How I Finished My Memoir—With Friendship and Poetry

Most people find endings difficult. This is as true on the page as it is in life. In the spring of 2023, I struggled to write the end of my memoir. The book told the story of the search for the mother who had been missing my entire life. I’d carefully plotted my investigation into this woman—and my eventual encounter with her in Korea. I’d titled it Woman of Interest. But I did not know how to stick the landing.

(Putting Truth to the Page in Memoir.)

Around that time, my friend Marie-Helene Bertino reached out to discuss a revision concept, one wonderfully her, which is to say: playful, smart, and intimate. She was considering running a table reading of her book, Beautyland. By listening to it aloud, she might catch what needed to be revised. As we exchanged messages, I copped to my problem:

I’m agonizing over the last chapter. I keep reading the ends of memoirs.

Most of the memoirs I read offered a reflective interpretation on what had been learned. What was to be taken away from the experience. A sense of why it all mattered. I understood that this was satisfying, but how could I succinctly say what someone as enormous as a mother meant exactly?

Marie had helped me to launch my first novel eight years before. I didn’t know her well at the time. I didn’t really know any writers well at the time. In the intervening years, she’d become a trusted friend, someone I admired because she was wise enough to be kind, sparkling intelligent, thoughtful. She liked weird. I did too. And it seemed to me that to write about someone as unusual as the mother who has not raised me, a woman who I’d learned had cut a ragged and strange path through life that often defied the conventional archetypes of womanhood, I couldn’t rely on the conventions of memoir alone.

Oh god I feel that. Please do whatever the opposite is of that. Read the ends of poetry collections instead! she replied.

In fact, whether she knew it or not, Marie had reminded me of myself—a person useful for a memoirist to recall.

I’d first started thinking like a writer by reading poetry. Before that, I read exclusively for meaning, and quickly. However, poetry developed my interest in sound and the music of language. Studying the enjambment of lines hooked me on the intrigue of a turn in meaning within a single sentence. I became aware of the “time of the reading,” the experience of the reader moving through a text processually—as opposed to someone simply seizing on the meaning at once. The creative constraint of verse forms became thrilling dares to think of alternative ways of putting language together. I loved the strange turns of logic I’d noticed in paratactic stretches of a poem.

In some ways, I too, advanced with a paratactic logic. My emotional life often enough included competing desires without one feeling subordinating another, not least of all when it came to my mother, who confounded me and who, nevertheless, I still wished I could connect to more. If I was conflicted about this woman, I felt that poetry—or at least a lyric approach to prose—could hold the music, shock, and beauty of it all.

In those final weeks as I faced down my deadline, I read Sharon Olds’ collection on grief at the loss of a parent, The Father. I read Kim Hyesoon’s I’m Ok, I’m Pig!, a startling volume exploring the vastness of women’s lives in Korea. “A cup of water knows everything about the insides of our body that we don’t know,” it ended. It seemed to me that the gestures of poetry knew something about the insides of a body that I hadn’t known how to say too. 

Check out Tracy O'Neill's Woman of Interest here:

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