“What I am trying—needing—to do in writing these things down together, in putting all of these memories and images of ‘me’ and ‘her,’ of Kyger and A, of all our multiple selves side by side or over and under, layered together, is to see and understand, at once enliven and detach from, that version of myself that cut my bangs and didn’t cling to the San Francisco man…” Lauren Westerfield, Woman House
Years ago, I maintained the practice of keeping a daybook, a journal that followed one single organizing principle: Each entry would begin with the weirdest observation or interaction I could remember that day, and each entry would try to understand why that observation or interaction mattered through narration rather than abstraction.
The result was that I spent more time trying to do different, varied things in my daily life so that I would have something to write a few paragraphs about each night. Some days were easier than others. Living in a walkable city made for more interactions with strangers, friends, enemies, dogs, some of whom became recurring characters in the stories that gradually took shape in the daybook. Midterm elections in that year made for some surreal interactions while canvassing or marching in a parade. My intentions led me to debates, arguments, awkward conversations. Friendships that lasted and friendships that have long since died.
I got a few publishable essays out of the daybook, but the wider consequence was that writing down my observations, and observing more intentionally and with more curiosity, made me a better person. It made me more engaged in local civics, more attuned to the experiences of my neighbors, to the weather, to the community, and to myself. It represents a marker of my personal growth, a version of myself I recognize but no longer am.
Lauren Westerfield uses a more affecting craft move to demonstrate this kind of distance between present and past selves in her newest collection Woman House, specifically in the essay “Double Exposure.” The guiding metaphor of photography in this essay lends itself to marked distinctions between past and present selves, but she materializes this distinction on the page by describing her former self in third person, as one new character in a cast of many.
Of course, the question of whether or not we are our former selves is not, itself, novel territory. Sabrina Imbler’s transition narrative “My Metamorphosis” uses the metaphor of a moth to examine their own transformation. Memoirist Beth Nguyen compares a similar process in the works of Edith Wharton to the lyrics of Taylor Swift in an essay I have assigned, with limited success, to my composition classes. An episode of Northern Exposure that aired when I was two months old, “Crime and Punishment,” involves the legal argument that the character Chris in the Morning is different from the time in which he was incarcerated, a theme that I find endlessly valuable in narratives like the film Sing Sing and Rachel Kushner’s novel The Mars Room and Emily Ruskovich’s novel Idaho.
I can’t speak to the therapeutic or psychological benefit of writing about oneself, but I do think that the project of self-examination is valuable for its own sake. Being able to see oneself as subject to transformation, as malleable and impermanent, is the stuff of religious and civic consequence. Self-reflection is the point of art, which I take to include literature and scripture and polemics and folklore. I think that there is awe in our ability to grow, recognize growth, and learn from that growth, which is at least partly the gift that memoir grants.
Phillip Lopate writes that regardless of your intention or position, “what you do need, however, is a tone of assertion” to write memoir. This is less a matter of factual confidence than it is self-recognition. I can describe the facts of my life in any given year with broad accuracy, but making sense of those facts, identifying their meaningfulness, is the challenge of memoir. It’s not the what or why or how so much as it is the who and for whom?
This is why Westerfield’s use of third-person to address her former self is valuable as a practice. I can try it now, and so can you: My former self, a skin I have shed, is, let’s say, myself in 2017. That version of myself was new to an MFA program and he was eager to absorb everything into his writing practice. He was energetic, more charming, more naive, less annoying by some strange happenstance. He hid less. He talked more. I would like to tell him he was doing better than he thought, but that is not the purpose, nor a possibility. The past cannot be changed; it can only be received, at different times, with different radio frequencies. Memoir, in the last analysis, is not a form of nostalgia, but a dialectic process of understanding. I think that we are starved for understanding, as a community and polity and language. More memoir-writing is not for the benefit of readers, though; I think that we would have better avenues for growth if we took seriously the self-interrogation that memoir requires, that we would be better as a collective if we examined our past selves with more attention to the artistry, the freeing grammar, of distance.
Lopate, Phillip. To Show and To Tell. Free Press, 2013.
Westerfield, Lauren. Woman House. University of Massachusetts Press, 2026.
