Para-memoir?

During silent meals (usually breakfast in the Companionary, but other times when I'm alone), I think. Lately I'm thinking about writing - not about what I'm working on (well, sometimes that), but about the process itself, and the feelings I have, and all the cautions I want to offer to you who might read it.  I'm beginning to think I could write a whole volume of precautions, prefaces, introductions, explanations!  I could fill the pages telling you how I feel about writing, about what I don't know about writing, what I'm learning about writing.  I could describe and explain why I'm not writing about something, or why I am.

Is this some new genre?  Or is it in fact a well-trodden path that I'm ignorant of?  I can't imagine it's well-trodden, for the simple reason that it would become hopelessly boring to all but a few.  Rather than inviting you into my story, I could put myself between it and you, endlessly, by telling you how I feel about writing this, what I think about it, what I plan to do with it.  I'd have to be a very good writer to hold your interest through a whole book of that - or even a longish article.

That's the beauty of blogging.  I can put that stuff here, and you can ignore it.  You can click on the posts that seem to be actual memoir.  Perhaps I'll put a "p-m" next to these other, excruciatingly self-referential posts.  But know this: it matters to me that you might read those pages too.  I'm writing now because I want to share it with you.  I have a journal for talking to myself.  This is different, in ways I don't know yet.  Somewhere between journal and memoir.  This is a space for blah blah blah that you might in fact identify with after all.  I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has these fears and dreams.  Maybe I'll encourage you to forge ahead in your own way.  Maybe not.

I wrote for an hour today.  Not this, but actually memoir.  Mary Karr advises us to start with the hardest memories.  I'm not starting quite there, but I am remembering a pretty bleak time, close to the worst.  And I'm finding the gift of remembering.  People I had forgotten, or given a glancing thought to, show up on center stage for a moment.  What the hell I thought I was doing shows up.  Who I was, begins to get clearer.  I know there's a lot of tedium to come, revisions and revisions, but right now I'm hurtling down lanes I had left behind.  I hope you'll come with me.