The Responsibility of Being Yourself

On Writing a Memoir, and Reading the Truth That Comes Back

“It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself.

It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

— Sylvia Plath

My life was seriously topsy-turvy.

Writing my memoir is the hardest writing I’ve ever done. And the simplest. Simple, because the truth doesn’t require invention. Hard, because it refuses to look away. It sits there staring you in the face.

Most writing lets you hide. You can slip behind a character, a narrator, an invented world, a convenient metaphor. You can shape-shift. I’m a master at shape-shifting. My memoir became about why. My memoirs led me to an uncomfortable place.

The Difficulty Isn’t in the Telling. It’s in the Reading.

The words come easily enough. They always have. Childhood scenes break open like old film reels. Cities I lived in return with their smells, textures, dangers, surprising kindnesses. My father walking through a foreign airport. A street fight in Johannesburg. The sound of a distant train. The way loneliness felt at twelve, and again at twenty-two, and sometimes still.

Writing it down isn’t the problem. Reading it is.

Reading it requires acknowledging how much I did not understand at the time. How much was taken in without explanation. How much shaped me before I had the language to resist or accept it.

There is a strange sensation when you meet the earlier versions of yourself. The brave one. The terrified one. The reckless one. The boy who kept moving continents. The teenager playing in punk bars at night and working opera during the day. The man who kept reinventing himself because standing still felt dangerous.

Writing this book means inviting them all back into the room. Some days, that room feels crowded. It is easier to be someone else.

Or no one at all.

Easier to stay busy, to stay loud, to stay productive, to stay masked in the architecture of your career. Easier to be the person other people think you are—a version polished by introduction lines, bios, and decades of improvising competence.

But the memoir asks something different. It asks for the unarmored version.

The human one. The flawed one. The one who doesn’t always get the tempo right, or worse plays behind the beat lost in my head.

It asks you to honor the songlines of your own life—not the mythology, but the actual trail you walked. The notes you missed. The harmonies you found. The surprising chords that changed everything. It’s a ridiculously complicated score to sight read.

There’s a moment in the writing when the whole thing goes quiet. No performing. No explaining. No defending. Just telling. And that’s when the truth arrives.

“This is what happened. Will you let it be real?” A tough confrontation.

The memoir isn’t a confession. It’s an act of clarity. Supposedly. It’s a temptation too. Tweak this or that. And in the end it’s not reality. How could it be? Some of these days I write about are seven decades ago. Understanding how to let those memories roam free with intention is the greatest challenge of all hands off. Let it be.

The hard part is letting others read It. It disappears into a black hole. I never hear from people who read it. Not a word. It’s way too intimate a moment to share. TMI. My wife hasn’t read a word. Makes for a healthier relationship. It’s writing that needs to be judged by strangers.

Once others can read it, they can know you. Not the public story. Not the curated version. But you. Your fears. Your contradictions. Your deceptions. Your failures. Your strange gifts and the crooked pathways that made them.

It is a hell of a responsibility to be yourself.

But I’m learning, page by page. To let the past stop hiding in boxes and notebooks. To see the shape of a life that has moved through continents, catastrophes, reinventions, and music—always music.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s the granddaughter who reminds me daily that stories outlive us. Maybe it’s the world, which feels increasingly algorithmic and disembodied, tugging me toward my own human center. Our humanity is dying. It feels like that some days. Being vulnerable feels like the only choice. I’m not the kind of human to sit in a chair surrounded by awards and call it day. I want to engage with every drop of my humanity I have. I want to take it out and examine it and see what new story it wants to tell.