WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW...

And How Memoir Shows You Don't Know Shit.

Write what you know.

Aspiring writers hear that exact advice dozens, if not hundreds, of times in their careers (depending on how many writing classes they take and how many books on writing they read).

For some of us, the obvious conclusion from that advice? Write a memoir.

A memoir is your recollections of your own life. There’s nothing you know better than that, right?

Start writing a memoir, and you’ll realize how wrong that is.

I suppose there are people who can write an entire book about how they were sure and confident in themselves and all things from the beginning, how they only ever made good choices and experienced good things. I’m pretty sure if those memoirs were ever written, they certainly weren’t published.

As humans we don’t want to read tales of the easy, the lucky, the perfect, the predetermined. Those stories are not only thoroughly implausible, they’re simply not interesting. We don’t identify with them, we don’t learn from them. And they automatically (correctly) read as false.

An interesting memoir is messy. It’s raw, it’s vulnerable, it’s uncomfortable. A good memoir is, at its core, self-incriminating. It’s the train wreck we can’t look away from, about the choices – or failure to make choices – that eventually forced the writer to confront hard truths.

And the truth about yourself is never what you know.

Truth is what rises up out of your own personal trash heap: that lifelong pile of “not going there” that you have spent years – perhaps decades - trying to frantically bury and ignore.

Truth grabs you by the jugular when you are at your very worst and most vulnerable and says “look at me now.”

If you can bear to look at those ugly-dark, long-buried truths, even for a few agonizing moments, you soon realize they are not what you know. They are new and uncomfortable, sometimes shocking, always unwanted.

You scramble to put that to paper. You try to capture this new truth beast in your memoir, this new person with that old past. You struggle to write what you (now) know.

But once you have let the belly-dwelling, hard-living, secret-keeping ogre surface and speak, you realize you should have written about flowers. Or ancient Aramaic art. Or children’s television. Something you can master, something safe and static that you can actually really know.

Write what you know, they said, and you decided to write about yourself. Now here you are, forever manacled to the great wild chaos monkey of mortifying memories and stinging regrets and unspeakable traumas and brilliant short shards of glory, and you realize you will never be what you know.

You never were.

But you pick up your pen, and you start writing anyway.

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My memoir, HOLY DISOBEDIENCE, comes out March 31st, 2026.

Sign up for preorder notification at Lake Drive Books.