Weaving Information and Personal Story in Hybrid Memoir

Stephanie Foo’s memoir takes the form of a hybrid memoir (memoir plus). This type of memoir weaves a personal story with factual information from psychology, history, science, or some other discipline integrally related to the writer’s personal story. Foo weaves her personal story of healing from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) with factual information about the disorder; methods to cope with symptoms of the disorder, such as anxiety and depression; therapeutic approaches that promote healing; and intergenerational trauma, particularly as it applies to the Asian community in which she grew up. 

 Hybrid memoir can be challenging to write because it requires balancing factual information with story and nonfiction writing techniques with narrative strategies that maintain reader engagement through a compelling character arc of transformation. Stephanie Foo navigates these challenges in several ways. She begins the prologue with seven words that brilliantly foreshadow what the book will be about:

Do you want to know your Diagnosis?”

These are the first words on the first page. These seven words, posed as a question, brilliantly foreshadow not only what the book will be about, but also how the narrative and character arcs will unfold over the course of the story. The therapist’s question to Foo occurs on a day when Foo reaches a decision that marks the memoir's inciting incident and a major turning point in her life. She is thirty years old, battling what she describes as the painful “fanged beast” of anxiety and depression. The battle has raged since she was twelve. Every time she believes she has slain the beast, and she has slain it hundreds of times, it reanimates and attacks her once again.  Her therapist has taught her coping skills for anxiety, communication skills,  relationship skills, and ways to manage her depression, all of which have improved her life. But she is tired of pulling herself up and out of depression. She says to her therapist, “I don’t want to pull anymore. I want a dumbwaiter, or an escalator, or a floating rainbow drug cloud. Anything to lift me toward emotional stability. To fix me.”  But to fix the problem, requires understanding what that problem is. The therapist indicates that the problem is complex post-traumatic stress syndrome (C-PTSD), which resulted from years of neglect and abuse by both of Foo’s parents throughout her childhood and adolescence. Foo’s initial reaction to the diagnosis, when she reads more about it after the therapy session, is devastation:​

Present Information After Establishing the Personal Story, Struggle, and What is at Stake
 
Despite feeling broken, Foo is determined to understand the diagnosis and to heal. This decision sets the narrative and character arcs in motion. She is clear about what is at stake if she does not succeed—self-loathing, the relentless battle with the fanged beast of anxiety and depression, frequent relationship ruptures, a life of chaos, crisis, and pain. At this point, the memoir becomes a quest with high stakes. This is a compelling strategy to maintain reader engagement. But a quest for understanding requires her to weave information into her personal story.  

 Foo presents factual information as part of her personal story rather than as a separate entity. She carefully selects the most relevant episodes of abuse and abandonment. These scenes enable the reader to understand the cause of C-PTSD, which she will present in more depth in later chapters. These scenes also enable the reader to grasp her difficulties with emotion, relationships, perfectionism, and overworking. Ultimately, they invest the reader in her, her personal story, and her struggle. Readers have walked with Foo not only through the abuse she suffered but also through her graduation from high school, her graduation from college, and her successful career as a journalist despite all that has happened to her.

Place Information Passages with Relevant Story Events

Having created a high level of reader engagement,  Foo spends several chapters providing in-depth information about C-PTSD, techniques that help her cope with the symptoms, such as meditation, mindfulness, grounding, and self-soothing, and her experiences with different types of therapy to heal. But even as the weight of passages shifts toward information, Foo continues to incorporate her personal experiences. After three chapters, which place more weight on information than on story, the remaining chapters are predominantly story, weaving in information when it is relevant to events in Foo’s life. 
 
Because Foo introduces the diagnosis as the basis for the narrative and character arc on the first page, because she invited her reader into her experiences and provided important context through brief informational passages, the reader is prepared for the transformation in her thoughts and feelings four years after the diagnosis. While the fanged beast of anxiety and depression still attacks from time to time, she has hope and agency because she knows that bad feelings are temporary and has proven to herself and the reader that she has become the beast’s master:

There are many ways to maintain reader engagement in a memoir when incorporating factual information. Foo's strategies include establishing the narrative arc, the character arc of transformation, and high stakes in the first chapter, investing the reader in the personal story and struggle before presenting in-depth factual information, and providing information only when it is relevant to unfolding events in the story.

