The Secrets of Hauntology (And How to Use them to transform your memoir)
(Be sure to check out my sister piece, Insomnia: Haunted by Hauntology on Substack.)
Burgess Meredith, Robert Sterling and Patricia Crowley in The Twilight Zone episode "Printer's Devil" February 27, 1963
In life, the one thing we don’t have much control over is time. It steals from us. It eats up our days with mundane obligations leaving the most profound moments few and far between. And in the end, as they say, life is short. We never know what day will be our last.
But I have a secret for you. Are you ready? This time thing—it works in your favor when writing a memoir.
I know you’re trying to remember exact details so you can get your narrative down as accurately as possible. Kudos to you! Nobody wants to read a memoir of lies no matter how enthralling it might be. We reserve that undertaking for fiction writers. Wink wink.
In a memoir, accuracy is key. Truth.
That means when you first start writing you might feel like you’re rehashing ideas without much creativity or control. Life has happened to you, and you must recount it accordingly, in a specific order.
But wait. What’s this thing over here?
It’s a literary device called a flashback.
And what’s that thing up ahead?
I think it’s a flash forward.
And look! That’s strange. The exposition isn’t stuck to the beginning of the story. It turns up in bits and pieces throughout the entirety of the book, unfolding slowly as we, the readers, progress along with the main character.
Memoir-making is the stuff of memory. Your memory to be exact.
The minute you sit down at your computer or notebook to write, you’re time-bending. You’re reaching back into the recesses of your mind to pluck out the most important ideas, thoughts, and experiences you’ve retained.
In constructing a memoir, no one expects you to remember every moment in perfect detail. Could you imagine having to recall all word-for-word dialogue in your life from your husband’s great aunt's speech at your wedding 20 years ago to your child’s complaints over last night’s dinner?
Whew! I’m exhausted just thinking about grabbing all that gab.
We believe real life moves linearly, but the reality is we slip in and out of our memories while we project our hopes for the future. We daydream. We hold onto the hand-me-down antiques from our grandparents. We listen to the nostalgic music of our childhoods. We make plans for our children’s education, inheritance, and security. We start a stream of thought only for it to get hijacked by the neighborhood kids knocking on the front door begging for your kid to come out to play.
Then when we finally get some time to sit at the computer and work, we may start writing but get distracted by emails. We look at social media and see posts made yesterday, last week, last year. Reposts that showed up today but were recycled from five years ago. And don’t even get me started on this new trend of articles getting posted with no date at all. Is the modern world trying to send us into a wormhole?
(I just noticed the new Squarespace blog is showing the month and day but no year. Why, Squarespace, WHY??!!!)
Will I have to learn String Theory just to post online?
The truth is time has always been a malleable entity.
Does our time really move forward in a logical order?
It’s highly suspect.
While time may march ever forward, what I’m talking about is the chasm between the entity known as time vs. our perception of it. And in writing a memoir, you get to be the caretaker of your readers’ perceptions.
I’ve been reading Mark Fisher’s book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. His series of essays has a decidedly melancholic view of our place in current history, but don’t get distraught just yet. I think my findings in this book are a boon to you, the memoirist.
Hauntology was a concept coined by Jacques Derrida and refers to a merging of “haunting” and “ontology” in which there’s a “return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.”
Nothing spooky here, though. This philosophy has little to do with the supernatural. (But if you’re looking for that check out How to Tell Your Ghost Story or read my Pink Pangea article Bringing Ghosts Back to Life in Jerome, Arizona.)
It applies mostly to how time doesn’t quite measure up to our expectations or how we have a hard time defining it.
In today’s world we’ve borrowed so much from past decades it's often hard to pinpoint a song or a fashion trend since the early 2000s. Today’s cultural fads and music could exist in any past decade or no decade at all.
It also implies being haunted by a future we anticipated we’d be experiencing, but that subsequent time never arrives. A foreign concept to many of us prior to COVID, but now we can all relate to that idea, can’t we?
Did you have big plans for anything that fell through because of that damn virus? Maybe you had big dreams in your 20s but now in your 40s, you’ve learned to let certain hopes go to make room for more practical pursuits. What does that feel like?
While Mark Fisher’s writing expresses depression over what Charles Eisenstein would call “the lost timeline,” this elusive sense of time might be exactly what can help you complete your memoir. If you understand how to manipulate time effectively you can craft a mesmerizing account of your past without adhering to the rules of chronology.
So, while you’re off wallowing in your old Joy Division 45s—Gen Xers, I’m speaking to you— just know you’ve got the ability to cultivate a world in your writing where you’re happily singing along with a living Ian Curtis like it's 1980 again.
I know it's confusing. Especially if you weren’t even born yet. But hang tight.
Think about it this way. If you’re honest about word and deed in your memoir, time can be your toy. The way you construct time in a memoir could even help you formulate your voice on the page.
In my first memoir, I began each chapter with a throwback scene from my childhood. This scene helped anchor what was unfolding in my adult sequences because my life as an adult was (and is) a culmination of experiences including my childhood. Nothing shows up out of nowhere. Everything evolves from something else.
Let me give you a cinematic example.
Ever see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet? Well, I hadn’t. But it kept coming up in my research on time in storytelling, so I recently watched it. I rented it on Amazon and if you scroll around or stop the film (which I do a lot with a 6-year-old at home) it’ll pop up trivia.
Towards the beginning of the movie, an info box popped up that detailed Kate Winslet’s character Clementine. Her hair is dyed lots of rainbow colors that change throughout the film. This could seem irrelevant to the viewer—maybe it’s just a stylistic character choice you pass off. But if you pay attention, you’ll notice Clementine’s changing hair color gives you a timestamp for where she is in her relationship with Jim Carrey’s character Joel. Brilliant!
