Writing An Authentic Memoir with Kelly Madrone

Award-winning writer and ghostwriter Kelly Madrone joins us to talk about writing as someone else, modulating a professional potty mouth, and how to create a nuanced story arc in memoir.

This is the first episode of our new series of interviews with thought leaders within & without the writing community. Stay tuned and subscribe to the Good Story Company YouTube Channel to learn all about writing, the craft, submission, publishing, and career building for writers of all kinds and ability levels!

Transcript for Writing an Authentic Memoir: Interview with Kelly Madrone

Mary: Hello, this is Mary Kole with the Good Story Podcast. Today with me, I have Kelly Madrone. I am very excited to welcome you. You are a writer in your own right. In your own right.

Kelly: See what you did there.

Mary: Quite a terrible sentence. You also ghostwrite. So you wear your own writing hat, and sometimes you put on hats, the hats of others, and right as them, kind of step into their shoes a little bit? Let's kick off with an introduction, anything else that you want to mention about your own work for our listeners today?

Kelly: Sure. Well, astoundingly, I can't believe this when I look in the mirror, but I've been in publishing in one form or another for 25 years now. I started out wanting to be a writer and when I was looking at colleges, my dad said, "Why don't you get a degree in education or something else as a backup," because of that old trope that nobody makes money as a writer. And so I was kind of dissuaded from that, and I got a degree in education, and as I was going through college, one of my writing teachers said, "I really think you should go get an MFA in writing." Which I didn't, because it didn't feel. Because again, I was hearing that, like, you can't make a living being a writer. And so what I did was, went into an adjacent business, I went to the University of Denver Publishing Institute...

Mary: Okay, yes.

Kelly: Because, you know, I loved books. And it was a great thing to do, I love publishing. I went into scholarly publishing, in part because I was based in Washington, D.C. and that's a lot of what they had there. But it was great. I got into psychology as a focus area and neuropsychology, and I have never lost interest in that, I had a minor in psychology in college. And so that's been a huge focus of my work today. Again, I kind of took a long roundabout loop, I was in and worked for the National Academies Press in DC for a while, I was in Philadelphia for a while, I went into corporate communications for a bit, and then I kind of ended up back on this. I did, I was a staff writer, so I got to learn journalistic writing for the Humane Society of the United States, which was fantastic. And so I've done all of these sort of adjacent fields, and in the process became trained, and practiced as a licensed massage therapist. And which seems totally out of left field, but, I've done a lot of writing in healthcare, I'm a martial artist and in the process of that had many injuries that landed me in physical therapy. And through that, I got really, really interested in the body and how it works, I've kind of got this undercurrent of science in a lot of my work, and so I figured the best way to learn was to get trained. And so I did that for many years, I taught anatomy, and physiology, and communications to health professionals. And so, what I have really landed on that I love is for the past many years, working as an independent writer and editor. So I've kind of come full circle now really getting to realize not just the editorial aspect, but the writing aspect of the work. And I mostly focus on books these days, but I do help people sometimes with blogs, or articles, things like that. So, yeah, that's what I do, and that's kind of how I got here in a nutshell.

Mary: That's awesome. One of the things that I really appreciate about your website is you basically laid out your interest areas, right? Your focus areas, kind of this...So you say psychology, so what's going on in the mind, physiology, what's going on in the body, kind of this holistic approach, social justice areas, and then you kind of summed it all up in sort of this, almost like a spiritual, community-minded, compassionate focus, that sort of ties together how everything else fits in of your focus area. So I think it's really nice that, yeah, you've had some varied experiences. Some, maybe your family would say, more practical than others. But you've been able to sort of really hone in on a focus area, a couple of very interrelated focus areas, and that is sort of where you are not only making your own name for yourself as a writer but supporting other projects as a ghostwriter. How did you...what was your first go at writing for or as somebody else? How did that come about?

Kelly: That actually came about because several years ago. In a way I'd kind of been ghosting for a while because I had been, when I was in corporate communications, I was writing letters, and you know, web posts, etc., for people, you know, and it would be under their name. So in a way, I was doing that but, my first real foray into doing that in a big way and for a book, was a number of years ago. I have a friend who's really my professional mentor, but she's also a dear friend, and she used to be an executive editor at Random House. And she reached out to me and said, "Hey, you know, I've been working with this person, and I think we've taken this manuscript as far as I can go with it. She's looking for something, and I just don't think that I'm the person to get it there, but I think you might be. Would you be willing to talk to her, and look at her manuscript, and see, you know, what you think you can do?" And so, that actually ended up going really well, it was a great client to work with. She had a fantastic story, it was a memoir, but it was really, it is funny because we tell people, choose between memoir and self-help, don't try to do both. It was a self-help book really where she included a bunch of her stories, so I don't wanna say that it was a self-help memoir. But we kind of went through a couple of exercises that landed on...that ended up really isolating her voice. And this is one of the things that I go through with people all the time. And I'm sure you do too, is sort of finding their writing voice. Now, this was somebody who does a lot of presentations. She's a phenomenal speaker. She does a lot of videos. She's really good at what she does, but her voice wasn't coming across in the writing. And so she said, "It just doesn't sound like me." So I watched a ton of videos of her, I listened to a bunch of audio, and I said, "I'm gonna rewrite a chapter in what I hear as your voice. Now, I don't think this is what we're gonna end up wanting to use, but just see," because she said, "I want it to sound exactly like me." So I wrote it exactly like I think she would have said it, and so I sent it to her, and she said, "It sounds exactly like me. Like, you really nailed it, and I hate it."

