Chap01

Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.

—SVEN BIRKERTS, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir focuses on enhancing your narrative by using the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit. In these pages, we’ll show you how the elements of craft will take your story from the jumble that is memory and circumstance into a story that has expressive characters, evocative descriptions, an organic structure, and a singular voice. By the time you finish, you’ll possess all the tools required to turn events that happened to you into a skillfully told story.

The fact that you want to write a memoir at all indicates that you’re interested in the journey of self-discovery, a key to the telling of all stories, whether fiction or nonfiction. A memoir details a specific journey in your life rather than the arc of your entire life. However, even though the memoir highlights a particular series of events, it forces you the writer to view your past through the lens of the telling of this significant life event as well. Our question for this chapter is: What stimulates the desire to write a memoir? Determining the spark or trigger that releases your story is your first task in beginning to write.

Here’s the beginning of Joan Didion’s haunting memoir The Year of Magical Thinking:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened…. For a long time I wrote nothing else. (3)

Why does this story begin here? Or, to put it another way, what in the author’s now has compelled her to revisit this particular then? This is what we mean when we refer to the occasion of the telling.

A memoir’s opening pages set up the urgency or risk of telling this particular story at this particular moment. Whether there’s a deathbed confession or a Proustian madeleine, something in an author’s “present” compels him or her to revisit the past. In this chapter, we show how you can best answer the question “Why this story now?” for your own story.

It’s not enough that something happened, something life-changing, something devastating, something, in Didion’s case, like the death of a loved one. What distinguishes the best memoirs is who we are in time and space when we revisit those life-changing events. This “now” of the narrator isn’t about a date on the calendar, or even the author’s present, but rather a state of mind and emotion, a place to stand from which you write about an event that has shaped your life to this point.

Hence, Joan Didion begins The Year of Magical Thinking where she does because it’s at this moment that she opens the notes she made a few days after her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne, died in January 2004 in order to begin to explore what happened at that moment and—more important for her story—what happened afterward. Didion couldn’t have written this memoir while it was happening because she needed narrative distance from the time John died before she could begin to try to write about it. When you try to write about something while you’re still living through it, you lack perspective—and writing a memoir is all about having perspective.

Thus, like Didion, your first step in determining your story’s occasion of the telling is to understand that writing a memoir requires what we like to call the two yous: who you are now, looking back at what happened with whatever insight compelled you to begin writing (the occasion of the telling); and who you were then—younger, perhaps not so wise, but living through those moments.

Another way of looking at the two yous is to think of one as the self who’s remembering—the narrator who provides the continuity throughout the book—and the other as the self who’s experiencing scenes in the past at distinct times. The interaction between these two yous is what propels your story forward. We’ll look at this concept in depth in chapter 2.

Here are two more ways to understand the occasion of the telling and the two yous. After we explained these two concepts to one of our classes, a clever student piped up, “It begins here because it’s about this.” Another added, “I need to have a place to stand to tell this story.” The place to stand represents the remembering narrator. Where the remembering narrator stands is not necessarily when in actual time the author is writing but rather a place she has chosen because it’s cathartic. The catharsis itself leads the author to the occasion of the telling.

Catharsis refers to the release of emotion (often long-buried). Aristotle writes in his Poetics how cathartic events in a play allow the audience to expel repressed or intense feeling. Similarly, readers are attracted to stories that allow them to explore their own life challenges, that help them grasp the significance in archetypal tales of crisis and redemption. The hero’s journey (the mythic path to self-discovery) itself always begins with an occasion of the telling. Something occurs that thrusts the protagonist into a new space. For example, the goddess Demeter, who controls the earth’s bounty, created the seasons when she lost her daughter, Persephone. For the months Persephone must spend in Hades, Demeter mourns, and winter falls upon the earth. When her daughter returns, Demeter’s joy is represented by spring.

In the memoir you are about to write, you are the hero, and the journey is yours. We suggest that you refer to Joseph Campbell’s wonderful books, which illuminate how the ancient myths are also myths for our time. As in mythologies from all cultures, most memoirs begin with loss or conflict, then detail the journey toward coming to terms with that loss or conflict. They represent the writer’s attempt to understand key people in his or her life, often parents or spouses or siblings. For example, in Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace, the protagonist receives a phone message about her mother, with whom the protagonist had ceased contact seventeen years before. The memory of the missed phone call, a metaphor of broken connection, provides the catalyst for the telling.

Similarly, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father opens with a premonition of death. Then the phone rings, and a relative answers. Wolff, who’s been imagining that the call will report the death of one of his children, is audibly relieved to hear that it is his father who has died. Wolff’s ensuing guilt and shock over his own words punctuate the complexity of his perceptions about this important figure in his life.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Think about stories that have resonated throughout your life. First, choose an often-told family story: jot down a description of the central character and how you came to hear about the story. Why do you think this story was handed down in your family? What did it illustrate? Second, note a story you’ve read, whether fiction or memoir, young adult or fable. How does the story begin? What event or thought causes the hero to make a break with the past or embark on a new path?

