I waited to watch "The Secret" until I could do it with my longtime friend Shoaleh. She lives about two hours away in Pennsylvania, and we've always shared an enthusiastic belief in the power of positive thinking, intentional meditation and everyday magic.

We rented the DVD the first night of my four-day visit, and watched with the giddiness of two 12-year-old boys scoring porn from a forgotten footlocker in the basement.  When it was over, she turned off the television and we sank back into the sofa cushions, exhaling in unison and digesting what we'd just seen.

"Wow." She said.

"Yeah," I nodded, my head all abuzz with conceptual data.  "This presents a potential problem for me though, Shoaleh.  I never thought about it before."

"What is it, honey?"

"Well, you know I believe whole-heartedly in what 'The Secret' says about your thoughts creating your reality.  We've both believed that for a long time."

"Yes, we have."

"They say 'what you think about, you bring about'.  If you insist on thinking negative thoughts, you're going to create a life that's full of annoyances and blocks and, well – just bad shit. Even if you don't buy into all this metaphysical stuff, the most pragmatic person in the world would have to admit that thinking about sad things will make you feel sad, and obsessing over stuff that pisses you off will only make you more pissed. It's just common sense."

"I hear you."

"So, okay.  I'm going to be spending the next nine to twelve months immersed in finishing my memoir manuscript, and I've only just BEGUN to tip-toe into the unpleasant stuff.  How am I going to write a memoir filled with bad memories without making my life in the 'now' completely depressing?"

She didn't have an answer.

"There must be some way to get through writing about a difficult past without letting it ruin your present."

I wondered if there was some concrete thing I could do to develop a sort of "memoirist's Teflon", a state wherein I could write about my most gut-wrenching memories in stinging detail, but be able to step away from the desk with every hair in place.

I have some tough stuff yet to face in my writing.  I don't look forward to reliving how I was completely disowned by my mother for a reason she fabricated in her squirrelly head.  Whatever happened to maternal instinct?  My mother turned her back on hers, and on me.  I don't relish the thought of recreating the debilitating panic attacks of my past, recounting every terrifying, undeniably physical, agonizing second of vertigo, hot flashes, hands enveloped in gloves of searing-hot needles and pins, the uncontrollable jack hammering of my heart, the cascades of phantom lightning bugs from inside my eyeballs.

So I thought maybe, just maybe, it was possible to create a healthy distance between me and my memories (and my writing ABOUT those memories) in order to stay sane.

After all, even in "The Secret", they address getting needlessly caught up in mass discontent over infuriating current events and drowning in world sorrow.  To those who might argue, "But I have to stay informed", one "Secret" philosopher agrees that yes, you should stay informed, but don't IMMERSE yourself in the bad news of the day.  In other words, don't internalize it and "be all about" it.  Sounded reasonable to me. Could I achieve a similar balance between my past and present?

But then again, I wondered if my writing might suffer with any "healthy distance" I'd create between me and my memories.  After all, getting down to the nitty-gritty always makes for the best possible writing.  I know I can always tell when an author has clung meekly to the outermost surface of a story.  The work is superficial and dissatisfying, it doesn't stick to the ribs.

This is my first memoir, and I'm only about halfway through the job.  So to get more insight into the psychological ramifications of writing a memoir, I decided to pick the brains of a few writers who'd gotten through the big bad memoir-writing process and lived to tell about it.

"Well, it was obviously no fun to dwell on painful memories – I got angry, I got sad, I got sentimental, and I got angry some more," Janice Erlbaum, author of Girlbomb told me. "But out of all the painful memories I had to re-encounter, it was especially hard for me to write about doing hard drugs, because I had to remember and recreate mental and physical sensations that I really didn't want to experience anymore. I'd find my heart pounding uncomfortably hard when I wrote about being on cocaine, or I'd get a paranoid, dissociated feeling when writing about taking acid. One night I was writing about doing coke, and I freaked out and called a friend and went straight to her apartment, because I didn't feel like I could stand to be alone right then. It was a very desperate, coked-up feeling."

Erin Vincent wrote her memoir Grief Girl about her parents being in a road accident when she was 14.

