It is this panic and distress that I see in the IPFW Writing Center on the faces of some students struggling with the generic memoir assignments given by IPFW first-year composition instructors. I have consulted with women and men who can think only of their recent harrowing divorce or child custody battles, or the last straw event before they left an abusive marriage, or the death of a loved one. Many of these students needed someone to listen to them as they struggled to put such difficult and previously unspeakable events into words. While it has been my honor and privilege to struggle with them, being present to their difficulties makes Sullivan’s argument for the memoir assignment particularly distressing. The tone of her article suggests that she is an educator who cares very much about the successes—personal and academic—of her students, but composition teachers and writing center consultants are not psychotherapists trained in the healing arts. As suggested in the introduction, caring and listening alone constitute insufficient responses to the needs of students trying to make sense of even one instance in a history of domestic abuse or trauma. Caring alone cannot address the material basis of students’ failures with or resistances to or fears evoked by a memoir assignment. The teacher’s role is to assist students, with and without histories of abuse or trauma, in achieving their literacy or education goals involving reading and writing. What I want to know is how to minimize the interferences to learning that situations of abuse or memories of them seem to create for these diverse adult student populations.