​If you’ve spent time with a preschool child, you’re familiar with the barrage of why questions that pepper their conversations: Why can’t I fly like the birds? Why can’t I have a cookie right now? Why is Jane so mean? Why do I have to share? Sometimes children are just seeking attention, but at other times, they’re working hard to make sense of the physical, emotional, and social world that is so new to them. While this constant barrage of why questions ebbs when children grasp the basics of their world, it never really stops.

Even as adults we’re continually asking why questions. We want to make sense of our experiences and our world.  We want to know why pandemics occur and why the economy is tanking. We want solutions to our pain and problems, so we ask why questions to understand the causes, followed by how questions to learn how to cope with them or to resolve them. We ask why did my marriage fail? Why do I have diabetes? Then we ask how do I live my life now that I am divorced, now that I am a single parent, now that I have been diagnosed with a chronic illness, now that I am entering the job market, now that I am anxious and depressed, now that I am expecting a child, now that my children have grown up and left home, now that I am aging. On and on our why and how questions go until we can grasp the causes of events and situations, and how to cope with them or resolve them.  

Causal Chains Address the Why of the Problem

Self-help books answer readers’ who, what, why, and how questions. Hold Me Tight is a self-help book that enables readers to understand why connection erodes in close relationships, the effects of those broken connections, and how to strengthen or restore them. It is a good mentor text because it illustrates how writers can use readers’ why questions in the opening chapters of their books to keep them turning the pages.

Addressing why connections erode in close relationships, Johnson draws on research related to the impact of attachment experiences on close relationships. Experiences that enable people to feel that others will hear them, understand them, respond to their needs and fears, and stay close promote secure attachment. She then moves on to present the causal chain that clarifies why relationships deteriorate.

The first step in Johnson’s causal chain based on her research about Emotion-Focused Therapy is the experience of a loved one being unresponsive or unavailable. This causes Primal Panic because it threatens the attachment bond. Primal Panic, in turn, results in fights that disintegrate into several patterns of damaging conversations identified by research.

Johnson labels these damaging conversation patterns as “Demon Dialogues,” then presents the three most basic patterns: Find the Bad Guy, Protest Polka, and Freeze and Flee. Readers now understand that couples’ problems are related to disrupted emotional attachment and connection, which causes Primal Panic, which in turn causes frequent arguments in the form of Demon Dialogues. With this understanding of the causal chain, the reader is now ready to understand the three key moments that result in either restoring connection or creating further disruption to the connection:

Links in the Causal Chain
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​Cause-and-effect chains illustrate how one event leads to another. They enable the reader to more easily comprehend complex ideas because of the logical narrative flow from link to link. They also prevent thinking errors, such as assuming that the last link in the chain—Demon Dialogues in this case—is the only cause of a problem or the major cause of the problem. Johnson’s causal chain illustrates how more remote events, such as someone being unavailable or unresponsive, are equally important—or perhaps more important, because ultimately, it sets in motion a threat to attachment, which Johnson presents as the main cause of disruption in a couple’s relationship.

Sequences that Build Address the How of Solving the Problem

            Having elaborated the problem of disrupted connection in close relationships and its causes, Johnson addresses readers’ how questions by elaborating seven conversations that build and restore attachment. You’ve seen this approach to providing solutions to problems in other books:  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver, and The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques by Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D. It might seem that authors simply create a list of solutions and move through them one by one in separate chapters with no particular rationale for their incorporation or sequence, but this is not always the case.

Johnson’s rationale for the seven conversations that restore and build connection is sequenced according to the need for couples to master the first three conversations before moving to the last four. Specifically, the first three conversations de-escalate tension in the relationship and prepare the couple for the four remaining conversations that build and strengthen the couple’s bond. I’ve presented a brief description of each conversation so you can see the logical links between them.

Conversations that De-escalate Tension in the Relationship

First Conversation: Recognizing the Demon Dialogues enables couples to identify their recurrent damaging dance and the moves that escalate it.
Second Conversation: Having identified the pattern of destructive fighting and escalation, couples are now ready to look beyond the hurtful pattern to the feelings connected with attachment needs and fears.
Third Conversation: Understanding attachment needs and fears, couples are now ready to revisit a previous destructive pattern, a Rocky Moment in which they identify the steps each made and the emotions felt.
 
