How the Memoir I Wasn’t Supposed to Write Saved My Life

I wasn’t supposed to write a memoir, but sometimes we need storytelling to survive.

(Don't Burn the Diary.)

I was supposed to be in a national park, jotting notes for the nonfiction book about joy my publisher had actually bought. Instead, I was in a hospital bed with tubing snaking from the port in my chest, winding like a river over the yellow journal on my lap, which I opened again and again between terrifying episodes fighting to stay alive. Mysterious and severe anaphylactic shock had almost stolen my life. And every few hours, it attempted assassination again—skin erupting in flames, itchy over every inch, begging my body to keep breathing until a nurse or doctor would stab me with epinephrine yet again.

My pen was my only tether to agency in a reality that made no sense. “I intended to fill these pages with adventures and awe,” I scrawled onto one page. “I will fill them instead with my fight to stay alive.”

Writing a memoir had long been my dream, but like most writers whose lives have not launched them like rocket ships into the galaxy of fame, I had been told by both my literary agent and publishing houses that memoirs are almost impossible to publish unless you are a celebrity. And let’s be honest—no one from HBO nor Columbia Records has ever heard the name K.J. Ramsey. I had previously published two nonfiction books that blended my expertise as a trauma therapist with personal narrative and theology, books my former publisher affectionately called “stealth-help.” I had also published a collection of poems. Even with a dedicated community of readers and a strong sales record, it was made more than clear to me that reaching for the genre of memoir as a non-famous human was like self-identifying as Icarus—trying to fly too close to the sun. “It’s all about positioning,” my editor at the time had said. “Memoirs are just so hard to sell.”

When life positioned me near the edge of death, I could no longer care so much about positioning myself and my work to please anyone, including publishers. All I had space to care about was survival. And the many other humans struggling to not give up on their stories when life picks them plot twists they would never wish on even their meanest childhood bullies.

Writing, in my experience, is a living and continuous conversation with life. I’ve journaled since I was a teen, carrying one everywhere so I can jot down sensory details, thoughts, and the start of poems as I wander through my days so nothing gets lost. My journal is the conduit of the ongoing conversation that both shapes me and my art.

Fueled by the frenetic energy of not knowing whether I’d survive the next year—let alone the next week—plus the high-dose steroids that were keeping me both alive and hyper-verbal, I filled the rest of that journal in the hospital fast. I spilled my fears. I noted my differential diagnoses. I told story after story of the providers who were keeping me alive and the nurses who held me when I wept in my hospital bed, shaking with panic attacks at night.

When I started writing the book that was Not Supposed to be a Memoir, I had strangely sensed deep within myself that I needed to write it by hand. I had started that yellow journal in a rooftop tent in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada, just weeks before, on the first night of what was supposed to be a whole summer of national park adventures. I had dared myself to go back and forage through the landscapes where I had first encountered joy in my childhood—a traumatic childhood—to find the good that had most preserved my life through over a decade of severe chronic illness as an adult. Instead, I was thrust into even more trauma and too sick to even hold my body up to type at a computer. But my journal dared me to keep foraging.

As a mushroom nerd, I love the way foraging in a forest slows me down enough to notice the tiniest signs of life at the bottom of my view. Wonders like phallic purple cortinarius and bird’s nest fungi are hidden right where hikers speed past. In the forest, you’ll miss seeing so much goodness unless you slow down and look for it.

Choosing to count my worst days as worthy of documentation changed how I experienced them. Telling myself my own story changed the way I lived it. While my near-death experiences stopped, mysterious and completely debilitating sickness didn’t. I felt utterly powerless, rapidly losing my ability to walk and work, exhausted by self-advocacy in a healthcare system that prefers to gaslight women in pain than see us as partners in healing. I didn’t get to choose the horrific things that happened to me, but I could choose to make something from them. Lifting my pen was a daily choice to reclaim my power by looking for love, kindness, and joy in a landscape full of pain.

In my previous books in different genres, I had the privilege of writing about pain with more past-tense perspective. For this book, I knew both that I would eventually have to fulfill my end of the contract with a finished manuscript whether my life was miserable or not and that if I stopped writing, I would probably sink so far into despair that I might entirely drown.

I also knew I was not the only one drowning. I’ve never craved a self-help book when I am sinking in sickness or despair. I’ve craved stories. I’ve longed for poetry and prose honest enough about the dark to pierce mine with light. So, I quietly kept writing in the journals that I now knew needed to become a memoir. “Well, life handed me a page-turning, wild story,” I told my agent, “so I’m just going to tell it so beautifully and fiercely that by the time we show my publisher, they won’t be able to say no.”

I don’t exactly recommend hoodwinking your publisher, by the way. But I do recommend letting your life guide your genre and letting your work be a gift to your own survival first.

For months, I wrote my way through my worst experiences. And then for many more months, I sat down at my desk, sandwiched between two major surgeries, rebuilding my stamina hour after hour with my journals to rewrite the raw material of a story that nearly ended short. Writing The Place Between Our Pains pulled me out of bed and back into my life instead of waiting for everything to get better first.

“Even when the truth isn’t hopeful,” Andrea Gibson writes, “the telling of it is.” Re-telling my story gave me a refuge to survive it. Writing my memoir did not redeem the pain. It gave me a way to reclaim parts of myself I lost to ruin. It gave me a way to look for the joy that holds us together, even when we can barely hold on.

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