The Shame Of Losing
My first book is a memoir called The Shame of Losing. I didn’t mean for it to be a memoir; in fact, I tried in my writing program to make it a movie script, then a collection of short stories. It was my mentor, a memoirist, who called me out, saying that this was my story and to pretend otherwise would be a disservice to literature, not to mention disingenuous. (Which isn’t to say you can’t use your story to make great fiction!
We know all the best stories are close to the bone in that way that makes us question, Is this a true story?) In my case, I was living my story while writing about it, and my new writer friends and mentors knew it, because that’s what I kept bringing to the table. When one obsesses on a theme, it’s time to pay attention.
I am glad I listened to my mentor. It would have taken me ten years to write a story collection or a movie using the themes I needed for my memoir, and I didn’t want to wait that long to connect with people and share this work. Through workshopping and years of revision, I was able to land on a structure that felt right to me: a hybrid of diary entries, letters, and short vignettes with lots of white space. Story is super important to me, and finding form helped craft the narrative arc (I hope!). I’d still like to adapt my memoir for screen, but all that says is that I am obsessed with my story. A good indication I am on the right path. The lesson here is not to choose to use the memoir genre, but to not shy away from telling what needs to be told, even if it’s hard.
So why the title, The Shame of Losing? Often when I reveal it to friends or family, their eyes get a little dodgy and they want to know if this was my choice for a title, or my publishers. They don’t want me to feel like a loser, and I want to reassure them I do not. “It was my title, and they liked it,” I say. I see them nod, a little confused, perhaps shy about asking for more detail or explanation. Usually I provide it, because I love them. I tell them how I was at a conference once, chatting with a colleague about our work.
She was bemoaning the fact that her agent could not seem to place her novel anywhere. She told me that for the first time ever, she paid a large sum of money to travel to one of these luxury writer retreats to get help from a writer she admired. What did she learn? She learned her character was lacking reader interest because he hadn’t assessed his shame in the role he was playing in the book. She said once she had examined that, she could easily put more emotion into his actions and reactions in scenes that were previously lackluster. And if emotion is feeling, then that’s the key. No matter what we read, we want to feel something.
This was a lightbulb moment for me. My book at that point was only a thesis – a thesis that needed a lot of work. It was OK, but it was snarky and self-deprecating not in a good way. I decided to think about that word, shame, in the context of my work. Shame carries a lot of weight, doesn’t it? What was I ashamed of?
When I took the time to think about that, it wasn’t hard to come up with an answer. I was ashamed that I wasn’t doing as well in life as was expected. In that traditional sense of success, I was losing. I was losing because I lost my husband to a terrible industrial accident, only I didn’t lose him entirely. I lost pieces of him that were forever unavailable to me, our kids, and to him. I lost money. I lost work opportunities. I lost friends. When I realized this, I knew that not only was I ashamed of losing what I expected for myself, but I was ashamed for being ashamed. Does that make sense? I knew, in his so-called miraculous “recovery”, I should be grateful. He’s alive, he’s with us, the kids are healthy, we can move on. But we couldn’t, and I had to tell people why, since it was so confusing from the outside. I know it wasn’t my responsibility to explain everything to people, but out of respect for friends and family I wanted to. And it was exhausting.
Losing isn’t a popular sentiment, but neither, sometimes, is the telling the truth. I didn’t write my memoir to make believe that our situation was tidy. I wrote it to figure out what I thought about why I was feeling so bad. Why I needed a divorce. Why I needed to shut down for a while. I wrote an essay a few years after my book was “done”; after the divorce and three solid years after my husband had left town for good. In it I write, “The shame is not in the losing, it’s in the shame. Shame on shame. We did the best we could and that matters.”
I wish I didn’t have to write the book I did, but I’m glad I did. I am less apologetic now, and more accepting of life’s natural consequences. I don’t owe anyone an explanation of my shame, but the book wanted to tell you nonetheless. Listen to your pages.
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Sarah Cannon was born in Seattle and raised in Seattle’s north-end neighborhoods. Her writing appears in The New York Times, Salon.com, Bitch magazine, and more. Sarah earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, where she later helped launch the Lighthouse Writers’ Conference and Retreat in Port Townsend, WA. Her memoir and debut book, The Shame of Losing, will be available this October anywhere you like to buy books. She lives with her teenagers, a live-in man-friend, and four animals in Edmonds, WA, near Seattle.
About THE SHAME OF LOSING
On the morning before Halloween in 2007, Sarah receives a phone call from her husband’s arborist colleague: Matt, her spouse of seven years and father of their two small children, has been severely injured by a falling tree branch while working in a neighborhood east of Seattle. Visions of their future go dark as she learns to care for the man she depended on for support. Faced with choices about how to behave through this unexpected journey, she takes as many steps back as she does forward and begins a rite of passage she never imagined.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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