#22: Referencing in Memoir

Not long ago, I submitted a short memoir piece – about the impact that poor sex ed can have on queer students and their relationships later in life – for publication. It will be published next month. And among the edits which took it from submission to publication were two statements which needed a reference.

To understand why they needed changing, I should first tell you what memoir does as a form. 

It is a genre of creative non-fiction – which also includes biography, autobiography, personal essay, narrative essay, lyric essay, etc. – wherein a writer recounts from their own life. 

While autobiography does something similar, memoir allows the writer to sacrifice breadth of information in favour of style. 

This means a memoir piece often covers one or a few experiences rather than an entire life, usually for a point.

And with the genre building done, we can get to the point.

The point of my short memoir piece was to demonstrate with my own experience how poor sex ed impacted my queer relationships later in life. I juxtaposed two scenes – of a sex ed class and a poor attempt at sex – for this effect. But recognising that these two experiences cannot serve as a map for every queer experience, I also supported ‘the point’ with references to other experiences, other people, the bigger picture.

How do you reference the bigger picture? Well, you have to start making some truth statements.

I got this information from the Royal Women’s Hospital Victoria website. Here’s an actual quote from them:

“Vulvodynia (said ‘vul-vo-din-ia’) is a condition where there is pain, burning and discomfort in the vulva that cannot be linked to a specific cause.

“This pain may or may not be triggered by touch and may be felt in one area or across the whole vulva.

“What causes vulvodynia?

“Unfortunately we don’t yet know.”

Although this statement was correct, the wording of this reference brought the story too far away from my experience. In a personal essay – wherein your experience is a starting point for a broader conversation – this is par for the course. In memoir, you want to stick a bit closer to you.

We changed the line to The cause? My doctors can’t agree. Just to bring it back to me.

I got the 1 in 16 men are rapists statistic from an article published with the American Psychological Association, and the 1 in 3 would be if they thought they’d get away with it stat from an article by University of North Dakota researchers. 

While I would recommend reading through them in their entirety, they are also both contested. 

The above phrasing posed the two stats as truth statements without acknowledging that other research found issues with the statements or different numbers altogether. I didn’t want to encourage the reader to blindly absorb this number as a hard-and-fast rule, but rather help the reader understand what it felt like to learn that the danger of sexual violence was everywhere. Once again, the solution was to bring the phrasing back to my experience. How did I first discover this information?

In the end, the line changed to: In eight years, I would hold a friend’s shaking hand as she told me that one in sixteen men are rapists and one in three would be if they knew they’d get away with it. I would count the number of men in a room and wonder which one planned to put his hand over my mouth that night.

What do you think of these changes, reader? Do they teach us more about where we draw the line between memoir, autobiography and personal essay? Or have I just rambled on about tinkering around the edges?

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