Today’s guest post is by Allison K Williams (@guerillamemoir).
How come our friends aren’t more excited when we publish? Why are our families unsupportive or dismissive?
After the long journey of writing and revision to bring our words into the world, it’s hard to see our parents, children, siblings and friends respond tepidly—or not at all. Particularly with memoir, their lack of enthusiasm and unwillingness to cheer for us can feel like personal rejection.
But there are three big reasons a support system gets unsupportive.
1. Your people are overwhelmed by the frequency of your announcements.
Think about a family member you love, on a journey you don’t fully understand, texting you about every milestone. Say, a niece who is a member of the Girl Explorers (making that up). And this year Ermintrude got her Green Sash and earned a Partridge badge and she’s working on a Silver Beret project about opossums. You’re glad for her. You’re always glad. But there’s a limit to how many times you can match her excitement about her project’s MANY levels, titles and prizes.
While our audience of readers sees us once or twice a week on social media (if we’re lucky), our family and friends are likely to see more posts, on top of emails, texts and happy-dancing phone calls. As debut writers, we have a lot of milestones: finishing a draft, finishing the manuscript, starting to query, getting an agent, getting a deal, signing the deal, getting a great blurb from a writer you admire, your live launch, your virtual launch, book-signings, speaking on panel or a podcast, getting a good review. It’s a lot to process, and because we’re thrilled at every step, our family doesn’t see how each achievement builds on the one before.
What to do if you’re worried about oversharing: Focus on your audience instead of your friends. Share as much as you want, but stop counting whether your nearest and dearest respond. Trust that people are smiling for you as they scroll by. If they’re sick of hearing about it, they can find the mute button, or you can limit your audience when you share your wins and leave them out.
2. Your family (and most of your friends) don’t truly grasp the scope of your achievement.
Remember how people always say “You should publish a book!” like it’s easy? They do not, in their hearts, understand just how hard this is.
When your Girl Explorer niece tells you she was recognized as Top Seagull and there’s going to be a banquet for all the Seagulls, it’s not particularly meaningful until you learn only 26 girls in the whole country reach that level, and it guarantees her a free ride at a top college and a personal visit from Taylor Swift (a former Girl Explorer, naturally). Now you have context.
Your family needs that context, too. They don’t know how good you had to be, relative to every other writer who finished a book, or how competitive publishing is. You can tell them you sent 65 queries, but they can’t feel how 64 form rejections drained your will to live. They didn’t see you prepping submissions in 15 different formats, joining live pitch events, scouring manuscript wishlists. They don’t know the difference between requested pages and requested full, and they don’t get why your essay in this venue matters. This can be true even for fellow writers!
Recently, a colleague was published in a journal I’d never heard of, winning an unfamiliar award. I congratulated, but didn’t know how to calibrate. Was this prize a big deal? How big?
Help your network understand your wins by adding context. When you share your publishing wins, give a little more detail. Why is this publication important? Have you always wanted to write an op-ed, or this magazine reaches the readers you most care about, or the judge who picked your essay is someone you’re thrilled to be read by (and why)? Better yet, when you share a win, tag all your fellow winners and the publication, or your agent and publisher, so you can amplify each other’s news and celebrate together.
3. The final reason your support system gets unsupportive is discomfort and worry about their own privacy.
It took you multiple drafts to plumb your own inner depths and honestly show your vulnerabilities and shortcomings on the page. A terrifyingly self-revelatory first draft became a scary-but-honest manuscript. Your family didn’t go through that process, and it’s hard to see themselves in the mirror, even if they’re happy you told your story.
Imagine the Girl Explorers center around something you find a bit distasteful. You’re not so opposed you’ll stop talking to your darling niece, but you don’t want the subject at every dinner table and in every conversation. Let’s say you’re a vegan, and the Girl Explorers are really into taxidermy.
So every time little Ermintrude texts to say, “We got another piece of roadkill and my mount is gonna be amazing on this one! I’m using green eyes for the opossum and they’ll light up with a battery pack, it’ll be sick!” …
… Your excitement level is already naturally lower than her own (scope/frequency, remember?) AND she’s excited about something you don’t really want to think about. You are proud of her achieving what she loves, but you’d rather not contemplate that damn opossum for one more second than you have to.
That’s what it’s like to be a family member of someone who wrote about the family.
What to do about family discomfort: Share judiciously. Let your parents (and your kids!) know it’s OK if they don’t want to read your memoir, or only read part of it. Remember, your family and friends aren’t your primary audience! Any memoir’s key audience is people who share an aspect of your experience, rather than those who journeyed with you, or inflicted trauma upon you.
Some writers are motivated by a desire to “show them” or make someone truly understand how they’ve hurt us. Spite helps motivate us to finish drafts, but revenge doesn’t make good books. Ideally, you’ve worked through your need for vengeance around your third draft. If so, reassure your nervous family, that yes, this book includes your experiences with them, but it’s not meant to make them look bad or hurt them. You don’t need their permission or approval to publish, but explaining how you’ve changed their names and identifying details may help them celebrate a few wins with you.
But if our family and friends truly loved us, wouldn’t they try harder?