And then [inaudible 00:07:18.375] what you kind of realize, especially if you're somebody who comes from a spoken word background, you talk in front of people, you podcast, whatever you do if you haven't written yet, there's a different voice for writing. And so, you know, that's one of the exercises I go through with people is helping them find that writing voice. Who they are on the page, which is a little bit different from who we are. I mean, it's still authentic, but the exact language that we use is a bit different. So I always use that story to kind of illustrate, you know, what the difference is so...

Mary: So basically, the answer wasn't necessarily replicating her spoken persona, her spoken voice. The answer was that voice modulated a little bit between what she was offering as her written voice, and what you heard as her spoken voice, there is a voice in the middle that is more engaging. You would say for this memoir kind of self-help, a lot of self-help, you know, as you're building your platform as a nonfiction writer, you do wanna insert yourself into anecdotes. It's a way of building rapport, but also credibility. So it's not that, I think there is a bit of memoir injected into self-help, and a little bit of self-help injected into memoir. If we were being totally honest, because there's, once you're at the phase where you're writing a memoir, the assumption is that you sort of maybe glean something from your experience that you're passing on. The average memoir reader reads for a dose of inspiration and aspiration, as well as, you know, hearing a good story or learning about an interesting person. So how would you say, okay, so we don't want the spoken voice necessarily, that doesn't translate that well. We don't want this kind of dry, I'm attempting to be a writer voice, which is sometimes what I see from people who are approaching a book that maybe come from different areas. Technical writing, or public speaking, or whatever, they feel like they have this like W riter voice with a capital W, you know? So how do you then, she hated that, how did you then steer the conversation toward that written voice that also captured her essence? Because that is tough for any writer to do.

Kelly: Yeah, yeah. It was definitely a process of recasting it in a big way and then really fine-tuning and tweaking it, and then kind of creating from that, you know, a template that we could apply to the rest of her manuscript. And of course, there were content changes that we made as well. So that affected flow and, but I mean, I kind of liken it to her, because she's somebody who speaks to large groups of people. I liken it to the way that you would present information to someone if you had a roomful of people versus if you were having a one on one conversation with someone. You would certainly, you would turn your personality down a little bit. You would use different language. You would, you know, and one of the things that I really see a lot of these days that I spend time talking to people about is with, like really colorful language, like, you know, cursing, etc., which I always tell people, I have no issues with that. But, it can get really overdone really fast, especially in writing. And recently, I heard an amazing example of it. I had gotten a book on boundaries because I was doing some research for another book because I also work as a researcher. And I was listening to it, and there was so many expletives in it. And this was a book written by a clinical psychologist. And I thought, based on this, I would never go to see this person because I bet she's really good at what she does. I bet she's not an angry and judgmental person. But if you say it's like, you know, this person's decision versus their effing decision, that really changes. Word choices is exceptionally important, and that really changes how you hear it. And then when you hear it read back to you by this performance person, it was like, "Wow, this doesn't read well at all." And I bet it didn't read well on the page either. So it's like, in writing I feel like a little bit goes a long way, whereas, you know, we're very animated, a lot of us are, when we speak, you know, to people, to groups. But when we're writing, it's almost like we got to just dial it back a little bit and be really thoughtful about our word choice because if we say something, you know, even on a podcast, if I use a word, I can kind of like then add a couple other words to clarify or whatever, writing, we don't really get retakes, so we wouldn't be really thoughtful about how we...

Mary: I'm like an infamous potty mouth, so I'm like taking personal and professional notes right now. But I think the analogy that I see in fiction and some memoir in nonfiction is dialect, and I think that's a really good analogy as well. It's when you hear somebody speaking with a specific dialect, you know, it really comes across, it feels very natural, it feels very organic, it just informs your perception of their voice, and kind of is a little accent, like, and sometimes literally. But, you know, figuratively, it's just a little seasoning that they speak with, but when you try to replicate dialect in writing, and you're dropping g's left and right, it just...it suddenly feels very overpowering. And I tell my clients, you know, less is more when it comes to any kind of dialect. You want a whisper of it, you don't want it to be shouting because it becomes kind of the only thing that you see for that character, for that sentence, that voice, and it's not in real life. If somebody has a slight regional dialect, that's not the only thing about that person that we wanna know. So I think kind of this modulation from, "I'm a big personality, I'm kind of like I'm up here at an eight or nine in front of an audience." And we're in a coffee shop, we're having a conversation, how do I bring it down and ground it a little bit?

Kelly: Right, exactly. I think the dialect is a really good comparison.

Mary: So at that point, what is your approach? Are you...so you've replicated the person and kind of shown what that looks like to the client. Now, are you stepping into more of a guiding role? Or are you heavily manipulating their own written output? So this seemed like more of a collaborative process, where you're kind of shepherding that person on their own project. Do you sometimes do more than that? Do you sometimes do less than that? How does it work?

