My book Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents was a cathartic experience to write. For a long time, the fear of that catharsis was why I did not write it at all.

I came up with the title “Grieving Futures” not long after my father died in 1996, with the idea of maybe writing a self help book or some kind of meaningful memoir. I started writing about my parents’ deaths and my grief off and on for the next ten years, but nothing came of it. Eventually, after The Great Breakdown of ‘08, I went into therapy and the book suddenly became necessary to write. It was part of a catharsis that included two years of therapy, a divorce, a career change, and (most important of all) survival.

It’s not a fun read and in fact I warn people off of it regularly. You can buy it if you want, but why on earth would you? It’s a laundry list of the cascading tragedies I survived between 1993 and 1997. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that was merely a four year period and not an entire whole century.

But in the end, that’s all it is: a recounting of events and how I felt when they happened. It’s a memoir only in the most basic sense of the word, and I never actually thought of it as such.

This came up again more recently for me when I described the experience of concurrently reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy.

(Yes, I concurrently read lots of books. If I have less than five going at any one time, I get a bit lost and wander around the house looking for more books. MOAR BOOX!!! RAWRRRRR!!!)

I told my friend Gina that Fun Home was a masterpiece of tragicomic memoir, while I’m Glad My Mom Died was a faithful recounting of tragedy as it unfolded.

That looks rather damning on the surface, but is not meant to be. McCurdy’s book is well written, and very intense. She went through hell with her mother and associated eating disorders, and she captures that experience well.

Reading it, though, made me realize that I do not agree with Tolstoy ¹All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Anna Karenina, LeoTolstoy. I do not think that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own, unique ways. Specifics might differ, but the children of narcissistic mothers all share similar experiences (as regular readers of r/raisdebynarcissists can attest). Therefore, while I can’t claim to have been a child star on Nickelodeon, I totally relate to McCurdy’s relationship with her mother on a lot of levels. Her book was a difficult read for me…much as, I suspect, Grieving Futures is a difficult read for other adult orphans who ended up destitute.

But I suspect that writing that book was for her, like Grieving Futures was for me, more of a cathartic project than a literary one. It was also, like Grieving Futures, her first book.

On the other hand, Bechdel was a storyteller with decades of experience by the time she started on her own memoir. Her seminal comic, Dykes to Watch Out For, was launched in 1983, so by the time she was working on Fun Home in the early 2000s she already had twenty years of experience in how to tell an engaging story. Neither myself nor McCurdy could claim that kind of background when we went on our cathartic writing sprees.

Which leads to my question: what is the difference between a cathartic retelling of events and a memoir?

And more importantly: why do I care?

Obviously, there is no stark line down the middle, and for that matter, “memoir” is a rather large umbrella genre. But I’m trying to parse out the difference because of the second question, “why do I care?”

I am in the midst of working—slowly, so very slowly—on what you might call the next installment of Patience & Fortitude: The Empty Bowl.

Whereas the first installment, Grieving Futures, was about the trauma I experienced during and after the deaths of my parents, The Empty Bowl is going to be a bigger-picture story. It will be the memoir of two very broken people trying to raise a very odd child.

My parents were good people who made bad decisions. They made those decisions because of the secrets they kept from their families, the secrets they kept from each other, and the secrets they could not hide from me²Yes, this is a shout-out to Dani Shapiro’s “Family Secrets” podcast, which has the motto: “the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.”. In the end, my father emotionally distanced himself from life entirely through alcohol. My mother probably wished she could do the same, but she was deep in the clutches of bipolarism and ongoing poor physical health.

I’m done with the catharsis, which I think suggests what the difference is when I think about that versus a memoir:

• The cathartic experience is for the writer. I wrote Grieving Futures for me, to help me process what happened and find a way to explain it to others.
• A memoir—or perhaps I mean the platonic ideal of a memoir—is for the reader.

Again, there is overlap, and many a memoir has been written as a way for the author to process their own feelings. But for me, it is a matter of intention—of purpose.

I do not want to give a by-the-numbers recounting of how my parents were good people, or of all the bad decisions they made. I do not want to provide a list of all the ways I miss them, or all the ways they wronged me.

I want The Empty Bowl to open a window into the complex world of two mid-century Americans, shaped by a world ravaged by both war and economic prosperity as well as the very tight gender frames they were forced into. Two people who stumbled into each other’s lives ended up with a child they never wanted but tried to love despite themselves.

They were broken people, and they were amazing, and I miss them. I want you to understand why.