A Conversation with Charlotte Maya

The birthing process of a book is... well, a process. It starts with the seed of an idea, goes through story development, into a first draft, followed by many rewrites, and then hopefully, eventually, it makes its way into the world, into the hands of readers.

Today a special book hits the shelves: Sushi Tuesdays: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Resilience by Charlotte Maya. I have been privileged to be on this book birthing journey with Charlotte through the story coaching and editing process, which she shares about in the video below. It is deeply rewarding to support a book that I know will affect the hearts and minds of those who read it; a book that handles the very difficult subject of suicide with remarkable skill and humanity.

The book launch event for Sushi Tuesdays is taking place this evening at 7pm at Vroman's in Pasadena (offsite venue: All Saints Church). Come join me!

Scroll down to read my interview with Charlotte where she talks about the writing life and what it's like to work with a publicist in preparation for her book launch.

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Charlotte Maya writes about suicide loss, resilience, and hope. Widowed at thirty-nine, when her children were six and eight, Charlotte explores the intersections of grief, parenting, and self-care in her writing—particularly within the context of suicide. Her work has been highlighted in Hippocampus Magazine and The New York Times. Sushi Tuesdays: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Resilience is her first book.

Charlotte lives in Southern California with her family. She received her B.A. from Rice University and her J.D. from UCLA.

Read Charlotte's Modern Love essay When A Doorbell's Ring Means Hope.

In the above video, Charlotte Maya shares about her experience through the Story Coaching process. Learn more about one-on-one story coaching.

KARIN GUTMAN:  Tell us about the story behind your debut memoir Sushi Tuesdays.
 
CHARLOTTE MAYA:  The short story is that I was widowed to suicide when my kids were six and eight. I had no idea that Sam was suicidal. So, a large part of the story is trying to figure out where I had failed him, where he had failed himself, and how to heal and move forward. It was really important to me that his death didn't define my life; but then it was impossible for it not to. I did accidentally fall in love again. My now husband had also been widowed and has two kids.
 
As far as crafting the story, it was really important to me that the book didn't end with a fairytale ending because, in my opinion, the grief doesn't really end. There's not a point at which you're done. It's important for people to understand that even though we are living lives with joy and passion and the kids are doing well, we all have our struggles. This kind of loss reverberates, and in some ways, changes who you are. We simply continue to carry that loss with us in a way that doesn't hamper our forward movement. But we don't forget, we don't get over it. We learn to carry it. 
 
It's important for people to know that we do still honor Sam. He made a mistake, and by that I mean, he did not reach out for help. But how he died does not define the whole of who he was. I also had to get to a point where I realized I could continue to live my life in a way that honored myself and honored him. Part of that was becoming the writer who could tell the story.
 
KARIN:  I know you started writing your story with a blog. How did you move from blogging to writing a full-length book?

CHARLOTTE: When I was writing my blog, I had all these posts. I printed them all out and had several 100 pages. I read it and it wasn't a book. I didn't know how to turn that stack of pages into a cohesive story. Then I heard a podcast where they said, “Just because you've read 100 books doesn't mean you can write one. That's why you need a book coach.” What I need now is a book coach, I thought. I was in your workshop and so that was easy for me to call you because I already knew you. I already trusted you. 
 
I didn't have a journalism background. I had a law degree and an English degree. I hadn't ever contemplated being a creative writer. I didn't have an MFA. I felt like my work with you was a mini MFA. It was so exciting to learn about story structure and character arc and how things work. I enjoyed reading, but I didn't really peek under the hood.
 
KARIN:  Suicide is a challenging topic. It feels to me like your story is coming out at a time when people are more open to discussing mental health.
 
CHARLOTTE:  From the beginning, there was a feeling that I have a story to tell, and I believe people want to read about the story. Even though suicide is hard to talk about, and sometimes people clam up, my personal experience showed me that people really wanted to talk about it. People were always asking me questions, and they might say, “If you don't want to talk about it, that's okay.” But I did want to talk about it. Because I feel so strongly that talking about suicide is the way to reduce suicides and to reduce the stigma that surrounds not just the people who have died by suicide, but also those of us who are mourning the loss of somebody who has died by suicide. By destigmatizing, it opens up a place for people to be vulnerable and ask for help when they need it.
 
KARIN:  You’ve described writing as a really expensive hobby. What have you spent money on?
 
