Kitty Axelson-Berry, who founded Modern Memoirs in 1994, also published her own memoir entitled The Hill: Letting Go of It in 2018. The following year, she retired and sold the company to the current owners, Megan and Sean St. Marie. In this two-part blog series, we asked Axelson-Berry to reflect first on her personal experience with writing a memoir and, second, on her experience launching and growing a successful memoir publishing company. Part 1 appears below; look for Part 2 next month.
1. Your memoir focuses on your “back to the land” years, which began in the 1970s. Though you initially pushed away from society (“disengaging from the rich, powerful, complicated entanglements with the military-industrial world”), you ended up being drawn to and forming a relationship with the land itself. How did this connection to the place help shape your memoir?
Kitty Axelson-Berry: I’ve toned down my rhetoric since 1971, but I still push back against accepting the status quo! I went to last week’s protest against the Supreme Court’s draft decision to prevent so many women from having control over their bodies.
How could I NOT have formed a relationship with the land, I ask you? Our gutsy determination and mix of cynicism and optimism carried us through at great personal cost. I struggled on the land every day to get to a road, to dig down between tree stumps and boulders for water, to cut and haul wood, to fail at growing our food, to be thirsty, to be frustrated with the weather, the darkness, the freezing rain.... It was a love-hate relationship. The shape of the memoir probably attests to that love-hate relationship on many pages, but what really shaped it is the same thing that inspired me to write it: I wanted to let go of my deep connection with the land, put it to rest. So the memoir was a bereavement ballad from start to finish, although I never got around to the ballad part.
2. You discuss the tension between “privacy versus what I consider information-sharing and networking” as a theme in your life. Many memoirists struggle with what to include in their books and what to leave out. How did you decide?
Kitty Axelson-Berry: That is one of a thousand themes in my life, and the context was about my cross-cultural marriage, actually. My family of origin was more expressive and free-flowing; my ex-husband’s was more reserved and very private. In my family, we swapped information and it wasn’t considered a “sin.” In memoirs, decisions about whether to include or leave something or someone out are difficult, and although my instinct at the beginning was that of a news reporter, I modified it after reading Family Secrets: How Telling and Not Telling Affect Our Children, Our Relationships, and Our Lives by Harriet Webster. (It’s listed as a resource on the Modern Memoirs website.) My recollection is that Webster’s analysis is wide-ranging and insightful. So for our clients, I learned to be somewhat circumspect. But for myself, I probably erred on the side of sharing too much.
3. In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, author Jill Ker Conway points out, “Traditionally there has only been one female autobiography for every eight written by a male.” Did this fact help motivate you to write yours, or influence what you wrote about?
Kitty Axelson-Berry: Not at all! But I’ve kept aware of research and ideas about why more women don’t write memoirs. To some extent, it seems to be much harder to write about daily life that doesn't have major ups and downs and doesn’t have big, public successes (or failures). Instead, many hours are traditionally spent doing household chores, perhaps practicing fortitude and patience, events (non-events) which certainly don’t write themselves. Another interesting thing is that women, even highly accomplished or successful women, have had a tendency in the past to attribute their successes to something other than their own agency, usually luck. This includes Jane Addams (her autobiography is discussed in the Zinsser book), who in 1931 became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and never took credit for her successes. She attributed her work to being lucky—she just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But I think this is changing, thankfully. Greta Thunberg and other women activists, Nancy Pelosi and other women politicians claim their own agency.
4. In your book, you describe the “torture” of writing a memoir. Why was it so difficult?
Kitty Axelson-Berry: Writing is difficult, period. It’s difficult for nearly everyone I know of, so it’s a matter of degree. And writing a memoir is personal, with too much material to select from and too many people (living and dead) to consider. I think it’s better for people to be authentic in their memoirs and not try to be someone else. I don’t know if you still encounter this, but we used to have a fair number of potential clients who wanted to hire us to turn their dry memoirs into something funny and heroic, but we aren’t ghostwriters. I wrote my memoir for myself alone, and it was like an exorcism in a sense. I hoped no one else would ever read it, but apparently you read it. Hopefully you opened it up randomly and skipped around.
I was being loose, colloquial when I wrote about writing being “torture,” by the way. It isn’t torture and I hope that isn’t a trigger for anyone.
5. In the end, what was the reward? What did you gain from writing your book?
Kitty Axelson-Berry: It has been astonishingly helpful on an emotional and mental level. I’ve read so much about memoirs and seen so much of clients’ joy, but this feat is over the top and long-lasting, and I am experiencing it personally. My goal of putting the land and those three decades to rest was met. I love being free to appreciate that land and those years, in their glory and despair, from a distance. And I want to add that it’s a relief to have certain photos and data about what happened when, and what so-and-so’s birthday is, in a single accessible place.