I’ve had a lot of memoir ghostwriting clients where, as I write and they edit the pages, it becomes clear they have a bit of a hidden agenda– they want to use the book to wallow in some sour grapes. For instance:
- I went through hell and didn’t get enough support from the people who should have been there for me
- My ex treated me badly
- A particular government official is corrupt
- Society doesn’t appreciate my type of person enough
All of these are actually perfectly reasonable topics for a book. So, if your ghostwritten memoir is about one of these topics, that’s not sour grapes; that’s the book’s central conflict. For instance, if the story is about you escaping an abusive relationship, then your ex-spouse’s bad treatment of you is relevant to the plot of a story where the spouse is the antagonist. Or if it’s about your quest for justice against some external foe—there will be antagonists who need to be called out for their evil doings, and that’s part of the story.
Legitimate Memoirs versus “Sour Grapes” Stories
Sour grapes, on the other hand, is when you have a ghostwritten memoir about your personal growth through a difficult period of your life and then, in the middle of it, you can’t resist throwing a couple of jabs at people you’re still angry at. With sour grapes, the jab is completely aside from the story’s central conflict. What you do is write a cutting remark or two into the text and move on, kind of as if it never happened. It reads as if you have something you need to say to a particular person and don’t have the guts to say it to their face. But now, your innocent reader has to pay the price for that by basically listening to you whine.
Good Memoir Conflict Moves Forward. It Doesn’t Wallow.
Sour grapes Is a version of what my mother used to call “feeling sorry for yourself.” Whenever I’d whine about something, she’d accuse me of this and I remember thinking, well if I don’t feel sorry for myself, who will? But now, I get it: feeling sorry for yourself is where you’ve grabbed on to some injustice and you’re looping it in your brain, amplifying it and pouring salt in the wound, more and more, over time. We do this in a ghostwritten memoir, frankly, because it makes us feel superior to the bad person who wronged us. That’s a nice feeling, after all. If we’re honest, who doesn’t want to feel superior? But the drawback is it reveals you as someone who can’t get over disappointment, betrayal, injustice, humiliation, and you can’t move on. In short, it makes you, the narrator, seem kind of annoying. Again, if you-not-being-able-to-get-over-your-sour-grapes is the plot of the story, then that’s not sour grapes. Sour grapes is where you make little jabs at people that aren’t necessary to keep the story on track.
Inspiring Sympathy in Memoir Readers
If you think readers will sympathize with your sour grapes, you’re probably wrong, even if your complaints are perfectly legit. That’s because you’re using memoir–a forum for telling stories about personal growth–and using it for the purpose of revenge, instead, which makes readers feel used. At the same time, you don’t have to emerge from the memoir victorious and changed forever and on top of the world. Not every story is heroic. But if you sprinkle those little sour grapes comments throughout the book, then no matter what statement you make about yourself on the last page, it’s the annoying sour grapes comments readers will remember. Being realistic, we all have some sour grapes about stuff that has happened. That’s natural. As writers, though, our challenge is to leave them out of our memoirs. It’s not dishonest to do so. It’s just good editing.