A memoir story keeps calling when carrying it in silence costs more than telling it would. Often a life event – a death, a ghosting, a diagnosis, a birthday with a zero on the end, a grandchild asking what it was like – loosens a memory you’ve guarded for years. The story that calls is frequently not the one you planned to write, and asking why it wants telling now shapes everything that follows.

Why does an old story keep coming back?

Many years ago I wrote Dancing With Dark Angels, a collection of short stories about my life. This was long before I’d ever thought about the word memoir. I simply needed to get those stories out of me and onto paper, and I needed to heal.

So I published it. Very shortly afterwards the shame arrived, hot and prickly, the way it does when you realise you’ve walked the length of the high street with your skirt tucked into your knickers – and I unpublished. I hasten to add I have never walked anywhere with my knickers tucked into my skirt, but I have witnessed someone else. For me the healing wasn’t over, and I didn’t want to feel that exposed.

Many years have passed. I’ve since written Words From the Wild, a hybrid memoir, which stirred up plenty of its own stuff. It also sent me back to Dancing With Dark Angels, and this time I could see what those stories might become: a hybrid memoir about healing. I’ve been playing with it ever since. It does indeed keep calling.

What do you do when one story calls louder than all the others?

Despite playing with Dancing With Dark Angels, nothing calls quite like Journey of The Heart. When I first wrote it, I was, again, in the thick of healing, and I called it the journey to self-love. I can still see myself writing furiously on the sofa downstairs. I was obsessed with getting it all out, but I couldn’t publish it, so I put it aside.

More than any other book I’ve written, this one has been nagging at me to get off my arse and write it. What’s emerging now is wildly different from the original. It starts in a different place, then travels backwards, exploring things that only make sense to me now – the kind of sense that only arrives with a few more decades on the clock.

I think sometimes we need that space and time to move away from the pain.

I’m at the planning stage, working out the plot and the Memoir Arc, mapping it all in my Memoir Arc Journal and journalling alongside. Plenty more is bound to emerge as I go. It always does.

Why do people end up writing a memoir they never planned to write?

Like me, most people never planned to write a memoir. They planned to get on with their lives, thank you very much. Then something changes, as we said earlier, and a story that has sat in the dark for decades starts clambering out. It’s all a bit mucky, but it’s ready to become something.

There’s a reason we talk about a calling. Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and we usually save the word for priests, nurses and people who run away to join the circus (I wanted to join a rock band btw). A memoir that won’t leave you alone is a vocation of the stubborn variety. It is like a very annoying person who keeps ringing until you pick up.

What does an untold story cost you?

Silence has a weight. A very heavy weight, and it shows up in so many ways – in the body, in the 3am wakefulness, in the conversations you avoid – taking up a lot of emotional space in our heads. We spend a surprising amount of energy guarding old memories, keeping them locked behind away the door, managing who knows what.

At some point the guarding becomes heavier than the telling. That’s usually when the calling starts.

Why does the worry arrive at the same time as the story?

Once a story calls, we’re often beset with all kinds of worries – who’ll read it, who might be hurt, whether we’re even allowed to share those stories – and that’s natural. Worry comes with the territory. And in the worrying, other things start to emerge.

What if the story calling you isn’t the one you meant to write?

Often the story that calls is not the one we meant to write. You sit down to write about your career and your father keeps walking into the scene. Or you plan a travel memoir, and every chapter circles back to the marriage you left. Those recurring memories may be invitations rather than intrusions. Listen to them.

When an uninvited figure keeps gatecrashing a manuscript, it is rarely random interference. Memory does not work like a filing cabinet; it works like an emotional associative network. When you sit down to document – a career, or a journey – the subconscious attaches the narrative not to the external but to the origin.

Those recurring appearances are not distractions, although they seem like it. There is always something underneath.

Think about the father cropping up; what might be going on?

Did your career choices emerge from your desires, or were they built as a counter-argument to him? My parents kept telling me to join the Civil Service – I did and hated it. Though in hindsight the pension would be handy.

Did you make choices that said – look what I can achieve, or look how completely unlike you I am. So is it your ambition or his? What does that mean? I think we inherit a lot from our parents’ model of the world, and in my case that was safety first, and somehow I didn’t want this.

Perhaps the marriage that is intruding on the travel is about identity. The road we are really travelling is the one to reinvention when a coupling fails. You are crossing borders and moving through foreign territory.

