04. Notes on Craft with Lily Dunn - Part 2
on the messy and rewarding dance between memory and meaning
In Part 1 of our conversation, explored the raw and often contradictory process of memoir writing – where personal history meets the art of storytelling. She spoke candidly about navigating the tension between exposing and protecting herself, the craft of shaping memory into narrative, and the ethical complexities of writing about family. If you missed it, you can catch up here.
In this second part, Lily Dunn moves beyond the mechanics of memoir to its transformative potential. From confronting the emotional truths that emerge in the process to facing rejection with unflinching determination, she unpacks the deeper shifts that writing can catalyse. For anyone curious about the messy, rewarding dance between memory and meaning, Lily’s reflections will resonate.
Nataliya Deleva: Lily, memoir often demands an intense level of personal exposure. When writing Sins of My Father, how did you navigate the tension between vulnerability and self-protection? I found writing about domestic abuse in my own work incredibly difficult – deciding how much to reveal and how much to keep private was a constant challenge. Were there moments when you felt you had shared too much – or perhaps held back too tightly?
Lily Dunn: Sins of My Father is essentially about my relationship with a charismatic and damaged father, and one which had dominated much of my life in negative ways. Because of this, the book kind of emerged out of necessity, over a long period of time. It started as a series of essays that were published in Granta and Aeon, and then morphed into a book. The first essay spilled out of me when I was stumbling towards my marriage breakup, and I was in a heightened state of pain and grief, and didn’t really give it that much thought, strangely.
My father had been dead a while and my mother and brother were supportive of my writing. When I was drafting the book itself, I wrote a lot more about my marriage than made it into the final draft and I was grateful for that, as I wanted to protect my husband and my children.
Now I am venturing into writing a third memoir (my second one, Into Being, is a kind of memoir / craft book on how to write memoir and is due to be published in autumn 2025), I feel much more cautious than I did first time round. I think this is because it is far more up close and personal – this one is about me leaving my marriage – and also that I know what it feels like to have your personal life out there in the world, read by strangers.
I found post publication of Sins far more painful than the writing itself. It was almost like I was driven by something beyond me when writing Sins of My Father, and maybe there was a recklessness in that. I’m not sure.
ND: Memory is rarely linear, yet memoirs must still be structured into a cohesive narrative. How did you shape the timeline of your story? Were there specific points where the interplay between past and present became challenging to manage?
LD: I love this question, because I find this the most interesting aspect of memoir – and it’s often the memoirs that are consciously aware of the fallibility of memory, and the way it might creep up on us, or grasp us by the throat, or not be the least bit reliable, which I most enjoy.
I, like many writers, had written fiction before turning to memoir, and so hadn’t really got my head around the importance of the retrospective voice of ‘now’, the narrator (me) sitting at my desk with all I have come to understand and know, venturing into telling this story from the past. My early drafts were written with the immediacy of fiction, because scene setting and ‘show, don’t tell’ was how I had learned to write.
But once I had gained in confidence, in my voice, but also my intention – how was I going to tell this story? – I was able to ‘lean into the narrative’ as author Marina Benjamin puts it. And by leaning into the narrative, I could identify with the narrator of ‘now’, and the reasons she was telling this story. From that solid unmovable position, I could jump any which way into the past, into the present, even into the future. Of course, not everyone writes memoir like this, but I do think the form lends itself to this kind of weaving and diving, and it feels more in line with the nature of memory, than writing a straight chronological narrative.
ND: Memoir lives in the space between fact and emotional truth. How did you reconcile factual accuracy with the emotional truth of your experiences? Did you ever face dilemmas about how much ‘truth’ to include?
LD: This is an interesting one, isn’t it? Because we have those myths from our lives – the stories that are shared within a family, memories that become fact simply by the nature of their repetition. I became very aware of this when I was writing, particularly when I began to ask my mother and brother to corroborate those stories, and spending time with them often showed up their flaws.
As a writer of nonfiction, we must be true to the facts of what happened, in as much as they can be proven. This can simply be bare facts: dates of significant events, holidays taken, the year you started going to school. And then there is that vast landscape of speculation, which often stems from emotion.
But often readers are drawn to memoir because of the author’s emotional connection to the subject. It’s the emotion that gives a narrative power, and of course emotion is faulted often, unpredictable, hard to pin down. No, I don’t think I worried about how much truth to include. One of the reasons I am drawn to memoir is because it enables me to be truthful – up front and personal in a direct and sometimes confronting way – and certainly in the case of writing Sins of My Father, which is about my relationship with a compulsive liar, someone who learned early in his life to lie in order to get his way, it felt imperative to be bold with the truth, and to write it in as honest and open a way as possible.
ND: Writing about family and close relationships can be fraught with ethical complexity. How did you handle writing about your loved ones? Were there specific boundaries you set for yourself?
LD: Yes, agreed, and this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for writers of memoir. I found it helpful to engage with the ‘storytelling’ aspect of what I was writing, and I don’t mean to trivialise the story by saying this. What I mean is that the more I crafted the memoir, the more the story became something that stood on its own feet, separate from its maker.
I wanted to write a beautiful book – lyrical, poignant, well structured – which would elevate it, and separate it from the original experience. Part of the crafting was finding names, or personas, for the characters. My mother, father and brother are never named, and other characters had made up names which were aligned with their personalities – I had a boyfriend who was very tall and rangy, with shoulders like coat-hangers and knees like a tabletop, and I called him the Great Dane.
ND: As you prepare to teach Memoir Bootcamp, what is one craft principle you find yourself returning to often when guiding memoir writers?
LD: As I mentioned above, it’s probably identifying that voice of the ‘now’ – from where do I write this memoir and why? I think once you can identify this, the story begins to fall into place. For some, this happens quite easily and naturally – maybe there is an event that has happened in the present day, which has prompted you to look back into the past – while for others it can take many years of living with the material before you find that determining factor, or that voice of wisdom which has earned the right to tell the story.
ND: The ‘messy middle’ is something every writer faces. What strategies helped you push through creative blocks or moments of doubt while writing your memoir?
LD: Gosh I had so many moments like this. I even lost an agent over my memoir. I think there were a few things that helped. When the writing was flagging and I wasn’t sure how to forge ahead, I would return to photographs, diaries and letters, as a way of keeping the past alive, and also reminding me of things forgotten. As well as the essays I worked on a number of vignettes that captured certain moments from my past, all of which found publishers. I think this really helped keep up my momentum. When I was dumped by my agent, who blamed the book – ‘It will never sell,’ she said – I didn’t believe her. I really believed in my book, and I knew it was good.
I also knew it was an important story. It wasn’t simply a book about my dad, it was about a whole generation of people who chose self-development and a kind of quasi-spiritualism – what writer Tim Guest called ‘the wandering tribe’ – at the expense of their families and children, and the fallout was huge. Because I believed in it and perhaps also in part because of the rejection from my agent, I plugged on and did not give up. And I really believe that determination is what makes a writer, beyond anything else. If you have this with talent all the better!
But I am so glad I did, because out of my book’s publication and the brilliant publicity it received – it was Guardian Book of the Year, 2022, and was reviewed widely – a documentary was made about those children who became the collateral damage of their parent’s neglect. It’s called Children of the Cult, and you can view it on ITV catch up.
A reminder for those interested in 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 sign up for the course here. Lily Dunn’s craft book on how to write memoir, Into Being, is due to be published in autumn 2025. Subscribe to her Substack to find out when the book is out to pre-order.
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