This exercise illustrates how the classic structure resonates in the stories we’ve heard all our lives.

Considering stories you’ve always known from the perspective of why they were told in the first place is a great first step toward discovering your own story’s occasion of the telling. For this reason, you may want to apply this exercise to everything you read and hear for a while.

With the concepts of the occasion of the telling and the two yous in hand, let’s look more closely at what makes a memoir a memoir.

As author/educator Sidonie Smith has noted, autobiography is a unique genre because, in this form, the self becomes both subject and object. But, while both memoir and autobiography are written by someone about him- or herself, the similarity between the two ends there.

Autobiographies are usually written toward the end of a public figure’s life and recount that life chronologically, beginning with the author’s birth (or sometimes with the author’s parents’ births). Fictive technique isn’t as central to autobiography, because readers read these books to find out about the author’s entire life, often because the author is someone in whom the reader is interested in knowing more about: celebrity and fame create an audience all by themselves.

Autobiographies are also often told chronologically, which reduces the importance of decisions about structure, plot, and emphasis, all of which are important choices in memoir writing. In autobiography, issues like plot and scene are recorded as they occurred or are remembered rather than constructed by the writer to dramatize a particular journey. Simply put, an autobiography is a record of a life, while a memoir is an exploration of a specific aspect of a life, using fictive techniques to create a dynamic story.

Memoirs spotlight (make a note of that word, because we’ll be using it a lot in a number of different contexts) a period in the author’s life distinguished in some unusual way. To broadly paraphrase Tolstoy, every family is dysfunctional, but each family’s individual dysfunctionality contains the seeds of memoir. The memoirist revisits this crucial time (the revisiting, as noted above, is another distinguishing quality), applying acquired or newfound knowledge to those events in the past. The tension between the self who remembers and the past he or she revisits is a key to a memoir’s plot, which we’ll cover in depth in chapters 3 and 4.

We readers begin reading (any book—not just a memoir) because we’re interested in the story. But when it comes to a memoir, we keep reading because we become invested in the storyteller. The risks he or she takes and their consequences immerse the reader in the memoirist’s story—we keep reading because we find ourselves on a journey with a narrator about whom we come to care deeply.

Writing the memoir is in some ways like keeping one’s balance atop a narrow fence: you need to present an honest appraisal of yourself, the main character in your memoir, while at the same time being the one who’s telling the story. As with any character, the narrator makes mistakes and has flaws. It’s how he or she negotiates these pitfalls that invest us in his or her story. Such an unflinching look at self and situation is what made Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996) and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle (2005) breakout memoirs.

Because the writer is a character, we like to refer to the protagonist of the memoir the same way we do the narrator of fiction: as the speaker or narrator. We’d also like to encourage you to speak of the experiencing you you’re writing about now in the same way. Doing so will offer you a narrative distance that will help you create a stronger narrative arc and more compelling characters—in the case of memoir, allowing you to dramatize specific people you know or have known. Thinking of yourself as a narrator creates a safe space around the events from which to create your story as well. The story is then allowed a life of its own. In this way, you create a distinction between you personally and the narrative you’re creating.

Thinking of yourself and the others in your story as characters allows you to be less chained to the exact details of what happened and more open to the meaning and shape of what happened. After all, as we all know, memory not only is fallible but at each stage of our lives is reinterpreted, seen in a fresh and sometimes surprising light. The fact is, if you were to write about these same events in twenty years, it would likely be a very different story. To burrow deep into the truth of the story, we need to worry less about the chronological exactness of what happened and instead remain true to the story’s larger truth.

At the same time, it’s important that your memoir doesn’t play with facts. You’re likely familiar with the debates about whether memoirs are fact or fiction—for instance, the fracas around James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and whether events in Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea actually happened. So, while readers of memoir understand that (for example) if dialogue appears, it’s likely reconstructed, they won’t tolerate the manufacturing of a reality that never occurred at all. Because the issue of truth in the memoir has been so hotly debated, we’ll delve into it further here before we go on.

In fiction and in memoir, one of the first decisions the reader makes is whether or not the storyteller is telling the truth. We call the storyteller we can trust a reliable narrator. In fiction, writers often use unreliable narrators, particularly in the first person, to show that a character’s self-interest blinds him or her to a more measured view of a situation. For instance, in Eudora Welty’s short story “Why I Live at the P.O.,” the protagonist, outraged at the way she’s been treated by her family, has moved to the post office, where she works, and is eager to tell her side of the story. Much of the humor in the story comes from her biased point of view and skewed sense of reality.

