When Are You Not Yourself? Encountering You in Your Memoir
Monument to pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago in Mansanilla de Mulas, Spain. Credit and copyright: Adam C Groves / Ultreya Editorial
“The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist … must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. ‘Good writing has two characteristics,’ a gifted teacher of writing once said. ‘It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.’”
–Suzanne Gornick
“The problem with I is … that fledgling personal essayists and memoirists may think they have conveyed more than they actually have …. In their minds, that I swarms with a lush, sticky past and an almost fatal specificity, whereas the reader encountering it for the first time … sees only a slender telephone pole … trying to catch a few signals to send on.”
–Philip Lopate
This is the latest in an occasional series of essays inspired by Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. You can find the review that kicked it off here, and my most recent installment here.
The title of this essay is a riff on a moment from the movie I Heart Huckabees, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UVl-mZi9WI. Brad, played by Jude Law, is a man who tells the same anecdote to everyone he meets in order to protect a carefully-cultivated image (including to himself). In this clip, a pair of existential detectives played by Lily Tomlin and Dennis Hoffman question him on his behavior until he snaps, then asks them, “How am I not myself?” All three characters begin repeating the question, more to themselves than to each other, as Law’s character walks out of the room in an epiphanic daze.
Writers of memoir face the challenge of self-knowledge.
I want to talk about this in two ways. The first concerns not providing readers with enough of the stuff of yourself for them to truly engage and come along on your literary journey. Let’s call this “When you are not yourself for your audience.” The second concerns not facing the full mystery of who you are during the writing process in order to truly go on a journey, yourself. This aspect we will call “When you are not yourself for you.”
A convenient framework for this discussion is the curse of knowledge:
“The curse of knowledge, also known as the curse of expertise, is a cognitive bias in which we assume that the people we are talking to have the same level of understanding as we do on a given subject. This often causes a barrier to effective knowledge sharing as we are uncertain about what the other party already knows.” (The Decision Lab, accessed August 21, 2025, 15:45 (CDT))
I suggest that we are not only ignorant of how much others know about what we know; I believe we are pretty ignorant about how much we actually know about what we think we know. For writers about the self such as memoirists, this includes knowledge of the self.
So as a writer of memoir, how do you get better at noticing, and remedying, “when you are not yourself” when you write?
First, let’s talk about when you are not yourself for your audience.
In writing, as in any moment of communication, it is important to remember that your audience is not in your head with you. Readers only know what you tell them. The more you leave out of your story, whether by intent or through neglect, the more they will shoehorn in from their own knowledge and assumptions. This goes for the “literal” aspects of your story—“who you are” in the story and what happens—but more importantly it goes for what it means.
“What it means” goes to the heart of the curse of knowledge when writing memoir. A challenge I often see writers struggle with is that they start from a place of “knowing” where it will all end and what readers should take out of the story, and then they tell only enough of their life story to drive that point home. But your idea of sufficient evidence will not necessarily convince a jury of your peers, much less present them with a coherent reconstruction of the case. No one but you has lived every moment of your life and made all of the big and small connections between every last thing you have been through, thought, and felt. No one but you has spent your entire lifetime whittling down the enormity of your experience to the essential clues which lead to your eureka.
The good news about all of this is that it gives you a head start on identifying what is and is not important. The harder news is that you’re going to have to spend a fair amount of time while you write double-checking your work, as it were.
As a memoirist, your challenge is to sufficiently reconstruct the scene of your life in order for readers to be able to put the pieces together for themselves in a way that is within striking distance of what you hoped for. You may find that you instinctively dismiss things that are essential for your audience’s understanding. And details you have come to see as irrelevant may actually matter quite a lot for readers to see.
Now, it is true that with any book the reader participates in creating the meaning of the story. But how much of that interpretive wiggle room do you want to result from negligence? If you do not pay attention to how much you are leaving off of the page as you tell your story, then a Wild West of reader interpretations is your best-case outcome. Worse, if you assume too much, there is a good chance readers will become frustrated and abandon your story.
Your readers do not want to be told what to think. They want to become convinced on their own.
The question of how much more the reader needs to know is a challenge with all writing, but this goes double for memoir. It is one thing to guard against the curse of knowledge when it comes to spaceships or French history, but is there anything you are more intimately familiar with than the contents of your own life? This makes it proportionally harder to notice when you are assuming things that no one else can know (until you tell them).
I want to go on a brief tangent to clarify that failing to notice what you forgot to include is not the same as leaving things out—or, more precisely, leaving things less than explicit—on purpose. Long ago, one of my graduate writing professors observed that there is a difference between ambiguity and vagueness. While I am not a huge fan of splitting hairs of vocabulary, I have always appreciated this distinction.
Ambiguity, he said, is when the writer knows exactly what the subtext of a scene is, and readers are sufficiently informed to follow the trajectory of what is transpiring. The writer has strategically omitted certain information to add tension or thematic complexity to a scene. Vagueness, the teacher went on, is when the writer doesn’t know what’s going on any better than the reader and/or has ignored their duty to supply important details. I’ll add that a writer sometimes thinks it dodges the bullet to admit this out loud, but it doesn’t work that way. To illustrate, take the sentence, “Jessica wasn’t sure how she felt.”
There is an ambiguous version of this, where the sentence is couched in a larger narrative context that drops enough clues for readers to make educated guesses about how Jessica feels (perhaps these hints are hidden in how she stands, or what activity she’s engaged in, or what’s going on around her; or maybe her mood can be deduced from a parallel scene that took place twenty pages earlier or from a conversation that will happen thirty pages on; or maybe Jessica is drawn so vividly throughout the story that readers are able to come to one or more reasonable conclusions about “how she felt”).