Kelly: Yes, I sometimes do more, and I sometimes do less. So, on the less end, I do what, I just call it writing coaching, where people send me, you know, what they're working on, and we do calls, and we discuss it, and I sort of give them overall feedback, but I don't do any writing for them. And then I do on the other end, I actually, like I just finished a project where I am the collaborating writer. And so, you know, worked with the named author, and was taking all of her material, like we worked very closely together. And then I would create, and I would add research and supporting materials, and then, you know, create an outline, we'd go through that, and then I'd create the first draft, you know, in its entirety, and we would kick it back and forth of each chapter. So, I was really doing the heavy lifting in terms of getting something on paper that we could work with.

Mary: And that's an attributed role, right? You're not a ghost there, you are very much a person on the project.

Kelly: I'm very much a person on the project, I'm not getting a byline on that one although I might in future. But, yeah, my role will be acknowledged in the acknowledgments, etc. And then there's, you know, someone else who I had ghostwritten podcast scripts for them, and I do that start to finish in its entirety, just by myself, and turn them in. So, I really prefer more collaboration. I've just found that that's more enjoyable for me. I can certainly do the other kind, but it's just, I feel like the product is better when, you know, the kind of subject matter expert or the person with the point of view is more involved, even if I'm doing the heavy lifting on the writing aspect of it. It's just a different thing than doing your own writing. And I like...And I just also just like the contact and getting in the collaboration rather than just feeling like I'm...I definitely have times where I like to be in my little office by myself just working away, and I do enjoy that, but I also like checking back in with somebody, and, you know, kicking things back and forth, and making it better that way because I do think it makes it better.

Mary: I have also, I mean, and you've studied publishing, you've participated in publishing, it is really a very collaborative environment once you get past that initial I'm a writer in my attic scribbling, I've come up with this manuscript. But once that object or that project exists, that idea exists, it really does take on this collaborative, you know, multi-input life of its own, from your agent to an editor to, you know, input from sales and marketing, a designer gets to have a voice in a project along its kind of production cycle.

Kelly: The agent will often if it's an agent in book, they could actually have a very heavy stamp on it sometimes.

Mary: Yeah, there's a lot of steering involved. And I think that's a really great way to get, you know, additional voices, additional viewpoints in there. Because writers can sometimes, you know, that's why my professional exists as a freelance editor. You know, sometimes two sets of eyes or two inputs are better than one, or make for a stronger project, or smooth out some of those potholes that where a writer might have blind spots. But this isn't just a commercial for editors, and ghostwriters, and collaborators. I'm most curious, I think on a personal level. So, this collaborative model, does it work better, or maybe differently for a nonfiction, let's say a psychology work like...or a sociology work, something that is rooted in researchable material, or does it work better, or does it present challenges for memoir work where the source material is locked up, you know, mostly in a person and a lot of the work is sort of getting at that material?

Kelly: Yeah, no, I like how you described that, a lot of the work is getting at that material. I'm actually working with someone right now, and we're in the latter early stages of her memoir, and she's got amazing [inaudible 00:19:07.723]. She's actually a phenomenal writer in her own right but has decided to...First, she came to me saying, "I want a ghostwriter," but our process became so collaborative, I went ahead and wrote a prologue based on our conversations. And I said, "Why don't you," you know, and she was giving feedback, I said, you know, "You can go ahead and make changes yourself if you want to." And she was like, "Are you sure?" I said, "Yeah, this is like, you know, do whatever you want." And so now she's like, "I think I would actually really like to be writing partners." I was like, "That's great. I think that's fantastic." It works really well as long as you know what everybody's role is, like who's doing the first drafts? How is this gonna work? But as I explained to her...And this, I've gone through this a number of times, and I've learned to describe this to people upfront when we're doing something like memoir, it's gonna take some talking, and you're probably gonna have to repeat yourself a few times, or tell me stories from a few different angles. And I'll go back and might ask you questions, and you might think, "I think we already talked about that." But I want to hear it in many ways because I'm trying to get inside your brain. So I need to be familiar enough with this material that I can really start to think about it in a flexible way. And so there is a lot of work upfront, where you're kind of trying to get into that person's mindset and choose, and understand what material there is to work with, so that you can kind of pick and choose, you know, what fits the theme the best, what stories illustrate, you know, certain points in their lives, and, you know, etc., in the most helpful way.

So that can be...it's very different. I mean, I would say it's like, if it's better or easier, I think it's just really different than collaborating on something that is more kind of science-based or researchable stuff. I think it's a little bit...To me, the nonfiction is really easier. It's not easy, which to me is a good thing. I feel if it's easy, it's probably boring. If it's easy, it's already out there, you're not creating anything new. But I feel like with memoir because we remember things differently, we see things differently. I might tag something as interesting and important that that person might not. So one of the experiences I often have with people which is really kind of fun is, we talk a lot, and then every once in a while I'll say something back as to like what I heard. So what that sounds like to me is that you kind of thought this, but then this happened, and that changed for you in this way. And they've never thought about it like that, you know? And so it's like, which is nothing special about me, it's being heard and having...I mean, we do this as friends with active listening, etc. But to me, some of the biggest benefit, and that's why, you know, you'll see on my website that my tagline is, "I help stories and people come alive." Because some of my favorite work is whether or not they ever publish anything, it's seeing something light up in them, and seeing them develop a new understanding of themselves and their work. Whether it, you know...And again, that's memoir, that can happen on these kind of straightforward nonfiction books as well. It's like, "Wow, I never even looked at my own work that way. That's really interesting, and it can send us in different directions." So I think that's kind of like one of the most fun things that I do, is just help people kind of look at their lives from different angles, and look at their work from different angles.

