Memoirs allow us to look for our own stories in others’ in order to give us permission to judge ourselves less, Jowita Bydlowska writes.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Jowita Bydlowska is the author of Unshaming: A Memoir of Relapse, and What Comes After and Drunk Mom: A Memoir.
Shame can be studied from afar, but I’ve learned that distance makes it too abstract. The only way I could understand it was to step inside it and speak from there. So a decade after my first memoir was published, I wrote a second – this time about relapse, something that brought me possibly even more shame than being a drunk mom had.
As much as it is a natural instinct to hide the ugliest parts of oneself, I wanted once again to see what would happen if I didn’t. And not only that; what would happen if you, the reader, could help me do this by witnessing? Memoir, after all, is a contract: The writer discloses, the reader interprets, and somewhere in that exchange it is decided what is forgivable and what is not.
But what I am really after is not absolution but recognition – the moment you see yourself in a story that isn’t yours and feel the fence dissolve. We see ourselves in stories even when they’re not strictly related to us, and through this seeing we’re no longer standing on opposite sides, judging. We are implicated together.
Sure, it is voyeuristic to read about other people’s most difficult moments, but while dark stories are train wrecks we can’t look away from, they can also elicit an acknowledgment of each other’s humanity. At least, that is my hope.
Still, if you are merely entertained by misery, you are invited to it. It’s par for the course: Every writer bleeds when they type, some more than others. The memoirists tend to bleed the most. If you want to be dramatic about it – and I guess I do – our art is literally our pain.
I didn’t quite understand this when I published my first memoir. Before that, I had read exactly one – an addiction story that ended in hope. I picked up Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. out of morbid curiosity about heroin-addicted teenagers in Berlin.
Bydlowska's first memoir, Drunk Mom.Supplied
When I wrote my own book, I wasn’t trying to confess my life as an alcohol-addicted young mother in Toronto; that wasn’t initially the point. I thought the “ordinary villain” of a mom like me would make an interesting character, which is why I pitched it as fiction. Sure, secretly, I wanted to let the world know people like me were out there – mothers who drank and were dying inside – yet I was scared to put my own face to it. But once I got sober, I told my agent that my manuscript for Drunk Mom was based on a true story – that it was, in fact, all true. Turning it into a memoir, I thought, might make others like me feel less lonely.
Beyond that, until it was published, I didn’t think about my readers much, other than a handful of other addicts who I thought would get it, and my loved ones who I wanted to understand why I was behaving the way I was behaving. I thought of Drunk Mom, too, as my “foot in the door” – I did always want to write books. Finally, I wanted it to be a form of apology to my son.
When Drunk Mom came out, my revelations were deemed shocking and upsetting, and there was a lot of backlash. But also, I did get a lot of support for not sugar-coating addiction and motherhood. I think my honesty is partly owing to the fact that I’ve always been obsessive about naming things for what they are, and partly because I first got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, where you’re taught from the very start to be realistic about your addiction and to forgo self-pity.
But whether it was positive or negative reactions, I felt overexposed by the attention the memoir got, and by having to carry the responsibility of being “the poster girl for sobriety.” I also grew angry learning how people talked about memoirs by women, calling them “confessional” in a derogatory way – as in unserious, narcissistic, diaristic – while men mining their own lives were called philosophers. One of my former mentors berated me for not writing about “real issues” and indulging in “drunk-Toronto-girl” navel-gazing when I continued to publish personal essays about mental health after the book came out.
Most significantly, far from being a perfect poster girl, I had frequent relapses, which brought me overwhelming shame – a private emotion that made me want to hide, to become whatever the opposite of a memoirist is.
I became fed up with my own story, with how it was unfolding. I often thought of what I had learned about Christiane F., who continued to use drugs and alcohol after the success of her memoir, and how I felt cheated knowing that she relapsed. I promised myself I’d never write another memoir, throwing myself instead into novels.
Meanwhile, the landscape of shame in the world at large started to change. By the early 2020s, people were narrating difficult things into ring lights. Therapy language migrated into captions. Influencers documented rehab in real time. Celebrities no longer took time off “for exhaustion” – they were freely admitting to trying to get sober. Confession had been rebranded as vulnerability and courage.
We didn’t just admit things; we celebrated the ugliness that kept us quiet and suffering 10 years prior. People referred to Drunk Mom as “groundbreaking.” That was vindicating to hear but was not what inspired me to return to memoir and get back on my drunk-Toronto-girl shtick.
Bydlowska's follow-up book, Unshaming: A Memoir of Relapse.Supplied
As with Drunk Mom, Unshaming is a book I did not intend to write. Except instead of starting off as fiction, this time I tried to write investigative nonfiction, tackling the topic of shame by interviewing others, widening the frame beyond myself. I wanted distance and I wanted expertise. I wanted to be the observer instead of the specimen. But as I wrote, I realized shame resisted outsourcing; it demanded a body. I had only my own to offer. Having relapsed, I was living inside a lie, which is an architecture of shame. I was the expert.
Unlike the last book, I wrote this one while thinking of the broader audience from the get-go. I know very few people can relate to something like a relapse, but most of us know what it’s like to hide parts of ourselves for fear of judgment. I also know that we all look for our own stories in others’ in order to give us permission to judge ourselves less. My shame was only mine, but shame is universal. And sharing it is how we make it smaller.
So it is for that reason that this time, with Unshaming, I am not asking readers to gape but rather to witness. If memoir is a contract, then perhaps what we are really buying when we buy one is not scandal or redemption, but proximity – to another person’s imperfection, and to our own.