CHARLOTTE:  I've spent money on workshops. I've spent money on book coaches. I've spent money on writing retreats. I have spent money on building a website. I have spent money on hiring a publicist. I did not self-publish, so I did not spend money on that. I continue to spend money on workshops. I think it's really helpful for perspective. It can be hard to see out from the work and somebody else's feedback can be very clarifying. Offering notes to other people is also clarifying, like a muscle you exercise.
 
KARIN:  How has writing affected your professional life?
 
CHARLOTTE:  My husband and I have a business. I used to go into the office three days a week. Now I go in twice a week, and my other days are my writing days. I have been much more intentional about how I spend my time. I am not one of those writers who gets up and writes from five to nine. I have always prioritized my kids, and that's prime parenting time until they are off at school. My schedule is easier now that the kids are all launched or launching. Still, I will very rarely not answer the phone when they call.
 
But I am better at getting my butt in the chair and getting something done. I'm better at writing what is very drafty, knowing that it needs to be revised. Giving myself a little bit more space to get bad work done, because that counts. It all counts. I'm better at understanding that now. I feel like I now understand the process that I'm in, which parts I get to control and which parts I don't get to control. I get to control sitting down, getting something written. I get to control revising it. I get to control workshopping it with other people and revising it again. I can choose to submit it. After that, I've done my work. And so, I'm a little less attached to the result. 
 
I'm getting better at being rejected. I think that's a good thing because it is less of a defining factor in whether I'm going to get my butt in the chair again. Validation is great and acceptances are thrilling. I'm not saying that they're not. But if those become defining, then the opposite is also defining, right? Not every piece of writing is for every publication, and that's okay. I always hope that the writing and the audience will find each other, but they are not things I can totally control. 
 
It’s similar to why kids play sports. You can’t control the wins and losses. Wins come or they don’t. But the teamwork. That's something important that we take away with us. Doing your best, that's what counts. There's a lot of really good writing out there, that may or may not be on bestseller lists or on the tip of everybody's tongue.
 
KARIN:  How long was the publishing process for you?
 
CHARLOTTE:  I sold it in February of 2022. When I signed the contract, my editor said, “I want books in hands this time next year.” And she made it happen. My impression is that there are a lot of things that can slow down the book, from signed contract to completed book on shelves. We were able to stay right on track with deadlines all the way through, but even so, I think it's lightning speed.
 
That also informed some other decisions. She wanted to go straight to trade paperback, which we did. That's something I hadn't really thought about—hardback or paperback? She had some strong feelings, because she wanted the book to be accessible and paperback is cheaper to produce, and as a result, more affordable for buyers to purchase. That was really important to her. And it has always been important to me, so those kinds of decisions were very straightforward for me
 
KARIN:  With regard to the book launch, what are you excited about and what are you nervous about?
 
CHARLOTTE:  I'm nervous about interviews. And I'm excited about interviews. I'm nervous about time limits, because I feel like we could talk for an hour and may only have 10 or 15 minutes.
 
KARIN:  Is your publicist helping you prepare?
 
CHARLOTTE:  Yes, she does help with a media training session.
 
KARIN:  What is it like to work with a publicist?
 
CHARLOTTE:  I didn't realize that I needed to hire a publicist of my own, and that in and of itself felt a little disheartening, because I didn't understand why the publisher didn't cover that base. The publisher does do quite a bit. They send the manuscript out for reviews and get it in their catalogs and get my Amazon author page up. So, there's a lot of behind the scenes work to connect the book to potential readers. I hired Kim Dower because she has a lot of experience in LA, and it made sense to me to have a Los Angeles publicist.
 
I did not realize that you have to pitch your publicist, the same way you pitch an agent and a publisher. They all wanted to read the book first, before deciding whether or not to work with me. So that was a little intimidating. It makes sense because you want a publicist who's going to be on the front lines of trying to get people to read this book, trying to get people to schedule an interview. It made sense afterwards, but I was surprised they got to decide if my book was good enough for me to pay them. I think it's especially hard for a first-time writer too, because I don't have a built-in audience. I have a couple hundred followers. I do not have a big platform.
 
KARIN:  How does the publicist work with you as the pub date approaches?
 
CHARLOTTE:  She now has my calendar, and she is the one who has scheduled different podcast interviews or radio interviews. She put together a press release, which she has used to place advertising in different news venues and get people interested in hosting an interview. So, I have several interviews scheduled now around publication date.
 
