Nancy Bachrach’s memoir, The Center of the Universe, was published by Knopf in 2009 to excellent reviews. In it, she begins with the moment her father, Mr. Fix It, dies in the boat he was repairing himself, injuring her mother gravely as well. Bachrach, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, did not start out to be a memoirist and spent a good deal of her career in advertising. With this memoir, she has proven her skill as a writer and as a remarkable chronicler of a family. Here she talks with Biographile about the process and satisfactions of writing a memoir for which, as she says, she had been taking notes “since kindergarten.”

BIOGRAPHILE: You talk about something that every memoir writer has to deal with: the fragility of memory. How much did you struggle with capturing the truth versus your version of it?

NANCY BACHRACH: I don’t think you can ever know the answer to that because no one has access to the truth. You only have your version of it, your perceptions. Events get filtered on their way through the brain, and then they get mutated by memory. I think vivid memories are as close as we can get to truth.

So while I don’t know exactly what happened in my childhood, I have a vivid memory of how I experienced it, and that’s the story I needed to write. I was once on a memoir panel where one of the first questions asked was, “What’s the most important thing for a memoir?” and I said “Memory,” and other panelists disagreed, maybe because they had played with the past, or they’d reframed it, or, who knows, maybe they simply had poor memories. But they were very defensive about it.

Truth in memoir writing, to me, means doing justice to the most vivid memories you have, recognizing that everybody’s raw material is inherently fuzzy. The task for me was to take the images, experiences, and conversations that were in my head and get them out of my head onto the page. That isn’t a fluid process initially and fear gets in the way.

BIOG: You say fear – can you elaborate on what was frightening?

NB: I felt obligated to protect my family, especially my mother, who’d miraculously survived Mr. Fix It’s boat accident, but I wasn’t sure she’d survive my memoir. I never expected to publish this book while she was alive; in fact, I hid it whenever she was visiting since she is the self-proclaimed “Center of the Universe” in the title. She knew I was working on it, and one day I asked for her blessing. “You’ll never have better material,” she said, entirely in character. Just in case she changed her mind, I changed her name. The day the memoir was published, she showed up uninvited at her local bookstore to sign copies.

BIOG: You have a wicked sense of humor about your parents and a keen eye for irony. In what ways did you use that to deal with some of the more painful details of what you call “the ancestral psycho-drama.”

NB: I’ve always found that humor is the best way to deal with a difficult problem. Thurber said that “humor is chaos in retrospect.” I had a lot of raw material. And humor helped me say the unsayable.

I think that humor is crucial to a memoir. I find that when I read other people’s memoirs I note the opportunities for humor in the margins. When I looked back at my family’s story, at its lunacy and absurdity, I saw it as dark humor. The whole story was absurd. My father, nicknamed Mr. Fix It, ended up killing himself after unintentionally turning his boat into a death trap. My mother survived only because she slept by a window that Mr. Fix It had caulked badly. It was absurd that she recovered from what the doctors termed irreversible brain damage. And it was completely absurd that carbon monoxide poisoning cured her bipolar disorder. If I had written this as fiction, the criticism would have been that it was just not believable. Dark humor was the only way to go.

BIOG: What was your creative process like?

NB: Well, I had been taking notes forever, since I was a child – there was so much material that if I didn’t get it down at an early age I thought it would get away from me. I always felt that I had a story to tell and I wanted to tell it. But I couldn’t quite finish. I was afraid to let it go, probably. Just before I was about to take a very long plane trip, three writer friends came over for dinner and they all gave me the same advice: Just “keep typing” on the plane until it lands. So I buckled up, turned on my computer, turned off my internal censor, and typed until touchdown. Draft one was done.

The best fun I had was rewriting the book. There’s nothing like rewriting because once you’ve finished the first time, you know where you’re going even if you don’t know how you’ll get there the next time. After the first rewrite, there were half a dozen others. The real key for me was to get away from the trap of chronology. I got some very good advice, which was to write only the high points and forget about the connective tissue. That was crucial. Once I wrote the big moments the structure emerged.

BIOG: Do you have advice for aspiring memoir writers?

NB: Don’t press send while you’re too hot or fiery – take notes while you’re hot, keep a journal, but don’t confuse conviction with quality. Write for publication when you have some distance, some perspective that allows you to see the story from the standpoint of a reader’s eye and not just your own. When I started this book, the first draft was snarky, angry, sentimental, and self-pitying. It was always funny, but funny and snarky, and it was only after I could put that draft away and let some time pass that I was able to write without rancor.

BIOG: What’s next? Another book?

NB: I hope so. You have to be so passionate to write because the subject takes over your life. When I’m writing I see everything through the prism of the story. Everything is reflected through the book. Writing is the most exciting, focusing, exhilarating experience. I will never forget walking down Madison Avenue while I was writing The Center of the Universe when a thought about the book came to me. I was afraid I would forget it so I stopped to take a note while leaning on a mailbox, and just then Joan Didion walked by. Joan Didion! I was both thrilled and mortified that one of our greatest writers might notice me, an unknown, huddled over a mailbox, urgently scribbling forgettable metaphors on the back of a grocery list. But Ms. Didion just kept walking, absorbed no doubt by the unfolding narrative in her own head. That’s writerly rapture. If it strikes me again, I’ll have another book.