Why We Write Our Lives

What’s the story you need to write down?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

There’s a moment in our lives when we realise: I need to write this down.

Not to vent. Not to prove. Not even to remember. But to understand.

Memoir, when approached mindfully, becomes the art of making sense of what we’ve lived. It’s not about the dramatic or extraordinary — it’s about discovering the quiet truths we’ve been carrying, and shaping them into stories that speak to something bigger than ourselves.

Often people think memoir means telling everything. A confession. A chronology. But what I’ve come to understand — through my own practice, the memoirs I’ve read, and the beautiful stories shared with me by other writers — is that memoir is a mosaic, not a map. You don’t need to show the whole terrain. Just the moments that changed the way you walk through the world. When you bring a mindful awareness to your past — without judgment, blame, or distortion — you can begin to see patterns, threads, symbols, and arcs. Meaning.

When I ran an indie press from 2018-2023, I published two memoirs. One of them was “A Song Inside” by Gill Mann, which is a love letter to her son, Sam. In it Gill remembers her life with him when he was a boy and a young man, the difficulties of his struggles with schizophrenia, and the impact of his death. It weaves seamlessly between past and present, and sometimes talks directly to Sam, to show how Gill has made meaning from his life and his sudden death.

The other was “The Naming of Bones” by Jan Kaneen, which is written in flash chapters. It intertwines her memories, dreams, folklore and the healing influence of the sea, as she makes sense of her past and the grief she didn’t even realise she’d forgotten she carried. 

Both authors have taken their grief and their healing and their new understanding, and turned them into works of literary art that are beautiful, heartbreaking and heart-mending, and resonate with the human experiences we all have.

But memoirs don’t have to be about the heartbreak in life. One of the first memoirs I read and loved, way back at the start of the millennium, was “The Good Life” which is about a couple from the UK who left their comfortable life behind and set off to Canada with very few belongings to see how things panned out. The story of their adventure settling in the Yukon and discovering a new way of living immersed in nature was inspiring, funny, and sometimes terrifying. But it made them get to know and understand themselves a lot more than their life in the UK had.

In the Mindful Memoir course, I invite you into this process — one that is as much about self-awareness as it is about storytelling. Each week focuses on an essential element of memoir as a literary form: how to write the truth, how to navigate the slipperiness of memory, how to shape a life into narrative, how to write about real people with compassion, and how to find a voice that feels like your own.

This work is rooted in presence. Mindfulness helps us write with clarity and courage — not to get it “right,” but to get it real. It lets us write from the wisdom and insight of the healed place instead of the wound. It teaches us to hold space for pain and growth, grief and light.

And memoir, when written from this space, becomes an offering. Not “look what I’ve been through,” but do you recognise this feeling too?

So much of the writing I love — and the writing I try to support — comes from that place: where the personal meets the universal. Where the story of one life ripples out and touches another. Where it’s an endeavour of compassion and love, for ourselves, the people involved, for our shared humanity. 

If you’re called to write your own story — even if you’re not sure where it begins, or what shape it might take, or what it’s really about — I hope you’ll consider joining the course. It’s not about rushing to write a book. It’s about making space for your voice, and learning how to shape the raw material of your life into something true and resonant.

Try this writing exercise from Natalie Goldberg’s wonderful book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.

“Sit down right now. Give me this moment. Write whatever’s running through you. You might start with “this moment” and end up writing about the gardenia you wore at your wedding seven years ago. That’s fine. Don’t try to control it. Stay present with whatever comes up, and keep your hand moving.”

That’s how we mindfully uncover the stories inside us that want to be told. Then we shape them into something bigger and brighter to create connections in our own minds, and with those that may read what we share.

Because, as Mary Karr wrote in “The Art of Memoir”, “Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.”

So this course starts with finding the meaning within your story with curiosity and care. You don’t need to be wise. You just need to want to make some kind of meaning from the things that happen to you. The rest unfolds from there.

If you’d like to come on this journey with me the course starts on 16th June. It’s limited to just 12 writers and you can find out more here: The Mindful Memoir Course.

I’m honoured to be joined by two wonderful memoir writers as guest teachers —

Eleanor Anstruther

and

Ros Barber

will be teaching live Zoom workshops as part of the course. And in the final week of the course,

Teri Leigh 💜

will be hosting a San Kalpa Zoom session to help you set a mindful intention to guide the writing of your memoir after the course ends.

And whether or not you join, I’d love to know: what’s the story you need to write down? Please do let me know in the comments.

With love,

---