As someone who's recently been forced to write about their own life, and as someone who doesn't have objectively horrific memories that can still and do trigger me (HaHAha mEntal ilLness iS so funnY! tRiggEred mEmes!), I have to wonder how much Jeanette is telling us about her childhood.
Because yes, she tells us about being molested, and starving, and being beat up, but how do we gauge how much she cares about these memories, and how do we know if she's leaving anything out? If these are memories that she has a hard time confronting, how can she have put them down on paper without obfuscating the truth in them? And if she can confront them, are they really terrible?
If she's not writing about a part of her past that terrifies her, how can she care enough? But if she is writing, how does she have the strength to do it?
Unless, by adding odd details to the story, she feels as if she's not writing about her past, but writing about a stranger. This might inspire objectivity, but as we've seen, the memoir is definitely not objective, no memoir is.
And that's what I don't understand. How can she write subjectively, and still have the strength to write about her most certainly traumatic past? This was my original question, and I keep going in circles.
I most certainly can't make any sense of it, but then again, there's my extremely subjective viewpoint limiting my understanding. Of course, all of us have a bias obscuring our worldview, but maybe, with everyone trying to understand, we can figure stuff out. Or not.
Probably not. We are humans after all, we're extremely limited in every sense of the word. Who knows, maybe someone does know.
It's possible that she wrote about these traumatic experiences with help from another person, having them guide her and keep her from having a breakdown about this. Or it could be that she sees those times as a way to keep other people from doing the same, and moves through it in the idea that she's helping people who could go through the same.
ReplyDeleteI want to say good luck on writing your memoir, and I'm sure you can talk to Ms. Garvoille about what you have to write. If you're uncomfortable with writing about those experiences, just ask her about it.
I actually just watched an interview that Jeannette Walls had with Oprah and in the interview, she partly answers some of your questions. In the interview, she spoke about how writing the book was a way to let go of her shame. She felt both ashamed of living a better life than her parents and also the way she was raised. After she wrote The Glass Castle, most of that shame lifted and, as she said it was limiting her happiness before, she was able to truly enjoy her life more. So although the book was most likely hard to write, as you said, it was also therapeutic in a way and that is probably how she got through writing about those harsh moments in her childhood.
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