"I decided to write it in my teenage voice, so forced myself to relive everything," she said.  "I realize now that I retraumatized myself. Some days as I wrote, my body would be covered in hives. I went to the hospital one night with internal bleeding, felt exhausted most of the time…I became depressed for a while.  Some days I could only write for 15 minutes before needing a nap!"

Janice suffered some similar exhaustion and psychosomatic phenomena:

"I experienced a period of intense exhaustion, where I thought I had narcolepsy or leukemia or multiple sclerosis or something, because I'd be working on the book, and I'd get so dizzy and tired that I'd have to lay down on the floor by my desk and shut my eyes for a while."

But, Janice also says, "It got easier with each draft. The first draft was the hardest, and then I had to go deeper for the second draft. But I'd already had some practice in confronting the material, so at least none of it was a surprise anymore. By the third draft, I could see it as a story with characters, and not so much as real people and events. And now it's like someone else wrote it; it feels so distant from my current life."

David Matthews, author of Ace of Spades, had a completely different experience.

"I didn't find the process of writing about painful things to be inherently painful. I think that for me, I was cushioned a bit in that I was a writer who decided to write a memoir, rather than an individual who just wanted to tell my story. Being a writer enabled me to approach the subject matter as a work, rather than something that had happened 'to' me."

So there may be some hope of a painless process yet! But what if my memoir-writing experience does end up being as visceral as Janice or Erin's?  Will that really be such a bad thing?

"I had to revisit some very painful experiences, and own up to things I'd done that I really wasn't proud of," Janice admits. "But now that I've been honest about those things, I'm glad – writing the book helped me put a lot of old demons to rest."

Aside from getting some kind of personal pay-off from surviving an emotional writing journey, perhaps the trip will be more bearable if I get over myself and think of how the final product might serve someone else.  Wade Rouse, author of three memoirs including the forthcoming Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler, points out:

"(Writing a memoir is) not for the weak of heart, and there is great risk, not the least of which is emotionally. But you know by writing your truth you are helping someone else reach his. You also know that people will, undoubtedly, be hurt in some way, big or small, by what you are sharing. Still, the very best memoirs force us to hold up a collective mirror to our faces and take a good, long, hard look at our lives, even though they reflect someone else's."

It seems I had a decent hunch about tramping boldly into those darkest places for the sake of the work.  In order to write her memoir My One-Night Stand With Cancer, Tania Katan got visceral with her memories on purpose.

"In order to access all of the feelings around cancer, chemotherapy, toxic relationships and unsavory phlebotomists, I had to go back and experience all of those things in my body. I would sit with a stack of journals and start reading about being in the oncologist's office awaiting treatment, and that would trigger a vivid image of me in that space, and soon I was feeling the prick of the needle in my vein and tasting the bleach-like chemicals in my mouth. That's the only way for me to write an accurate description of what I went through and by doing so, I allow my audience to experience these things as if they're going through it, too."

Wade told me, "It's impossible to pen a memoir—about any piece of your life—by distancing yourself from your life. You must laugh, and cry, and scream, and writhe, just like you did the first time. That's when you know you're getting it right ... and real."

In the lame hope that by some miracle, I might still be able to emerge unscathed from writing a truly gripping memoir, I asked Erin: Do you think one sacrifices an intensity of writing by attempting to keep past emotions at a distance?

"Absolutely! That's why I immersed myself in my past. I wanted 'Grief Girl' to be raw and immediate. I wanted the reader to feel they are there with me."

Janice agreed.

"Unfortunately, I think you have to be a 'method writer' – you have to use your emotions in the same way actors do in order to perform well. You have to dredge up the ugly stuff and use it, or your writing will be flat."

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

So I guess I'll just have to batten down the hatches and hold on tight.  This is a ride I'm determined to take, and I want to bring forth the most remarkable work I have in me.  I'm willing to dig deep.  I'm certainly willing to sob and pummel pillows.  Admittedly, though, I'm not sure I want to relive panic, anxiety and terror.  Surely there are SOME things I can do to minimize the trauma and stay positive.

Janice confided, "I've been in therapy for the last eleven years; my book is dedicated to my shrink, Judith.  There's no way I could have come to a place in my life where I was stable and happy and motivated enough to tackle this project had I not been in therapy. She cheered me through the draft, and held my hand through the really hard parts."