Memory is notoriously unreliable, and our stories in memoir are our stories, no one else’s. Many writers have weighed in on this issue, and the consensus is that, in memoir, the writer owes it to the reader to be as accurate as he or she can. However, given that we are each limited to what we experience and to the quality of our perceptions, here are several examples of reasoned opinions on the accuracy issue.

Judith Barrington, in Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, stresses how difficult it is to tell the truth and find the facts, along with the necessity of doing so in memoir. She concludes that it’s part of the contract with the reader to “be an unflinchingly reliable narrator” (27). She also makes a useful distinction between truth in fiction and truth in memoir: “While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing [memoir and fiction], the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe” (ibid.).

William Zinsser, in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, talks about a disagreement he and his mother had about his presentation of his grandmother in his memoir, Five Boyhoods. Zinsser says, “The truth is somewhere between my mother’s version and mine. But she was like that to me and that’s the only truth a memoir writer can work with” (12).

Lee Gutkind, in The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality, agrees that we must work to find the inherent truth of our story but suggests we employ what he calls “expansive thinking,” which allows “three-dimensional thought and scenic expression in a novelistic context” (118). We’ll explore more tools to excavate “scenic expression” in chapter 4.

It’s up to you to define your truth in the particular story you have to tell. Of course, you won’t be able to remember dialogue word for word from years ago. But if you create your characters fully, they will speak authentically within your story, and their words and actions will emerge within the context you have established. For further discussion on truth, we refer you to Judith Barrington’s and William Zinsser’s books. Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative is also a rich source regarding the nuances of a memoir writer’s ethics. Gornick excavates the memoir’s value in testifying to one’s own particular story and the power of both reader and writer to witness the personal journey.

Part of finding your story will be uncovering the particular self where the story lives. It’s this self that will guide you in discovering the truth of your story as well. In chapter 7 we’ll revisit this issue from your, the writer’s, perspective.

When we decided to talk about ways of organizing the memoir and then started looking at the stacks of books piled on our desks, we realized that there are as many ways to organize the memoir as there are memoirs themselves. That said, the more we looked, the more we realized that the memoirs that resonate most with readers seem to be organized around a distinct catalyst. We’ll delve into more specifics of structuring the memoir in chapter 3, but here we’ll look at a few effective types of organizations that directly affect the occasion of the telling.

The first way of approaching the occasion of the telling is via some momentous occasion in the memoirist’s “now” that leads him or her back to his or her “then.” Here, for example, is the beginning of Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning Just Kids: “I was asleep when he died. I had called the hospital to say one more good night, but he had gone under, beneath layers of morphine. I held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again” (xi). Smith’s dear friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, has died, occasioning Patti to go back to the beginning of their lives together. After this opening, Smith circles back to the moment when Patti and Robert’s story begins, with the bulk of this memoir told chronologically. As Patti and Robert develop as artists, they are on a trajectory as a pair as well as on unique paths that diverge sharply. The memoir is a record of their friendship, love, and commitment; their artist selves, which could never have existed without each other; and their unique stories.

Other recent memoirs using this approach include Joan Didion’s (which we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter); Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, which explores her mother’s death; and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Tale, about the death of her husband, Raymond Smith.

Another way to approach a memoir’s beginning is to spotlight the moment when everything in the author’s life changed. In this mode of telling, the experiencing narrator thinks her life is on one course when, suddenly and unexpectedly, something intervenes that changes everything. Abigail Thomas does this in A Three Dog Life: “Monday, April 24, at nine forty at night, our doorman Pedro called me on the intercom. ‘Your dog is in the elevator,’ he said. The world had just changed forever, and I think I knew it even then. ‘My dog? Where is my husband?’ I asked” (11). This harrowing passage spotlights the moment when Abigail and her husband Rich’s life together changes irrevocably. Unlike the relatively chronological line that Smith uses after her occasion of the telling, however, Thomas instead follows two narrative threads: what happens after this moment and her life with Rich before it.

In Jeannette Walls’s deservedly popular The Glass Castle, the narrator is in a taxi on her way to a party in New York City when she sees her mother rooting through a dumpster. This spotlit moment takes our narrator back into her chaotic childhood with the eccentric family that caused her to struggle while at the same time taught her to love and to think for herself. The occasion of the telling is Walls’s realization that her past is a part of her, which leads her to break open the barrier to the life events that brought her to this moment: “It had been months since I laid eyes on Mom, and when she looked up, I was overcome with panic that she’d see me and call out my name, and that someone on the way to the same party would spot us together and Mom would introduce herself and my secret would be out” (3). When Walls and her mother have lunch soon after this spotlit moment, the author asks, “’And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?’ ‘Just tell the truth,’ Mom said. ‘That’s simple enough’” (ibid.). And so, on the next page, Walls begins her story.

