Chap02

As we continue to seek the occasion of the telling that prompts any memoir—the why of our story—we are led to examine the speaker and how a particular story can be told. A memoir is told by an author in the present (the remembering self) who takes the reader to various stages of his or her past (the experiencing self). The journey of this past self—along with its lessons and conflicts—gives the story its tension and informs the author in the present. Because of the dual nature of memoir, your story is a journey of self-discovery not only for you, its author, but for the reader as well.

As Sue William Silverman notes in Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, “A memoir…is only partially about writing recollected facts of what happened. The other part requires a more authorial observation and understanding of events…written through the viewpoint—and with the insight—of the author sitting at her or his desk trying to figure out what it all means” (8, emphasis added). Thus, remembering what happened, and reflecting on it, allows you to act as a witness to your own story.

It’s our belief that this witnessing is an important reason for memoir’s current popularity. As Vivian Gornick notes in The Situation and the Story, “The age is characterized by a need to testify. Everywhere in the world women and men are rising up to tell their story out of the now commonly held belief that one’s own life signifies” (91). Memoir matters because it’s in coming to understand individual stories that we find our commonality.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the challenges and pleasures of this duality and suggest strategies for walking the tightrope between the two yous.

“To write one’s life is to live it twice,” Patricia Hampl notes in I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, “and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form” (37). Your reminiscent narrator grounds your story in its present, anchoring the moment of departure back into the story for both you and your reader. We call these two selves—aspects of yourself at different times—the two yous, as it’s useful for the purposes of creating the story to separate the you who remembers, who has gained perspective and insight during the intervening years since the memoir’s events, from the you who has lived through their dramatic arc.

It may be helpful for you to think of the remembering narrator as the you who says, “If only I’d known then what I know now,” or the you who tells us, “Let me take you back to the way my life was then.” An example of this you, who takes us on a journey into her past, can be found in Annie Dillard’s iconic memoir, An American Childhood, when she begins her prologue: “When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that” (3).

Dillard provides us here with an arresting occasion of the telling (“the dreaming memory” of the land of her past) while at the same time signaling to the reader that she will mediate her history, and its landscapes, through her remembering self, thus following Patricia Hampl’s suggestion that “[m]emoir is the intersection of narration and reflection, of storytelling and essay writing. It can present its story and consider the meaning of the story” (I Could Tell, 33). Dillard’s beginning also alerts us to the lyrical tone and ruminative qualities of her voice, an aspect of memoir we’ll be covering in more detail in chapter 6.

Just as the occasion of the telling offers you a place to stand, employing a remembering self gives you a place to view the self, allowing you objective distance from what is ordinarily subjective and habitual. Empowering the you who looks back at your past offers a vehicle for tackling the hard work of revisiting your past.

In Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, the remembering self we’ve come to rely on throughout is well positioned to offer this passage near the end of the book: “What was can’t be restored; I can neither have Wally back in the flesh, nor return to the self I inhabited before his death. The vessel’s not cracked but broken, all the way through, permanently. The break, from now on, is an inescapable part of who I am, perhaps the inescapable part. Hasn’t it become my essential definition, my central fact: I loved a man who died?” (286).

By this time in the memoir, the reader has traveled with Doty from the first positive diagnosis of Wally’s HIV through to his death. Doty, and the reader, concurrently move forward into a life now characterized by Wally’s absence. This journey hasn’t been chronological, but nonetheless, throughout the book, the tension in the story reverberates between the remembering self, who knows his partner is gone, and the experiencing self, who in the past experiences one loss after another until Wally’s death actually occurs. The experiencing self is too busy reacting to have the perspective the remembering self offers.

In this sense, the remembering self is a comforting presence. By grounding this narrator (or, in some cases, by surviving to write the story at all), you, like Doty, assure the reader that you’ve made it through the difficult journey that many memoirs map. Of course, as Doty so eloquently notes above, you’re not the same as you were before the events in the book took place; you’ve changed profoundly. The dialogue between the two yous showcases that transformation by documenting its journey in rising and falling action, climactic moments, and resolution.

Because stories are most engrossing when the reader can experience their events through sensory details, your task as a memoirist is to show the stages of your change with scenes that bring the past alive. In these scenes, the experiencing self holds sway—the you who lacks the insight distance brings, the you who acts and reacts in the moment.

This other, experiencing self is vividly shown in Koren Zailckas’s Fury: A Memoir, when the protagonist is addressed by a man seated next to her on an international flight when she doesn’t feel like talking—something most of us have experienced at one time or another. In this passage, however, Zailckas takes the familiar experience much further, going back and forth between her experiencing self and the remembering self. She begins with the former, as she says to the man: “‘I don’t mean to be rude, but a man just broke up with me in the worst way, at the worst possible time, and under the worst possible circumstances in my limited experience, so you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel like talking.’…But the old man doesn’t seem to have heard me. He describes the sights he saw in London” (7–8). At this point, the remembering self, the grounding narrator, breaks in with a comment that reveals her distance from the self in the past: “If I had an ounce of attention for anything outside of my own suffering, I would have cracked a neighborly smile by now. But in this black hole, no human warmth can reach me” (8).

