How Much Trauma Is Too Much Trauma?

The Memoir Nation Show Up & Write accountability group is weekly a source of inspiration and motivation. I start the group with a chat about some aspect of memoir-writing, and last night, in the aftermath of Jason Arday’s death and my Substack post about the Trauma Olympics, the subject was trauma, and why writers might feel the need to push the envelope to the point of lying.

One memoirist in the group asked, How much trauma is too much trauma?

Such a good question, and I want to relay what I shared.

It’s not so much how much trauma a given memoir is packed with, but rather, how the writer shares it that matters. If a writer is begging the reader to validate their trauma, or if the reading experience starts to feel like a writer is writing for the sake of being seen—for what happened, as a victim, with no real reason other than to say “acknowledge what happened”—the reader feels it and knows that the book is not really for them, the reader; rather, the book is for the writer.

One of the biggest criticisms of memoir is that it’s indulgent, that it’s too process-y, and these judgments against the genre are not unfounded. Many people find their way to memoir to process the worst things that ever happened to them. Memoir is, in fact, a great container for terrible experiences. But, unless and until the writer takes seriously the purpose of memoir—which is to offer something to your reader—the work will fall short.

I had the privilege of interviewing V (formerly Eve Ensler) onstage in Berkeley a few years ago when she was touring for her book, The Apology, in which she imagines her father apologizing for the abuse he perpetrated on her when she was growing up. She talked about people who identify with the wound, who pull up their buggies or their bicycles right next to the wound and get radiated by all the negativity there. She said, “There’s a portal inside the wound, and if you go through the wound, it’s very painful, but there is freedom on the other side.”

I recalled V last night when I was answering the question about how much trauma is too much trauma. I can think of a dozen books (see below) that are intensely traumatic books. But the writers didn’t park next to the wound. The writers went through it to freedom, for themselves and for their readers.

By the way, if you’re reading this and you are parked at the wound, that’s okay. Part of writing memoir is to work your way through trauma. To figure out what happened and to reclaim your story may require you to flush out the wound, to tend to it, to stay for a beat why everything heals. I think this is why it often takes memoirists so many years to write their memoirs—especially for those with enough self-awareness and understanding to grasp that their early drafts are not ready for prime time.