Week 6: Showing the Truth

While reading Lena Dunham’s memoir, I immediately saw myself. As someone who also regularly attends therapy, I could relate to almost everything Dunham experienced with her own therapists. I especially sympathized with her frustration of not knowing anything about her therapists when they knew nearly everything about her: “Margaret won’t tell me anything about her life. From the start, she makes it clear that we’re here to talk about me. When I ask a question about herself, she tends to ignore it.”

A relationship with a therapist is very strange. You visit them quite frequently at first, and then possibly less frequently after that if you’re making progress. And each time you visit, you spend an hour talking about yourself and your thoughts and your feelings and your worries and your fears. It’s rather narcissistic if you look at it that way. And you never learn anything about your therapist unless they slip up and mention something that may be relevant to your own problems. When Dunham wrote about the excitement she felt when she was on the phone with Margaret and she finally told her about her own life, I saw myself again. That’s exactly how I feel every time my therapist mentions something about her life outside of the tiny box we meet in every two weeks.

“Or maybe it was an accident. Maybe she forgot our roles for a moment, and we became just two women, two friends on a long-distance call . . . catching up about our houses, our husbands, our lives.”

Neither memoir seems to over tell their story. Perhaps you could make the case that Dunham’s goes too far, but I only interpreted these details as honest portrayals of the life she experienced in childhood. Memoirs require honesty, and sometimes that honesty can come off as over-sharing. In this case, however, Dunham is merely honest.

In both memoirs, the author predominantly shows rather than tells. However, in Dunham’s piece, there is some telling, especially in terms of her own thoughts and feelings about her therapists, which she states quite directly. I don’t think this is problematic though because it adds an authentic voice to her writing. The other memoir, “Cousins,” definitely does a lot of showing and practically no telling. Much of the information presented in that piece is implied, so that the reader must read between the lines to understand what is happening and what they are meant to learn from it. For instance, at the very end, the author gives a sense that something more happened the night her cousin left her in the middle of the night when they write, “And my eyes portrayed the thought of...’I am a fool for letting you leave like that. I should have never let my cousin leave in the middle of the night, off into a rain storm that was sure to obstruct the 1,300 mile journey that laid before her.’”

Despite these differences in the style in which each memoir was written, I still got a sense of truth-telling from both stories. Dunham’s story felt especially honest to me, especially since I have experience with therapy myself and could tell that her experience was authentic. In “Cousins,” the author also seems to tell the truth as evident by the raw emotions behind each word. With lines like “The whole thing just made me feel empty. Left wondering if this would ever be patched up” the author shows how much this incident affected them. Based on this, and especially the last passage about the look shared between the author and their cousin, I could tell this was a truthful tale.