Why I Wrote My Memoir in Verse

When I first sat down to write the story of my escape from relentless domestic abuse, I tried to begin at the beginning.

I opened a blank document and typed a single sentence about the night he threw a plate of pancakes against the kitchen wall. I stared at the page, my jaw contracting in familiar fight-flight-freeze response. Was it winter? Was it after I had moved into the townhouse, or before? Was I remembering the right fight, or combining three separate rages into a single scene?

(How I Spent Years Writing a Memoir and Ended Up With a Novel-in-Verse.)

Within minutes, I was no longer writing. I was frozen, interrogating my memory.

Every attempt at a traditional narrative draft dissolved this way. I would reach for a moment and feel it shift under my hand. I could see the yellow truck he drove, fist hitting the dashboard, jerking the wheel to scare me, jabbing his lit cigarette in my face, as I cried as quietly as possible in the passenger seat.

I could see the stain the pancakes left on the wall after he hurled them at my head. I could see the loaded handgun he once placed on my pillow, the day I packed two suitcases and both cats and drove away. Those images were clear. The order of events was not. Dates blurred. Conversations overlapped. Entire stretches of time seemed to flatten and fold in on themselves.

More than a decade after I left my abuser, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD. Unlike a single-incident trauma, complex PTSD develops through repeated exposure to threatening or abusive environments, often over long stretches of time. Children in volatile homes, partners in controlling relationships, people who cannot safely leave the environment that is harming them: These are the circumstances in which complex trauma forms.

For women trapped in abusive homes, when trauma is ongoing, the brain prioritizes survival over preserving memories. It can collapse similar events into one another. It can blur sequences. It can erase details that once felt vivid. The result, for me, was a profound lack of chronological confidence, as well as a disconnect from my body and the pain that still lingered.

After years of safety, I wanted to finally write the truth about what had happened inside my home, details I had kept hidden from my own mother and now-husband for years. But I simply could not wrestle the timeline into a linear narrative. Rather than feeling therapeutic, the act of writing destabilized me further.

Even years later, I still rely on concrete evidence to anchor me in the facts of what happened. I keep the photo of my broken pinky finger. I keep the FBI assessment—he scored an 8 of 10 for prediction of future violence. I keep the proof he tracked my phone and hacked my email. Without these artifacts, I worry I am an unreliable narrator of my own life.

In 2023, desperate to break the logjam, I joined a poetry community where there was no pressure to construct full chapters. There was no expectation that we would untangle trauma into clean narrative arcs.

When I stopped trying to nail down exact sequences and focused instead on image, language, and emotional resonance, I could write about the yellow truck without calculating the exact night he threatened to drive it into a bridge embankment. I could write about the pancakes without describing the shade of the wall they collided with.

Through metaphor and symbolism, I approached the horrors slantwise and found truth I could not say in straight exposition. If a memory felt incomplete, I relied on the image that remained. If details wavered, I focused on the thrum of pulse in my fingers. I found language I would not have reached for in prose—less concerned with reconstructing a courtroom-ready transcript.

Facts still mattered. For one poem, I spent three hours researching the exact alignment of planets. I looked up the number of seconds it takes light from the sun to reach the earth for another. I pored over videos studying the behavior of leaf-cutter ants. Within the poem, facts were now in service of meaning. The larger aim was to communicate what it felt like to live inside that darkened townhouse of domestic abuse, inside that constant undercurrent of threat.

Poetry allowed me to revisit a single event from multiple entry points. I did not have to capture everything about a scene in one attempt. I could circle it. I could approach it from above, then from beneath. Over time, the emotional core of the memory became clearer, even if the chronology remained loose.

As the manuscript grew, I realized that the fragmented structure of a memoir-in-verse mirrored the way these memories lived in my mind. The repeated traumas of his rages were not stored in neat chapters. The taunting existed as flashes, images, sensations. The anxiety rose without warning. The memories overlapped. They echoed one another across years.

A long, seamless narrative would have suggested a level of linear clarity that I did not experience while living through the events. Short poems, separated by white space, felt more authentic. Forms such as sonnets, golden shovels, tankas, and free verse honored the kaleidoscope rather than forcing it into order.

When writing prose, I felt beholden to reconstruct events exactly as they occurred; in poetry, I had more room to shape the material. If the emotional truth of a memory required compression, I could compress it. If it required expansion, I could linger. I could change the weather in a poem to match the atmosphere of the moment.

For the first time, I felt a sense of authority over my own story. The past no longer felt like a fixed object I was required to replicate with perfect fidelity. It became material I could examine, shape, and offer to the reader with intention.

I spent most of my abusive relationship doubting my own perception. Writing these poems was the first sustained experience in which I asserted: This is how I remember it. This is what it actually felt like. This is the shape it takes in my body.

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