Loss seems to be a part of life—an unfair part of life, certainly. A parent dies. A friendship dissolves. Your childhood home is sold. An illness steals a version of you and never brings it back. That’s why loss shows up in almost every memoir. If you’re trying to figure out how to write about a significant loss in your own memoir, you don’t need to know how to tell your whole story, yet. You just need a place to start.
There’s No Calendar to Write About Loss in a Memoir
We can talk about the stages of grief, for sure. But we also know that our response to a loss doesn’t follow anyone else’s timeline. We might feel relatively fine for months, believing we’re “coping well,” and then be flattened by a song in a grocery store. Our grief is personal and specific to us. It makes us human.
That’s one reason you may find writing about a loss is more difficult than writing about other aspects of your life. When we sit to write into an experience of defeat or bereavement, that loss still lives inside us—even as we’re trying to get it on the page.
To make this easier—possible, even—don’t try to march through the events of your loss in chronological order. Instead, let yourself write about the loss, your grief, in the ways that occur to you. You might write about the funeral, first. Remembering that might remind you of a Tuesday afternoon six years earlier, a moment you now treasure as one of the sacred ordinary. From there, you might find yourself thinking of the first time you laughed again—or the week you simply weren’t able to leave your bed.
However the experiences come to you, let your early writing follow your own emotional logic instead of calendar logic. You can always reorganize these moments to serve your larger story in later revisions.
Don’t Rush the Reader Past the Hard Part
Writing guru Natalie Goldberg tells us to “go for the jugular.” Her rule of thumb is this: “If something uncomfortable, controversial, painful, wild, or surprising pops up while you’re writing, don’t stop! Keep your hand moving … and write it all out.”
We might instinctively try to soften a painful scene, to hurry through it to spare both ourselves and our readers. But rushing through a tough situation tends to flatten the very moment that will benefit the most from depth—depth of feeling, of observation, of clarity. Give yourself permission to slow down exactly where it hurts the most. That may be where your reader relies on you the most, too.
Find an Object to Show the Emotion
Grief can’t really be conveyed by abstractions: “It was devastating,” doesn’t carry as much emotional weight as we might think. Instead of telling your reader about your feelings, try showing them through the concrete and everyday. You might write about a coffee mug still sitting in the drying rack, or a voicemail you haven’t deleted, or a coat that still smells like the person you’ve lost.
Joan Didion does this in The Year of Magical Thinking. After her husband died, she found she couldn’t give away his shoes because some part of her clung to the idea that he would need them when he “returned.” When she shares this in her book, she doesn’t need to explain either the depth of her loss or the fact that grief can make us believe impossible things. The shoes do it for her.
T.S. Eliot named this literary technique the objective correlative. He appreciated the way an object or event can evoke an emotion without the writer needing to name that emotion directly.
A Small Memoir Exercise About Loss
When you want to write about the feeling of loss in your memoir, think about a physical object that carried the emotion for you and start there. It might be a coffee mug, a pair of reading glasses, a voicemail. Something you couldn’t bring yourself to give away or delete.
Set a timer for ten minutes and respond to these questions as specifically as you can:
- What did it look like? Not “an old sweater,” but the exact shade of blue, the pilling, that one button that never quite matched.
- Where is it now? A drawer, a box, still hanging where it always hung?
- What do you do when you see the object—or the blinking light that reminds you that your loved one’s last voicemail message is waiting for you in the limbo of electronic space? Do you touch it? Listen? Avoid it?
- What memory do you have attached to it? Write a scene that shows how the object was present before your loss. (I wrote once about the color blue, and ended up remembering a day with my now-deceased dad in which he took me to a frame shop to frame my college diploma with my alma mater‘s colors: blue and gold.)
Don’t try to explain the loss while you write this. Just stay with your description and your relationship with the object. If feelings show up, let them, but see how much work the object can do on its own.
You Don’t Have to Get It Right the First Time
If you find writing about your loss feels clumsy, or too raw, or not quite true, know that you’re simply finding your way. Your first attempts at writing about your loss might be either overwrought or oddly flat. It’s fine. Just like grief doesn’t move in straight lines, neither does our writing about it.
Eventually, you’ll find that writing about your loss will give it shape—something you can hold, revisit, and eventually share. Start with one object, one scene, one Tuesday. The rest will follow.
Writing a memoir can be a deeply rewarding journey—but also a tricky one. This article offers guidance for shaping your story in a way that honors both your truth and your readers: “How to Write a Memoir.”
Wondering how to write about loss in your memoir? I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.
If you’re interested in my general approach to writing narrative, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.