Another Form of CNF True Crime: Trauma and Abuse Memoirs

This isn’t material I would teach as mandatory reading in a creative writing class, and probably also not in a literature course, no matter how well crafted. Teaching fiction that deals with childhood violence has offered me enough instances where undergraduate students, many of whom are still teenagers, react strongly and not always predictably to material that is too close to home.

I remember this from my own undergraduate studies, in various realms.

The roommate who signed up for a Sociology presentation on childhood sexual abuse because it was a topic she wanted to explore safely, and who then gained the support she needed to tell her parents about her brothers’ behaviour when she was younger.

The mature student who befriended me in a Women’s Studies course and confided she was taking a class on Women and Violence because she was trying to leave an abusive husband.

I think that there’s enormous potential for pedagogical experiences to be productive and supportive, not just re-traumatizing. But each student needs to select their own opportunities for this growth, and in some instances we are overly ambitious about what we can handle.

This worries me, in terms of my own final project for my creative writing certificate.

I’m not sure that an academic term when I’ve been away on medical leave to deal with my autoimmune diseases’ upswing due to college budgetary upheavals and layoffs is really the best time to write my own lyric essays, which touch on abuse and other difficult subjects. Academic bullying. Marriage. Friendship breakups. Dead parents.

On the other hand: I’m currently employed and thus have access to exceptional professional development funds which pay for my final creative writing project. So I’m giving this a try, and the days are counting down until I need my full first draft. This morning’s essay section is about swimming: “Dead Man’s Float.” The first part is not trauma content, and it’s sheer joy to write about swimming. The next session will be tougher.

I’ve been bolstering my own supports by lining up writing and meditation retreats, weeding out activities that are exhausting and/or enervating, and pruning my own circle of care as well as my garden, both of which were in need of attention after a difficult wintering.

One of my great joys is my friends. But I sometimes hold on to connections that have expired. I was once a very lonely kid with no friends, because keeping secrets is antithetical to intimacy, and that motivates some of my choices.

But I can make better ones.

And can I just say, and yet once more, that therapy is a very good thing. Living at a cultural-historical moment where we talk about painful feelings is an even better thing, and we have been, collectively, normalizing discussion of past trauma.

Several people sent me a Guardian piece this week about trauma plots & narratives, and I failed to see what the author’s point was, so I’m not linking here. Yes, I agree that it’s lazy storytelling to connect a character’s present-day choices back to her childhood and have there be, every. single. time. a moment of revelation about abuse, neglect, or loss.

But it’s also the case that these stories serve the purposes of not only narrative suspense and plot construction, as the author suggests, but catharsis. We tell stories of trauma not just because they sensationalize real-life experience but because they are real-life experiences.

The author does have a point that merely telling trauma is not enough to resolve it. And from experience, I can say that telling the wrong people–those who haven’t learned to listen–leaves one bereft. But the fact that the narrative climaxes in a revelation of a particular traumatic loss or event in some instances is not a reason to dismiss storytelling about how pain shapes and deforms us as a cheap gimmick.

I’ve been reading widely, in search of models and guides, and there is so much very good creative nonfiction about trauma.

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is justly acclaimed, Stories of abuse in queer relationships can be exceptionally difficult to relate for political reasons as well as aesthetic ones. Philip Sayers notes in this review that “In the Dream House takes place under the sign of fantasy and speculation in part because that’s the necessary mode of writing about a subject, like queer domestic abuse, with an ephemeral archive.” But in a sense, I think, all narratives of abuse are ephemeral. We see this at both the grand political or national level and at the interpersonal one: dictators try to scrub clean their crimes, and so do families, both with the motive of trying to change the recording of the past.

But there are always witnesses.

I’m also reading Kelly Sundberg’s powerful Goodbye, Sweet Girl. She traces how a relationship that was sometimes loving and reassuring was also wracked by her male partner’s physical and emotional abuse. The latter is, of course, challenging to portray, and there are definitional issues. For me, emotional abuse includes yelling, breaking things, the silent treatment; not everyone would concur. But I don’t let people yell at me twice, and I’ve been stunned, in academia, when there’s been yelling during department meetings, or name-calling, or shunning: all instances of academic bullying, and all inappropriate.

But having also dealt with well-meaning complaints processes and officers, who know very well that tenured bullies aren’t going anywhere, I have learned that the best (really, the only) solution is to retreat to safer spaces, where colleagues treat one another with kindness and respect. My current department is an oasis, in that regard. I still marvel, sometimes, as we pass around cookies or baby photos before our meetings start, at how calm everyone is, even in this moment of institutional crisis. I never feel afraid at department meetings. And I no longer countenance any relationships in which I am made to feel afraid, in personal or professional contexts.

Wishing everyone peace, and spring flowers, in whatever form you prefer them.