Conversations that Build and Strengthen Bonds

Fourth Conversation: This conversation transforms relationships by moving couples into being more accessible, emotionally responsive, and deeply engaged with each other.​
Fifth Conversation: Forgiving Injuries
Sixth Conversation: Bonding Through Sex and Touch
Seventh Conversation: Keeping Love Alive
 
When I first read the title of Johnson’s book— Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, I thought it was just another book about relationships offering a quick fix, a superficial set of things couples could do that would work for a while because of the placebo effect, but ultimately fail because it didn’t get to the root cause of deteriorating relationships. When I read the book from beginning to end, the causal chain illustrated that Johnson had dug deep into her subject to identify that root cause, and then carefully sequenced her conversations to build toward a long-term solution to the problem her book addressed. Carefully crafting a self-help book to answer a reader’s questions about how and why is as important as the specific information provided. Structures such as causal chains and solutions that build on each other make complex ideas easier for readers to grasp and retain. They also keep readers engaged because following such a logical flow of information provides the same satisfaction as finding a place for each puzzle piece until the entire picture is revealed.  

​Structure is a Writer's North Star  

​In the memoir, The Color of Water, McBride brings readers into his family, his neighborhood, the Civil Rights Movement, and his mounting confusion about his mother, his identity, and where he belongs:
As a kindergartner at the bus stop: He knows that his father, who died before he was born, was black. At the bus stop, he notices that his mother doesn’t look like the mothers of the other black children at the bus stop. She doesn’t look like him. In fact, she looks white like his kindergarten teacher, but she insists she is light-skinned.
 
Every Sunday at church: Looking across rows of black faces sitting in the church pews, it is clear to McBride that his mother is the only light-skinned face? white face?
 
In the neighborhood: Seeing his mother in these different contexts and watching her ride her bike through the neighborhood with black kids zipping past her on Sting-Ray bikes and skateboards, McBride eventually became clear that his mother was a white woman living in a black world.
 
Blacks talking about whites: McBride feared for his mother’s safety. With Malcom X labeling white people as the “white devil” and the rise of Black Power, he feared black people might kill his white mother. Yet, his mother didn’t feel threatened, nor did she think “white devil” applied to her.
 
His mother on black and white: McBride details the many contradictions in his mother’s decisions and her advice about black people and white people: White folks were evil toward blacks, but, McBride, having decided his mother was white, didn’t see her acting evil toward blacks. Additionally, even though she said whites were evil toward blacks, she placed him and his siblings in white schools to get the best education; Blacks were more trustworthy, but anything involving blacks was substandard. She may have been the only white person in a black church, but this meant that he was often the only black kid in a white classroom.
 
McBride’s confusion about who his mother was and where she belonged was compounded by the fact that she never talked about her parents, where she grew up, or anything else related to her past. He felt that if he could only understand who his mother was, he could understand who he was. He decided that his life would be easier if she were clearly black or clearly valued blacks or whites. 

 Structure Can Mirror the Main Theme
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The structure of McBride’s memoir mirrors his increasing confusion and then his increasing understanding of his mother and himself.  It is a memoir that illustrates how the structure of a book can echo the main themes in an individual's life and the author’s main point.  Chapters focused on McBride alternate with chapters in which his mother reveals her past.  Readers walk beside McBride and his mother as her story and his trips to her hometown, Suffolk, Virginia, culminate in his understanding of who his mother is and, by extension, who he is.  

 The chapters progress thematically rather than through a strict linear chronology. For example, McBride’s chapters focus on McBride’s siblings (Brothers and Sisters), his family’s relationship with the church (The New Testament),  School, and the Civil Rights Movement (Black Power). His mother’s chapters focus on her Jewish heritage (Kosher and the Old Testament), her brother (Sam), and school (Schul). Through the juxtaposition of thematic chapters, the author and the reader discover that his mother was white and also Jewish. As a young girl, she was teased and bullied. In the family, she was used. Her father, Fishel Shilskey,  used her; her brother, Sam, and her sister, Dee-Dee, as free labor for his grocery store. He sexually abused her.

People in Suffolk, Virginia, who knew her mother, Hudis, described her as a sweet woman. She was a Polish immigrant whose left side had been paralyzed by polio. Fearful of the husband who married her for her family’s money and sponsorship to New York where her oldest sister lived, she did what she could for her daughter.
 At school, McBride’s mother was teased because she was Jewish. Worse, the Jewish community ostracized her family because her father’s store sold to the black community.  She found acceptance and love with Dennis, a black man. When she married him, her family performed the Jewish ritual of sitting shiva for the dead.  Dead to her parents and siblings, she closed the door to her younger self, changing her name from Rachel to Ruth and leaving her Jewish culture and heritage behind.

