As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence.

These words "accessible" and "emotionally available" get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers - or the reverse - if it's not all goo-ey and sentimental we're told it's "cold" or "uncaring" or "emotionally vacant." In other words, responses to women's writing in particular continue to be "gendered."

The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.

In water, like in books—you can leave your life.

The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric - but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her "life" boundaries.

Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as "abstract" when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body.