03. Notes on Craft with Lily Dunn - Part 1
Writing the self: memoir, memory, and craft
I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Lily Dunn to my Notes in Craft series. Lily is the author of Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling, a deeply personal memoir that explores family secrets, spiritual manipulation, and self-discovery. Her compelling narrative blends intimate storytelling with sharp literary insight, making her memoir a masterclass in creative non-fiction. Her second book, Into Being: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform, is forthcoming in 2025, and you can subscribe to ’s Substack newsletter to know more.
Memoir occupies a unique space in literature – intimate, unruly, and deeply revealing. In Sins of My Father, Lily Dunn chronicles her relationship with a charismatic but destructive father, exploring the profound impact of his choices on her own life.
Lily and I first connected through a discussion about crafting compelling scenes on my Substack. Her thoughtful comments on narrative momentum and emotional resonance sparked a conversation that naturally evolved into this interview. With her upcoming Memoir Bootcamp course at London Lit Lab, I’m excited to discuss with Lily her writing process, the challenges of writing a memoir, and how she guides others through the art of telling personal stories. Her reflections offer a rare glimpse into the emotional and creative demands of memoir.
I’m sharing our conversation in two parts; you can expect Part 2, which continues this exploration, on 4th January.
ND: Memoir sometimes requires imagining scenes or events you didn’t directly witness. How did you approach these moments while ensuring emotional and narrative integrity? Did you feel a responsibility to signal this to the reader, or did the emotional truth take precedence?
LD: Yes, good question. There are a few scenes that I did not personally witness. The most telling one is at the start, when I imagine my father opening an email to a Russian scam. In the early drafts of Sins of My Father I was convinced I had started in the right place – I am in my living room with my baby daughter, and she crawls towards me while I take a phone call from my mother telling me my father has died. It felt like the perfect conflict of life and death in a single moment, my father’s death giving way to the blossoming of new life and my determination to parent differently – to protect my daughter from his influence, his legacy (little did I know!). But my partner, who is a screenwriter felt I needed to start in a different place.
My father was embroiled in a scam, when he lost a lot of money, and it was the event that preceded his downfall to full-blown alcoholism. I was there in the hotel room when the Russians came to take away his money (money they had convinced him he needed to give them in order to release the money which apparently was his due), but I wasn’t there when he returned to the US to set out on his mission to drink himself to death, and I also wasn’t there in the outset when that email would have first come in.
But I did have the question – why did my dad fall for this age-old scam, an intelligent, savvy businessman? Trying to enter into his mindset when he clicks on that email was part of my attempt to answer that question, which justified it in my imagination. But because I am writing nonfiction, and therefore I must speak the truth, and above all be a reliable narrator, I told my readers that I was imagining it. In fact, I think those are the opening words – I imagine that the fog had lifted, that it was a bright morning when my father dragged himself from the bed.
ND: Memoir often serves as a form of personal investigation. How did the act of writing Sins of My Father change or deepen your understanding of your family’s story? Did the writing process offer you any unexpected insights or resolutions?
LD: Yes, the writing and researching process was incredibly transformative for me in my understanding of my father and my relationship with him, but also as a form of acceptance, even forgiveness in the end. I do think creating story from life experience is cathartic as I explored in one of your questions above, because of the process of objectification: the degrees of separation from initial raw experience, which lives inside of you, to feeling associative emotion; finding a way to articulate it on the page, transformed into words, ink, on a screen, or on paper, away from you; to crafting it; it then existing in a book; on a shelf for others to read and be touched by in wholly personal ways, before feeding back to you. This is healing in itself, or has the capacity to change your relationship with the source of the story.
I feel so strongly about the transformative power of memoir that I wrote a book about it – Into Being: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform (forthcoming, MUP, 2025). It is an indulgence in many ways to spend so much time writing, thinking, reading around a personal part of your history. I like to align it with therapy, only you don’t have to pay for it (although you do pay for it in time, of course). But like with therapy the simple act of stopping and paying attention to something, holding it up to the light and looking at it from multiple perspectives, helps you view it from outside of yourself – and seeing it from outside of the self allows for compassion and empathy, which is what memoir is about in the end. So yes, all of this is transformative, and wholly satisfying.
ND: Memoir is about shaping lived experience into meaning. How did you decide where your memoir should end? Did you find emotional closure through the writing process – or was the end simply a new beginning?
LD: I love this question! I remember sitting in the pub with my partner as we were emerging out of lockdown. We were in the garden. And I had a sudden image of my father as a little boy standing on the step of his boarding school, crying as his parents walked away. He often relayed this moment to me, as the point when he had felt most abandoned. But the image had expanded in my imagination in my attempt to find meaning in the madness of his betrayal of us all those years before. I realised sitting there talking to my partner that my father’s inability to parent me and my brother, to love us or receive our love, was rooted in this moment because he was too busy putting his arms around that abandoned child to see much beyond it. I began to cry. This felt like a moment of forgiveness, and I had a profound sense that it was to be the end of my book.
But when this moment didn’t quite land with my editor in the same way it had with me, I was able to peel back one more layer, to look beyond it – she was concerned that my readers might feel let down by my willingness to forgive my father because of this trauma from his childhood. That his betrayals went deeper than this, that in many ways they were unforgiveable. This was another transformative moment in the writing of the book because there were things a perceptive editor could see that I was far too close to the story to see myself. There was certainly emotional closure in writing Sins of My Father, but closure doesn’t mean a closing of doors. In many ways it means laying something to rest, in order to wake up to something new, something else that needs your attention and which was perhaps clouded by all that had come before. Writing this memoir allowed me to move on from the insidious influence of a narcissistic father, and start to get to know myself.
For those inspired by our conversation, consider joining Lily’s Memoir Bootcamp course at London Lit Lab, where she’ll guide you through the art of writing and shaping your personal story. You can learn more about the course here.
And, to receive Part 2 of our conversation, as well as future posts, writing advice and online courses, please consider subscribing.
Until next time,
Nataliya x
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