Befriending the Elephant

In 2016, I was an aspiring writer attending the Galiano Literary Festival. Sonja Larsen was one of the featured authors, reading from her new memoir, Red Star Tattoo. In the Q&A after her reading, I asked if it was hard to expose yourself like that.

She said that trauma remains, taking up space, and if you didn’t write about it, you ended up writing around it, and leaving an elephant sized hole in the room.

After her public talk, I gathered my courage to approach her and ask if writing it down makes the elephant go away?

She said it doesn’t, but that in writing about the elephant, you can train it.

So instead of writing YA fiction about imaginary worlds peopled by strange creatures, I turned my attention towards the elephant in my room. My abusive first marriage. I got married when I was 18 and separated at 21, but that brief relationship shaped who I was and how I moved through the world.

At first, I tried to write my story as fiction. But I gave up before I’d gotten a third of the way through; I couldn’t force a fictional character to make the bad choices I’d made in real life.

My second attempt was an epistolary memoir. I wrote my story in a series of letters to my daughter, thinking that in explaining my past to her, perhaps I’d come to a deeper understanding of why I’d made the choices I had. I finished that version, but I still wasn’t happy. My elephant was still an ungainly obstacle in the centre of the room.

In the meantime, I drew on my writing, along with journals, to craft shorter essays on the theme of domestic violence. And these were successful, published in: Grist, the Humber Lit Review, the Ocotillo Review, and more.

A couple of years ago, I started writing my memoir again. I drew on everything I’d learned and wrote a linear narrative memoir. This time I faced my elephant and wrote it truthfully (instead of dodging its edges) and got the elephant to take me where I wanted to go. I’m on my fourth round of edits, and the story is finally solid. Because this time it’s my story. It’s who I am. I hung garlands around the elephant’s neck and didn’t look away.

You can read the latest essay drawn from my memoirs at Grist here.

You can read Sonja Larsen’s log post about our conversation here.

Photo by Rithish Mahadevu on Unsplash