How to Write a Memoir That’s Personal—and Deeply Researched
When I sat through my first life-saving ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, there wasn’t just a puke bucket beside me. I also kept close a binder of research I’d printed out about the healing potential of psychedelics.
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As traumatic memories surfaced in the hours-long medicine journeys, I sometimes felt for the articles in the darkness. Just feeling the pages reminded me of the therapeutic benefits of ayahuasca—if you’ll pardon my French, as I experienced panic and intense flashbacks in the thatched hut, my hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis was being reactivated alongside PTSD-healing processes like fear extinction and memory reconsolidation. It was comforting to remember that. It reminded me that this psychedelic tea is a rapid antidepressant that creates new synapses in the brain.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the peer-reviewed research I brought with me to the Amazon would end up being incorporated into Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis, my queer ayahuasca memoir that has almost 30 pages of citations in the back and braids the personal with the ecological and the neurobiological.
Like a psychedelic journey, writing a memoir can be positively harrowing—and transformative. Alternating between exhilaration and despair at your desk, you commit your vulnerabilities to the page for a judgy world to read—or, more likely, ignore—even as you hope for a greater sense of wholeness after it’s done and published.
But what will see you through to that point? What can give you the courage to write your memoir in the first place? Research can be a powerful support.
Because information is more accessible than ever, it’s harder to justify not weaving research into your personal storytelling. Here are some things to consider as you work on your deeply researched memoir.
Check out Greg Wrenn’s Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis here:
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Research can give you courage.
How many memoirs have never been written because the writers were too scared? Think of conducting research as a way to activate the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in rational decision-making, and to calm down the amygdala, which is the brain’s fear center. In researching, we get to look away from our demons and turn into more even-keeled scholars and journalists.
In Mothership, I often turn to a landmark text by Harvard trauma researcher Judith Herman, MD, Trauma and Recovery, in which she systematically defines complex PTSD and offers hope for those who suffer from it. Even more than my own therapist, Herman’s book helped me understand my developmental trauma from an intellectual rather than reactive standpoint. Presiding over Mothership like a fairy godmother, Herman helps me make sense of emotionally charged scenes. Her expertise is the rappelling rope I hold onto to make the controlled descent from prologue to epilogue. I’m not sure I could have ever finished my book without hers.
Especially when you’re working with difficult personal material, research allows you to feel safer even when you’re scared. Using it thoughtfully, memoirists can turn to research the way scientists don stainless-steel chainmail dive suits to swim with sharks—the adrenaline is still pumping, but they’re better able to observe predators in the wild and appreciate their beauty.
Greg’s Reading Recommendation: What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Complex Trauma, by Stephanie Foo
Research can overwhelm you—and fuel procrastination.
I have to be careful not to romanticize research—some of us can go overboard, easy as it is to go down online rabbit holes and avoid facing the pain of our past. Excessive research, in other words, can keep a memoir treading water. It can be a procrastination tool for avoiding your feelings and your story.
Stay aware of this avoidance behavior—and don’t forget that, as a memoirist, you’re first and foremost a storyteller. Block off time each week to draft scenes away from your research materials. If you have to, set a timer for 30 minutes or an hour for scene drafting, so when the writing gets too intense, you aren’t tempted to stop and go back into online archives.
Turning webpages into PDFs and organizing them in folders on your hard drive is a good way to stay organized, but it’s easy to forget to do this when we’re saturated with info. You can also take handwritten notes about online sources and then think about them in free-associative journal entries. On breaks from research, daydream about what you’ve learned and how it speaks to your memoir.
Greg’s Reading Recommendation: In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado
Research can help you remember your story.
Conducting research, particularly if it involves travel, can stir up emotions, causing us to remember forgotten details, even neutral ones like the mural in our high school gymnasium. If you return to where you grew up, you may be shocked by the memories that surface when you smell the pages of a book in your boyhood room, or when you taste your aunt’s buttery grits.
Be sure to write these vivid impressions down in a phone note or journal and let them simmer—there may be memoir-worthy scenes embedded in those details. Get your hands on photo albums, recipe boxes, old newspapers, yearbooks, love notes, blog posts, divorce papers, and medical records to jog your memory, refresh your understanding of historical context, and get better acquainted with the younger version of yourself that you’re writing about.