She's very straightforward about setting expectations and really good at bouncing ideas off of too. I graduated from La Cañada High School, and in fact graduated from high school with the person who now owns the local paper. So, I said, “Should we send the press release to the local paper?” and she said, “That's a great idea. I'm on it.” So, today's paper has a little blurb in it. That's the kind of thing that I wouldn't have known how to do by myself.
 
Having a publicist also gives me a certain level of credibility. Because she has read the book, she has perspective on how it fits into the larger world of books. My publisher has so many books that they're working on, and publicists tend to only take on a few clients at a time.
 
KARIN:  Whom do you imagine to be your ideal reader?
 
CHARLOTTE:  People often tell me that they want to send my book to people who have lost someone to suicide. And while I hope that it resonates with those people, I really hope it resonates with people who don't have such an intimate relationship with suicide, but are open-hearted enough to want to learn about it. I think it will actually be more helpful for people who haven't had an intimate suicide experience, because I think it will take a lot of the fear and stigma away from understanding that suicide is just like any other illness. It just looks so much uglier from the outside.
 
Suicide is a disease. I hope that readers come away from this book with a renewed appreciation for all of our shared humanity. That it humanizes Sam, that it humanizes me, and gives us all space to be glitchy, beautiful people.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.



Buy the book

To learn more about Charlotte Maya visit her site.

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A Conversation with Laura Davis

We are already a month into the new year!

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Laura Davis, a memoir teacher and author based in the Santa Cruz, California. She is the author of six nonfiction books, and recently published her debut memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars, about her tumultuous relationship with her mother. It was fascinating to hear about her learning curve as as writer, putting what she knows and teaches into practice and her growth as a storyteller. We talked about everything from how to create a page turner to how to work with a shoddy memory. She also shared about how she reached the tipping point of finally being ready to write and share this story.

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LAURA DAVIS is the author of six non-fiction books that change peoples' lives. The Courage to Heal has paved the way for hundreds of thousands of women and men to heal from the trauma of sexual abuse. Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, a rich resource guide co-authored with parenting expert Janis Keyser, helps parents develop a vision for the families they want to create. And I Thought We'd Never Speak Again teaches the skills of reconciliation and peace building to the world, one relationship at a time.

Her latest book, her first memoir: The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story, tells the story of her dramatic and tumultuous relationship with her mother. It gives a no-holds-barred peek at the real woman behind the teacher, the facilitator, and the author.

KARIN GUTMAN: Given that you coach memoir writers, what was the learning curve in writing your own memoir?

LAURA DAVIS: When it came to writing my memoir, I understood how to get the raw material out, like how to do the deep excavation, the really painful kind of excavation. But then I had hundreds of little pieces that I'd written over the course of years. I knew the theme was this mother-daughter relationship. Some of them were really good—the individual piece might be polished and powerful—but I really had no idea how to make them into a book. I didn't know about storytelling, how to sustain a story over 360 pages. I had to learn what to leave in and what to cut out, which I think is really challenging in memoir.

The other thing I had to learn, that was really hard, was sequencing—like when to reveal things and when to conceal them. Part of that was learning how to create a page turner. That's my favorite feedback I get, people who said, “I picked up your book and I couldn't put it down.” I hear that every single day. I had no idea how to do that.

KARIN: Can you share more about that?

LAURA: Well, one of the final things I did at the very end of the 10 years of development—the very last edit, after I'd actually shopped the book around for a year and couldn't sell it—I shortened the chapters. Not the whole book, but a lot of it is very short chapters, which I think is good because everyone's attention span is so poor, you know, frazzled. Also, I interjected past, present, and future really fast. So, you're in one situation and then you're thrown into another situation. It doesn't work for every reader, but a lot of people really like that. It creates a very fast momentum.

And then, there was a lot of experimenting with placement. The worst moment between me and my mother—the scene where I tell her I've been sexually abused as a child, and she basically freaks out and attacks me—was a really pivotal scene and was the last straw between us when we became deeply estranged. I tried placing that scene in different places. I wanted to reveal it at the end. But then when people read it, they would say, “I don't understand why Laura is so mean to her mother?” Like, why is she being such a bitch?

Then I tried putting it right at the beginning and it was just way too emotionally intense. People would stop reading. So, I had to figure out how to sequence things. There are a lot of twists and turns, things that get revealed. It's like putting a puzzle together. It was a lot of trial and error.

