how to write your life without losing your mind

on why I've started a memoir club

I hope you don’t mind me holding my head in my hands and gazing at you with a slightly exhausted, woebegone look — I’m not sad, I promise! I’m just taking a break because it’s shaping up to be a quite a busy week.

My memoir Where You End and I Begin launches on Thursday (July 7th) in London with John Murray Press. It will be also be out at the end of the month in Canada and the US with Penguin Random House and HarperCollins respectively. Here’s the first review in Publisher’s Weekly. 

When I started Juvenescence earlier this year. I figured: “I’m between books, why the hell not?”

So far the response has been fantastic — humbling and invigorating by turns. So many of you have subscribed, it’s wild. I barely do social, I’m not on TikTok, I just sit in my little London writing shed most of the time, so I figured, who gives a crap what I think? Apparently a lot of you (which is really nice).

Lately when I wake up at 3 am I often find myself thinking, Why the hell didn’t I start Juvenescence sooner? which I can assure you is highly unusual. So thank you all for temporarily alleviating my Philip Larkin-ish mortal dread. Really, I mean it.

To celebrate, I’ve decided to try something new here on Juvenescence. Something fun and immersive and creative — something I hope you might find valuable, apart from my random cultural musings. It’s a bit of an experiment, and I need your help.

I’m starting a memoir writing club. I’m calling it Leah’s Memoir Club, because it’s mine. I started it. So I’m allowed to pick the name. Sorry to be bossy. It’s genetic.

Having said that I’m hoping you might join. At this point (and actually for the past several years) Leah’s Memoir Club has only had one member — me — and let me tell you it gets pretty lonely in the old shed, especially in winter. So feel free to come along for the ride, or not, as the case may be. It is, after all, a club that would have you as a member which I know many of you (myself included) struggle with. But still.

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

SO HOW DOES THIS SO-CALLED MEMOIR CLUB WORK?

Broadly speaking, the idea is to take my entire jumble bag of literary tricks, tips and insights (gleaned over a quarter century of professional first-person storytelling, creative non-fiction writing, novel and short story writing and general freelance anecdotalising) then empty it out on the table for all of you to see. So in that sense it’s a bit like a course or a workshop.

I’ll begin by addressing the memoir-related questions I get asked all the time — by interviewers, friends, readers and random people on the street. They are exceedingly difficult questions I’ve thought about deeply and discussed at length with other writers, editors, publishers, agents and others. Because of this, I have answers. Authoritative, tested and definitive ones. I think you might find them surprising. I think they might help clarify your thoughts, dispel your worries or anxieties. They might even give you inspiration or hope — or at the very least prevent you from striking off half-cocked in the wrong direction, because I’ve done that too. More times than I can count, and I’ve lived to tell the tale.

We will cover questions like:

1) I have an amazing story to tell and I’m compelled to write it but I’m terrified my family/friends/spouse will hate me if I publish – what should I do?

2) What if I get sued or someone threatens to sue me? How do privacy and libel laws actually work?

3) Who owns a story? What if another person’s story forms part of my story? What makes a story “mine” to tell or not tell?

4) What if other people remember what happened differently and contradict my version of events? Will I get cancelled? Will I lose my job? Will I not be invited back for Christmas?

5) What if I just call it a novel instead? Isn’t that what Knausgaard did? By the same token, if I’ve already written my story as thinly-veiled fiction, can I turn it into a memoir in the hope of selling it?

6) I have a story but I’m not sure it’s interesting/explosive/dramatic enough for a memoir – how can I be sure my story will be interesting to anyone but me?

7) Am I being narcissistic and self-indulgent to even be considering this? Given the state of the world, shouldn’t I be volunteering at a soup kitchen instead?

8) What if I just want to record my story for posterity in case future generations might want to read it – is that a silly, egotistical thing to do?

9) How do I get published? Is self-publishing weird? How do you even go about it? What about promotion? Will I ever make money at this? What’s the deal with agents? How does the publishing industry work in different territories?

10) What if I don’t really do social media or have a “following” – should I bother? If I want to write, shouldn’t I establish a platform first? 

11) What if my story is complicated and parts of it make me look bad? If I’m ashamed of the truth, should I still risk telling it?

12) What if there are parts of my story I want to leave out? Is that cheating?

So there you have it. I will answer all of these thorny questions in full detail, using real life examples, and you can then file away any nuggets of wisdom that work for you and discard the rest. After that, the plan will be for YOU to get cracking on a finished project of your own. 

Because you have a story to tell. I know you do. 

More than anything, I want Memoir Club to be a gathering place and an interactive experience, not in the virtual-reality-fortnite-mission sense but in terms of sharing and connecting and learning from each other. Substack is a forum that will allow us to do this, free from the algorithmic snark and competitive aggro-jousting of social media, which as I mentioned is not my thing.

HOW EXACTLY WILL IT WORK?

I will treat the Memoir Club as a job — hence “Leah’s.” I will be posting twice per week on the craft and art of the memoir. Eventually, once I have gathered a like-minded group of participants, I will then offer interactive threads in which members can connect with me and other established mentors and writers (oh yes!) to weigh in. Eventually, if all goes well, you’ll even have a chance to request one-on-one manuscript consultation from me or another mentor. There is of course no pressure to actively participate, you’re entirely welcome to dip in and graze at the Memoir Club buffet as you will – how you use it is up to you.