Notice how the back and forth of the two yous appears effortless here. This ease of moving in time is one of your goals as a memoir writer, as then the reader not only learns quickly to make these time shifts but ceases to realize that they’re even on the page. Because Zailckas negotiates the dance between her two narrators so skillfully in this scene, the reader feels the tension of knowing what the narrator wishes she had done while at the same time braces for what she’ll do, which, ultimately, is to explode into anger.

In such a scene, the remembering self and the experiencing self appear far apart: the remembering self, with her acquired wisdom, would truly have behaved differently, as we’ve noted. The distance between the two yous in this case may bring to mind the film Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow, in which one version of her character chooses one trajectory through life and another takes a completely different path.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: “A memoirist gazes at a canvas that’s already swirling with color,” Sue William Silverman writes in Fearless Confessions. “Where a fiction writer crafts images onto that blank canvas, the memoirist decides what to remove from it” (31).

Consider the canvas of a scene from your past you’d like to re-create on paper as if it were a still life. Now take a further step back and consider yourself considering that scene. Observe the observer you. What does she see now that she didn’t see then? What does she think about what she’s observing? Without judging either of the two yous, make some notes about the remembering you studying the experiencing you.

As the sequence above happens early in the first chapter, it also dramatizes Zailckas’s occasion of the telling—the incendiary anger that characterizes the protagonist at this stage of her life. (You’ll recall that the title of this memoir is Fury.) As a result, the author combines two important tools of the memoir writer—to explosive effect.

Whether or not they’re aware of how it’s being negotiated, readers of memoir are drawn to the back-and-forth perspective on life’s challenges offered by the two yous. But creating the two yous requires contemplation as well as digging deep into the past. While it’s easier to sketch the past, to make lists of events that happened, than to present the stories of our lives fully digested, so that both reader and writer apprehend the experience in a nuanced way, it’s the back and forth that creates memorable memoirs.

Another way of looking at it is that, in moving between the two yous, you the writer don’t just mine your memories; you refine them as well. As memoir writers, we gain perspective on our lives by reimmersing ourselves in the messy details through the process of writing them down. As Patricia Hampl notes, “We embody, if unwittingly and impartially, our history, even our prehistory. The past courses through our veins. The self is the instrument which allows us not only to live this truth but to contemplate it, and thereby to be comforted by meaning” (I Could Tell, 97).

Still, it’s one thing to journal, to, as Natalie Goldberg puts it, “write down the bones.” It’s quite another to reshape your material into a journey readers eagerly join. Consider how you as a reader might experience Mary Karr’s journey through her unusual childhood in The Liars’ Club without the wisecracking—and wise—voice of the reminiscent adult Karr telling us, “My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark” (3). After beginning here, with her reminiscent narrator, Karr immediately moves back into the memory itself: “I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on the mattress on the bare floor. He wore a yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape on his chest” (ibid.).

Having established her two selves in the opening paragraph, Karr masterfully moves back and forth between them throughout her award-winning memoir. The dialogue between these two selves allows the reader to discover insights that move the story forward via an interplay between Karr’s two yous. Thus, the act of looking back allows you, the writer, to gather the most salient and striking details of your past and mine them for a heightened realization.

While it’s something of a truism to say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, by writing your way through a complex experience, as Karr does, by weaving the past series of yous with your present, remembering self, you can also discover a way to move on from that experience—to not, in other words, repeat it. “The writing process itself is part of the journey,” Sue William Silverman notes. “The insights you have while writing aren’t things you knew at the time the events happened. It’s only through writing about events after they happened—as we craft our memoirs—that we come to understand what they mean” (45). Part of the pleasure of writing memoir lies in achieving these deeper realizations.

Just as testifying—retelling—experience helps us process it and then move on, the conversation between the two yous enables you to assess the past, learn from it, and share it with others. A striking example can be found in Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. One of the many reasons for this book’s success was the sense of community it forged among its readers. Through reading Gilbert’s book and talking about it, readers felt that their similar yearnings for experience (including travel to exotic places) and understanding had been witnessed.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading: Choose a passage from a memoir you admire (you may wish to choose one we’ve mentioned in this chapter) where you notice the narrator shifting between the two yous. What perspective(s) does this movement in time provide toward your understanding the protagonist more deeply? Are there gaps between the narrator’s assessment of the events in this passage and what you perceive as a reader? Often the reader makes connections that the writer may not consciously have intended. It’s through these connections that author and reader witness each other and that the reader gains new understanding.

