How do you write about medical topics without clinical language?
Writer and trauma writing doula Katherine Standefer joins us, plus news from the front lines of those querying recovery and illness memoirs.
I’m away for work this week, so I’m sharing a thought-provoking piece a new writer friend of mine shared on Facebook the other day. Thank you for letting me publish this here, Katherine (Kati) Standefer! Please enjoy this post and support Kati’s work through the various links to her classes and books below. If you’d like to support my work, please hit the blue button!
As a book coach, I work frequently with memoirists, and often, my clients are women. Over the past two years, I’ve had a lot of writers come to me because they are putting all of their heart (and a percentage of their resources) into writing about trauma they’ve experienced that they’re ready to confront. More and more often, these traumas are medical—many have to do with women being gaslit by the American medical establishment, others with a total lack of support after giving birth, or after losing a pregnancy. I myself have written on this topic in my own memoir.
The predominant reason that these writers come to me for help is because they’re being told “no” by the gatekeepers, and they don’t know what to do. “No, we are getting too much ‘sick lit’ and there’s no room for yours,” “No, we don’t want any more birth trauma narratives,” “Nobody is going to buy a book about endometriosis,” “Nobody wants to read about a rape; it’s just too heavy for Americans right now.”
It’s too heavy, it’s too depressing, there’s no audience for this, nobody will buy it. Who the hell wants to hear this about your life and heart? I know that some of you are hearing these terrible (and unhelpful) rejections. And I also know that many of you know that you have readers for your work: you are in forums with them, you are in groups that meet in person every week. Maybe you’ve been in anthologies with them. You follow a hashtag on the topic you’re writing about that is followed by thousands of other people. You know your audience is out there. You know your stories matter. But the gatekeepers are saying ‘no’ to it. What are you doing wrong?
About two weeks ago, the trauma writing doula and author Kati Standefer wrote about a trend she’s seeing in memoir in a private Facebook group that we’re both in. I found Kati’s observations just and inspirational, so I asked her for permission to share her words here. Please keep in mind that this was a Facebook post, and it hasn’t been edited—I’m sharing her words directly from the Facebook wall.
Before we read Kati’s post, here are some ways to support her work and partake in her classes:
Kati has a Patreon account here where you can contribute if you enjoyed the below post.
Her 2020 Kirkus Prize finalist memoir “Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life” about a lifesaving medical device that my own brother has also had negative experiences with is available wherever books are sold (and deserves the buy button because it was a pandemic release.) Read the opening here in the New York Times Book Review, or listen to Kati talk about the book on NPR's Fresh Air.
If you need the assistance of an experienced trauma writing doula, Kati offers consults, and she also offers editorial consults as well.
And finally, she’s got a fantastic lineup of memoir writing classes and intensives going on this summer. Learn about them here!
Without further ado, here is Kati’s post about a specific trend she is seeing in memoir writing.
Facebook post from week of June 20th written by trauma writing doula, Katherine E. Stander. (Shared here with her permission.)
I'm judging an award this summer, and screening the submissions underscored something I've been seeing a lot in client/student work: the psychologization of memoir. What do I mean by this? I mean I'm seeing personal stories told in clinical terms, even by people who don't work in clinical fields. Memoir is a meaning-making act, and of course it makes sense that in a society where we're receiving more and more diagnoses--told our behavior and experiences are the result of "disorders" inherited and not--we would make meaning through that terminology. (After all, getting a diagnosis can feel like a liberation. Or like a death.) However, what I'm seeing repeatedly in pieces of writing is a simultaneous loss of STORY--the over-attendance to clinical terms and explanations leads to an under-attendance to what makes readers want to read: mystery, beauty, tension, uncertainty, compelling and complex characters and ideas. Too often, we flatten ourselves to explanations of disorder or tell stories to defend ourselves through diagnosis-- and other characters who have diagnoses (The Narcissistic Ex) get flattened too. And, now that so many of us do have certain diagnoses, the explanations of them are becoming cliché, the moves rote and distancing. As a judge, I've seen it before, and am unmoved.
One of the things I am consistently talking to my students about is how good books often make people FEEL things in order to create their THINKING about things. Marya Hornbacher's book MADNESS knocked me off my feet because even though we know she's portraying her experiences of mania and depression, there's nothing clinical about it. We feel, in our bones, every sway and spike and paralysis. We feel a storm brewing and we both want it--the euphoria, the productivity-- and want her to take medication and get away from it. (Suddenly a reader gets why someone might resist their medication while also experiencing terrible despair or getting in financial trouble.) When I read Terese Mailhot's HEART BERRIES, I got so wobbly inside I had to make sure my own mental health was okay; indeed, I was just feeling HER suicidal ideation, feeling HER shame after punching her ex. (How uncomfortable; but also, how brilliant, because it changes how I sit where I sit, to know what that feels like. To root for a protagonist even though they have done this thing!) What is it I'm feeling FROM, in these two works? The spinning landscape out the window, the speed of the running, the bodily swoon. The quality of the language itself, the pacing, getting to hate a character through their dialogue and details rather than just being told to hate a character--these are what cast the spell.