Mary: I have about 80 million questions, so I'm gonna try to organize them on the fly. But I do want to sort of get back to this idea of, you know, memoir is often very therapeutic regardless of the outcome of the memoir. I see a lot of people, and you say this on your website as well, you know, whether you're writing for your own legacy kind of to pass something on to your family, whether you're writing for publication, I do think that a lot of people go down the road of wanting to write a memoir because they do want somebody to hear their story, whether it's a small group of people or a large group of people, but also, I do think that writing our own story is one of the most therapeutic tools available to us for unpacking and understanding our own story. There's this Terry Pratchett quote that I say probably 80 times a day which is, "Your first draft is just you telling yourself...this telling the story to yourself." I've butchered it now. But I feel like, in memoir, that takes on new meaning because you're actually telling your own story to yourself. And I think that facilitates a lot of kind of understanding, and contextualization, and healing also. So when you step into that process, what's it like? And do you ever run into conflicts with the writer, when you can see, well, like you were saying, I can see the situation a little bit differently, and oftentimes that unlocks new understanding or insights for the storyteller? Are there ever times when you're like, "I don't know if the story you're telling me is the actual story," or, "I don't know if I agree with your take here."

Kelly: Yeah, no, that does happen. I think the form that I see most often is people wanting to write their memoir for other people before they've really processed their circumstances themselves. I almost think that there's, for most people, there's kind of this gap between...I like how you phrase it, that the first draft, the quote, that the first draft is really telling yourself your story. That there's a gap between your experiences and your initial reflection on them, and then your long-term reflection on what you really...how that impacted your life. I had someone come to me the other week who is in the process of...she's like, "I decided I need to write a book about my transformation." And I said, "Oh, great. Tell me about that process and what that looks like for you." Her transformation started at the beginning of COVID. And so she's very much still experiencing it. And so, I think that I'm not gonna discourage her from writing about those experiences at all. But what my role is, I think, in those cases, is to gently encourage people to get some more reflection because, you know, I often say that the, you know, what people think of a memoir is often kind of like a journal. Their diary, this is what happened to me, this is what happened to me, this is what happened to me, it's like reading somebody else's journal. Whereas a memoir is, you know, it's very selective first of all. Like somebody who really journals might journal every single day. For the memoir, as you know, we're picking a theme. And so we're gonna choose stories that are authentic, we're not gonna omit things that are really important, but we're gonna choose the stories that tell that, that support that theme, and that, you know? So it's not going to be everything, and you really curate how you present it. And it is a point of view, it's a very strong point of view. So I think that there can be a really common misperception that memoir is what happened to me. It's really, it's what happened to you with perspective, and with time, and within sight, and ideally, with the ability to be kind in some way to the people who hurt you so that you can at least see them as full characters.

There was a story I told in my newsletter a couple years ago, where I wrote...I've written a couple drafts of a novel for young adults. And I'm still working with it, it's on the shelf right now. It's not ready for its next iteration, I've talked to some agents about it and rejected them, and decided, you know, I'm gonna come back to it. But in the first draft of the story, I wrote...It's based on a true story, not that happened to me, but that happened to somebody I know. And the parents that I wrote, it's a young female protagonist, the parents that I wrote for her were very much representative of the parents this person had and how they behaved at the time. And there was a lot of negativity around there. And what I realized in rereading the draft was how one-dimensional that was. They didn't, you know, like, even the darkest people we think of, who we think of as the darkest people, the negative characters, the antagonists, if we can't see some dimensionality in there. That doesn't mean they have to also volunteer to soup kitchen, it doesn't have to be as dramatic as that. You know, like, you don't have to literally forgive them in the course of the book, but we have to be able to see them as human. And so, that was, part of it is when I came back into my second draft, I made them so much more human, and that's when they really, really came to life. And I think it's the same or a similar process when we look back on people in memoir who've maybe been responsible for some serious hurts, you know, some things that we've experienced. If we paint them entirely as villains, it's not going to come across as authentic, and if we're not in an emotional and mental place where we can see them otherwise, it's probably not time for the memoir yet.

Mary: I think that is some brilliant insight. And an analog in fiction would be the villain, like a villain who's just villainous, and just loves evil for the sake of evil. You know, they're just not interesting.

Kelly: The twirly mustache and the...

Mary: Yeah, right? The cackling.

Kelly: Yeah, the Snidely Whiplash, like, okay, it's not that interesting.