I also had to figure out, What's the question that I want the reader to be asking?

KARIN: Every memoir needs a story question. What did you come up with?

LAURA: I think for me the biggest question was, “Can I open my heart to this person who betrayed me in the past?” We had reconciled to some degree before she moved out here, but I think our reconciliation was successful because there was a 3,000-mile buffer between us. Suddenly, she was in my town and she had dementia and I got triggered all the time by her behavior.

So: "Can I be the daughter she needs me to be or the daughter I want to be? Am I capable of taking care of her until the end of her life? Can I actually follow through and do this thing?"

Also, "Could I open my heart?" I could go through the motions of being a good daughter. I could do all the activities. I could do the research. I could drive her to the doctor's appointments.

The other thing that was super hard is, I have a really shitty memory. I was dissociative as a child because of being a trauma survivor.

KARIN: How did you navigate that?

LAURA: Well, first I discovered that the more I wrote about something, the more I remembered. So by free-writing, I found that if I really went deep and followed a thread, more memories would come back. I often use the prompt, “I don't remember.” I don't remember this… I don't remember that… and then suddenly, but I do remember this.

One my favorite scenes in the book takes place in a car. My mother and I are in a car together. I knew it was a really critical scene because of the things she talked about for the first time on this car ride. But I had no idea when the car ride was, where it was, where we were going. I just didn't remember anything about it except the conversation. But I did remember that it was pouring rain, and that it was a very long drive, and that the windows were closed. She was chain smoking. So, I built the whole scene around smoking in the rain.

KARIN: That was all you needed, right?

LAURA: It was super satisfying and it's a really good scene. So, it was learning how to work with the things that I did know.

I wrote, “I don't know” at the beginning, like, “I don't know where we were going.” I only figured out it had to be around this time because there were no car seats in the back. I didn't have children yet. If it was too far back, we weren't speaking. It had to be this certain kind of like suppositional writing. I did a lot of that.

And then there were certain scenes I would have liked to have written, but there was just no way to get any traction, and I had to find a different scene that would do the same work.

KARIN: It sounds like you were working on the book for a long time. Did you know the ending?

LAURA: I knew what the last scene would be. But I had to tell myself I wasn't going to publish it for nine out of the 10 years. I had too much history with certain people in my family who had already kicked me out of the family for writing The Courage to Heal when I was 31. I had already spent more than 20 years reconciling those relationships. The idea that I was going to lose those people all over again was just so devastating to me. I hadn't published anything in 19 years because this is the story I wanted to write, and I just felt like it was taboo. I finally got to the point of, I can't not write anymore. I was taking care of my mother, and I knew I needed to write it. And then she died, and it was like, Okay, I really need to write it. But maybe this is just a great project.

KARIN: At what point were you ready to put those relationships at risk to share this story?

LAURA: I think it was a few things. One is that I am an author, and that I really wanted to publish again. I didn't want to go for the rest of my life not publishing, and this was the story I had been given. I felt like if I didn't do this story, I wasn't going to have any other stories. We have a few core stories that are ours to tell, and this clearly was mine.

I couldn't have written it before. But if I had tried to write it before, it would have been a really different book. I'm 65 years old. I needed to be this age, this stage of life. A grandmother, a mother, you know, as seasoned as I am as a human being to be able to touch into the depth of the story in the way that I feel I have. I needed a lot of time after my mother's death to process the relationship in a different kind of way. My relationship to her is still changing. She's been dead for seven years. It's still evolving. If I was to write this in 10 years, it would be a different book again. But I needed that kind of time to have that vaster perspective, more like out in the universe looking at the story instead of at these two personalities. It's looking at her whole history, the epigenetics of trauma in our family, and just so many other things.

KARIN: I’ve noticed a lot of mother-daughter themes in my memoir-writing workshops. I'm imagining that your book is striking a chord with many people. You are probably giving a lot of people hope.

LAURA: I think it does. That's what I'm hearing from people. People are saying things like, “I picked up the phone and called my mother for the first time in 18 years,” or “I've had this box of letters from my mother sitting in the garage for the last three decades. I pulled them out and I'm going to write about them.”

KARIN: You can't get better feedback than that. That's amazing.



Buy the book

To learn more about Laura Davis visit her site.

