Who Cares Anyways? How to Fight the Fear That Keeps You from Writing Your Memoir

by Theo Pauline Nestor

Who are the two demons that get the most airtime in memoirists’ heads? Who Cares Anyways? and its evil twin What Will People Think?

What Will People Think? is scary as hell and can loom large over your writing desk like the elongated shadow of a cartoon villain. It can also be dismantled, but we’ll fight that battle another day. But for now, let’s go to the mat with Who Cares Anyways?.

Who Cares tells you that you’re wasting your time. No one cares about you and your little life, so why do you even bother? Who Cares relishes reminding you of the world’s injustices and tragedies and climate change and what on earth makes you think anyone will have any interest in you? Who Cares is a ruthless opponent who aims to grind you to a halt halfway through Chapter Three (Yes, Who Cares might let you get THAT invested before rearing its horned head. Who Cares is that twisted).

First, before we talk about all the ways that Who Cares is nonsense, let’s investigate the truth that does reside in the Who Cares argument. If we fail to examine the legitimacy of Who Cares, it will always retain some secret power over us. Doubts will endure. Insecurities will fester.

The validity of Who Cares is this: You actually can’t expect readers to care about the events of your life simply because they occurred. Just because you experienced something—even if that something was spectacular or horrific—doesn’t mean the reader will be interested in those events. Who Cares is right about that much. A memoirist’s job is to use their imagination to transform their experience in a way that allows the readers to reimagine life, in a way that offers them something of transferable value.

In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick says it like this: “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that, the power of a writing imagination is required.”

It’s that thing Gornick calls “the large sense” and identifies as “the wisdom, the insight, the thing one has come to say” that knocks the wind out of Who Cares.

So, you might ask, where do I unearth this “large sense” stuff? You could start with the memoirs you most admire. When you read those books, how were you able to reimagine life? What wisdom or insight about your own experience did they offer? And now—perhaps the more challenging question—how did the writer accomplish this? Can you point to moments in the text when you stopped and reflected? What can those moments teach you about writing your own story?

And Who Cares is also right in that even if you do yoke imagination and wisdom and insight to your story, your memoir still won’t be for every reader. No book is. A few books that have transported me on gossamer wings and morphed my internal landscape forever carry one-star customer reviews with subject lines such as “Meh” and “BORING!”

And this brings us to one of the weapons we can use to puncture Who Cares: The existence of memoirs that have brought you to your knees.

Go back to that list of memoirs you love. Where were you when you read them? I remember exactly where I was when I read the last lines of Kathleen Harrison’s The Kiss: “As we look, all that we have ever felt but have never said is manifest. Her youth and selfishness and misery, my youth and selfishness and misery. Our loneliness. The ways we betrayed each other. In this dream I feel that at last she knows me, and I her. I feel us stop hoping for a different daughter and a different mother.”

Strangely, I was reclining on a chaise lounge beside the pool of a Las Vegas hotel (The Kiss is not a beach read!). I remember closing the book and turning it in my hands and thinking that mother and daughter is my mother and me and this, this is what I want to do with words. This is the kind of writer I want to be.

The books on your list matter to you. Matter like family and—in some cases—more than family. Your book will matter to some readers. Not all readers, but some. Your book will make some readers feel less alone. Your book will let a reader in Vacaville know they weren’t the only ones who ever felt that way. Your book could inspire a bit of hope where currently none exists. 

A bit of hope where currently none exists. A memoir can do that. Take that, Who Cares!

Here’s another thing to remember about Who Cares: It’s not your special demon. This guy has slept with everybody. This demon has whispered why bother, no one cares in the ears of most of the writers I’ve met in my classes and in my own ears and probably in the ears of the writers who wrote your favorite memoirs. This argument has been a-ROUND. And what if the writer of that book that made you feel seen, that made you feel this, this is what I want to do with words, what if they’d buckled and let Who Cares victor? What then?

Maybe next time Who Cares comes by, you could just say to “Someone.” Someone will care. 

You could say “Someone will care” because you will make sure they will.

Registration for the Structuring Your Memoir online class with Theo Nestor is now open! The class is designed to walk you through the questions that underlie your writing project and help you discover, through writing prompts, the answers you already hold for your work-in-progress. Head over to our Online Writing Series page to learn more and register.