Mary: It's not, and you have to remember that even the most messed up people you could probably think of, they feel like they're operating toward a good in their own value system. It might be a skewed value system, you know, they might be too broken to see, you know, whatever the impact of their actions usually, but it's trying to figure out who that person is? What they contributed? Why they might, you know, be behaving and existing in the world the way that they are? So this brings up a really interesting question, right? Because, fiction, right? We can choose the endpoint, we can choose the beginning, we can kind of choose the whole story, that's what I tell my fiction writers. They're like, "Well, the fairy magic can't operate in this way," I'm like, "Yes it can because you're making the whole thing up."

Kelly: You're the real builder.

Mary: Right? It's like if it doesn't work this way, try it another, but with a life, right, there are more parameters. Obviously, memory is subjective. A lot of people don't see it this way, but memory is subjective, and it changes. And it changes with not only what we're able to recall, but it changes as we change, and our relationship to that event changes. You know, like you're saying, the more time and a reflection that goes by, maybe that person that hurt us is painted with a more compassionate brush, you know? So, in memoir, the story doesn't technically end until the big ending of the person, right? The story is ongoing and has the potential to be ongoing. So how does a person...This is gonna be a two-part question, but basically, how does a person choose when the time is right and how much of the story to tell? I have to admit, I have written a memoir about a very specific period in my life, and it is now completely irrelevant because the things that happened after that period have sort of thrown everything else into question. And so, it's on the shelf as well. So it's like if life is gonna insist on continuing, and we are going to be gathering experience and perspective all the while, how do we choose? How does somebody say, "You know, I think this is a good time to dig into that memoir."

Kelly: I think a lot of people come to some realization that they have a full arc, that they get to a point where they feel like, "Wow, if the younger me had known that, that would have been really helpful," or, you know, not that they regret anything that they experienced, but there's this spirit of, "I wonder if it'll be interesting for other people if somebody else could gain insight, if somebody else could gain support from me sharing this thing that I experienced." I think that's often sort of the motivation. And it can, again, I think people can kind of have that a little early on. But it's like if you can sort of encapsulate it and say, this was, okay, so I...this is a good example, last year, someone came to me with a manuscript that she'd had some work done on it, but it just wasn't...when I...And it was a story of her, the loss of her teenage daughter who died, she became ill. It was like basically, it was a...We all know what a Coronavirus is now, but it was basically just a kind of a cold virus that somehow got to her heart and they weren't able to get it in time, and it just spiraled over a series of weeks, and then she was gone. And so it was her journey of really creating this new relationship with her daughter. And it's like, for anyone who's lost someone, especially a child, but for anyone who's had a serious loss like that, you know there's never an end to grief, you know that there's never an end to mourning in some respects. So there's no end to that story where you say, "This is how I stopped grieving. This is how I slept missing that person." But her arc was, "How did I get to this place where I have a whole relationship with my daughter now, where she's still, it's in present time." And as she says, "I would always rather choose to have her here. Given the option, I would always rather have her here. But having experienced this there are actually things that I can see about my life that have changed, and who I am that are different in a positive way from having gone through this." And so, her idea of telling her story was helping others navigate that path of how do I deal with this heart-wrenching loss when I think that, I don't even know if I can...like I can't even imagine tomorrow, I can't even imagine an hour to actually living a really rich life, and in her case, sort of with the presence that she feels of her daughter. And so she had this manuscript, but it just wasn't, it didn't go deep enough. And it wasn't because she wasn't willing to go there, it's just she...it was at the end of her kind of writing skills.

And so, I worked with her to recast it. You know, we changed some of the order upfront to where we came in, and I just kind of did a rewrite after spending lots of time with her, pulling in some different stories, you know, whatever, and really recasting it, raising the drum a little bit here, so that the reader could really be in the experience more with her rather than saying...because that's another thing, and I'm sure you see this a lot as well. You'll see like this happened, then this happened, then this happened. It's kind of that telling versus showing, but it's also an arm's length thing when we really want the reader to be experiencing it almost in real-time with you in part, so they can feel that like, uh, the emotionality of it and be with you in that, even though they know what's gonna happen in some respect. And so we recast it in that way. And I'm just delighted to hear last month, she got an agent, and she's, you know, in the process of trying to sell it. And so, I'm really happy for her because she's a wonderful person, but I think that her story really can truly help other people. So that's an example of a really encapsulated...Her life, she had a life before that, her life will continue to go on, and maybe she'll write another memoir about more experiences. But that was...we chose a specific period of about four years of her life that we covered. And if you look at somebody like, you know, an example I frequently use is Martha Beck. She wrote a memoir about leaving the Mormon Church. She wrote another memoir about, you know, giving birth to a son who has Down's syndrome. And they don't overlap really at all. So, those are great examples of choosing specific orcs and things that have happened in your life and then sharing the stories and the experiences that relate to that. So, when somebody says, "How can somebody have more than one memoir?" That's kind of how.

Mary: And I like that better. I think there's a big fallacy, and we don't do this in fiction anymore, this kind of cradle to graves, you know, David Copperfield type of storytelling. It's not desirable in memoir because you really do want...your...So the constraint is that you are functioning with material that you know really well, and there's a lot of emotion wrapped up in that. And sometimes, you know, a lot of writers struggle with like, well, I don't remember this, and how do I, you know, am I telling the truth, that memory is subjective, those are kind of unique considerations to memoir. But it's like, you only have this to pull from really, you're not making it all up hopefully. That's been controversial in the memoir space. But you're also attached to it, and you've lived a whole life. I mean, if you were to transcribe for 40 years of life, it would be thousands upon thousands of pages. So I feel like a lot of memoirs, writers really struggle with cherry-picking and curating, like you say, the events that tell a specific angle of a story rather than a comprehensive story.