See all interviews

A Conversation with Tristine Rainer

This month I had the opportunity to interview someone I've long admired. Tristine Rainer is a trailblazer and well-known expert in the field of memoir, having written two classic books on the subject: The New Diary and Your Life as Story —both of which have provided enormous inspiration to me as well as a wealth of practical tools on the craft of writing memoir. I am forever grateful to Tristine for pouring all of her heart and knowledge into these master works. For anyone serious about the art of journaling and memoir, put them on your reading list!

Tristine and I enjoyed an extensive conversation on everything from the ethics of being a memoir coach and her approach to working with writers, to the unique structure and process behind writing her novoir Apprenticed to Venus, which is about her relationship with mentor Anaïs Nin and is being released in paperback this summer!

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Tristine Rainer is a recognized expert on diary and memoir writing and the author of two renowned classics on autobiographic writing continuously in print.

Her mentor Anaïs Nin wrote the preface to Tristine’s first book The New Diary, calling it revolutionary. Published the year of Nin’s death, 1977, The New Diary popularized contemporary journal writing and created its lexicon. According to Amazon, after hundreds of offshoot books on journaling, thirty-eight years later it is still the bestselling book on journal writing.

In the 1970’s Rainer taught literature and writing in the English departments at UCLA and Indiana University, co-founded the Women’s Studies Program at UCLA, and created that university’s first Women’s Lit courses.

In 1997 she published Your Life as Story: Discovering the New Autobiography and Writing Memoir as Literature (Tarcher/​Penguin-Random.) The book anticipated the rise of contemporary memoir writing, and Tristine returned to lecturing and university teaching, at University of Hawaii and for eleven years as a faculty member in the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. Privately, Tristine has coached many authors to publication.

As founder and Director of the Center for Autobiographic Studies, a nonprofit since 1997, Rainer promotes the creation and preservation of autobiographic works, teaches, lectures and consults.

In her novoir Apprenticed to Venus, eighteen-year-old Tristine Rainer was sent on an errand to Anaïs Nin’s West Village apartment in 1962. The chance meeting would change the course of her life and begin her years as Anaïs’s accomplice, keeping her mentor’s confidences—including that of her bigamy—even after Anaïs Nin’s death and the passing of her husbands, until now.

She “blends memoir and imagination in this engaging examination of her relationship with author Anaïs Nin,” an intimate look at both the blessings and risks of the female mentor-protégé relationship and “a fascinating personal journey” (Publishers Weekly).

The paperback will be released July 16th!

Karin Gutman: How did you become a memoir coach?

Tristine Rainer: I think I invented the job. The first time I used the term "memoir coach," was in Your Life as Story and I added, "Say what?" because it was such a novel idea then. Certainly, there were editors who had worked with, usually, well-known people in publishing memoirs. But the whole field was being increasingly democratized. And we began to see the beginning of people who simply had a good story, or something important to say, who didn't have any name, begin to get published and to write literary memoirs.

The first time I worked as a memoir coach, I had been teaching autobiographic writing—memoir writing—at UCLA Extension. I think it was the first time they ever had a class on it.

Karin: What year was that?

Tristine: Probably 1988. There was a woman who was a well-known Brentwood psychic in the class, and she was writing about her life and how she became a psychic. She came up to me, and said, “Would you work with me individually on this?” And I said, “Well, I don't know. I've never done that. And I wouldn't know what to charge you.” So she said, “Well, how about $100 an hour?” I said, “Okay, let's try it.” That was the first time I did it, and she had sensitive material.

Karin: We’ve talked about the importance of ethics in being a memoir coach. How did that evolve for you?

Tristine: I don't think I was aware then. I think at that time, it was instinctual for me that if people were confiding in me, and they were within the protection of just writing, at that point, for themselves, that I would have to create some standards for myself. But I don't think they were conscious at the time. I think that I am a person who keeps confidences. It's just my nature.

Karin: We know that from your memoir, Apprenticed to Venus. 

Tristine: Yeah, I kept Anaïs Nin's confidences for more than 30 years before writing about that material. It has always been true that people feel comfortable confiding in me. And I've always taken it as, you know, somebody says, “This is between us,” and I say, “Yes,” I consider that a contract.

But I actually made a mistake once. And that's when I became conscious that I needed, at least for me, to formalize my ideas about what the ethics and procedures of being a memoir coach should be. I had a newsletter for the Center for Autobiographic Studies. This was way back; I mean, we didn't have the internet for sending out newsletters. We actually folded and sent them out with stamps. 

Karin: That's awesome. 

