Writing a memoir can make you sick. Not often, but now and then a ghostwriting client of mine gets emotionally or physically ill when we get into the deep emotional material, usually with coughing or nausea.
A memoir writer asked a question in a writers’ group this week about exactly that. Her manuscript was finished and with an editor. But while she was writing it, she’d gotten sick. A massive cold sore. A horrible cold, when she rarely gets sick. Night after night she couldn’t sleep. She missed work and was mentally and emotionally exhausted.
The events were decades old. She’d already been through a lot of counseling. She was surprised how hard writing them down hit her. It was also, she said, very healing. Was she crazy, or did this happen to other writers?
She isn’t crazy, and it happens.
The replies covered the whole range. One writer had a breakdown three-quarters of the way through her manuscript and had to get help for serious depression before she could finish. Another signed up for short-term therapy before starting. Another said the opposite happened to him: no sickness, no lost sleep, just relief, and fears he’d carried for years losing their grip as he put them into words. A woman said she started having good dreams about her family and remembering small things she’d forgotten.
All of those are true. I’ve seen both ends of it myself.
Can writing a memoir make you physically sick?
It can wear you down until your body shows it. I won’t pretend to diagnose anybody. But stress shows up in the body, and few things are more stressful than sitting down on purpose, day after day, with the worst years of your life.
When you write a memoir, you don’t just remember. You relive. You have to recall the room, the smell, what was said, how you felt. Those details make the scene work on the page. Your mind doesn’t always know the difference between remembering something vividly and going through it again. Sleep goes first for a lot of people. Then the immune system. A cold sore during a hard stretch of writing isn’t a coincidence.
If writing your memoir is making you sick, take it seriously. See your doctor about the symptoms. Talk to a therapist about what’s coming up. Neither one means you should quit the book.
The client who couldn’t finish
About six years ago a woman came to me to write the story of her trauma.
When she was fourteen, her parents sold her into sexual slavery. She spent about fifteen years in that life. She was hooked on drugs and alcohol, she was arrested more than once, and she had every reason to believe that was how her life would end. Then a Christian man found her and got her out. When I last heard from her, about six years ago, they had a family of five together and she was doing very well.
She wanted to write a book about what happened to her. That was a brave thing to want.
We got about three chapters in. Then she became very emotional, and even slightly physically ill, and she couldn’t continue. We stopped.
That was the right call. A memoir isn’t worth more than the person writing it. She’d built a life most people in her position never get to build, and no book was worth pulling her back into the worst of it before she was ready.
Some people write their hardest story in their thirties. Some write it in their seventies. Some decide it’s enough to have lived through it. Every one of those is a legitimate choice. I’ve written more about what it’s like on the other side of the table in telling your trauma story to a ghostwriter.
A memoir isn’t worth more than the person writing it. If the book is making you sick, stopping is allowed. – Richard LoweShare on X
Can writing a memoir be healing?
It was for me.
My autobiography, My Life in Crazytown, is super personal. It goes deep into the trauma of the house I grew up in, and it’s very much to the point. The idea of the book was to show how my ADHD was formed or reinforced by the emotional and physical abuse I took from my parents. Writing it helped me get it off my chest in a way nothing else had.
I didn’t get sick writing it. I’d already been through the worst reaction a family can give to a book, when my father told every relative to burn my first autobiography, and I’d come out the other side. By the time I wrote Crazytown, I knew what I was walking into.
Why does the same act heal one person and flatten another? I think it depends on where you are when you write it. Distance matters. Support matters. So does your reason for writing it. Are you trying to understand what happened, or are you surviving it again? And some stories are heavier than others. Nobody should measure their own reaction against anybody else’s.
How do you protect yourself while writing a hard memoir?
Plan for it before you start the hard chapters, the way you’d plan for any long, heavy job.
Line up support first. A therapist, a friend who’ll listen, a support group, whatever fits your life. Several writers in that thread signed up for therapy before they started or partway through, and they all said it helped. Tell the people close to you that you’re working on it, so they know why you might be off for a while.
Pace yourself. Don’t write the worst chapter on a deadline or at midnight. Write it in the morning, when you’re rested, and plan something ordinary for afterward: a walk, a meal with someone, a dumb movie. Alternate hard chapters with lighter ones. Nobody says a memoir has to be written in order. I write my own books out of order, the chapters that strike me first, and a memoir can work the same way.
Take breaks without guilt. If you can’t sleep, if you’re getting sick, if you’re snapping at people, stop for a week. The book will be there. And watch for signs that it’s more than a bad week. If you’re sliding into depression the way one writer in that thread did, get help, the way she did, and then come back to the manuscript.
Should you use a ghostwriter for a trauma memoir?
It can help. A ghostwriter does the writing, the rewriting and the hours alone with the material. You do the remembering, in interviews, and you get to stop when you need to. Many people find it easier to tell a story out loud to a person than to sit alone with it at a keyboard.
It doesn’t take the weight away completely. My client was telling her story to me, not writing it, and it was still too much at that point in her life. A good ghostwriter will watch for that and slow down or stop. A bad one will push for the deadline. Ask anyone you’re thinking of hiring how they handle a client who needs to stop. Their answer tells you a lot. I’ve covered more in the emotional truth problem in memoir.
Do you have to write the worst parts of your memoir?
Not all at once, and not always in full.
A memoir needs the truth of what happened, but it doesn’t need every detail of every hour. Some of the most powerful memoirs handle the worst events in a few plain sentences and spend their pages on what came after: how the writer survived, who helped, what changed. Readers don’t need to be dragged through every moment to understand it. Often they understand it better when you don’t.
You get to decide how close to stand. You can write a scene from a step back, the way you’d tell it to a friend years later. You can summarize a terrible year in a paragraph and slow down only for the moments that turned your life. You can leave things out entirely if they belong to someone else, or if writing them would cost you more than the book is worth.
Many writers draft the worst chapters last, once the rest of the book exists and they know exactly what those chapters need to carry. By then the hard scene has a job in the book. Is that easier? For a lot of people, it is. It’s also usually better writing.
And if you’re working with a ghostwriter, say what’s off limits up front. A good one will respect it. Your story belongs to you, including the parts you decide not to tell.
What if you can’t finish your memoir?
Then you’ve still done something. Three chapters of a hard story on paper are three chapters more than most people ever manage. You can come back in a year, or ten. You can turn what you have into a letter to your children. You can keep it in a drawer. None of that is failure.
The woman who asked that question finished hers. The book is with her editor. The writer who had a breakdown is back at work on hers. My client set hers aside and kept building the life she’d fought for.
If you’re thinking about writing your own, the memoir hub covers every stage, and if you’d like someone to carry the writing while you carry the memories, here’s how my memoir process works. Write the hard story when you can afford what it costs you. It’ll wait for you.
