“I don’t know how to write about this person. I don’t know if I forgive him, and he basically ruined my career/relationship/life. I’m still angry.”

I hear this a lot from my memoir clients.

When you’re writing about betrayal, loss, pain, abuse, injustice — it’s messy and it’s hard. And it’s a whole ‘nother layer of mess when it involves going public.

So how do you handle that?

How do you write about people who harmed you?

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Some authors see memoir as a place to expose those people’s awfulness. They want to unleash all their rage and disbelief, even hatred, on the page.

It may feel vindicating at first, to publicly throw shade on someone who wronged you.

(Of course it does. We want to be seen and heard, and that’s part of the value of writing memoir at all. That’s why it’s often helpful to write “for your eyes only” first. Write it in all its rawness—but don’t jump straight to publishing.)

Blind anger doesn’t read well on the page.

Vengefulness doesn’t either.

What does read well:

Emotional complexity.

Looking for depth.

Allowing for the possibility that there’s something beyond anger and hurt.

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Tristine Rainer, from whom I steal most of my memoir-writing process, says this:

Tell the truth with love.

YOUR truth. Not trying to explain or justify that person’s choices. But YOUR experience as YOU know it to be true.

With love.

Love of yourself, if not for the other person.

This doesn’t mean sugarcoating or pretending it’s okay.

It doesn’t mean a tidy “Now I’m fine, I forgive all.”

It means working through some of that anger behind the scenes—out of self-love, and/or love of something greater—and writing about it from *that* place.

Because at the end of the day, your anger is not you. 
Pure anger is usually not the end of the story.

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Is this hard? Yes.

Does this mean you have to do some internal work before and during the writing?

100%.

Readers are astute, and can spot inauthenticity from a mile away.

And, if you’re still growing around the experience, you may regret publishing before processing. Years later, you may look back and realize you published a memoir that captures an anger that has since transmuted into something more complex, even more powerful.

Memoir writing is not for the faint of heart. But if you go into it with the intention of telling the truth with love, you may surprise yourself with what you find.