Moving Forward With Loving Action

Why Turn My Trauma Into Fiction Instead of a Memoir?

Some stories are so outrageous that telling them straight would sound like a lie. Mine is one of them.

Since I started doing deeper therapy work in recent years, I have honestly thought to myself multiple times, “You really cannot make this stuff up.” I have literally felt like people wouldn’t believe me because the things I have witnessed and experienced are so outrageous that they seem like a made-for-Lifetime-TV movie. A mother who calls you her “little princess” while repeatedly abandoning you. A car crash on your sixteenth birthday in front of Buckingham Palace. Tears at an airport gate that were never about you, but about them.

So why fiction instead of a memoir?

Fiction gives me something memoir can’t: distance. In memoir, every character is real and every word is testimony. In fiction, I can tell the emotional truth while giving myself room to breathe—and room to be wrong about exact dates, times, and sequences of events. Being a senior citizen comes with the privilege of distance from the mistakes of youth, but age and trauma also come with a lack of full clarity on the smaller details. As fiction, I can give each character a proper arc instead of just giving them each a case file. I am so glad to be using creative writing to share my story. This process is freeing me to share important truths without feeling stifled by details that really aren’t as important for readers.

My desire is to use stories based off of my life to support other trauma survivors who are doing the same type of therapeutic recovery work as I am. Just as I have done with this blog, I am including journaling prompts in my book. I know that doing the work to understand yourself and your life is transformative. I pray that you’re doing your work and seeing transformation over time.

My novel, The Summer She Learned She Could Choose Herself—about a 15-year-old Black girl who crosses an ocean and learns to choose herself—is coming in 2027. You can read more about it here.

You cannot make this stuff up. But you can shape it. You can give it meaning. And you can hand it to someone else who needs to know they’re not the only one.

If that’s you, come walk with me. Subscribe below, and I’ll share excerpts of the novel as it grows, along with journal prompts to help you do your own work. Because the story isn’t just mine anymore—it’s ours.