As writers, lack of support from loved ones sucks. We want them to be proud of us, as excited as we are, as often as we are, and we take not having those things as failure. But it’s not about the family thinking we’re not good enough, or friends not respecting our success. Their lack of support comes from fears about their own privacy, not understanding the level of achievement, and/or hearing about the 23rd achievement in a row. Their discomfort, your frequent wins, and lack of context combined create total overload. They are unable to perform any more excitement.
As you share the joy of memoir with your family, remember you’re talking taxidermy with vegans. Be selective. Put your success in context. And reach for your true audience, the readers out there who love you—light-up stuffed possum and all.
Allison K Williams has edited and coached writers to publication with many of the best-known outlets in media. As a memoirist, essayist, and travel journalist, Allison has written craft, culture and comedy for National Public Radio, CBC-Canada, the New York Times, and many more. She leads the Rebirth Your Book writing retreats series and, as Social Media Editor for Brevity, she inspires thousands of writers with weekly blogs on craft and the writing life. Allison holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and spent 20 years as a circus aerialist and acrobat before writing and editing full-time. Her latest book is Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Blank Page to Book (Woodhall Press, 2021). Learn more at her website.
I’d love to post a GIF of exploding confetti–you NAILED it, Allison!
While I am not writing a memoir, I’m on novel #4 without having a single one published. (Yet.) I have a (very) few people who have listened to me explain the many steps to getting published and they admire my fortitude (yes, fortitude). I’ve actually been told by others that publishing is “easy” and “doesn’t cost anything” to just “do it on Amazon.”
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That is me banging my head on my keyboard in frustration.
My late mother-in-law was a hoarder in the very worse sense (think the tv series) and the pain of this on the family could make quite a memoir. I am very sure I could write a proposal and get a go ahead on it, but reliving those horrible years are not something that would be healthy for me, or my husband, or our kids.
Thanks for an excellent essay.
Thanks for the cheer, Ellen! And boy, I hear you on that frustration, too. Good for your for knowing what you don’t want to write – and I’m cheering for novel #4!
Thank you!!!
You’re so welcome!
I often tell my publishing clients, Don’t be disappointed if family members are the last ones to read your book. First, they’ve heard the stories you have to share – perhaps umpteen times, and some of them are just not readers. You can’t force a non-reader to read a book they’re just not interested in, regardless of who wrote it. They may be proud of you, they may buy your book to support you, and as far as them seeing it as an achievement, they probably already view you as a high achiever, so it’s just one more thing you’ve done. I also tell my clients, don’t write your book for your family; write for the people who need to hear your story because it will help them.
Carol, you are so right! I love your point about “they have already heard the stories.”
I wonder, though, because I read in many places that if you write a memoir, an autobiography, a family story and you are not famous, you write it mostly for your family and you should not expect many bonus readers.
Marina, it’s definitely an appropriate path to write a memoir with only family or community readers in mind, and I’ve worked with a few authors where this was their goal. But many authors would like to be more widely read. The key is to actively consider our wider audience while writing–the “so what?” of our memoir.
So, for example, Karen Fine’s The Other Family Doctor is about her experiences as a veterinarian, but the “so what?” element is that the stories center around what animals have to teach us about love, loss and mortality, so it’s interesting to more than just the people who know her.
I advise writers to think about what elements of their story are interesting, useful, or enlightening to readers beyond their family, and to identify who those readers are. So, for example, Fine looked for other pet owners, and read pet magazines and participated in online pet-related discussions to see what people with pets care about, what questions they have, and what they need to learn. Then, she was able to include answers they needed in her book, so it was relevant to more than just her family.
This is the big step a lot of memoirists skip! And if we want our memoir to be read, it’s really important to start thinking about the audience early in the process.
This is truly a great and very recognizable post! Everyone who has published a memoir will have experience and disappointment with this. When I went through this exact realization after publishing my travel memoir, I was actually not too surprised since it reminded me of something else with the same (lack of) reactions.
When I started traveling full-time in 2003, even before I knew it would be full-time, the friends and family members who I thought would support me and be interested in my journey, travel reports (this was before blogs became popular), and struggle to survive, couldn’t care less. And acquaintances who I had long forgotten about, were super interested and encouraging.
Just like with my publishing journey, support came from unexpected yet no less important and supportive sources and people. Embrace anyone like that!
Liesbet, I love that parallel! And it reminds me of how dating gurus and job coaches say you’re more likely to connect through your acquaintances than your close friends, so maybe it’s human nature to want to know more about the people we don’t already know a lot about?
Great post! Loved the comparison. Now, in my experience, family members, unless they are already bookworms, rarely read our work. And if they do, they don’t read it as fans but as fact-checkers. Even with a metafictional mystery like The Novel Detective, where I’ve turned myself into a character, the few relatives who’ve seen the galleys have been quick with their impertinences. I get told, “That’s not how it happened!” (to which I say: Exactly, it’s fiction!) or “I don’t like this character; is that supposed to be me?” It has taught me a lesson: whether you’re writing fiction or memoir, you aren’t writing for your family, but, hopefully, for the general public.
Yes, Teresa, you are so right! And I love that way of putting it – “not as fans, but as fact-checkers.”