Clementine’s hair becomes an anchor for us.
So as random as the movie may seem, the creators have gone to great lengths to give us this timekeeping foundation.
But you don’t have to go to extremes to play with time in your writing.
Here are some ways you can bend time in more subtle ways:
Before You Start Writing:
Confront and spell out past emotions:
Strong emotions tend to linger in the back of our lives. These feelings aren’t linear or logical. Think about these: resentment, depression, anxiety, humiliation, and even old anger. These are the emotions of experiences from the past or in the case of anxiety, a potential future fear we’re envisioning.
Try to get to the heart of your feelings. If you’re really hung up on one experience, analyze it more closely. Recall the experience as best you can and imagine it’s like a still picture on your computer you can zoom in on. Now zoom in until you pinpoint what is causing you the most pain. What really riles you up? Can you name it? Continue to magnify the feeling as you ask yourself some questions. What’s the exact emotion you’re experiencing? Why is it coming up for you? What is the relationship you have with the person in this situation? Has someone lied to you or broken your trust? Is there anything hidden more deeply here?
For example: Are you really upset over the checkout girl flirting with your boyfriend or are intrusive jealousies arising for you after you caught him handing his number to someone at the club? Try to get to the heart of why you feel the way you do. Can you identify the humiliation or hurt? Do you feel a sense of worthlessness creeping in? Start there.
You may even need to put your memoir writing on hold and write about your emotions as they’re coming up first. By addressing these emotions, you’re ensuring you’ll continue to make progress in your life and your writing. And you never know what useful ideas might arise that you can explore in your writing.
Consider your audience:
Now let’s zoom out—way out.
Think of your audience. Picture your ideal reader who has just gotten their hands on a scene in your hypothetical book. This person is a huge fan of all your work, so they will feel for you. Imagine this person is on your side and wants to see you succeed.
How might that reader best comprehend your experiences? Do you need to say more about a particular emotion? Maybe the opposite is true, and you should pull back and write less to reveal more.
Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and consider what they need from your writing.
During Your Writing:
Showcase a character’s thinking:
Memories and projections in thought are excellent places for you to challenge your concept of logical timekeeping.
Unlike in a film where everything must appear visually or be spoken aloud, you as a writer have that superpower of showing your readers what’s inside a character’s brain.
Find ways to take us into your character’s thinking without disrupting the plot. Perhaps you have a scene where your main character goes on a thinking tangent that gets interrupted by real action. You’re revealing lots of information about this character, but the interruption brings her back to the present moment and keeps the plotline moving forward.
Consider using italics or quotation marks to set the thinking apart.
Reframe the scene:
In what ways can you gain power today by recounting what’s happened in your past?
One way I reframe past events towards a more positive future, is I write experiences out as I recall them. Then I aim for a more uplifting ending. I like to finish on hope. You can see an example of this in my companion piece Insomnia: Haunted by Hauntology over at Substack. I write about a resentment I had with my husband but by the end of the piece, I’ve progressed and gotten myself unstuck. I believe this is the goal for memoir writing. Moving you and your readers forward in time toward a better future. (A fun side note, my husband edits all my work, so he’s aware of the process I go through when detailing my feelings about him in writing. He’s a great sport and a great editor, too!)
Use flashbacks and flash-forwards sparingly:
While these are literary devices that get used throughout the classic novels we all read in high school—Faulkner, I’m looking at you—overuse of them can spell disaster. If you spend your entire memoir shifting time, you have the potential to confuse your readers.
One way to ensure you aren’t overusing the literary devices of time is to sketch out a chronological plotline first. Consider the plotline your foundation (like Clementine’s hair!). Then only add in flashbacks or flash-forwards when necessary.
The key is not to become an unreliable narrator. While memoir gives you room to manage time, if you start to sound like you’re jumping around all over the place, you could come off as unstable. This works well in mysteries and horror, but not so much in the memoir genre where we all want to trust our narrators.
The most effective use of time bending:
Leave out the extraneous details.
Consider that every detail you add to your memoir is there to move the story forward. If you’re trying to be so accurate that you’re losing the overall story concept in favor of showcasing everything that happened, stop it. Your readers don’t need every tiny detail.
For example, if you’ve got a scene where you as the main character are in your house and the next scene is at your dentist’s office, you don’t have to guide us from your front door to your car to driving down the road to arriving at the dentist office to checking in to finally having a hygienist leading you back to your chair. Chop that stuff. In a memoir, just like a film, you can jump from one scene to the next. So, fly there. And don’t weigh us down with superfluous stuff.
Target what’s most important. Focus on the scene in your house. Then cut straight to the dentist's office.
It may take some time to get the hang of how to best use time in your memoir.
Your goal should always be to relay the story as clearly and concisely as possible. No one’s expecting you to become the next William Faulkner writing your characters’ thoughts via stream of consciousness. But I know managing time can be confusing because there aren’t always clear directions for manipulating it in a memoir.
One of the biggest reasons you may be eager to craft a memoir is because your hindsight might have given you a new perspective on a situation that you didn’t have when you were living through it. Run with that instinct!
If you’re writing to publish, you may want to investigate literary devices, especially the ones that use time. But if you’re writing to process your emotions, know you have all the time in the world. It’s not a race to the finish line.
Your work will evolve over time. And for those diehard hauntologists lost in melancholy because you aren’t sure what your new future will look like, remember—you’re a memoir writer, you don’t have to know what’s next. Stick to processing your past a little longer and your future will reveal itself.
Now go read my Substack article Insomnia: Haunted by Hauntology.
