Memoir is about truth. Our personal truth. Not capital T truth, because perception of past events is always filtered through the stained glass windows of our coping mechanisms.

Writing our truth requires bucketloads of courage. Because we must face our fallibility, our flaws, our defects, our culpability. In fact we must do so much more than face these things: we must put them on display for the world to see, like leaping stark naked onto a nudist beach after a lifetime of shame around body image.

The very act (or series of painful, daily acts) of writing requires us to have the courage to stare down the facts of our past, to make sense of them, and to show the reader that we’ve come through it all somehow better, wiser, more resilient—rarely do we aim to leave the reader feeling hopeless because we authors come out the other side of our memoir-writing exercise beaten and bloodied.

Writing memoir is not for the faint of heart.