Diana Friedman & Valerie Berton
USING THE HERMIT CRAB FORM FOR DIFFICULT MATERIAL

Hermit crabs don’t naturally have shells, so they spend their lives seeking vacated shells as they grow, then make them their own to protect their soft and vulnerable abdomens.

If you’ve written memoir or deeply personal essays, you know that working on heavy emotional material can sometimes feel boundless, impossible to contain. Grief, anger, longing—these don’t arrive in neat paragraphs. They spill, and that can be frightening. Perhaps there is something to be learned from this little crustacean about protecting our own vulnerable insides. Perhaps we can borrow “shells,” too.

In the writing world, this approach is known as the hermit crab essay. You channel your thoughts and emotions into a non-literary structure, such as a Yelp review, a dating profile, an advice column, a court document. By writing into a pre-existing container, you don’t have to stare down an empty page or screen. The structure supports you, and the material often flows more easily because some of the decisions have been made for you.

There’s also a bit of magic here. The form creates distance and gives your nervous system a break. 

Consider the work of Irene Hoge Smith, a writer and psychoanalyst from Washington, DC, whose mother abandoned her and her three sisters when Irene was 14. She struggled for years to write about the loss. Among Irene’s attempts was a series of letters in which she addresses her mother as if she were an employee who quit a job.

Here’s an excerpt from her hermit crab essay that appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly: 

RE: Clarification of your intentions

Dear Mrs Smith Mama,

I am writing to ascertain your plans regarding your position here in Washington, where my three sisters and I have been posted, in our father’s establishment, since the end of last year. Your unannounced departure, which gave us no opportunity for an exit interview, has resulted in some confusion about your future availability.

Using a pre-formed and contained structure like this allows you to downshift your emotions and/or access the material from a different angle, giving the feeling part of your brain a break as you let the structure, rather than the actual material, guide you. It provides a safe space.

It also helps that so many hermit crab forms can be humorous, even absurd, taking some of the load off. 

Hoge Smith waited many years before writing her traditional memoir, The Good Poetic Mother, not starting until she was nearly sixty. The time not only provided distance but perspective. It allowed her to expand the story to be about more than just her abandonment, a story in which her mother was not only the one who left, but also a complicated, wounded person in her own right.

We know that time does not heal all wounds, but in many cases, it tempers it, softens the edges just enough. 

Writing about family—mothers, especially—is rarely simple. Sometimes we need distance. Sometimes we need a shell. And sometimes we need both.

Diana Friedman & Valerie Berton are co-founders of KindWrite Studio, which offers coaching, developmental editing, copyediting and submission services. They run writing retreats in Spain, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, including The Motherlode Retreat (April 26-30, 2026), which focuses on the challenges of writing about mothers, offers techniques for working through difficult material, explores matrilineal relationships, and helps you transform personal experiences into powerful writing.

Diana Friedman is an award-winning author whose creative writing has appeared in literary journals, newspapers, blogs, and popular press magazines. She writes a newsletter, Under the Red Pen, and is currently co-editing an anthology of short fiction from Maryland.

Valerie Berton has been a writer and editor for decades. She volunteers as a proofreader for Cleaver, a mentor for Girls Write Now, and works as a freelance editor for The Nature Conservancy. Her essay, “Hasty Exit,” was selected for inclusion in Alternative Liberties II, an anthology of life in the mid-2020s (expected mid-2026). 

Read more from Cleaver’s Writing Tips.