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Changing Your "Reality" Through Your Memoir
​ Can Open the Floodgates!​
​

​I worked with a writer whose father had committed suicide when he was twelve years old. He was one of twelve children.

His first writings were filled with rage and betrayal. He couldn't fathom what had driven his father to suicide. As if that wasn't enough, the family lived a lie: "He died of a heart attack in his sleep."

When he completed the memoir, it was a moving story of a family tragedy, truth-telling and the power of family love. No matter how many times I've read the ending, I cried!
What allowed the writer to move from rage and confusion to love? One day, when he and I were discussing the many incidents that made him angry and left him bereft, he mentioned, with sadness, that he hadn't been allowed to go to the funeral. 

"I can't tell you how much I wish I'd been able to go to the funeral," he admitted.

"So go," I suggested. "Write the scene where you go to the funeral?"

​"I can do that?" he asked in amazement.
"Absolutely!" I told him. And he was off and running. He wrote a powerful scene where he and two of his younger siblings sneak out of the house and make their way to the church. Along the way, they met a strange character, a wise fool of sorts. Then they slipped into the church where the funeral was going on, and the memoir changed.

He changed. He was inspired. New storylines emerged, much of it based on fact and some on imagined scenes that allowed him to make sense of his world. Finally, he was able to shed light on the family secret that said his father died of a heart attack in his sleep. 
​Most important, his "made up" adventure of sneaking into the church opened him to fertile complexities of family love. It's part of the amazing and mysterious journey of the imagination!

​When we brave the risks of the journey, a memoir is a tapestry that liberates us in ways we never imagined were possible!