Tristine: People loved getting them that way. It was somehow very intimate. So each time, I would write on a theme related to autobiographic writing, and for one, the theme was about ethnic identity. I used an example of a woman who had consulted with me. I didn't think that I'd revealed anything intimate, but I had revealed that this was a theme of her work. And she came back to me, and she said, “I trusted you. You've now given away my theme.” And I said, “Oh gosh.” I immediately realized, oh, I really had done something wrong. And I refunded her money. And I then, at that point said, “Okay, I speak about autobiographic writing, and I like to include examples, but I'm going to have to have permission anytime I do that.”

So in terms of confidentiality, I thought that the best thing to adopt is the same standards and ethics that psychotherapists adopt. Because the work is so very similar, though, I think, for me, far easier. I would not want the responsibility for somebody's mental health without having the tools of writing to direct them to. That's just me. Because I think that it is a, you know, “Don't give me a fish. Teach me how to fish.” Somebody then can use those tools and take them forward with their own writing.

For each of us our story is precious to them, and there's an energy in keeping it within the creative cauldron when you're working on it. I'm of the belief that neither they nor I should talk about it much. But they're free to talk about it as much as they want, and some of them do.  

I think the best example was Elyn Saks, who wrote The Center Cannot Hold. I was teaching memoir writing at USC then and she was on the faculty. She came to me and said, “Would you work with me privately? I have a memoir. But I don't know whether I want to write it.”

So she told me her secret, which I now can tell because she's published it herself, and also gave me permission to talk about having been her coach, which not everybody does. Not everybody wants anybody to know that they even were coached. In her case, she was a highly functioning law professor, psychoanalyst herself, and has schizophrenia. And she felt the need to write the book because it really was not known that somebody who has schizophrenia could be very high functioning. She, even though she had tenure, was terribly afraid of how the knowledge that she had schizophrenia would affect her colleagues, her job, and her life, and she wasn't ready to come out with it.

So we worked provisionally, that she might never publish it, share it at all. She was going to see what it would look like if she wrote it. We went through a draft and she decided at the end of that draft that she didn't want to do anything with it. So she went her way, and years went by. Eventually she got to a point that she had an agent, and she decided it was time. And really, I was so delighted. The book that we did is pretty different; it's gone through evolutions since that first draft we did together. I, all that time, felt this was such an important book, but that it wasn't for me to make that decision to publish or not.

When she did, it was so liberating for her. She ended up getting the MacArthur Genius Award as a result of publishing the book. It was on The New York Times Bestseller List and turned out to be a wonderful thing for her life. She's helping so many people now, people who have schizophrenic children will write to her, and she always writes back. It fulfilled herself and her purpose in life.

Karin: Do you think it’s more helpful to write for yourself or with an audience in mind?

Tristine: I feel that anticipating audience in a first draft can create blocks, writing blocks. And so I suggest, even if somebody has to write on every page, “This is for my eyes only.” They don’t have to show me everything they write. This goes back to the question of privacy, which has been flipped around on the internet, where people write the most intimate things, share the most intimate things online, and they don't care about it. But I feel that for reaching the myth, which is what I'm going for, the healing myth inside each story, that there has to be a safe place for that. 

Karin: What do you mean by myth? 

Tristine: I guess I mean the story, and the story in its simplest terms, that leads to a realization. That realization is either for oneself, to change oneself, or to expand oneself to grow in new ways, and to be a different person, or it's to be shared and given to the community. So in Elyn Saks's case, it was to share and be given to the community, and I do think that that's very appropriate at the level of a second or third draft.

Karin: How do you coach people about writing sensitive, often deeply painful, material?

Tristine: Emotional flooding?

Karin: Yes, when you’re concerned someone may head down a rabbit hole. I believe you use a tool called ‘containment’. Can you talk about that?

Tristine: It's related to what Kathleen Adams has done with journal writing, with working with people who may have psychological problems, where the idea of just free and unlimited journal writing is not a good idea for them. She has them set a timer and only write for 10 minutes. So I suggest they deal with it in the same way. Time it. Maybe do it in the morning, write for 25 minutes. And then it's important to stop writing.

My daughter and I are working on a memoir now that's going to have a lot of dark and difficult material in it …

Karin: That’s so exciting.