By contrast, a vague version of “Jessica wasn’t sure how she felt” plunks into the story like a finger in a dike. It is meant to close a psychological gap in how Jessica was conceived but the emergency seal only draws attention to the faulty construction of the character. The whole edifice of Jessica may blow apart under the pressure of reader expectations at any moment.
Moving on, how do you increase awareness of your curse of knowledge so that you can start to break that curse on behalf of your readers?
My number one piece of advice is the same as always: enlist fellow writers and beta readers. Ask them to read your work and point out what is missing. And I suggest that you don’t tell them what your intended plot or tone or message is; instead, ask them to tell you what they think those are. Other pairs of eyes can help you to hone your internal vision for blind spots.
And if you have not already, check out books on writing craft. These can help you to cultivate skills of observation and sensitivity to how to construct characters, scenes, dialogue … all the things. This pays off in all sorts of ways, most notably for our purposes in that it will help you to think of your own life less in terms of “this is what it means, because this is what happened” and more in the sense of “this is what happened … and I wonder what it means.” The Creative Process, by Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley, helped me a lot in my early years to cultivate my own writing skills.
Let’s turn our attention to the second point. How do you get better at noticing “when you are not yourself” for yourself?
That is, how do you become enough of a stranger to yourself while writing your memoir in order to have a deeply enriching encounter of yourself?
In memoir it pays off to pay attention to your blind spots, not just for the sake of readers but for your own sake. As Gornick puts it, “the writer is on a journey of discovery.” But the reader can only be persuaded of this if you, the writer, were persuaded first.
Part of the surprising beauty of memoir is its power to show you that even you are not always in your head with you. If you are honest, diligent, and fortunate, you discover as you write that you don’t know yourself as well as you thought you did. As that dawns on you, you transform from someone simply reporting on yourself to someone investigating yourself—and discovering yourself! And one day readers will have a more enriching experience of coming on your journey because you will have well and truly gone on that journey, first.
In his book The Anatomy of Genres, John Truby astutely links the memoir story type to its natural siblings: “The Detective and Thriller genres mix well with Memoir because the author-hero is always the detective of her own life” (Truby 2022, p. 206). I love this observation, and I love what it implies: like Hercule Poirot or Jessica Fletcher, you arrive at the scene of your own life almost like the scene of a crime. With pen and paper in hand, your sacred vocation is to observe, document, and deduce. And you do not observe what you wish was there, but rather what is. You do not document what is convenient to document, but rather everything that is pertinent to the case. Finally, you do not conclude what want to conclude; you reach the verdict that the evidence demands.
Imagine that you decide to hire someone to get to the bottom of your life and tell the tale. You are eager for them to get to work, but when they show up at your home, they move around quickly, arrogantly, hardly paying attention to the questions you raise and ignoring two-thirds of the breadcrumbs on the floor (even though they must lead somewhere).
It becomes clear that they believe that who you are and what happened here are fairly elementary matters; that these photos on the mantle obviously mean this, and the food in your fridge clearly indicates that, and your diaries speak so transparently that a few short quotations will make the other thing perfectly apparent (and those odd items in your coat closet and upstairs bathroom? Those don’t matter). Then they bag up about one percent of what they bothered to pay attention to (which is only a sliver of the piles of evidence surrounding you), say they’ll have a final report for you in a couple of days, and hold out their hand to get paid.
I would hope that you would be scandalized by this half-hearted examination. I would hope that you’d say, “Can you show some proper curiosity and respect? This is my life we’re talking about!”
We are rarely this openly careless about telling our life stories. Quite the contrary: everyone I’ve worked with who is dedicated to chronicling themselves takes it very seriously. I only exaggerate to demonstrate how damaging you can inadvertently be to yourself … and to your memoir … and to genuine and cathartic self-discovery … to approach your own story with too much of an air of already knowing how it’s going to turn out.
Sometimes we think we are doing ourselves and the world a great favor by deciding in advance what message we want to deliver and then never wavering in our pursuit of that objective. Perhaps the world has never listened, and we are finally seizing our chance to say what we want to say. Or perhaps we have not received the chance or given ourselves the chance to speak, and we fear that this is our only opportunity, and we do not want to let it be spoiled by the discomfort and unpredictability of really digging into ourselves, which will probably only spoil our one and only chance to shine.
Maybe, sometimes, we are right about all of this. But I suspect that a lot more often, self-expression, and memoir in particular, can be much more rewarding to both writer and reader when we are willing to stumble; when we are willing to get a little lost in pursuit of a deeper truth.
I am talking now about the writing process, not the editing process. About slowing down, showing up, and listening. Becoming curious about all the pieces of your life and not only the ones you like the most or which paint the best picture of who you are. I am talking about “how to be yourself to yourself.”
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says something remarkable. She says to writers, “You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself.” A little further on she adds, “It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host…. This is what the writer has to offer” (Lamott 1995, pp. 202-204).
Lamott is talking about the gift you offer of being a host to others and which you give by writing, but I believe memoir carries immense power to help you become a proper host to yourself, and that writing can help you move a little closer to discovering the gift of peace and wholeness … if you let it.
“When are you not yourself?” For today, the answer is, “When you don’t let yourself be.” So today, my invitation to you is to think about how it would on your writing journey if you were to invite all of yourself along. And ponder what a profound invitation of love and integrity that writing experience would extend to your readers.
Ultreia et suseia, dear pilgrim
Works Cited:
“Curse of Knowledge,” The Decision Lab, accessed August 21, 2025, 15:45 (CDT), https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/management/curse-of-knowledge
Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. Anchor Books, 1995.
Lopate, Philip. “The Personal Essay and the First Person Character.” In Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, Plume, 2007.
Truby, John. The Anatomy of Genres. Picador, 2022.