How you arrange time in a memoir is one of the most important decisions you’ll make about its organization, and your decisions about time are directly linked to the occasion of the telling. As an example, in Heaven’s Coast, Mark Doty revisits the death of his life partner, Wally, from AIDS. Exploring very specific details about Wally’s death takes the narrator into the key moments of their lives together as well as into his own journey of going on without Wally.

The remembering narrator fluidly moves back and forth between past events (not chronologically but associatively) and the place where he stands to remember. This style of organization requires great skill, but because Doty is foremost a poet, he is particularly adept at navigating this metaphoric and literal journey. Each scene and internal realization add up to a complicated whole, creating an organic narrative, one that is particularly effective because it mirrors the complexity of its intertwined subjects, life and death. As Doty phrases it in his preface, “This book was written in the flux of change; I wrote it not from a single stillpoint but from the forward momentum of a current of grief. I wanted to allow for shifts in my perspective as time moved forward, as what we think of as healing began. What is healing, but a shift in perspective?” (ix).

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Using the notes you made in the spotlight exercise about family stories earlier in this chapter, take one story you remember and play with its organization in time. Try to come up with three versions of how it could be told. For example, if the story were told by an older sibling, how might it begin? How might the speaker go from now to then and back? Another example is noting how the story’s time sense would change if three or four members of the family chimed in to tell the story. Each might start events in a different place and give the listener a different context.

The challenge of structuring time and the movement between now and then involve the two yous and will be explored in more depth in the next chapter. As one you is the remembering narrator and the other you is the experiencing one, the movement between the two determines the rhythm of time in your memoir.

The decision to embark on a memoir comes most often from a make-or-break time or event in the author’s life long after the events about which she or he writes have taken place. Speaking out about this difficult time is risky and life-changing, but, as readers, we’re drawn to memoirs that explore how others face life’s greatest challenges—we want to learn, in a sense, how to navigate our own lives. While critics sometimes dismiss memoirs as records of trauma and dysfunction, the fact is that few lives are free of either. We read memoirs to share in the personal stories of others, stories that resonate with our own.

If you write your memoir about an occasion that has a charge for you and you’re invested in the consequence of your story, then your readers will be invested, too. Your occasion of the telling telegraphs this sense of risk and consequence from the very beginning of your memoir.

FURTHER SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Reading: Compare the occasion of the telling in two of the memoirs from the bibliography or from books of your choice. Are you committed to read further after reading the writer’s occasion? Why or why not?

Writing: List five events in your life that are significant. Maybe they involve specific people or a move from one place to another. Maybe they spotlight other transitions, or possibly they are key turning points that haunt you. Don’t think too much; just write them down.

Taking each of the five events from the previous paragraph, imagine a photograph that captures some essence of the event. Write down a detailed description of what is in that photograph. What is in the foreground? What is in the background? What (or who) is not in the photograph, even though you know that person or thing should be a part of it? Who might have taken the photograph, if it were real?

Now choose one of the images from the above paragraph and make it move. Begin to construct a scene around that moving photograph. What happens because of what event or person? Again, don’t think too much; just try to get down this key moment in as much detail as you can.

One consequence that we sometimes don’t anticipate but that nonetheless is often the case is that we ourselves will be changed by writing about the past. The act of translating our experience into the hard reality of the written word makes us see ourselves differently. It broadens our perspective and yet focuses it as well. As if we’re using a magnifying glass, new details will emerge and take their place within the larger picture.

The act of writing itself is risky, but so is daring to face the past and dive into its clutter and layers of truth. Perhaps the biggest consequence of finding the occasion of the telling is to assert that our lives matter. We all have many stories, and each story is part of the larger story of our families and the communities in which we live. It takes courage to claim our stories, and yet sharing them is an act of enormous generosity, because, in doing so, we allow others to learn from our experience as much as we individually learn from it in the writing.

The image you create in the above writing exercise or from any one of the five events you noted may evolve into your occasion of the telling. Each of these moments has consequence (you’ve remembered it all this time); each changed your life in some significant way. Spotlit moments like these are the seeds of memoir, the images that reveal us to ourselves.

As we move through Find Your Story, we’ll ask you to pause and reflect about your own story, to write down some of the images and thoughts and insights that will shape your narrative. By the time you finish this book, you will most likely have a blueprint for creating a memoir. Possibly, you’ll have the seeds for several separate pieces or books. What’s most important, though, is that you’ll have taken the leap to committing to write. Through the process of sifting and examining your impressions and memories, the act of writing will become a familiar one, a process you’ll look forward to rather than one that feels out of reach or too difficult to attempt.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore more fully the two yous and finding a place to stand, which are intertwined with each story’s consequence for its writer. A story’s place to stand spotlights the moment where you must begin to share your story and is returned to again and again. We’ll examine how this remembering self serves as both reflector and witness, key elements in the memoir’s process of discovery.