Kelly: Right, absolutely. Yeah.

Mary: And how do you counsel people? So, one of the questions that I receive, and I would be honored to sort of learn your very nuanced feelings on this, how do you deal with people who are like, "I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly, or can I fudge how somebody might have been feeling, you know?" Where we get more into the creative nonfiction part of creative nonfiction, which is what memoir is sometimes termed. Or if you get a sense that somebody is like using it as a burn book maybe? Or they're holding back? They're withholding something, maybe protecting somebody? When when you have one of those may be more complicated components to a memoir project, how do you work with that?

Kelly: Well, I always try to be really compassionate and respectful for whatever challenge, issue, perspective it is that they're having. With the kind of burn book, I think that gets into the territory of not enough distance. If we, again, you know, if you're painting everybody as villains. If I read somebody's draft or if I read somebody's memoir, and it's like, "This is what happened to me, and this is whose fault it was." I'm not at all interested in that. You know, there's a lot of that in the world, and that's not really something...Not that that's not a valid and worthwhile perspective and story for people to share, but it's not something that is insightful. And part of this really gets into a much broader issue, which is leaving gaps. I always talk to people about, leave a gap between what you take from a situation or an experience, and what the reader can take. Don't tell the reader how to feel. Like, don't write, you know, in such a way that you're filling in all the gaps, and the blanks, and the whatever, and kind of dictating how you want the reader to react to something. Put the situation out there. You can describe your own reaction, but let the reader, you know, meet you. Because if somebody, and I've read published books like this, so they made it through a process. If I'm reading something...

Mary: That is a very nice way of couching your feelings.

Kelly: And I feel like there's no room for me to have, like, I know exactly how I'm supposed to feel, I know who's supposed to be the good guy, and who's supposed to be the bad guy, and how I'm supposed to view the author. I'm not interested in that at all because I do have my own feelings. And I would rather you just left a little bit more room around it for me to engage because that's when we really love books, is when we feel like we can connect with them. And if it's...This is gonna sound funny, but I always say like, if the memoir, it feels like it's all about you, there's no room for me as the reader. Which sounds kind of silly because it's a memoir, it is all about you. But if you...there's a way of sort of that we can kind of flood the page with our feelings and our point of view so heavily that the reader doesn't feel free to have their own perspective because we all know that there's your version, my version, and the truth, you know? It's all, we all look at things differently. And so we actually want to leave space for the reader to have their own point of view, and to, you know, that's gonna mean that maybe sometimes they don't look at our decisions, and our actions, and our words, and our lives as maybe the highest and best use of our time here. But that's the truth of how we live, and that makes you, being willing to do that, to leave that space for other people to think what they will, also allows them to connect with their own experiences, where they say, "Oh, I know a time I felt like that," or, "I bet she felt like this because this is the experience that I had." Like, whether that's accurate or not, it lets them make their own connections. You know, it actually lets them start to derive meaning, etc. And so, you know, it is again, it's funny because it is a story about you, but a memoir really is something different. You want to allow space for the reader because nobody's really interested in anyone just saying like, "Hey, I'm just gonna talk about myself."

Mary: I'm gonna talk at you.

Kelly: Exactly. So we're just doing that on the page. And it can be really, and I'm sure you experience this, it can be kind of challenging sometimes to explain that if people don't get the concept right away, but usually in practice, once we start going through it, one of the things I'll often do with people is say, look at version A and look at version B, and I'll take something, and show them the different ways of doing it. And then it's like, "Okay, yeah, now I see it," because it can be a little subtle too.

Mary: I think, yeah, one of the things that I talk a lot about is what readers want, because when we're aiming for publication, whether fiction, whether nonfiction, whether memoir, we're inviting readers to the table, maybe for the first time, with somebody's life story, you know? It's not just this idea of getting the story on the page, it's also inviting the reader to the table because you're opening up your story to somebody else, and that somebody else deserves to have the joy of discovery, the joy of experiencing what you experienced but maybe not in the overbearing way that some writers come at it, being like, "No, this is how I felt, this is how you have to feel." That last part has, to me, not a lot of place in a successful manuscript of any kind because readers are going to, they...When readers are told, the reason that we have this show, don't tell advice, is when readers are told, they disengage because there's nothing for them to do. The best books invite us to be active readers. Readers love their jobs, that is the one thing we all have going for us in this machine of I'm a writer, I wanna write books, I'm a reader, I wanna read books. Everybody's on the same team. They all want to have this kind of like mutual communication, this conversation, but it has to be a conversation rather than, you know, a soapbox.

Kelly: Right, absolutely. Absolutely. It's like if you think about it, even in a teaching atmosphere, even in a classroom atmosphere, the best, most engaging teachers are involving you. They're leaving gaps for you to meet them, they're not just, you know, otherwise, they just lecture the whole time, and we know how that goes.

