Making narrative from memory

Turning the past into memoirs

Hello friends, from now on the second Monday of the month is going to be memoir-in-progress posts for my paid subscribers. There will be writing prompts and exercises for you to get writing too.

I’ll be sharing my flash memoir pieces as I write them. They will be raw, they will be messy, they won’t be in order. But hopefully in mining my memories and turning them into creative non-fiction narrative pieces, we will all learn more about our craft, ourselves, and the ways in which we can turn our memories into memoirs, or morph them into fiction.

Although I believe the line between fiction and memoir is blurred, anyhow. Our interpretation of events, our faulty memories, the passing of time and the added layer of hindsight mean that every re-telling of a past event has a layer of fiction, or more than one, at its heart.

After almost 20 years of writing fiction, and nearly a decade of trying to process my past, it feels like the time has come to turn my writerly hand, and gaze, to my own life as well as those of the characters I write in my stories.

So here is my first piece of raw, messy first draft memoir as I recall the events that led to me leaving my family. I am finding the meaning as I go along. I hope you’re looking forward to finding it with me.