Landall Proctor On the Vulnerability of Writing Memoir

In the summer of 2006, I set out to ride my bicycle solo and self-supported around the perimeter of the United States. Before leaving, a friend who had been an integral part of helping me plan the trip handed me a pocket-size journal, “For your memoir,” He said with a hug. While I had never considered writing a book, I journaled every night of my ride, recapping interesting and often odd interactions with strangers.

After the trip, I attempted to piece together my journey at least a dozen times. One of the problems I faced in completing the work that became Headwinds was deciding what kind of book it should be. As I was preparing for the trip, I searched desperately for any book about long-distance bike travel, but they simply did not exist. Now, on the other side of my own trip, I thought there was an opportunity to fill that space. I set the project aside and every few years I’d flip through my journal, open a document, and take another half-hearted stab until I let either self-doubt or indecision get in the way.

In the 14 years between completing the trip and writing Headwinds I’d find myself in social settings where someone new would learn about my summer in the saddle. They’d inevitably ask for my favorite story and, tired of always retelling about my accidental night at a nudist colony, I’d start to mix it up. More and more vignettes would make their way into the rotation. Like the time a cop pulled me over riding on the shrinking shoulder of the 101 trying to find the Golden Gate Bridge. Or about how I basically fueled my body on gas station fruit pies and McDonalds for three months. I often wondered if I could just tell the stories from my trip in a voice that made my friends and family feel like I was reading to them?

In the fall of 2019, I found myself at a sort of perfect storm for picking the project back up. I was feeling burned-out building software and was moving to Berkeley, CA from Detroit, MI with enough savings to support myself for a few months. I decided now was the time to finally put pen to paper and stick with the process through to the end. Instead of overthinking what kind of book I should write, I planned to simply take the project on day by day. I hoped that if I got the stories out of my head and onto paper, the type of book it should be would reveal itself.

For the next seven months I sat down daily, journal in hand and wrote. With a surprising frequency, details of the trip that I had long forgotten but had written about in my journal came vividly back into view. As the page length increased, I grew more confident that I was capturing the details of the trip as they happened, not just how I wanted to remember them.

As I’d hoped, eventually it became clear that I was writing a memoir, but that presented a terrifying prospect. Memoirs, as I thought of them, are often memorialized accounts of a life or event in which the reader should draw meaningful lessons. Did my bike trip qualify? I was fairly sure it didn’t, but since I was both making real progress and enjoying the process, I continued writing.

At some point, a few themes started to bubble to the surface. Some were obvious; the kindness of strangers, physical challenges related to riding a bike around the country, and equipment failures. These themes were objectively easy to recount. Two others weren’t quite so straightforward. I stayed with dozens of host families on the road, many of whom didn’t share my world view, particularly around matters of race and religion. I knew I needed to include these sometimes-painful encounters in an honest way, trying to encapsulate what was said, but being cautious to avoid a preachy tone. In these scenarios, I tried to leave space for the reader to evaluate the situation.

Another obvious theme that was difficult to explain but led to the spiral of emotions towards the end of the trip, was my deep loneliness. As somewhat of an introvert, I didn’t know what to make of my longing for social interactions with familiar faces and the feeling of a cartoonish storm cloud hovering overhead for hundreds of miles as I pedaled along. Having never faced such depression, it took a long time to diagnose the problem. Writing about that emotional response was my greatest challenge through the project. I had to learn to be vulnerable as I recalled sitting on a curb on the outskirts of Phoenix, watching a puddle of my own tears evaporate in the desert heat.

Headwinds doesn’t have a tidy ending that you might expect from a book about a bike trip. Spoiler alert. I called it quits before making the full lap around the country. For many years, a sense of shame for not completing the loop prevented me from fully sharing my experience. I was afraid people would view the trip, and me, as a failure. Some people still might, and that’s ok. In the end, I’m proud of the final version. What I came to realize through the writing process is that not all adventures wrap up in the way that you might have intended, but it doesn’t mean there weren’t lessons and stories worth retelling.

In that aspect, Headwinds turned out to be a memoir, but not one that aims to impart wisdom on its readers. Likewise, I never intended the book to be the culmination of a life well-lived. I set out to share my stories from that summer, finding the changing landscape of the country and myself as a then 24-year-old man pedaling a bicycle. If someone takes something away from my experiences that they can apply to their own life or spurs a conversation with friends, that’s great. But if all they do is laugh at my junk food diet and feel a tug on their heart strings at my descriptions of teary-eyed calls home, I’ll have done my job.

