How I use my journals in drafting my memoir

I wanted to type up all of my handwritten journals just for the sake of respecting this enormous amount of writing I’ve done throughout my life. I didn’t plan, at first, to write a memoir.

I pulled out my journals, which began when I was ten, and started typing them into a Google doc for each notebook. Typing my journals led me to read them very closely. I found that I could see insights into what was going on at certain times in my life that were invisible at the time. I understood other people in my life better because, reading as an adult, I started to see their motives and other ways in which their actions made sense. I was able to speculate plausibly on, for example: What my dad saw and felt coming from me at times when I thought he was hostile; and on what my boyfriend (30 years ago) was going through at the times of our arguments that so confused me. These are just two examples of people close to me whom I now understand better than I did when I knew them / when they were alive.

That sensation of understanding other people compelled me to open new documents and flesh out the lives of certain people in my life, as characters. At that point, I changed their names, because although I believe my speculations were plausible, technically I was now writing fiction. (As an exercise as background — not as stories to publish.) With what I knew about each person’s life at specific times, plus what seemed obvious now, I was able to make good-faith guesses and reconstruct what was possibly behind a person’s “position” during a conflict or when making a decision I didn’t understand.

Writing out these speculative insights made many events in my relationships appear suddenly organized, as if fallen dominoes reversed their disorder and stood up in a neat row. It also had the constructive effect of giving me empathy and compassion for the “characters” in my life — clearly, I wasn’t the only one whose actions were motivated by old pain as well as by youthful dreams. And my loved ones were not the only ones whose actions were incomprehensible at the time; mine were too, to my family and my friends.

As I wrote about my “characters,” who are real people in my memoir with their names changed, I checked and re-checked the timing and order of events by looking back at my typed journals, sometimes using the search function.

All that searching told me I needed a timeline. I opened another doc and titled it Timeline. Each month of each year had a heading. I went through the typed journals — only a few, at that point — and added short versions of that month’s events. As I continued typing my journals all the way from age 10 through age 53, I added to the timeline for each month. I went back and added details whenever I had a question answered by an older relative, or whenever a forgotten memory was triggered. (The journals do help me remember things I had not written down — journal entries sometimes feel like hangers or hooks that have other things attached to them besides what is in the entries.)

With the journals all typed (900,000 words) and my timeline fairly well documented, and a few of my “characters” fleshed out in my plausible imaginings, I started writing my memoir at whatever point in my life was drawing my attention the most strongly. I now have more than 100 pages of decent-quality first draft: vivid (at least I think so) narrative, with settings and dialogue, interspersed with short excerpts from the journals. I refer to my timeline and my journals all the time. 

I wrestle daily with how much of my speculation about others is legitimate to use in my memoir. I’ve noticed that many memoir writers do portray the thoughts and beliefs of people close to them. I intend to keep in mind, and to let the reader know, that I realize I am speculating and I am not actually believing that I can read the minds of people in my past. And yet I have to speculate in order to make sense of strange events.