Writing in a Zigzag
One of the hardest parts of writing a memoir is that you, the author, change. Like glass that hasn’t cooled, you are never quite set in place. New knowledge comes to you, new experiences, perspectives, ideas. And what’s worse, it’s often for the better.
When I started writing my memoir Also Here, I was twenty-seven, a copywriter in Philadelphia with a knack for concision. I knew how to write a five-word headline or a thirty-second script, but nothing longer or more in-depth. The thought of a book was so daunting I couldn’t say the word. I couldn’t say what I was doing for the simple reason that I didn’t know. My grandma had put the idea in my head, had insisted she wanted me to tell her story. At thirteen, she escaped the gas chambers at Auschwitz twice, hiding from the Nazis inside their own camps. She had never fully learned to read or write—perhaps because of her early wartime experiences, though illiteracy is uncommon among survivors—so I felt the weight of her request and knew the importance it held for her.
I wanted to do it right. But is there a right way to write a memoir? A correct process for re-constructing the past? I didn’t know the answer, didn’t know how one begins to shape a narrative this entangling and personal and rife with pain, a pain that had been hidden from me for much of my life, but I knew how to book airline tickets, so I did that. I boarded a plane to Florida to visit my grandma and hoped for the best.
Looking back, there was so much I didn’t know—about her, about myself, about craft and memoir and structure and narrative. Looking back, that may have been for the best.
After my trip to see my grandma, I created a file on my laptop called “Unnamed Project.” It was only a project after all, not a real book. I transcribed my interviews with my grandma word by word, then added my own memories from our time together. Things had not gone as I’d planned. There were so many misunderstandings between us, our communication jumpy and incomplete. In the doc, I alternated her words with mine, hoping to capture the fractured nature of reclaiming memories of war, displacement, and refugee life. That draft let me establish a frame with a beginning, end, and a sense of how much was missing in the middle.
I called my grandma to ask her more questions, questions relating to sentences I could not finish, nuances I wanted but did not have. I wrote into the gaps and saw my manuscript expand from the belly out. When she didn’t have the information or context I sought, I spoke to other relatives, dug into official archives, and reached out to historians and relevant research institutions. Nothing I did was in the right order and I kept finding myself describing one thing, then learning another. I was writing in a zigzag, drifting from one inquiry to the next, uncovering contradictions, and reckoning with them line by line. Research rabbit holes opened in the middle of my paragraphs. Wild goose chases unfolded mid-phrase. It was a wildly inefficient process, but each discovery lit a spark within me, pulling me through my self-doubt and fear.
I was writing not just to find answers, but to discover questions, to see where my knowledge and memory were falling short, where I should point my curiosity next. There was so much I was curious about, my pursuit for understanding unrelenting. My grandma and I kept talking—first over long-distance phone calls; then, after we both moved to Chicago, over breakfast. We looked at family photos together, discussing the past in a way we never had before. When I hit snags in my research, when there was no more detail or clarity to cull, either from her or from historical records, I wrote about that, about the haziness that comes with time and trauma, from the deliberate destruction of evidence, from telling someone else’s story while having your own noteworthy flaws.
The structure was a disaster—a book cannot be so fractured it doesn’t hold up as a book—so I played with its order. I put every major point on index cards and laid the cards on my living room floor, rearranging them with my foot. New gaps emerged and I wrote into those. There was so much I wanted to say first. Should I start with my trip to Florida? Or the time in third grade when I tried to teach my grandma to read? Or maybe the night I was born in her driveway? I tried them all until one reader referred to the opening pages as trudging up “introduction hill." I knew exactly what she meant and reworded, reworked, following each instinct to its natural conclusion. In this way, I sharpened the narrative into something clearer and more insightful, though I’d had no vision for it until I worked it out on the page (and the rug). The plot came from living and listening, but the prose came from the work of writing.
As early readers gave me feedback, I weighed each note, considering how to bend my molten mess into something more resonant—fractured, but not broken; layered but not stiflingly so. I began to develop rules for myself, stylistic choices I would and would not make, clarifying what was most vital from earlier drafts and expanding, cutting, or rethinking the rest. As I worked, I found the speaker on the page growing further from the writer bringing her to life. Years had passed, and I was no longer the same person, a writer who couldn’t say book. On a second date, I told a man with good hair about my memoir, all the research and revision I was doing. I knew more now, about my grandma and the war, how she survived and struggled, the transformation that persecution thrust upon her life. I knew more about myself, too. When I’d started writing, the truth had seemed like a fixed point, something for me to unbury, but now it hovered in the distance, refracting in complex, beautiful, frustrating ways. I read and researched in tandem with my writing, a spiral pursuit of wondering, processing, and composing. I had always had distance from my grandma’s early life, but now I had distance from my own, from when I flew to Florida years earlier, before I’d sunk myself into my family’s history. I could track how I had evolved through the work, discovering feelings that were true when I wrote them, but less so upon re-reading, realizing I had softened, shifted or changed in some distinct way. (I believe this is called maturity.)
During revision, I considered the idea of narrative distance, how much I should bring my ever-evolving perspectives to the work. I experimented with time and its closeness, with backstory, memory, flash forwards, reflection. I layered in newer revelations, adding complexities I missed in earlier passes. Contradictions didn’t irk me in the same way; they became part of the story. By the time a publisher bought my memoir, I was thirty-five and had added as many words as I’d cut, re-structured the book several times over, and married the man with good hair, who never doubted my project was a book.
I’m certain there are better processes out there than the one I took, long and circuitous as it was. But there are advantages to the winding path, to discovery through trial, to writing by impulse. The work can provoke a shift inside; you can be startled by it, bothered, humbled, confused. You can bring that back to the page. With openness, we can learn to trust ourselves and trust we will change. We don’t need crystalline visions to start, just the belief that we can gather as we go.