It really is exciting. I mean, she is just such a wonderful writer. It's such a gift to me. We haven't gotten to the really tough stuff yet, but we've already talked about containment. And the very way we're doing it has containment built into it because it's just one scene at a time. We also talked about looking for the light, the moments of beauty, of love, even in the darkest times.

I watched the film Beautiful Boy. I had read the memoir and I think that the memoir worked for me because the author's intelligence as a journalist, and his personality, kept me safe. But the movie really did not. It was so hard to watch. It's an important movie about an important subject, and brave, but just not enough light in it to allow the audience to stay. And that's hard when you're dealing with a subject like addiction, which doesn't have a lot of light in it. 

So my daughter has a good way of writing that may help her. And by the way, in terms of confidentiality, she's given me permission to say anything. She is so brave. She really wants her life to have purpose, and she is doing so well. But she does not stay in the present moment. She writes very free association style and she will move through time so she can bring in almost anything she wants. I mean, you can move through time very easily in memoir writing if you have the right voice. And therefore, even if it was an extremely dark time, you can bring some light to the reader while they're going through it.

Do you mean by invoking other moments from her life in the darkness?

Well, it can be from another time, but it can also be from that time itself. I mean, even in the darkest times of her addiction and her homelessness, there were moments when she and I got together, and our love was still there. The desire to connect with love was still there, and it's a thread. In my case, we are writing a spiritual memoir, so we're looking… You know, God isn't absent even in those times.

The way I see it… if someone is writing about a difficult time or memory, they are writing about it from the perspective of having arrived here. So there must be a light force in them, even in darkest hour, that got them through.

Yes, completely. If there isn't that, then people are dehumanized. But nevertheless, they need the right circumstances to heal and finally be able to get that.

What is your approach when working with people, particularly someone who knows she has a story to tell, but is unclear how to tell it?

I work differently with everybody. But I do like to use Your Life as Story. I like them to have the book and be able to direct them to certain exercises to do, or chapters to read, so that I don't have to repeat all that material, and say, “Okay, this would be a good time for you to read the chapter on writing dialogue because you need some dialogue in here.” I like them to do the story structure exercises and refer back to it.

Frequently, it seems that they'll have already written several chapters but they got stuck because they don't know where they're going. So I like to read what they have before we start working together. And maybe correct in those chapters, where they haven't found the voice yet, to lead them to find the voice. I find that once they have a structure and the voice, and they can identify it, they then can run through a whole first draft and I don't need to look again until the first draft is finished. 

I kind of tell them when they've gotten enough from me. Once their momentum is going, I like to let them loose and say, “Don't contact me until you have a problem.” Because, boy, once that motor gets going, I am amazed how quickly they can write.

Somehow structure is the thing that eludes people the most. Do you find that?

Oh, yeah. And for some reason, my gift is to tell them their story. I will tell it back to them. “Here's what I hear, I think your story is…” I think that comes from all the years that I worked in television movies, and pitching stories. I mean, I was dealing with five stories a week that I would go and pitch. I was constantly taking material, true material, and trying to figure out how to shape it into an entertaining story, and looking, “Is there a genre that this fits?” In working with clients I get excited about the story, then they pick up my excitement and then they take it and run in ways that I never could have imagined. 

Do you talk in structural terms, using the three-act structure?

Yes, and most of all, it seems to be giving them an ending; for them to understand what a crisis, a climax, and the realization is. Understanding that they think they know what it is, but they don't. Really understanding what the climax of their story is, which doesn't always happen exactly the way it needs to be expressed in a story. So I think I add my imagination as a storyteller for them and then we find a way to make it real.

I carry their story with me once I get their material. I carry it with me when I'm taking a shower, when I'm going for a walk. It's working its way through my imagination. And so by the time I talk to them and tell it to them, I've got an excitement about the story that they pick up. That seems to be what works. People get themselves so tangled up in their story, because they don’t realize what they can leave out. We figure out, "This is the story. All this other stuff doesn't need to be in it. That character doesn't need to be in there, who's still alive, who's going to give you trouble."

The structure of your memoir, Apprenticed to Venus, is so unique and eye-opening—the two voices, weaving your story with Anaïs Nin’s.

Oh, it was so hard. For me, emotion comes last. It’s like an Asperger's thing almost. I see structure and I wanted to do something very difficult in the structure of my book. I had to play more fast and loose with memoir, in terms of chronology and freedom to imagine where something could be placed, more than really anything I've ever worked on with somebody else.

