ABSTRACT
Autoethnographical qualitative research includes personal narrative, researching the researcher, storytelling, autobiography, performance, and memoir writing, using carefully focused language and inquiry with the intention of finding meaning in the experience of being human. Memoir writing style navigates a nonlinear trajectory, following memories as they arise, scattered and out of order. Memoir writers struggle ‘for the emotional truth of the memory, finding perspective, and making meaning of that particular slice of a life. Memoir offered a new method to assimilate experiences and begin to shift a few wounds to wisdom. Memoir can provide this healing place as the phenomena of traumatized memory gets attention by the writer and is not dependent upon outside acceptance or correction. Through the task of self-reflection and writing, a memoirist must, most importantly, be alert to the reality of distortion. D. L. Schacter presents numerous problems of perception due to issues of memory: ‘transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence’.