There will be no mandatory homework.  But if you are moved to participate, if you are hoping to improve your own writing, my aim is to support and educate you on how to push yourself further in your work. What’s more, I’m hoping to get your regular feedback — starting from right now, today — on what works and what doesn’t. I want to treat Memoir Club as a kind of collaborative story laboratory, a place to experiment together, so please, please tell me what you think and I promise to respond in due course. Email me back or leave a comment below.

To begin with I’m just going to tell you everything I know about writing a memoir, which is a long and interesting story in itself. 

Because my memoir? The one that comes out this week? It’s not just the story of my childhood (specifically the deep, complicated, emotionally-enmeshed love I shared with my mother growing up), it’s a memoir about memoir writing itself – what it does to your life, your mind and your heart. It’s about what happens when family secrets become stories and how those stories (victim-narratives in particular) then reverberate through generations and form new stories of their own. 

Where You End And I Begin was a truly terrifying book to write. It felt like driving backwards in the dark, my heart was in my mouth for two years straight. It was hard but it was also so, so worth it on so many levels – and not just because it’s being published. But the writing process itself was pretty lonely and scary at times. I wish I’d had something like Memoir Club while I was writing it. So that’s part of the idea too.

WHAT ELSE AM I GOING TO LEARN?

I want Memoir Club to be as inspiring as it is practical – because for anything to succeed in life or writing, you need a bit of both. 

Mostly I’m going to be talking about the work, because that’s what interests me most. There will be lots of reading recommendations and deconstructions of how and why memoir writing works in a granular way. Voice. Storycraft. Sentences. Even grammar. The words on the page. Almost everything I’ve learned along the way I’ve gleaned from study and practice and hard won experience, trial and error mostly – I know what works and what doesn’t – and while I’ve had a degree of success I’ve also had a lot of failures. It’s the failures that make the writer. Learning from them, I mean. I want you to learn from mine.

In this way I hope to help you machete your way through the steamy, spider-and-snake-infested jungle of memory and personal experience toward that holy grail: the completed first draft, which I hate to tell you is actually just the beginning. The beginning of the beginning in fact. 

One of the things that’s made me passionate about memoir is the way it forces you to look carefully at the story of your life. What I mean by this is that it pushes  you to reckon with your own remembered truth. And in my experience, that reckoning can be immensely powerful in and of itself.

WILL THERE BE RULES? IF SO WHAT ARE THEY?

Yes and no. What follows is a set of self-generated guidelines I came up with while writing my memoir that now inform every aspect of my work – memoir or otherwise. These are less rules than guidelines toward a specific way of thinking. A kind of touchstone for navigating the tricky process of attempting to turn remembered past into a narrative that is coherent, but also empathetic and expansive. 

If I believe one thing whole heartedly about memoirs, it’s that the best ones are never self-serving narratives of convenience. The truth is complicated. Life is a bit of a mess. Good readers and writers understand and embrace this, even (perhaps especially) in storytelling. 

I have these rules tacked on a sheet of A4 above my desk and read them every single day.

THE SIX GOLDEN RULES OF LEAH’S MEMOIR CLUB

– First there is what happened. 

– Then there is what happened to you. 

– Then there is the story you told yourself about what happened. 

– Then there is the story others told you about what happened.

– Somewhere in the middle of all these things is the story you are trying to write. To find it, first you must earnestly grapple with and consider all of the above. 

– This is the work. 

If you take these rules to heart, if you are willing to stretch yourself, to look at a story – specifically, your own story – from multiple angles and hold it up to the light, test it against your own biases, then I promise you are halfway there.

It sounds simple, but it’s not. But trust me, we’ll get there.

WHAT WILL IT COST ME?

Short answer: $5 (£4) a month.

Long answer: The topline posts will be free to begin with. This will give free subscribers a sense of what you can expect to learn and read and whether you’re even into it. Down the line, the best parts of Memoir Club will become subscribers only. Part of the reason is pure economics (I want to treat it like a job and justify my time) and the other part is that I want the club to be a circle of trust. Why? Because memoir writing can be a pretty raw experience. You don’t have to share, but if you do I want you to feel safe and supported. It’s not a competition, it’s a forum and I want it to feel safe. No meanies or bullies allowed. So, another reason for the friendly paywall. By culling the herd we create a circle, a tribe. 

The price of a Starbucks flat white a month is really not a lot to pay for a safe creative space in which to learn and play and grow. Consider the cost-benefit.

ULTIMATELY, WHAT IS MEMOIR CLUB TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH?

In this snark-free safe habour, I’m hoping some magical things will occur: 

– We’ll learn to find our voices. Because memoir writing is all about voice. Finding your own distinct voice is key, in fact, to understanding and crafting your story. The voice and the story are one. Your voice is the origin of everything, it’s the spark that will ignite the barn fire of your narrative, which will then take on a life and momentum of its own.

– We will examine how sentences work and through their analysis become more aware of stuff like rhythm and cadence and how you can use these techniques to greater storytelling effect. And no, “good writing” is not a talent anyone is born with. That’s why there are no writing prodigies. It’s a craft and an art and can absolutely be taught, at any age. I truly believe that.

– We will immerse ourselves in the finest examples of the form, from Nabokov to Didion to Mary Karr and more contemporary practitioners of the form like Roxanne Gaye and Hilary Mantel – the reading list will be lengthy and exhaustive and you can pick and choose. The examination of these works will help us to understand our own stories and see our writing with fresh eyes.

– We’ll hang out and get to know each other and maybe even become friends.

So thanks for coming out. Speak soon. I’m off to buy a frock.

xLeah