But I had said for myself, “I want to see how the myth, the story inside one person's life, can change the trajectory of another person's life,” and that’s what Anaïs and I did for each other. I wanted to tell her story not as biography, but as it influenced my story. And so, to interweave them, boy, I just had to leave so much out, and jump through time, and pick out those moments where one of her turning points would influence me, even if it influenced me in a way where it was a misinformation that influenced me, or carefully revealed information that would make me go in the wrong direction.

Your memoir really pushes the genre forward. Do you feel like that’s happening elsewhere, in terms of the evolution of memoir?

Well, it's happening in France. It's happening as autofiction. That's their term for it. It's the most popular genre in France. They're frequently ahead of us, in terms of experimentation, and having a readership for experimentation.

Do you think this new territory makes memoir more interesting? Or do you think traditional memoir, being as true as you can be to your story, is just as valuable?

Well, with Anaïs, people have written straight stories about knowing her. People have written biographies about her that were carefully researched. So if I was going to write about Anaïs, everything has been kind of used up. So I wrote the book for myself, to see what I could do with this genre, which was taking it as far as possible, and to have fun with it for myself, and for the reader. And now I'm working on a book that's going to be strictly non-fiction. I'm not going to make up anything. I don't need to.

Sometimes what is a great idea, or inspired by a true story, doesn't fulfill what you need, in terms of story structure. But if you go deep enough, I often find that it does. Certainly, I'm not encouraging my writers to fictionalize. I'm encouraging them to look within the emotional story, what could be brought out in terms of making a true story more powerful. Sometimes those may be things in one's imagination. One's imagination is true too. “I dreamt that this would happen.” “I wanted this to happen.” Those are real. And they allow you a great freedom without lying to the reader.

The perfect example is Mary Karr's Liar's Club. She's in the car with her mother and she writes “I didn’t think this particularly beautiful or noteworthy at the time, but only so so now. The sunset we drove into that day was luminous, glowing; we weren’t.

“Though we should have glowed, for what Mother told absolved us both…” You forget that she's saying it should have happened that way because you get the emotional relief of it happening that way. What's important is the emotional release for the writer and the reader. But that is the power of fiction. The power of fiction is, “What if?” And I don't see any reason why a memoir writer can't use, “What if?” as long as the reader knows that's what they're doing.

Speaking of Mary Karr… In her book The Art of Memoir, she shares a quote by Philip Gourevitch who says that his works of memoir are just as great as his works of fiction. Still, the publishing world seems to hold fiction in higher regard. Do you think memoir has gained more respect in recent years?

I think that's it gotten better in quality because it has incorporated the techniques of fiction—scenes, dialogue, story structure, thematic unity, character development, character arc. That's what the new autobiography is, and that's what interests me.

One of my favorite writers is Pat Conroy, who was writing autobiographic novels long before there was such a thing as autofiction, or what I call novoir. He admitted that he was writing autobiographical novels. He was so committed to language and craft that, for me, it's tremendous that it's coming out of this man's experience who experienced of all macho sides and damage of being a man, and that he has the ability to write emotionally about it, and artistically, and with the craft that really makes it into a satisfying story with multiple characters.

And what about the evolution of publishing? Do you recommend following a traditional publishing path or self-publishing?

Most people that I work with, and that I like to work with, have a sense that this story has been given to them, and they have a life purpose in sharing it, realizing it, for themselves, and for others even if that might be a limited audience of family or self-published. I probably have a lot more people who are writing for publication, and I like to recommend them to a commercial publisher. Because I just think, for a writer, that getting somebody else to do all the things that are involved with publishing a book, it's just really nice to have somebody else do that for you. Self-publishing, well you just have a huge learning curve, but I greatly admire those who self-publish.

What advice would you give to someone who knows they have a personal story to tell, but might not be sure where to begin?

Well, I still think I have the best book on memoir writing, in terms of giving concrete advice on craft and covering the subject. So I'd tell them to get Your Life as Story. I think it untangles a lot of knots for people and gives them a roadmap and encouragement.

In terms of Apprenticed to Venus, which I hope people will buy in softcover, now that it's more affordable, I would say read it in terms of the freedom of how far you can go in experimentation. It's got two different voices in it, and it’s sort of funny. When I ask people, “You want me to tell you what I made up? Where I changed things?” People will say, “No, don't tell me.” They want to keep for themselves the story as I told it.

To learn more about Tristine Rainer, visit her website.

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