Whether you’re scanning police reports or reading reports on crimes against humanity, at times you may even be triggered. Take it slow. Step away for as long as you need to. Sometimes—but not all the time, in my experience—this reaction could indicate something important is trying to make itself known for your memoir. For instance, I nearly had a panic attack after reading a scientific journal article in Aquatic Mammals on the shockingly violent sexual practices of male sea otters. I write about this episode in Mothership as I try to make sense of my trauma in the context of the natural world.
Greg’s Reading Recommendation: The White Mosque, by Sofia Samatar
Research can give you imposter syndrome.
Expect imposter syndrome when you’re drawing on research outside your field—and reach out to experts to help you. Even though I incorporate science into my teaching and writing, I’m neither a formally trained neurobiologist nor a climate scientist. I’m an English professor. Certain concepts would be simply over my head without help. It’s important not to let that lack of knowledge stop you—take the initiative to find folks who are willing to explain complex, niche theories to you.
One thing I learned when writing Mothership was that experts more often than not are happy to meet with you for a 20-30 minute Zoom interview or to answer brief questions over email. Don’t worry about bothering them with your introductory email. If they can’t help you, they will either ignore your message or tell you flat out they’re too busy.
County extension officers and reference librarians are also wonderful resources. Posting on Facebook or Reddit can also help connect you with experts from around the world who are eager to share their knowledge.
If we’re going to address the most urgent crises of our era, it’s going to require experts to leave their silos, share information, and work together, knowing a little bit about everything. Our 21st-century nonfiction, hybrid as it often is, answers that call. And a scientist or engineer, after all, might be emailing you tomorrow for literary advice.
Greg’s Reading Recommendation: The High Sierra, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Research can add credibility to your story—but be sure to fact-check.
No small thing in the hyper-subjective genre of memoir, research adds credibility to our remembering self. It situates you as a curious, more trustworthy voice in a society where you aren’t as special as you thought you were. Infused with research, memoirs don’t have to be so navel-gazing.
We live on an interconnected planet with many interlocking crises, so our personal stories are increasingly bound up in the story of the collective. To make claims about that civilization and participate in it as your memoir’s protagonist, you need to transcend the personal and gaze beyond the self. To tell your story, you often need to have listened to others tell theirs, whether they are relatives, frenemies at AWP, climate scientists, Mormon genealogists, or the lady who works at the corner store. Compassionate yet discerning listening is essential for research. Do your best to fact check what you learn from others.
Being scrupulous about the integrity of our memoir’s storytelling, we’re also careful to verify our memories as best as we can through interviews, direct observation, and reading.
Was the day my dad told me he was dying a Sunday in November? Was I living in Brooklyn when I met the hot woodworker or Oakland? In how bad of shape was the first coral reef I ever snorkeled with my mother? Do your due diligence.
Greg’s Reading Recommendation: Heartbreak, by Florence Williams
Research can be part of your story—and help raise the stakes.
In Mothership, a huge turning point in my life is learning about psychedelic therapy from Michael Pollan and researchers like Gül Dölen and Robin Carthart-Harris. I credit a research paper by post-doc Dr. Antonio Inserra,“Hypothesis: The Psychedelic Ayahuasca Heals Traumatic Memories via a Sigma 1 Receptor-Mediated Epigenetic-Mnemonic Progress,” for inspiring me to go to the Amazon to work with ayahuasca.
“Ayahuasca could come to represent,” Inserra writes, “the only standing pharmacological treatment which targets traumatic memories in PTSD.”
Research, as Lulu Miller’s gripping examination of David Starr Jordan’s life in Why Fish Don’t Exist demonstrates, can add much-needed plot twists to your memoir’s storytelling. Can you imagine Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk without its many forays into the falconry writings of Englishman T. H. White? Research can raise the stakes and make a story juicier and more noteworthy than it otherwise would be on its own.
Greg’s Reading Recommendation: Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller
Whether it means conducting WhatsApp interviews with açai farmers, combing census records for your great-grandmother’s address in 1940, or searching through Google Scholar for breathtaking dissertations that were never turned into books, research helps memoirs look outward, making them as intellectually engaging as they are emotionally impactful.