Structure Includes Character Arcs of Personal Transformation

Even though the story progresses through thematic chapters, there is a clear narrative arc and an arc of transformation for the author and his mother. Through her decisions to marry Dennis,  a black man, and live in a black neighborhood, McBride’s mother moves from abuse and alienation to love and belonging. She becomes a wife and the mother of twelve mixed-race children, develops lifelong friends who are black, and is embraced by Christians in the New Brown Church founded by her husband.

McBride’s chapters also demonstrate a clear narrative arc and an arc of transformation. There are two components to these arcs: McBride’s identity crisis and his grief after the death of his stepfather. The identity crisis resolves as his mother shares her life story and McBride takes trips to Suffolk, Virginia, where his mother lived as a girl and a young woman. Through her story and interactions with people who knew his mother and her family in Suffolk, Virginia, McBride experiences the loneliness of his mother and grandmother, loneliness created by the cruelty of his grandfather and the discrimination against Jewish individuals and blacks.

McBride had searched school records, court records. and other documents. He had explored his mother’s hometown, ordering lunch in a McDonald’s restaurant on the very spot where his grandfather’s grocery store had stood. And he had spent time with people who knew his mother and her family. The moment came when he had read, explored, and gleaned enough information about his mother’s family from the town’s older residents that the isolation and suffering of his grandmother, his mother, and her siblings overwhelmed him with a loneliness that began to suffocate him. He had seen and heard and experienced enough that finally a moment of clarity came, resolving his question about who he was and where he belonged:

​The second element of McBride’s arc tracks his transition from a confused, but good kid, to a confused, acting-out kid, to the man who went to college and became a writer. McBride didn’t really know Dennis, his biological father, who died before he was born. However, he had a warm relationship with his stepfather and called him Daddy. After his stepfather’s death when he was fourteen, a confused and grieving McBride skipped school, shoplifted, stole purses, smoked marijuana, and abused alcohol. Unable to impact McBride’s bad decisions, his mother sent him to live with relatives in Kentucky in the summers. Over three summers, he hung out on a street corner with unemployed men who were alcoholics. These men looked out for him. One told him what he needed to know. Chicken Man could see that McBride thought he was special because he was smart. He let McBride know that the men on the corner were also smart. If he didn’t change, he would end up dead, in jail, or wasting his potential on the street corner just like the men around him. When Chicken Man died senselessly after an argument with a girlfriend, McBride reconsidered his decisions. Eventually recognizing the truth of Chicken Man’s prophecy, he returned to school with the renewed goal of attending college.
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Developing a structure for a story that resonates with its main themes, engages the reader through a compelling narrative arc, and unfolds to reveal a significant transformation in the main character, begins with committing time to reflect on questions such as the following:
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What do you want to say through the events in the story and the main character’s response to those events?

What is the main character's arc of transformation and what sets it in motions? 
 
What themes and issues related to the human condition do you want your story to explore?
 
What do you want the reader to think and feel after reading the last word on the last page of the book?
 
Your themes and what you want to say, and what you want the reader to take away from your story, are the North Star that will guide you to a structure that serves your story. They are the North Star that guides selection of the specific events that create a compelling narrative arc that reveals how and why the main character transforms over the course of the story. Whether you sit down and dive into writing your story or carefully plan it out, take some time to reflect on the questions above to find your story’s North Star.

How to Find the Structure for a Work of Narrative Nonfiction--Biography


Hiddden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, a work of narrative nonfiction, elaborates the story of the Galvin family, a family of twelve children—ten boys and two girls whose births between 1945 and 1965 closely coincided with the years of the baby boom. Over time, six of the boys were diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Most stories about physical or mental illness focus primarily on the diagnosed individual. Kolker’s work focused on the six boys diagnosed with Schizophrenia, but also on the parents, the siblings, and the researchers struggling to understand the cause of this mental condition. This deep and nuanced approach to Schizophrenia confronted Kolker with questions about how to structure the book, questions he discussed at length in several interviews. *
 
Genre as a Guide to Structure

Kolker’s first decision related to which genre would provide the best structure for the story he wanted to tell. He could write a popular science book about Schizophrenia, detailing the research progress using the family as an example. He could also write a nonfiction multigenerational family saga, incorporating the science to provide context for readers to understand the symptoms of Schizophrenia, the options available for treatment, and an understanding of the causes of Schizophrenia at that time.  He decided that the family story would be primary because he could then use the science not only for context but as breathing space for readers entering this family’s extraordinary and overwhelming experience.

