by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager
MCWC 2020 memoir workshop instructor Christine H. Lee has mastered the complex intersections between writing and memory. Her memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, was featured in The New York Times, Self Magazine, Time Magazine, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. An accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Christine’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, The Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. She is an editor at The Rumpus and teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California’s MFA program.
Christine discussed with us the unusual circumstances that led to the publication of her memoir, her experiences in writing across genres, and her novel forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins.
You describe using journals and photographs to document life during your memory loss in this interview with NPR. How did you go about researching your own experiences and integrate that into your writing?
First off—thank you so much for looking all of this up! It feels great as an interviewee to be SEEN by my interviewer.
It took a long time for me to be able to write about my memory loss in one cohesive narrative. During a span of seven years, I certainly tried, but clearly I needed years to absorb my experiences and come to an understanding of the embedded lessons. Luckily, Past Me was pretty diligent about journaling my day to day happenings, both in a hard copy journal and online, on an anonymous blog. Without those items, I think my memoir would be an entirely different creature, one more reliant on external sources rather than my own voice.
Those external sources included friends and family. But also my medical files, which I pulled for the purpose of writing both my BuzzFeed essay and the memoir.
But bottom line: I learned that what matters most are the emotional memories we collect throughout our lives.
The events that ring most clear in my mind are those that entered my brain and mind through my emotions. This is the reason we remember a few, very vivid things in early childhood. We forget everything else. I find remembering names more challenging than before the stroke, so when I teach, I ask students (spoiler alert!) to talk about themselves via ice breakers in the first class. This is the way I remember their names: through narratives and through emotion.
And guess what? That’s what we are trying to do as writers. We are trying to enter our readers’ emotional centers. And while our readers may not remember exactly what happens on page ten of our manuscript, the goal is to enable them to feel deeply.
So—yes. Memory is important. Story telling is an exercise in memory. Reading stories is an exercise of memory. BUT—what matters most are emotional memories, and we don’t have to remember everything in order to create those.
The BuzzFeed essay that went viral and led to your publishing deal posted in September 2014 and your memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life, published in February 2017. That's less than three years from the post to the book release! How much time did you have to write the memoir and what was that experience like?
It was intense. I wrote my memoir at a blistering pace. It took me almost exactly one year to write AND revise Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. And I met my deadline.
But just so you know, that doesn’t always happen: my novel has taken years and years and years to write. It’s like when I tell people I didn’t have morning sickness whatsoever while pregnant; if you ever want another mother to hate you immediately, tell them you’ve never had morning sickness. But hey, I tell them, I also had Reynaud’s and other very rare and painful complications during pregnancy. So your mileage may vary.
I think every book has its own personality and each one takes the time it takes. That said, I didn’t write about my stroke and memory loss until years and years after recovery. So, it may be that my subconscious was ready. It may be that I was at a particularly desperate time in my life as I wrote the thing.
I wrote it while recovering from postpartum depression, while going through a divorce from an 18-year marriage, while adjusting to motherhood with an infant, while under dire financial straits. I wrote it because I had zero control over anything else in my life at the time.
We can always make ourselves feel like we could revise our past, revise the way in which we could have done things. But that book and my daughter kept me alive. So there are zero regrets.
You were in the middle of an MFA program and working on a novel when you had the stroke. How did the experience, including publishing your memoir, change your writing life and your fiction goals?
I’m basically still in shock that I went from someone writing her novel in soft pants to a published writer of a memoir with a two-book deal.
But guess what? I’m still someone writing her novel in soft pants. My goal to have a joyful and productive life with a circle of trustworthy friends hasn’t changed.
Let me tell you a story. I was once at a writing residency, and my goal was to finish my entire novel in three weeks. You know that this didn’t happen. And it’s because I was a tyrant to myself and to my writing. The more I dictated what should happen and how it should happen, the more blocked I became.
I spent most of that residency crying in my cottage. The novel, I thought, was bringing me to my knees. But what was really happening, was that I was trying to bring my manuscript to ITS knees, and as a result, it fought back.
So what did I do? I gave up for a bit. I couldn’t take the agony. I spent the rest of my time taking walks on the beach and sneaking out to town and getting bags and bags and bags of Doritos. And eating them. I made a friend who joined me on the Dorito escapade. That friend became my best friend.
Life has twists. I went to write a novel and came back home with a best friend. Do I think my life is lesser for it? No. And I learned to listen to my characters.
Tl;dr: Every setback is an opportunity.
In this interview with The Normal School, you talk about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. Can you tell us a little about that difference and your forthcoming novel ?
I’m a slow as shit fiction writer. Like molasses. Like crystallized honey. I’m in the midst of rewriting my novel manuscript. That decision was a tough one to accept; the original manuscript wasn’t working. So I’m starting over. It’s about a family heirloom and three generations of a family and their unique relationship to the heirloom.
You were an early convert to the blogging scene, and still maintain this blog about your urban farm, as well as a new substack at Christinehlee.substack.com. What role does blogging play in your writing life?
Yes! I still have a blog off my main site. I don’t blog as often as I used to, because I made a decision a number of years ago that I wouldn’t write for free anymore. But I do write a blog, because it is critical to my health as a writer.
I strongly feel that writers must have a venue for low-stakes writing, where it doesn’t feel like everything is on the line. It’s critical to keep ourselves engaged with why it is we write, which is unique for each individual. For me that venue is my blog, where I can keep in touch with my own voice, where I can write without regard to assigned subject matter. Where I don’t feel like every word will be scrutinized. Where I can have FUN. Because writers need to PLAY. That’s the value in workshop, because it’s much easier to play with other writers’ words. And it’s in workshopping others’ work that we learned to play with our own work.
And it’s funny—when we write our passions, sometimes that can lead to opportunity yet again. I now write about urban farming on a column called Backyard Politics over at Catapult Story, which was informed by my blog posts. I didn’t have a goal in mind when I wrote those posts, but when we engage in our passions, they lead us in the right direction.
To find out more about Christine H. Lee, check out her website at www.christinehlee.com.
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