Landall Proctor is not a New York Times Bestseller, but if enough of you buy this book, he’ll happily update that sentence. So really, that’s on you. And your friends. And their friends. When he’s not writing about his bike trip he likes to race marathons, bird hunt with his dog George and say things that result in eye rolls from his son, Hudson. He lives in Berkeley, CA and thinks it's nice. You can find Headwinds and read more stories that didn't make the final edit here.

Truth and Dare: A Childhood Burn Survivor Tells Her Truths

by Dr. Lise Deguire, clinical psychologist and author of Flashback Girl: Lessons on Resilience from a Burn Survivor.

Fifty-four years ago, I was burned in a devastating fire. Just three years ago, I discovered the true story of that fire. That same year, I also lost my mother, the last member of my first family. After she died, after we held her service and cleaned out her apartment, I began to write my book. I had never written a book before. I had no idea what I was doing.

Words poured out of me like water gushing from a garden hose. I woke up and wrote. I wrote every morning before work. I wrote every weekend. I gave up exercising and reading so I would have more time to write. I wrote like a liberated woman, which is what I was. I finally felt liberated to tell my story.

For 50 years, I withheld my life stories. I held back those stories because I knew my parents would be mad at me if I told them. My stories are not the same as their stories. In their stories, they were gifted and brilliant, sexy and fun. And my parents were indeed all those things. But they didn’t keep us safe, me and my brother. They meant to (and it is not always easy to be an effective parent). It is even harder to be an effective parent if you are absorbed with your own needs, to the point that you can’t prioritize your children. . . to the point that you can’t see that your children are suffering. . . to the point that your children are in grave danger and you. . . look away.

What are these stories? There is casual carelessness. There is neglect and abandonment. Also, fun and adventure. Music and travel. Stunning genius. (Them! Not me). Tragic suicides, searing pain, and more loss. Emotional healing and rebirth. Plus, you know, that fire. It all began with that fire.

Tension burns a different kind of fire inside me now. Who am I to share these secrets? Is it wrong? Will I regret this? Am I a bad girl, daring to speak ill of my parents, whom I also love? And yet. . .

I need to speak the truth about what I have gone through. I need to tell the truth about my brother and how I lost him. I need to speak the truth for my own wholeness and for the blessed memory of my brother, Marc. I survived my childhood; he did not.

Far beyond my own need to be true, I believe the truth helps people. Many people have suffered through stories like mine, and much worse. Those of us who suffer and get well can build a recovery roadmap for those who suffer now. Our roadmaps can point others toward the direction of healing. I hope my roadmap, my book, Flashback Girl, can help people trying to heal from tragedies and build themselves a better life.

Dr. Lise Deguire is a clinical psychologist in private practice for over 20 years and the author of Flashback Girl: Lessons on Resilience from a Burn Survivor. Her memoir is earning rave reviews and is available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Newtown Book Shop and The Commonplace Reader. The lone surviving child of unsettled and iconoclastic parents, she grew up all over New Jersey and Long Island. Following a horrific fire where she suffered burns on two-thirds of her body, she spent much of her childhood alone in a Boston hospital, undergoing countless surgical procedures. Dr. Deguire graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Tufts University and earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Hahnemann/Widener University. She maintains a solo practice in Pennington, New Jersey. Dr. Deguire has appeared on television and radio, and has been published in the Trenton Times, GrownandFlown.com, and Medium.com. She also writes about psychological resilience issues in her blog and is a national keynote speaker. She is married, has two grown daughters, and lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

How to Create Psychologically Believable Characters in Fiction

by Bev Thomas

For a writer, creating characters that readers want to spend time with, lies at the heart of great fiction. And of course, we don’t have to like a character to believe in them. A character who is psychologically credible can take the reader on a journey anywhere; to both places of hope and joy, as well as darkness and destruction. But what’s the key to writing characters that are authentic and real? How do you bring a character to life?

Before writing my novel, I worked as a clinical psychologist. It was in the quiet stillness of my consulting room that I had the privilege of listening to many complex and often surprising life stories over the years. Often these were extraordinary stories of ordinary people and it was undoubtedly the richness of this world that led me to set my debut novel A Good Enough Mother within the confines of a therapy room.

