took notes diligently all the while telling myself this was going to go in my future novel that I was working on, about the young mother who drinks and can’t stop. In my head I was not like the others in rehab who were there because they had a real problem. I was merely infiltrating, living one of those great journalistic stories of investigative immersion.

I told this story a few times over the years when I would try to illustrate the level of denial an addict goes through. Two of the quintessential elements of recovery are the ability to be honest with yourself and being humble. I lacked both with the little story I told myself about the reasons why I had to sleep in a prison-like cell with a roommate, ate hospital food in a cafeteria with other alcoholics and junkies, or why in the afternoon I painted rocks with cheesy slogans (“Believe” “Live Love Laugh”). Because I lacked those two elements, once I left rehab, I almost immediately started drinking. Years later, I went to another facility, except that time I was desperate enough to get sober and I took everything seriously, even the rock-painting. I did not write about that. I never will.

This is because by then I learned something about mining your own life for stories. What I learned is that as much as it is a writers’ magical shield, it can also be self-harmful. What I mean by magical shield, is specifically that trick (?) that you instantly acquire once you start thinking about everything happening to you as fodder for stories. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen posts by writers threatening to write about bad people in their lives, regurgitating the good ol’ “Never invite a writer to dinner if you don’t want them to write about it,” which is attributed to Margaret Atwood, and which, I’m sure, gives us the illusion that we are these powerful forces that will immortalize assholes if they dare to f*ck with us. I mean, okay, sure we do have that “power” to some extent and I have used examples from my own life to inform even my fiction, but just on its own it’s a sad motivation for publishing. (And, to be honest, I’ve written entire passages where I’d get lost in some story trying to recount various grievances. Without a fault, these are always taken out by smart editors because my lack of distance is evident. Too much emotion equals less distance. For example, in Unshaming, I had a whole section where I described a failed love affair — that I was still recovering from —and my first editor saw right through it. Out it went.) My word of caution about self-harm comes from my experience with writing and publishing Drunk Mom. I will never regret this book, but I was not quite prepared to deal with the attention that happened after it came out. This might be a Jowita-specific thing, but it was a thing that was detrimental to my recovery. The constant exposure and the responsibility I felt with having a memoir dealing with addiction, led to some unexpected but predictable consequences (another relapse). Looking back, I know that I probably published the memoir too soon – I should’ve given it at least two more years before I offered my tender belly for public consumption.

At the same time, I think it can be quite powerful to use your life to give your writing more emotion, even use something like a heartbreak to inspire a story but relying on just your experiences and feelings will most likely read like a diary entry rather than something that was thought-through and that other people will be able to relate to.

I know we live in the age of oversharing or whatever, and many people document things online and it’s normal now. Writing about yourself –- whether for a memoir, a novel, or a social media post –- can be a kind of lifeline, a way to transform things like shame, grief, and obsession into something meaningful. But it can also be a slow erosion of the boundaries between what is yours and what belongs to everyone else. There is power in mining your own life, yes, but there is also danger. The closer you get to yourself in the pursuit of honesty, the more fragile you might become, because once it is written, it is no longer just yours. For me, the later lesson in my writing career ghas been this: distance is the writer’s greatest gift. Not detachment in the sense of apathy, but the capacity to observe, select, and shape. Some stories are meant for the page, and some are meant to stay private. The act of preserving them in your memory can also be the most radical, restorative thing you do.In the end, writing about yourself is always a negotiation between what you need to tell and what you need to survive, and learning the difference is, I think, one of the only ways a writer truly becomes whole.