Sh-h-h-h!
I’ve written memoirs for a number of celebrities and it’s often a struggle to get them finished. Not because I don’t work fast enough or because they don’t like them. It’s about the element of surprise that the celebrity faces when they dig deep. Sometimes they find something they thought they had tucked away a long time ago and there it is, rearing its ugly head. They don’t know what to do with it so they start to feel cornered. I always get it finished but not before they come up with all manner of ways to dodge the truth and avoid finishing the book.
One woman got pregnant and she was nauseous all the time. Another woman went on a drunken bender. A man decided to go on tour when we had one month left. Another man who wasn’t a writer decided he wanted to start over and write the book himself. And a woman filled up her schedule with so much to do, she didn’t have time for the interviews.
I don’t blame them. Many of them just don’t want to look into the proverbial mirror and expose their human frailties As if they didn’t have any.
And then there was Grace Slick. One of the first rock and roll women to hit it big in the time of Janis Joplin, she didn’t have filters. If she said it in the interview, I could write it. That made for a great book but she was the exception to the rule. I once ghostwrote a memoir for a legendary diva who wanted the word “Secrets” in her title. She was candid in our interviews but a few days before the deadline, she chopped up the manuscript and whitewashed anything that made her seem human. There were no confessions, no revelations and above all, no secrets. The book hit the bestseller list because of her name and the promise in the title, but when it didn’t deliver, it fell off the list in one week. That was no surprise.
We all have secrets about what we did in life, what we thought and what shames us. We have the right to keep certain things under wraps, especially when they have to do with exposing other people. Or we may not have had time to process them yet. That makes sense but if you’re writing a memoir, you have to be willing to say the things that other people are afraid to say.
While secrets are yours to keep for protection, some of them can be damning and dangerous. A woman I know was married to a man in the nineteen eighties who was a renowned professor at an Ivy League college. When he found out he had HIV, the first thing he told her was, “Don’t tell anybody.” He pretended he had cancer and he died without anyone knowing the truth. My friend was also diagnosed with HIV, she managed to survive, but she told me, “As bad as the illness was, keeping the secret was much worse. It nearly killed me.”
In 2014, when I was writing my memoir, I had some decisions to make. Would I tell the truth about things that made me cringe? Things that I was ashamed of? Would I finesse what had happened in order to feel better about myself? I went back and forth in my mind and I made a commitment to remove the filters like Grace did and tell the truth. I was sure that whatever I had done, so had other people.
When my book was published, I was invited to a book club of women to discuss my memoir. One of them asked me, “How could you tell that story about your abusive relationship? Doesn’t it make you feel ashamed?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not that special. What woman in this room hasn’t done things that embarrass them? Who in this room didn’t have a bad relationship?”
They all looked down at their hands. When they looked back at me, they had softened. It appeared that they knew what I was talking about and they could relate to me. I was gratified, not because I’d written my stories to help other people heal. I had written them for my own healing and if someone else felt better for it, that made me feel less alone.
I sometimes come up against judgments when I post my weekly blog. I’m painfully honest and most of my followers are on board. But every so often, someone tells me what I did wrong and how I could improve my life. When I expose something sensitive about myself, I’m not asking for advice. I want the experience of telling the truth about myself to myself, and to other people. I think it’s far better to shock someone than bore them with useless information that doesn’t ring true. It’s good to remember that we all get embarrassed. We all get angry. We all get frightened. We all fall in love. And we all have secrets. However different our lives may be or how different we may look on the outside, we are all the same on the inside.