I initially started writing my memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved?, about my youthful, ill-advised, ill-fated marriage, to make sense of my life. Sometimes when people asked me what I was working on, and I told them, they got a little uncomfortable, as if they found the idea of writing about such an experience to be a little too personal. But more often, to my surprise, women, in particular, told me their stories. I discovered that one of my friends had entered her first marriage at the heartbreakingly young age of fifteen. Two others had been sixteen. And dozens of others had, like me, made vows at the more advanced age of twenty or so.

One of the gifts of writing memoir—and to some extent, poetry and fiction as well—is that chance to take back control of experience, find the humor and joy amidst the heartache, and recast our notions of our lives. I had consciously rejected any notion of embarrassment or shame over my “mistakes”—in fact, I was reluctant to label them mistakes at all, because of their essential role in shaping who I became and defining what I wanted. But another gift of writing memoir was the discoveries I made about the wealth of others’ experiences and wisdom. And I was gratified by those who told me that reading my book had made them reconsider the way they thought about those early life experiences. That they didn’t have to be written off as failures or embarrassing secrets.

I’ve written five memoirs—an essay collection about recovering from a traumatic event in my late twenties, two books related to adopting my daughter and returning to her birthplace in China when she was ten, a book about rereading favorite children’s books and returning to places related to them, and this most recent book about the sequence of events that led me into—and out of—my marriage. The latter felt like the most personal of the books, but by the time I wrote it, I also felt more detached from the experience. It had been so many years, a lot of it felt like someone else’s life. 

But I’ve also learned that there’s not anything especially weird or unique about me or my life, even if good writing requires that we find a way to tell our stories through our own unique vision. Ultimately, though, if it happened to us, if we’ve thought or felt it, it’s happened to other people, too. They’ve had those thoughts and feelings also. Memoir, to me, is a way to shine a spotlight on ideas and feelings and experiences that we’ve previously relegated to the shadows and to help us all feel less weird or alone.