My mind is in a quandary. I signed up for a course on memoir writing because I am helping my elderly mother write her memoirs. Except, after just one lecture, I have discovered that she is not writing her memoirs at all. She is writing an autobiography and I am simply helping her put her words down on paper and trying to organize them into something approaching a chronological order. There is no emotion in her story, no sense of what she felt or how life has shaped her. Instead it is her story of “I was born, I grew up, I got married and had children, and I am approaching the time when I will die”.
So now what do I do? Obviously my mother will write her autobiography and not her memoirs, but will I write mine? In the first lecture we were to brainstorm a list of teachers and I was stumped. I couldn’t remember anyone. Can I write memoirs without memory? Past trauma has stifled a lot of my memory, yet my brain feels full to bursting. I desperately want to write, to share the emotion, the experiences, the good and the bad, with myself and with others. Yet I am afraid it will be like opening Pandora’s Box and I am afraid of being overwhelmed.
As a side note, I looked up “quandary” because I wasn’t sure of the spelling and google provided me with this:
quan·da·ry
/ˈkwänd(ə)rē/
noun
a state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation.
“Kate is in a quandary”
Even Google knows I am in a quandary!
Kate