I Think It Happened This Way: What the Personal Essay Gains from What We Forget

Personal essays often begin with a moment of memory—a childhood smell, a fragment of dialogue, the atmosphere of a long-forgotten afternoon. Yet one of the most persistent fears for many nonfiction writers is this: What if I don’t remember it right? What if the details are fuzzy? What if I’m misremembering the timeline, the conversations, or even the emotion? In a genre that claims truth as its currency, uncertainty can feel like failure.

But in fact, unreliable memory is not an obstacle—it’s a gateway. The slipperiness of memory is not just a permissible element of personal essays; it’s a powerful tool. Rather than striving for photographic accuracy, great essayists interrogate memory itself, using gaps, distortions, and doubts as fertile creative ground. And this is precisely where a publishing consultant can become an invaluable ally: not only helping you shape the content of your essay, but encouraging a more nuanced understanding of what “truth” can look like in personal writing.

Memory is not a static archive. It is active, fluid, constantly rewritten with every act of remembering. Neuroscience supports this: each time we recall something, our brain modifies the memory slightly, layering new meaning onto the old experience. In personal essays, we often reach for emotional truth rather than journalistic certainty, and that emotional resonance can be built even—or especially—through the uncertainty of the recollection itself.

Some of the most compelling personal essays begin with a writer acknowledging the unreliability of their own memory. Lidia Yuknavitch opens her memoir The Chronology of Water by stating, “The day my daughter died I was in the shower... I think.” With those two words—I think—she signals something important: the experience is real, but the recollection may be fragmented, dreamlike, distorted. And rather than being disqualified by that distortion, her narrative gains power through it. The emotional truth of the loss comes through not in exact sequence but in sensation, texture, and reflection.

A skilled publishing consultant can help you embrace that ambiguity rather than fear it. Especially for writers new to the genre, there’s a natural temptation to over-explain—to rationalize the gaps, to smooth over contradictions in memory, to offer unnecessary disclaimers. But a consultant who understands the creative potential of uncertainty can help you lean into the emotional and philosophical possibilities of those gaps. They might ask, What does the uncertainty reveal? What does it mean that this is how you remember it? These questions shift the focus from accuracy to meaning, from verification to insight.

Writers like Sarah Manguso, in her work Ongoingness, explore the very concept of forgetting as a kind of narrative frame. Her obsession with documenting her life in journals eventually becomes its own subject, and the inability to preserve memory becomes a paradoxical kind of clarity. In her sparse, elliptical prose, the reader feels the ache of time slipping away—and that ache is more powerful than any precise chronology. A publishing consultant might help a writer like Manguso identify these thematic undercurrents early in the drafting process and build a structure that magnifies them.

Another reason writers fear imprecise memory is that they believe it weakens their credibility. But often, it does the opposite. When an author openly admits, “I’m not sure if this happened in 1993 or 1995, but I remember the light on the wall like a bruise,” the reader leans in. That vulnerability, that effort to be transparent about what can be known and what must be imagined, builds trust. A publishing consultant—especially one familiar with narrative nonfiction markets—can help you find the balance between integrity and imagination, between transparency and artistry.

Of course, memory’s unreliability isn’t just a cognitive issue—it’s also shaped by culture, trauma, power, and psychology. For writers dealing with painful histories, particularly those involving abuse, systemic oppression, or family dysfunction, memory may arrive in fragments, or not at all. The publishing world has historically been suspicious of these fragmentary accounts, sometimes demanding more linearity, more “evidence.” A publishing consultant with sensitivity to these dynamics can serve as a crucial advocate, helping the writer preserve the integrity of their lived experience while navigating the commercial realities of the memoir and essay market.

In such cases, form becomes one of the writer’s most important tools. A consultant might suggest experimenting with collage structure, nonlinear timelines, or hybrid forms—formats that mirror the very nature of fractured memory. Braided essays, in particular, allow multiple threads to run parallel—perhaps one rooted in memory, another in research or cultural commentary, and another in reflection. These layered forms not only accommodate uncertainty; they make it central. And with careful guidance, the form itself becomes a kind of meaning-making device, one that helps both writer and reader find shape within the haze.

Sometimes, working with a consultant also means pushing past overly tidy narrative resolutions. Many novice essayists, especially those writing about memory, try to draw conclusive lessons too early. A good consultant may challenge that impulse, asking: Is the insight genuine, or is it imposed? What happens if you leave the question open-ended? This insistence on thematic honesty—even in the absence of narrative closure—can be one of the most transformative aspects of the consulting relationship.

Writing about memory is not about retrieving fixed facts—it’s about constructing emotional experiences. It’s about revealing who you were, who you thought you were, and who you are now in light of that. The question is not did it happen exactly this way, but what does this moment mean to you now, and how can that meaning shape the reader’s own understanding of human experience? That’s the work of the personal essay. And a thoughtful publishing consultant can help you do that work more fully—by asking the right questions, helping you shape your manuscript’s structure, and guiding you through an industry that is increasingly interested in essays that value voice, complexity, and emotional truth.

So if you find yourself staring at a half-written essay and wondering whether you’ve “earned the right” to tell this story because the memories feel blurred or incomplete, consider this: you have already earned the right by remembering. The haziness is not a disqualification—it’s your invitation. It is what makes the writing worth doing.

And it might just be the part that your reader remembers most.