FEARLESS CONFESSIONS: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir
Sue William Silverman
University of Georgia Press, 2009
Sue William Silverman’s Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir begins in her shrink’s office. More specifically, with an anecdote about her psychiatrist’s advice that perhaps writing a memoir (rather than the fiction she’d been struggling with) might be therapeutic. A good many writers and teachers of writing who would stop right there, page one, convinced of the book’s inherent flakiness. Until I wrote a memoir, I might have done the same thing. Most of us who teach writing expend an extraordinary amount of effort proving that what we do isn’t self-help, but Silverman refuses to uphold this pedagogical taboo. She doesn’t use words like pedagogical, for one thing, and she begins her book, with no apologies, in a deliberately therapeutic mode.
Silverman has plenty of experience taking on taboos. Her first memoir, Because I Remember Terror Father, I Remember You (University of Georgia Press, 1996), winner of the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction, chronicled the years of sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, as well as her mother’s complicity in that abuse. Her second memoir, Love Sick (W.W. Norton, 2001), revealed her struggle with sexual addiction. Fearless Confessions, her latest effort, is many kinds of books at once. Published as a creative writing textbook, it can also be read as a third memoir—about her journey as a writer. Fearless Confessions also contains an impassioned defense of the genre itself and extensive resources for writers committed to further study of the genre.
Fearless Confessions focuses on both creativity and craft. It’s one part inspiration and anecdote, like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and one part technique and writing exercises, like Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing. The first few chapters focus on the usual suspects: language, theme, plot, voice, metaphor, writing style. And then boom, it’s chapter 7 and we’re on to marketing. But this approach seems appropriate since the nonfiction is quite market-driven. A helpful appendix attempts to define the subgenres of creative nonfiction, explaining them in terms of movement from plot to image, from objectivity to subjectivity: biography, autobiography, immersion journalism, memoir, personal essay, meditative essay, and the lyric essay. Silverman offers practical advice on publishing outlets, the pros and cons of publishing at a New York publishing house vs. an independent or university press vs. self-publishing. She also explains how publishing can lead to a career as a professional speaker. For someone looking to make a living as a writer today, it’s essential to understand how to best represent yourself as 1.) a writer and 2.) the proprietor of the business of being that writer. I was surprised, however, that Silverman didn’t address the “blogs to books” phenomenon, such as recent hit Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table which began as her blog, Orangette,
User-friendly analogies clarify important conventions and concepts; for example, Silverman uses the term “horizontal plot” to refer to a story’s exteriority, its “showing,” and the term “vertical plot” to suggest character interiority, the “telling.” Silverman distinguishes between the subject of the memoir, the experience itself, and the reflection upon that experience with another handy analogy: the Voice of Innocence and the Voice of Experience. To emphasize that there’s a spectrum between innocence and experience, Silverman draws stick figure illustrations. At first I balked at these drawings, but then I asked myself why I balked. With a shock of recognition, I realized that over the years, I have—in spontaneous (and sometimes desperate) attempts to explain something to my students—sung songs as varied as “Amazing Grace” to “Fight the Power,” impersonated movie stars, created thousands upon thousands of analogies to popular culture, and drawn gigantic icebergs on the chalkboard. Typically, I erase the board before I leave my classroom, lest any colleague enter the room after me and wonder what silly antics those creative writers are up to these days.
But Silverman proudly leaves those lessons on her chalkboard, and that is to her credit. Fearless Confessions speaks directly to its intended audience: the still-fearful student who shows up to the designated room—a classroom, a coffee shop, a living room, a writing desk, an online forum—because she needs and wants to write her story.
Cathy Day is the author of the memoir Comeback Season (Free Press, 2008) and the short story cycle The Circus in Winter (Harcourt, 2004). She teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.