Mary: I have small children, so I do know how lecturing goes. It's usually...just, and then the day was lost. So one thing that I would love to know is sort of, what would you say...So, publishing is a marketplace, right? Speaking of inviting the reader to the table and connecting with readers, there's a whole machine that gives us that platform, allows us to create these books, what would you say is sort of a hallmark of a modern memoir? So we've talked about what makes a good section of story, a good sort of encapsulated story for memoir, but what do you see as really doing well in contemporary memoir in terms of kind of type of story, type of voice, maybe some of that authenticity, and that ability to sort of come to the page warts and all, rather than sort of telling a glossed over story. That's something I see in terms of voice and kind of approach that connects with the self-help a little bit.

Kelly: Right. Yeah...

Mary: What are you seeing is especially effective?

Kelly: Authenticity I think is king and queen, and everything else in between and beyond. And I think that it's like, you need to be reliable. And I think that this actually ties back into not telling people how they should see you or see your experiences. It's just, I mean, honestly, I just did a manuscript read of it, and it was a first draft. And it has, it certainly has work to do because all first drafts do, my first drafts always have lots of work to do. So, just to give a shout-out to every single person out there working on a draft, there are many drafts in between for all of us. So, of course, it has work to do, but I was put back on my heels by his raw honesty, and just his willingness to go there. And I was just like, just from that alone, and he's very sensitive and insightful. So, I was really, you know, what he noticed, and what made an impression on him was, you know, really interesting to me. You know, going through his childhood and his later years. And I think, sometimes what I see these days is, it's kind of trying to duplicate a style of the messy me where it's in all extreme of a couple of really well known, very popular authors who their style is to show you their imperfection. And I don't mean to say their style in terms of the...to imply that that's contrived, but they were sort of first to market with this in terms of people who got really picked up with it in a big way. And so, just like with the pre-love, lots and lots of other people are kind of getting on the bandwagon of that and saying like, "Hey, this is..."And I always tell people, it's not that I don't think that that's the authentic you, but, you know, often when we see these trends in publishing, publishing is now looking for the next trend because there's only as, you know...You're not a follow-on, this is your life, but it could be seen that way if you alter it too much.

I just finished up a proposal with someone who...and she had already done a ton of work, she's a phenomenal writer. I didn't have a whole bunch more to do with her with this, so I don't wanna take credit for it because...And what I've made her do was go through and take out every reference or quote from one of these authors because I was like your work is strong on its own. You have a platform, you do workshops, this is something that you've done, you give credit where credit's due in terms of, you know, these other places where...These people you're kind of putting in I think totally unnecessarily and sort of, like, almost like you're looking to them to give you some validation, and saying like this is the group of people I belong with. But what you should also know is publishers are kind of tired of you people comparing their stuff to these already really successful and popular people. So, it can be a tightrope, you know, because you are in that genre, but you also don't want to seem like a follow-on, you want to make sure that people see that this is your material, this is your authentic voice. And so it was like, you know, I said, you know, "Just totally be you. Don't pull that back, but just be really super sensitive to anywhere that you're like," I forbid her from using the phrase spark joy. I was that's somebody else's phrase, it's overused, it's not a bad phrase, but it's done its thing and if you use that, it's going to, you know, like conjure this other person who you're not, and you just want to be you. So, I get it, you know, we wanna be, and we're in the same genre, we wanna, you know, place ourselves and have ourselves seen in that way, but we don't want to imitate intentionally or unintentionally, you know, other people. And so I see that with some of the swearing, and I see that with some of this, and I'm like, "I just want them to see the messy me." And I'm like, yeah, but it's really hard, because we got to make sure that it's you, and that they're not just seeing a version of you that seems like this other person too if that makes sense.

Mary: Oh, absolutely. This brings me to a very selfish question that I'm gonna ask, that I've really struggled with in my editorial work. Speaking about kind of buckets of people and buckets of experience, obviously, everyone is their own person, but one category of memoir I especially struggle with is quit lit because we have these ideas of, you know, establishing ourselves as a relatable and reliable person, a reliable narrator within our own story, but there are so many things that are specific to the experience of addiction, where we really do go to a rock bottom. And we don't go there just once, we go there, you know, especially with drugs that affect our memories, or affect our decision-making. We make a ton of bad decisions, and we do it over and over and over again. And so, a lot of quit lit has that redemptive arc at the end where, you know, you hit your rock bottom, you scrape around there for a while, you come up with your lessons, you live a more meaningful life, and you wanna help other people. All of these are great things, but for the majority of that life story, we really are circling the drain. So how do you make a person who we see making their worst decisions of their life over and over and over again, how do we make a compelling story in that specific subset of memoir?

