“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”— Anne Frank
French writer André Malraux wrote, “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.” Women writers from Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl) through Jeanette Walls (The Glass Castle) and back have sought and found some kind of redemption in the writing of our trauma. Not just the retelling of it, to be sure, but the crafting of a narrative that speaks to the heart of the writer and her experience.
Author and professor Roxane Gay suffered a terrible trauma at a young age and wrote about it 30 years later in an essay called “Writing into the Wound”. In a Vanity Fair interview with Monica Lewinsky on writing trauma and the course she teaches about it, Gay says: “People underestimate that it’s a craft. That writing is a job, and I’m not just doing it to exorcise my demons, I’m doing it to elicit a response from the reader and to accomplish something.”
When asked in an interview what role writing played for her in coping with traumatic events, Canadian novelist Miriam Toews answered, “For me, it’s huge. Writing is how I process things, how I stay sane, alive, and healthy. I have to write. I have to make sense of everything, trauma, life, absurdity, pain, joy through narrative. I don’t necessarily have to publish, but I definitely have to write.”
It’s safe to assume that Anne Frank had no idea of the effect her diaries would have upon the world, though she did edit them with the plan that they would be part of an archive of the Nazi occupation. She died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just after her 16th birthday. Her book was published in over 70 languages and is considered to be one of the most widely-read pieces of non-fiction on the planet.
We too, contemporary women writers, are writing in the dark — whether we write about joy or pain. Most often, we have no guaranties: we don’t know where or when our work will be read or published. We write because we must, because anything less would be shortchanging ourselves and history, and because our experience matters.
Image courtesy of Ronni Kurtz, Unsplash