Unlocking Creativity: Elissa Altman Reveals the Radical Power of Saying ‘Yes’ in Memoir Writing
EA: I actually do liken it to the five stages of grief. I went through periods that I can benchmark now, in hindsight. When it first happened in 2013, I was so shocked and so stunned, because I was very, very close to these people; my cousins were like siblings to me. I also had to deal with their rage, which was very hard for me in part because of the home and parents I grew up with, which is something I covered in my last memoir. That dovetailed into my sending them pleading emails, asking for forgiveness, and telling them that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to hurt anybody, which, of course, is true. Then I became accusatory, devastatingly angry, and literally frothing with anger of my own. That was two years in. Between 2015 and 2017 I started to write my way through what was happening to me. My usual way of metabolizing something that’s traumatic is to write about it, even if it’s just for myself.