Kelly: I think that that's a really great question, and it is a really significant challenge. Because I think it does, it walks, again, there's another tightrope there. We want you to be authentic, and we want you to be accurate to the best of your recollection. But we don't...I just kind of encouraged people to hit it but not stay there too long because it can be overwhelming for the reader. And it's not that there's anything bad about that experience, it's not that there's any judgment about you having those experiences, but we're kind of getting it in a capsule. You experienced it in, you know, over a time, you were the one who was actually experiencing it, but we're getting it in a strong, single-dose, right? And so it's a concentrated form. So I think we need to like get in there, like get the gist of it, you know, but if it starts to get to...and this is where I think, you know, readers can be really, really good readers, can be really appropriate readers, can be really helpful being like, "Uh, okay, about here. I started being like, oh, God, when is this gonna be over." And that might be a little bit of what you're going for, but, you know, there are so many ways to exhaust the reader. And we see this in some classic literature too, different ways to exhaust the reader. But it's like, it can be really, you know...and different readers are gonna get that, hit that note before, hit that point before others. So it really is kind of a judgment call, but it's like, can we go into some kind of reflection? Can we go into some kind of what were other people thinking around you about this? I feel like there are other ways to fill in the story too so that we're not always in this exceptionally concentrated painful space with you all the time.

And I sort of went through that too with this, the memoir I was just talking about where the woman whose daughter died, the first 80 plus pages were like an agonizing experience. And I had one reader who'd lost her husband very suddenly read it and say, "Too much details, stick with it too long." Every other reader I had say, "I needed to read that to really understand it. Like you hit the right amount." So I had, you know, several people read it. So that's, you know, and the point of sharing that is, another thing I tell people is, be mindful of reader feedback, and be careful about how you choose your readers. I'm glad that I chose that other reader because I want broad feedback, and I really took, you know, we took her words and we really deeply considered them, but we also decided this is really...if we pull back, we're gonna pull our punch a little too soon because we do want you to feel some of the agony she felt. I promise it's not anything near what she actually went through. And we did leave [crosstalk 00:54:26.840]. We did leave some details out that we could have, you know, we skipped forward a little bit, we skipped some days. So, it's like, it can be tough to judge and gauge exactly what it is, but it's like, you know, there's a sense of, okay, we really need to come up now, or at least we need to see some light. You know, even if we're gonna go back down.

So some people do that with humor really well. You know, sometimes people have a beautiful sort of insightful humor that they can inject in moments like that. And that's kind of like the guy who I just said, just finished his first book, his insightfulness, and his commentary, he's got this kind of sardonic sense of humor, can be so like just dead-on, you know, it's so incisive. And then he's got this amazing sense of humor that doesn't pull the punch back, but it shows I've got perspective enough on this experience, and I can laugh on it, and I kind of hope you can too. Like I hope you can be here with me, you know, sort of thing. So there are different techniques, other people's perspectives, stepping out of your own self and kind of looking back in from the now self, adding humor if that feels, if you, you know...It needs to be natural. If you're not naturally a humor person, it won't feel natural, but yeah. So, but I agree, that can be pretty challenging. But we really don't need to hear every single detail. And that, you know, and I say that with love, for us to get it and to go with you. So just remember it's really concentrated and an intense format that we're taking it in, you know, things that happened over a period of time.

Mary: And I think this, your beautiful advice on balance, I mean, can apply...People don't write memoir when they've lived kind of a boring, uneventful life, you know? The people who are writing memoir are writing memoir to overcome, you know, trauma, abuse, something terrible that happened. And so, I think this idea of either coming back at it with your current perspective or surfacing to take a breath, using humor if your voice sort of already calls for it. Just some really good advice in general on balancing your storytelling and taking your sort of reader's perspective and their experience.

Kelly: Yeah, it's really, it's interesting because I'd said that I wrote a novel based on the experiences of someone I know, some pretty traumatic experiences to give the background of where I come in. I come in on my character having already experienced those things. So we don't go through it, we just kind of allude to them. And when I was talking to the person who actually, who lived this, we were joking about her writing a memoir, and she said, you know, like, "I couldn't write half of the things that actually happened because it would be too much for people. It would be too overwhelming, they might not believe it." And that's true. I agree. She has no desire to write a memoir, but if she ever were going to, it would be a case like that where we would give enough to, you know, so that you get a sense of it. But we wouldn't drag people through the details, and, you know, every single thing. Because you don't need that to get it. And it can actually just...it can shut people down. Depending on their own experiences, it can actually trigger them, and I use the word trigger meaning actually trigger them in a...not in a just a non-bothered way, but in a, I'm triggered into, you know, challenge of my own mental health kind of way. So I think that there's a responsibility there too. And again, I'll say it again, it's a balancing act because you want to be authentic, and I encourage people to be authentic. And you don't wanna, you know, stop pulling your punches. It's just kind of moderating, you know, what keeps people engaged and tells the story, what's necessary, and what's not.

Mary: I have loved every minute of this, and I would love to talk to you for a billion years because you just have this, such a wonderful, just centered, balanced, wise approach to your work. I think anybody that works with you would be so lucky and just so well off as a writer as a result, and a human being. I fully believe it. Kelly Madrone, thank you so much for joining me. I hope everybody out there who is working on nonfiction, memoir, anything like that, look her up, read her own writing, and maybe even engage with her. But thank you so much for spending your time with me. This has been such an honor to hear your thoughts.

Kelly: No, for me as well. For me as well. Thank you.

Mary: My absolute pleasure. My name is Mary Kole. My guest has been Kelly Madrone, and this is "Good Story Podcast." Here's to a good story.