When you walk out of a marriage, you do not just leave a person; you leave a shared reality, an entire domestic Universe, and the person you had to be within it. Every mile travelled is measured against that old yardstick. Travel is the vastness of the world out there, and marriage could be a cage.

So, were you travelling toward something entirely new, or were you physically creating the distance required to look back at the wreckage without being consumed by it?

It’s interesting, isn’t it?

Listening to the Invitation

How do you listen to a story that won’t stay in its lane? You have two options: force it into an artificial structure, or follow the undercurrent. I would always follow the threads because I am curious as to why they are nagging at me.

Is the book you want to write the safer option – no shame, no guilt, no one to potentially hurt?

Look at where, for example, the father puts his oar in, or the marriage is creeping into the journey. What changes? The trigger could reveal the unhealed link. I see in these examples a breaking away – but then I would (smiles).

The story is not off-course. It is simply showing you where the real cost was paid.

That’s what happened with mine. Self-love is part of Journey of The Heart, sure, but underneath it sits something deeper: what it means to live from and with the heart. And tangled in among all of that is a deep grief.

In Chinese Medicine, and I have only learned a small amount, grief and sadness live in the lungs, and the lungs sit right beside the heart – the Heart is called the Emperor, and the Lungs its Prime Minister, the trusted advisor at its side. I’ve ignored my heart for years. Yes, I learned to love myself, and that love was there when I healed a fractured spine. What I never healed was the grief about who I am, who I could or should have been, and where I should have been in life.

So my heart and I have a big journey ahead. I suspect it’s been saving things up. Look out, my journal…

What questions help you hear why your story is calling?

Sit with these. Read them through, do the ones that resonate first, or, if you want to get to the nitty-gritty, go for the first one that you don’t want to answer. You don’t have to answer them all.

• Why now? Why this story? Why after all these years?
• What finally made the silence feel heavier than the writing?
• What does an untold story cost you – in energy, in sleep, in any other area of your life?
• Which memories refuse to stay buried?
• What subjects keep appearing no matter what you try to write?
• What if the story you most want to tell isn’t the story your heart needs to tell?
• Why do some memories seem to demand witnesses?
• What if the story is writing you as much as you are writing it?

A lens to look through

Some stories keep knocking for a reason. Before you learn how to write a memoir, ask why this one wants to be written. The answer will shape every choice you make later, from where you begin to what you leave out.

Journal it

• Write the memory that keeps returning, uninvited, at odd moments. Don’t explain it. Just write it.
• Finish this sentence ten times without stopping: The story I keep not writing is…
• If your story could speak, what would it say about why it chose now?

Frequently asked questions

Why do people feel compelled to write a memoir later in life?

Something changes – a death, a ghosting, a diagnosis, a milestone birthday, a grandchild asking what it was like – and a memory that has been guarded for decades starts to loosen. Time matters too. Distance from the pain often makes it possible to see what a story really means, which is why many memoirs only become writable years later.

What if my memoir keeps turning into a different story?

Follow it. When a parent keeps walking into your career memoir, or a marriage keeps creeping into your travel writing, the story is usually pointing at where the real cost was paid. Recurring memories are often invitations rather than intrusions, and the thread you didn’t plan is frequently the heart of the book.

Is it normal to feel shame or fear about writing a memoir?

Yes. Worry about who will read it, who might be hurt and whether you’re even allowed to tell it tends to arrive with the story itself. Shame can be a sign the healing isn’t finished yet. You can write for yourself first and decide about publishing later – I unpublished my first collection and came back to it years on.

How do you know when a memoir story is ready to be written?

Notice what keeping it quiet is costing you – in energy, in sleep, in some other area. When guarding a memory feels heavier than telling it, the story is usually ready. Journaling helps: write the memory that keeps returning without explaining it, and see what surfaces.

Where do you start when a memoir story is calling?

Start with why, then move to how. Ask why this story, and why now, because the answer shapes where you begin and what you leave out. Mapping comes next. The Memoir Arc Journal takes you through the six movements of the Memoir Arc, from Setting the Scene to The Aftermath & Meaning.

If your story has started knocking and you’d like help hearing what it’s asking for, come and join me at my free Memoir Arc – Find Your Story masterclass or explore it in my Memoir Arc Journal.