Did I Get My Memoir Wrong?

I was confident in my narrative and wrote a memoir about it. But turns out the facts were questionable.

This past April, I published a memoir, The Red Zone: A Love Story, about figuring out my mood swings and eventually realizing—through reading books, scrolling Reddit, and visiting my therapist—that I was dealing with premenstrual dysphoric disorder. From there, I brought it to the attention of my doctor. She was dismissive; the second doctor I went to relented. I still remember the feeling of seeing it written out on the piece of paper I left with that day. The relief. Almost giddy. Someone believed me. I had figured it out.

Creating a plot out of my period was extremely challenging. Periods are unpredictable, surprising, unknowable, and their symptoms vary wildly from month to month (for me). I didn’t have any other books as guidemaps for what period-as-plot would look like. Capturing PMDD, which made me paranoid and full of illusions, was already tough to get on the page. Sometimes I’d have blackout rage and forget what I’d said. I wondered occasionally: How much better would my book have been if I could remember everything I’d said?

One thing was certain about my book, and that was that I’d never (ever) heard of premenstrual dysphoric disorder until 2017. It was 2017 when my therapist uttered the condition’s name to me, 2018 when I decided to go to the doctor for it. I’d never heard the acronym out of anyone’s mouth until 2017.

At least that’s how I narrativized it.

My memory was something to be trusted, because my memory is something that has been complimented for many years—by teachers, by readers. People I dated told me I had a photographic memory. Friends would ask me what outfit they’d been wearing when we’d gone to the Yeasayer concert in 2008. In interviews about my writing, my memory was almost always touched upon, the interviewers asking me how my memory was so sharp.

Maybe this wasn’t the most productive for my writing, though—this fawning over my memory. Maybe it gave me what I’ll call “inflated-memory ego.”

Maybe the problem was that I was writing from a place of knowing, instead of unknowing.

*

I used to think that if you tell a story the exact same way every time you tell it, it means the story is true: Nothing exaggerated or with a detail left out or let in. Now, I think the more often you repeat the same story the exact same way, probably the less true it is. These days, I can tell I’m too stuck on a narrative when I repeat it the same way over and over. I always think it would be interesting to challenge myself to never tell a story the same way twice, but it’s easier said than done. By changing the way you tell a story, you have to think more deeply about what actually happened. About what’s actually true. And what’s actually true one year might not feel true the next year.

There’s that Mike Birbiglia joke, who opens his film Sleepwalk with Me describing how after he gets offstage doing stand-up comedy, people come up to him and ask, “Was that true?”

“Yeah,” he responds.

“Was it?” they say again.

He then jokes that maybe he should say it louder, so he yells, “Yeah!” and then the person says, “It was probably true, he said it louder.”

*

Recently, I was trying to uncover something about the anemia I have, and I wanted to look at my medical records in my patient portal, something I’d never done before. After forgetting and setting and resetting my password, I was finally in the mecca. I felt like I was snooping on myself. Most of it was boring and repetitive. It went all the way back to 2014.

Under “Visit Summary,” in a column that read “Problems,” PMDD was listed underneath it.

It was listed under 2015 and 2016 as well.

It was never verbalized to me, nor was it listed on any documents the doctors gave me post-appointment.

By changing the way you tell a story, you have to think more deeply about what actually happened.

“Holy shit!” I yelled from my office. My husband and stepdaughter couldn’t believe it either. Here I’d been, for years, so intrigued and baffled by my body and hormones. I’d read books, interviewed women, and gone binge writing at tiny cabins in the woods. And then so simply, almost cruelly, “PMDD” just sat on the page in my patient portal, the same way my eye color might have been noted.

*

Memory exercises I have used for years in my classes:

“‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction”

Instead of the infamous “I remember” by Joe Brainard, using “I don’t remember” to open each paragraph.

Mary Karr and George Saunders’s staged fight.

From Write What You Don’t Know by Jessica Handler: “Creative nonfiction is a gloriously flexible genre. What we don’t know or can’t know doesn’t have to wreck our writing. Instead, what seemed at first to be only an empty space can be an opportunity to shape and expand a narrative, exploring the gaps and writing our way through the myths.”

But I thought I was writing what I did know.

*

Often, I tell students to go back to the time they’re writing about. Read all of the journals, calendars, texts, and emails. I also find playlists of music from the year I’m writing about and use them to trigger that part of my brain. It works. I did all of this for The Red Zone, even finding years-old phones to listen to voice memos from.

It never once occurred to me to log in to my patient portal. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps (see, I’m perhapsing here) if I’d looked at the patient portal, obsessed over the patient portal, I’d have lost the thread, the arc my book needed. The seeking of the diagnosis took up the first half of the book. How would the book have looked without that seeking? Why would anyone even write a memoir if they weren’t seeking?

*

Just last month, a new paper was released based on the findings of a global study conducted by the International Association for Premenstrual Disorders (IAPMD). Of those with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), an alarming 34 percent had attempted suicide. Because previous studies of suicide and ideation have relied on less valid self-reported measures of PMDD, the new findings offer the strongest scientific evidence to date that the disorder is likely an independent contributor to suicidal thoughts and actions.

“Our study reveals just how destructive PMDD is,” according to Sandi MacDonald, IAPMD executive director.

If a medical disorder wherein 34 percent of people who have it contributes to suicidal ideation, then how is it legal for a doctor to put PMDD into my chart without talking to me about it?

How would my life have been different if, in 2014, 2015, and 2016, doctors had mentioned PMDD to me and hadn’t just marked it in my chart? I would have learned about PMDD at age twenty-seven instead of thirty-one. Would this self-knowledge have made my life easier or harder?

But the fact that doctors were listing me as having PMDD and not once talking to me about it is a whole other essay and deeper issue.

There’s a crime even worse that I can barely stand to face here on the page: Did a doctor talk to me about PMDD and I simply . . . forgot? Me, who can remember the color pedicure I had at your rooftop birthday party in 2006? Me, who knows which dress you wore when we went to see CocoRosie perform at the Warsaw? Me, who can remember the exact intonation in the way someone said something and which song was playing in the background when they said it?

My memoir, like all memoirs, was structured around memory and my attachment to my narrative. As Michelle Tea points out in her essay “Against Memoir,” from her book of the same name, writing memoir is the opposite of Buddhism: You are attached to stories about the self.

Now, it turns out my narrative was all wrong, or at least more complicated than I thought. It is so important that doctors communicate more holistically, looking at all of the moving pieces instead of compartmentalizing. If I’d known there was something called PMDD that lined up with my symptoms in my twenties, perhaps I could have found medication and conquered it earlier than I did, at age thirty-five.

*

Recently, my aunt and I were on vacation. She was talking about how “bad” her memory was. She couldn’t remember anything from childhood, she said. I challenged her. “What was the name of your third-grade teacher?” She knew. She then went on to describe the teacher’s outfits—and that led her to a memory of being at her friend’s house, and that led to a crush she’d had, none of which she’d have remembered without the prompts I kept giving.

There’s a school of thought that you must have a good memory to write a memoir. I don’t subscribe to that way of thinking anymore.

Often I hear writers and students describing themselves as falling into this “good” and “bad” binary of memories. You don’t have a good or bad memory. You have a memory.

I am not the young writer with the impressive memory anymore. Maybe I never was.

So how do we reconcile with our faulty, malleable memories? We continue telling our stories, shaping narratives, while also holding space that memory is out of our control. The stronger you are convinced you are right about something, the more I’d encourage you to question it.