Although a very different book in tone and structure, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking similarly bears witness for a large audience through its meditation on the sudden loss of a dear one. The most memorable memoirs serve this testimonial function through both the two yous within the book and the connection of book to audience. The ability to create intimacy and community at the same time helps explain the popularity and the significance of memoirs like Gilbert’s and Didion’s.

“The truth that memoir has to offer is not neatly opposite from fiction’s truth,” writes Patricia Hampl. “Its method and habits are different, and it is perhaps a more perverse genre than the novel: It seems to be about an individual self, but it is revealed as a minion of memory which belongs not only to the personal world but to the public realm” (I Could Tell, 205). This shared experience between writer and communities of readers gives the memoir its power as a genre.

Often when we begin writing, we really don’t know where we’re going. We just know we feel compelled to write about our experience to try to understand it. In Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Carlson describes how the story itself finds its own way: “Beginning a story without knowing all the terrain is not a comfortable feeling…. But there are moments in the process of writing a story when you must tolerate that feeling: you stay alert to everything that is happening and by listening and watching, you find out where you are going by going there” (15, emphasis added).

One of the ways we find our way through the terrain that Carlson speaks of when writing memoir is through the back and forth of the two yous. When we decide to write about something—whether a difficult move in childhood, the death of someone close to us, negotiating our way through an illness, the process of growing up itself—we don’t know where that writing process will take us. In fact, even though we’re writing about the past, we often don’t yet know the end of the story we need to tell. What Carlson reminds us is that, by excavating the past through the prism of the present, we will eventually find our way.

Excavation is key to this process. It’s also the most difficult part. You may think that you’re finally ready to tell that difficult story, but you may discover that, when you at last have the time to write, you’ll do anything—from the dishes to your tax return—to avoid returning to those emotionally fraught memories on the page. As Carlson puts it, “All the valuable writing I’ve done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I’ve wanted to leave the room” (15).

Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream explores this difficulty in great depth, suggesting that it’s only in digging deep that we will find what really matters to our story: “When you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place…. Whatever scared the hell out of you down there…you have to go down there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can’t flinch, can’t walk away. That’s the only way to create a work of art—even though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there” (18).

What comes up from this “white-hot place” will be the pure, raw emotion of your story. You won’t be able to spend a long time there, and you’ll later want to revisit the material with your remembering narrator along to turn the raw emotion into art. “Trust memories,” writes Sue William Silverman. “Trust feelings. Write your truth, how you remember events. Writing, in fact, will bring you closer to your truth” (130). Learning to move between the two yous will help you temper the raw emotion necessary for reader identification with the steady hand of the older but wiser person you’ve become.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading: During the Middle Ages, alchemists sought to turn lesser elements into gold. While their experiments couldn’t succeed, as a writer you possess the tools to, as we note above, “turn raw emotion into art.” The first of these tools, of course, is the memories themselves. But negotiating this territory requires a willingness to mine, and then refine, your work.

Find a passage in a memoir you’ve read where the author has clearly gone somewhere difficult. How does he use his two yous to negotiate this territory? What would be missing if the remembering narrator weren’t there? Employing a remembering narrator to witness his difficult return can be a key to negotiating it.

Moving seamlessly between your two narrators is a skill you’ll come to refine in your own way only over time. The process requires thought and revision; the analogy that comes to mind when we teach is that negotiating this territory can be similar to tiptoeing through a minefield. The good news is that, in this case, practice makes a big difference. The internal logic of your story, through time, will also at some point take over and make this negotiation somewhat instinctive.

One of the side benefits of employing the two yous is that it can offer others in your story the opportunity to give their different take on the proceedings. Let’s say, for example, that your memory of an important moment from your childhood is entirely different from a sibling’s recollection. In The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr negotiates this territory by parenthetically adding her sister Lecia’s voice to her own at these moments: “(If I gave my big sister a paragraph here, she would correct my memory. To this day, she claims that she genuinely mourned for the old lady, who was a kindly soul, and that I was too little and mean-spirited then to remember things right…)” (47).

Unlike Karr, Mark Doty relies on only his own memories. But Doty negotiates his duality first by acknowledging it and second by exploring it and its meaning. Near the end of Heaven’s Coast, for example, Doty meets a coyote in the dunes. Stunned, he decides that Wally has sent him: “This apparition, my—ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen one in the middle of the day before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter” (304).

The decision about how to acknowledge the subjectivity of memory is one that you will want to consider as you write—and rewrite—your own story. These two examples are but two ways of negotiating this territory. We’ll look in greater detail at considering—and including—others’ memories and points of view in chapter 7.

