Such decisions are never easy, and Michelberg had to bravely face the backlash to her decision from friends and foes with courage and resolve. She was able to not just carry on, which she likened to Dorey’s “Just keep swimming” advice in Finding Nemo, but to make a brave but unpopular choice for her husband’s long-term care needs so that she and their children could live complete lives. In Crash: How I Became a Reluctant Caregiver, Rachel Michelberg finds bravery she didn’t know she had after her husband was severely disabled in a plane crash. Her bravery was one of changing the expectations for herself, and stepping fully into her dream, even before she had realized it. She invoked her mentors – Elizabeth Gilbert and Oprah – and literally willed herself onto the stage with them to get their support for her journey and show herself that she could do anything she tried. In Butterfly Awakening: A Memoir of Transformation Through Grief, Meg Nocero writes about leaving a lucrative legal career to pursue one of speaking and inspiring women, even though she was still developing her own bravery to do that for others in the midst of grief about losing her mother. Running on pure chutzpah, the scrappy, irreverent group of eight persevered for 13 years despite a lack of mainstream success, illuminating what women and feminists were up against. In Anarchy in High Heels, Denise Larsen tells the tale of starting a feminist comedy theatre troupe from scratch in the 1970s and not only bravely challenging traditional resistance to women in comedy, but flying in the face of the feminist approved sense of humor at the time. In each of these recent memoirs or biographies, women challenged how they were expected to behave, and in some cases, took a lot of flack for it. For women, being brave often means going against the standard societal expectations for women and against those people, whether strangers or family, who are upholding those expectations. We must bravely face the judgement of others. We can be praised or attacked, not just for our writing, but for what we actually did in our lives.
To publish a memoir, we have to “let the words fall out” about our own lives and then stand behind them, embrace and sometimes defend them.
Memoirists know what it means to be brave. In her song, Brave, Sara Bareilles sing s, “I wonder what would happen if you say what you wanna say.
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