Therapy was also helpful to Tania, "both creatively and personally. It doesn't hurt to learn about yourself in-depth when you're trying to write about yourself in-depth, you know?"

Janice found other ways to keep the more bleak aspects of her memoir from coloring her here-and-now (which may be especially helpful if you can't afford a therapist):

"I tried to have as much fun in the present as possible. And I tried to treat writing like it was any other job. I set goals, and rewarded myself for working hard."

"My advice would be to think of the protagonist of your memoir as a character, rather than as a literal (no pun intended) version of yourself," David suggested. "The protagonist (who only happens to be you) suffers, laughs, loves—the writer (who also only happens to be you) records these events in an exciting, meaningful, and truthful way. You're the court stenographer."

Tania had a great idea:

"Keep two journals. One is the Emotional Journal. The other is the Writing Journal. Allow yourself the freedom to write all of the feelings and fucked up thoughts you have in your Emotional Journal without editing. Let the words sit for a bit, then go back and read. See how fucked up you were just a few days ago. Smile and relish in the fact that you have grown. Now get dressed and grab your Writing Journal and start crafting a coherent story. When you feel like you are not being true to the emotional content of your story, go back to your Emotional Journal and access the real, raw stuff. But whatever you do, don't mistake one journal for the other. Both serve a purpose. One is a soliloquy and the other is a dialogue."

Since Wade's first memoir America's Boy was composed of short chapters and vignettes from his life, he says he "tried to intersperse the difficult parts with big doses of humor, and memories of good times. That helped me come back from the abyss many times."

Wade's experience is a reminder that I'm not required to write my first draft in any prescribed order.  I don't have to write chronologically or linearly.  When I get through a rough chapter, I'm free to give myself a break by working on a "fun part" before I dive into another harrowing event from the past.  I'm in control.  (Why is that so hard to remember?)

After Shoaleh and I watched "The Secret" that night, I went to bed with a somewhat troubled mind.  But I had an enlightening dream.  When I woke the next morning, it was still clear and prominent in my mind.  I ran my lazy oversleeping butt downstairs to the kitchen where Shoaleh was making breakfast.

"I dreamt about my memoir!" I jumped up and down like it was Christmas morning.  "I dreamt that every other chapter was written as a letter.  They were letters to me in the past, from me as I am today.  I told myself all the things I wished I could have known back then.  And I assured myself that everything was going to turn out okay – that I already had everything I needed to survive inside me.  Isn't that amazing?!"

What memoirists like Janice, Tania, David, Erin and Wade have shared with me only reaffirms what I think I already knew.  My fellow memoirist-in-the-making Mary Elizabeth said it best:

"...as you're writing and reliving things, you're deeply aware that you got through them."

Hey…that's right.  I got THROUGH my past!  I made it! I made it all the way to HERE – and mentally, I'm not too badly equipped, if I may say so.

I've got everything I need to make the journey back again.  I know the terrain.  In fact, I'm the world's foremost expert on my past!  Plus, I'm going back armed with the insight of age and experience.  I've got my own experience, and the travel tales that "been-there" memoirists have been kind enough to share.

In addition to the brilliant advice of our above-mentioned memoirists, I'm realizing there's something else I can do to stay positive and happy while slogging through an uneasy past.

When I'm away from the writing and research, I will no longer waste a single minute worrying about what my memoir "might" make me feel.  It's counterproductive; a total waste of energy.  There are some things I'm willing to feel again and some things that give me trepidation.  But it's nothing I haven't felt before.  And I know more now than I did the first time I felt the feelings.  As far as I'm concerned, that gives me a major advantage.

Besides, the difficulty of writing an emotionally-charged memoir varies from one writer to another.  Who knows, maybe I've processed enough of my past already to get through the recording of it with relative ease.

If anybody can get me through the jungle of My Past alive—it's ME.  And remembering this, I believe, will be the secret to success.

Want to read more?  My complete, uncut interviews with Janice Erlbaum, Erin Vincent, David Matthews, Wade Rouse, Tania Katan and Mary Elizabeth are posted on here.