in real life

Ah late January when it feels like it will be 45 degrees and raining for all the rest of our lives. When our early enthusiasm for shiny New Year's resolutions has given way to feelings of 'I want to stay in and eat/ drink the contents of the cabinets including the baking chocolate and the vermouth that's leftover from the time we decided to get into martinis even though we don't like them.'

Readers, I don't want to get up in the mornings to work on my novel. Any more than I want to do any of the long list of ambitious and worthy things I laid out for myself as goals when I was on vacation in the desert right before new year's. It was warm there guys! And sun-shiny! And planning to do things whilst drinking a mojito by the pool is way easier than you know, doing them. 

But something other than this mid-winter inertia inhibits me too, I realize as I roll over to smack my snooze button to high heaven every other morning. Fear.  

My new project is set to be a bit more ambitious than my last few novels because it's going to be good deal more personal. The relationships and experiences that inspired and fueled my past novels were fascinating ones in my life but ultimately fleeting. Now I mean to write about something that cuts much deeper. I can only imagine all the nerve endings I will hit along the way and I must admit, I'm a little scared to go to that place. Even though I know I'm ready, even though I know it will be cathartic, even though it's only fiction and I'm not naming names. 

I want to know from those of you who've done it: how, how do you survive the experience of writing a memoir?