The decision to incorporate breathing space for readers is important when writing about traumatic situations because of the phenomenon of secondary traumatization. This type of trauma occurs when an individual experiences significant emotional distress when hearing, watching, or reading about an individual immersed in situations of severe physical or emotional pain. Kolker wasn’t a psychologist, but he was a very wise writer. He may not have known the term secondary traumatization, but he intuitively understood that he needed to present the family story in small pieces with frequent breaks, which is exactly what a psychologist would recommend. The structure for the book that evolved from this understanding was a dual narrative. Chapters related to the family story alternated with chapters related to the research about the causes of Schizophrenia.
 
 Chronology and Controversy as a Guide to Structure

Because Kolker decided to incorporate the research related to the causes of Schizophrenia to provide context for the family story, he read over one hundred books on the subject and conducted numerous interviews with experts. He needed a focus to wrestle that mountain of information into a unified, coherent narrative. His love of historical narratives provided a solution. He conveyed the research about Schizophrenia, chronologically, by elaborating the ongoing debate over decades about nature or nurture as the cause of Schizophrenia. 

What makes the research Korler presents so engaging is that he focuses on individual researchers or a team of researchers in a given time period, relating their theories and research conclusions through their professional and personal stories. For example, to explore the nurture side of the debate, he presents the work of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann at Chestnut Lodge in the 1940s. At a time when psychiatry warehoused individuals with mental conditions in asylums and prescribed insulin shock treatment and lobotomies, Fromm-Reichmann prescribed the talking cure. She believed that the origins of Schizophrenia were the result of a domineering, controlling mother. She labeled this type of mother as the Schizophrenogenic Mother. Schizophrenia’s origins were not the result of biology and heredity; parents, especially mothers who were ineffective nurturers, were to blame. Kolker presents the nature side of the debate through Lynn DeLisi and other researchers focused on brain imaging and genetic studies. 
 
Reading Broad and Deep as a Guide to Structure
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 With fourteen members in the Gavin family, Kolker also faced a dilemma about how to approach the chapters detailing the family story. To support readers as they navigated so many individuals, Kolker used several strategies. On the first page of each chapter, all fourteen family members are listed with the family member(s) who is the focus of the chapter in bold font. Additionally, at the front of the book before Part One, he provides a chart with the name of each family member, date and place of birth, and, where appropriate, the name of the spouse, number of children, and the date the individual died.

Kolker discovered another strategy to unify the family story and to support readers as they encountered the different family members through his love of reading multigenerational sagas in fiction and nonfiction. East of Eden by John Steinbeck was divided into parts with each part concentrating on a different generation. Applying this structure to Hidden Valley Road, Kolker focused the first part of Hidden Valley Road on the parents of the children, Mimi and Don—their dating years, their marriage, the birth of each child, the years of working toward the American Dream, and the years in which that dream shattered. In the second part of the book, he focused on the children as they grew older and worked through the traumas of their childhood.

These strategies supported the reader as they navigated a story with fourteen family members, but writing his first draft, Kolker realized that he was covering the experiences of too many people in a single chapter. Once again, a work of fiction guided Kolker to a solution. While revising, he dipped into War and Peace and discovered that Tolstoy often focused a chapter on a single character. He decided that if he used the same technique and focused chapters on only one or several family members, readers would understand that he would pick up the storyline of other family members in subsequent chapters. Recently, I discovered this same approach while reading Middlemarch by George Elliot. Surprisingly, those very lengthy classics still have a lot to teach modern writers. Reading books in the genre you’re writing, but also books outside that genre—contemporary and classic— enables you to discover solutions to problems you encounter when completing a manuscript.
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Hidden Valley Road, with its many family members and many researchers posed a challenge nonfiction writers often confront—a mountain of information that must be distilled into a coherent narrative that will engage readers. With decades of experience as a journalist, Kolker brought well-honed skills to the task, but still encountered difficulties as he wrote and revised. Surprisingly, fiction provided the mentor texts that would guide him to develop the structure of his nonfiction book, proving that it should become a truth universally acknowledged that writers must not only consistently show up at their desks to practice their craft, but they must also read deeply within their chosen genre and widely outside of their chosen genre.
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Politics and Prose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76OzuGHtJDE
New York Times Podcasts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaHXuadUYfQ
NPR
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/05/826695581/in-hidden-valley-road-a-familys-journey-helps-shift-the-science-of-mental-illnes
Book Report Network
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8q7ERWS5Pk
Aspen Words
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p_ipAuA0qE