While the link between the narratives of people’s lives and the narrative in fiction was not lost on me, it was only after writing my book, that I was able to clearly see the parallels. There is an intimacy about the therapeutic process; two people talking in the quiet of a room, and this sense of solitude is mirrored by the intimacy of the relationship between the reader and the life of a character in a book.

With my background in psychology, I have been able to apply the key features of therapy, to the art of story-telling, and in particular to the process of creating authentic characters that are as complex and nuanced as the people we might meet and be intrigued about in real life.

As a clinical psychologist, ‘formulation,’ is the tool that underpins all work with clients. At its heart, it’s a way of reaching a shared understanding about a person’s difficulties in the context of their life. In the room with my client, I worked collaboratively to understand their own particular story. I asked specific questions, teasing out their story both in the past and present, finding out how they had coped (or not) with their difficulties along the way. It was my job to listen, and to ‘bear witness’ to the story, it was also my job to draw links between past and present, and to frame what they said using psychological models and theory. Like a detective, it was my role to piece together the evidence together, twisting a kaleidoscope of often random, fragmented and disjoined pieces into a pattern that made a coherent picture.

I have identified 5 elements in the therapy process that can be applied to the writing of authentic characterization in fiction.

1/ Drives and motivations. In therapy – we often ask the ‘why now?’ question. It’s a key question that unearths the reason that has prompted them coming to therapy at that particular time. What’s the trigger? And I think novels, regardless of genre must have that kind of trigger to jump-start the story. It might be something big; an accident, the end of a relationship, an affair – or it may be a smaller (but equally devastating); a psychological shift or change that is not obvious from the outside, but one that will change the character in a seismic way. Just as the decision to go to therapy is prompted by something, so too is the beginning of a character’s journey in a book.

2/ The said and unsaid. In the therapy room there is as much focus on what’s left unsaid, or avoided, as well as what’s said. A useful metaphor is the iceberg, where we can see a whole chunk of ice that is shown above the surface, there’s a much larger chunk that remains hidden and submerged underneath. This may be deliberately concealed to others, but also to themselves, and a window into the realm of the unconscious. So, when considering your characters, think about what they might want people to know about, and the things they don’t; things they might feel ashamed or embarrassed about, or the things they may not even be aware of. These hidden depths are the things that make characters complex, interesting and alive.  

3/ Anger and conflict and frustration.  People don’t come to therapy when life is going well. Therapists see clients at their worst; sad, confused, angry or in distress. And in fiction, as in life, we are generally not captivated by characters’ lives that are happy and perfect. There is no drama here. It’s often how someone behaves in times of difficulty or stress that is the most interesting. How does a character express anger and irritation? Is it outward? Or does it become internalized and fester inside? Try to dig deep and find their dark side, the hidden underbelly of their inner lives.

4/ The past unfolding in the present. A lot of therapy is about understanding the present (ie the presenting problem) with a forensic consideration and understanding of the past. Freud talked about the therapy process as a kind of archeology. The notion of digging and excavation to uncover the ‘truth’ as experienced by the client. In fiction, this relates to the notion of backstory. The past of a central character needs to be very clear to the writer – and while not all of this will end up on the page, there needs to be just enough in evidence, so the way a character behaves on the page will make perfect sense, without being too predictable. Actions that come ‘out of the blue,’ can leave the reader frustrated and unsatisfied – and will somehow break the spell of ‘trust’ that have been set up between reader and writer.

5/ Change is not linear. In therapy, a person is on a journey of discovery and change. But the process isn’t a series of lightbulb moments that translate easily into change and decision. In life, the progress of change can be frustrating, and full of faltering steps, we often rail against emotional truths we have learnt, and can be held back by resistance and denial. And we may go onto repeat the same mistakes again and again…until we learn to stop. In therapy, when the change is overnight, or too quick, a therapist might be left with doubts. Perhaps they are doing it to please me? Or perhaps they are saying it because they want to feel different, want the quick-fix without the hard work or recovery? This can be equally applicable to fiction. Big psychological and emotional shifts in characters cannot happen overnight. If too hurried, or too determined by the needs of the plot, the reader can feel duped, and may lose belief and empathy with a character.   

By considering these five areas, it is possible to create characters that have depth and complexity, and a capacity to grip and surprise your readers. Characters that will not only keep the pages turning, but will hopefully linger on in the memory of the reader, long after the book is finished.

Bev Thomas is a clinical psychologist, and draws on her wealth of knowledge about therapy and mental health to craft A Good Enough Mother, a captivating suspense novel about a therapist-patient relationship gone wrong.