When we FEEL as readers-- especially when we get mixed feelings-- we start thinking: trying to parse out or solve something. Drawing a conclusion, chewing on what could work better, asking what is right. When the author then steps in at the right moment to frame the conversation, to further point at what's important, to send us thinking a different direction with her essaying-- this is powerful craft. So it's not that we *never* want to be told something, or TOLD ABOUT something, it's that we first need to be seduced. Brought into a world. We want to be told once we are in a trance and suggestible-- when we can already feel it. The point, after all, isn't really the diagnosis. It's the loneliness, or the relief after a lifetime without answers, or the unexpected brilliance of being seen, and there's so much story necessary to really GET that.
Which is to say: if you're writing about diagnoses, where has your language gotten clinical? Does it need to be so? Are you also making readers FEEL? Are the readers in touch not only with the story you are telling them about your experience, but an experience they can feel inside themselves, because of your syntax and pacing and focus on the right moments of the story--because of your ability to transcend clinical language?
Not every work has the same intention, but in my experience, the best ones make me feel alive.
[Note about image used in Kati’s original post: headlights shine around the bend in a wet Wyoming forest at night.]
[End of Kati’s post. Back to Courtney now.]
Kati is a member of this newsletter. If you have comments, it’s possible that she will see them. So let’s get into it: have you noticed this trend toward what I would call the “clinical-ization” of memoir in your own writing? Have you been reading it in manuscripts that come your way? Do you think it’s helpful to write about trauma in clinical terms, or distracting? I certainly think that it’s required at times to help readers understand what’s going on—but the clinical should always be balanced with the moving, with the emotional, with the heartfelt, it must exist alongside rage, and loss, and anger. When that’s done well? You have a truly unforgettable memoir. Two titles that come to mind that follow this example are Alex Marzano Lesnevich’s astonishing “The Fact of a Body” and “The Incest Diary” by anonymous.1
Note that Kati mentions two memoirs in her post above. They are “Madness: A Bipolar Life” by Marya Hornbacher and “Heartberries” by Terese Marie. I haven’t read either but they’re going directly on my TBR list!
If you’ve read these books, or have thoughts on Kati’s post, please share in the comments. As always, comments are only open to paid subscribers to keep things safe and supportive. Please be respectful and thoughtful with your words, as we are all coming at life and writing from different places and from different past experiences.
Thank you for being here, and thank you, Kati, for joining us!
Oh, and if you applied to Turning Points, we got so many incredible applications. We hope to have decision letters out by mid July at the very latest!
xo
Courtney
These blue hyperlinks are affiliate links to Bookshop.org. Please note that some of these titles might contain content that is distressing or triggering to some. Inform yourself of the content before you read them.
I also subscribe to Katherine's newsletter, have her book (I've followed her publication journey in a FB group we're in—perhaps it's the same one?!), and have been wanting to attend one of her doula seminars. I'm hoping to budget for it in the fall/when it comes back up.
I think writing something clinical can work well as a first step in any type of writing when you're recounting personal trauma. Sometimes just spitting out the facts can work as a blueprint so you can weave in the delicate and triggering moments that lead the writer to first learn of those dry clinical terms.
Hoo boy, do I ever relate, as a writing teacher for decades, seeing this emerge in medical memoir from my students and clients, this clinical flavor she's talking about. And as a fan of Heart Berries (what a book!), I certainly relate to those memoirs about illness who are gut-punchers rather than intellectual or factual.
I haven't really wondered why writers move towards the clinical instead of the emotional--it's a lot easier to stomach when you're trying to describe a terror in your life, gives a certain (perhaps false?) detachment or distance. I've been there myself and appreciate the reasoning, but after the clinical descriptions and medical terms are on the page, the next step is to go in and revise to bring out the meaning, imho. And not everyone's up to it. The experience might have worn them out and they have nothing left to say or learn. Even with many years passing, these kinds of trauma can remain all too fresh in the mind and heart. So I don't criticize the writers who stay clinical and avoid the emotion/meaning, believing that the writing process is the healing for them, at that level, like proving a point.
But to touch a reader, it must go further. Clinical is fine, to me as a reader, but the core needs to communicate viscerally. And that's what many don't realize, and why Kati's piece is so important.
Thanks for sharing this, Courtney, and thank you to Kati for the clear, honest message that all writers need to heed.