Healing Personal History: Memoirs of Trauma and Transcendence

Abstract

Memoir writing, especially concerning experiences of suffering and trauma, is not only an increasingly popular form of literature—perhaps overtaking fiction among the reading public—but also a proven means of healing and overall improvement in psychological and physical health. It is folk art as well as a less formal but significant extension of philosophy as phenomenology, ethics and metaphysics. It explores, in Levinas’ terms, “the problem of the relationship between the I and the totality,” which “comes down to describing the moral conditions for thought.” It is living rather than dead historical discourse, in that it struggles to express the evolving consciousness of living souls. The greatest memoirs throughout the centuries have been and remain attempts to heal. This paper suggests that their achievements result from fully mindful attention as the medium of creative resolution and the transformation of individual consciousness to new levels of personal growth and healing. Three examples of individual transcendence in memoir writing are offered: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking; Patty Dann’s The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth about It); and an episode from the writer’s memoir in progress in which she gains an unexpected and more morally cognizant perspective on the adolescent trauma of being jilted for the high school prom. These works are discussed from a standpoint of attention not only to personal experience, but also to the craft of storytelling and the challenges of meeting a personally set standard of truth-telling. The writer spoke with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Patty Dann, quoting them on various problems and benefits of memoir writing. The paper closes with reference to David Grossman’s reflection on writing as a means of transcending the enslavement of degrading personal memories—which connects memoir writing to the exploration of ultimate reality, i.e. metaphysics.