One simple way to move around in time is to use your remembering or experiencing narrator’s sensory cues. But while contemporary Westerners rely mostly on seeing and hearing, the most vital and direct sensory cues utilize the limbic senses: smell, taste, and touch.

Consider, for example, a smell from your childhood, whether it’s Aunt Maudie’s face powder or the lingering scent of marijuana emanating from under your brother’s bedroom door. A mere whiff of this scent and you are transported back to the moment you first smelled it as if you’re once again in that moment. Sight and sound alone can’t trip this time travel. Only our oldest senses, the ones tied to our ancestors’ survival mechanisms, kick in this way.

What this means for you the memoirist is that you can use a sensory cue to instantly transport both your narrator and your reader to a moment in your narrator’s past. In the following excerpt from The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls describes setting herself on fire while cooking hotdogs at the age of three. Here touch, sound, and sight magnify her pain and distress: “I felt a blaze of heat on my right side…. Frozen with fear, I watched the yellow-white flames make a ragged brown line up the pink fabric of my skirt and climb my stomach…. I screamed. I smelled the burning and heard a horrible crackling as the fire singed my hair and eyelashes” (9).

Walls confides to the reader that this is her first memory, reinforcing our sense of when her experiencing self begins in time. But in addition, this moment allows us to bear witness as readers to the enormous leap Walls has made in her life from this terrified little girl to the sophisticated and accomplished woman who discovers her mother digging in a Manhattan dumpster many years later.

Note, too, how the sensory details Walls chooses enhance reader identification with her experiencing self. It’s of course unlikely that you have ever set yourself on fire, but the vivid image of the flames climbing up the little girl’s skirt, coupled with the sound and smell of the fire, create a horrifyingly real scene. We’ll go into even greater depth about how the right details can bring your memoir to life in chapter 5.

Another way of moving back and forth between the two yous is via the language you use. After all, your experiencing self is in the past, a place you’ve moved on from, and so you will likely speak in a slightly different way both in dialogue and in your ability to analyze or describe. Here, for example, is Mary Karr negotiating the balance beam between her young self and the memoirist: “I guess I concentrated so hard on Gordon that day, because I almost couldn’t bear to look at Mother. She’d become the picture of somebody nuts. For one thing, she’d tried to dye her hair red that fall, but wound up with a substance less hair than pelt. It was the overall color and texture of dried alfalfa” (223).

Because of the everyday diction Karr uses, unless one looks closely at her use of language, it’s easy to miss the way she employs it to move between her experiencing and remembering selves. If one weren’t reading as a writer, in fact, one might argue that there is no difference between the two. But only a remembering adult narrator could come up with phrasings like “less hair than pelt” and “the overall color and texture of dried alfalfa.” Karr’s language may be disguised by the spice she adds, but in truth it’s one more tool she employs to marvelous effect.

A repeated image or sequence can also transport the reader between the remembering self and the experiencing one. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion returns over and over again to her memory of serving her husband a second Scotch before dinner. At that moment John was alive, and yet in the next he was not. Didion’s inability to grasp that moment takes us back to her occasion of the telling when we stand with the experiencing self who herself stands helplessly by as the paramedics storm her home.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: In conversation, we seldom pay attention to the way we use language. There may be moments when we choose our words more carefully—when we need to get a point across, or when we’re disagreeing with someone about whom we care deeply—but most of us use our own particular everyday diction to express what we wish to share with others verbally.

How we express ourselves in writing, however, involves a more elevated diction or, put another way, a selection and reordering of words and phrases to convey meaning on the page. When we add the two yous to this equation, it becomes all the more challenging a prospect.

For this exercise, select a moment from your past that you hope to include in your memoir. First, write the scene as you remember it, using words and the writing skill you possess now, as a remembering narrator.

When you’ve finished this scene, put it away. Now write the same scene as if you were once again that younger you. Nothing you’ve learned since that moment can enter into this writing—not words, not experience, not hindsight. Try to use active verbs that bring to life the emotions you were experiencing then, and don’t forget to include more than just visual senses—add sounds, scents, tastes, feelings.

After finishing the second scene, read the two versions. Chances are, there will be parts of each of them that will work very well for your memoir. If you want to take this exercise one step further, try moving back and forth between these two yous to interweave these two renditions into one scene containing both your voices.

You may also choose to use the life of the mind to move from your reminiscent narrator into a moment in the past. Annie Dillard does this repeatedly in An American Childhood: “When I was five…I would not go to bed willingly because something came into my room. This was a private matter between me and it. If I spoke of it, it would kill me. Who could breathe as this thing searched for me over the very corners of the room? Who could ever breathe freely again? I lay in the dark” (20).

Notice how by using both her remembering and experiencing narrators, Dillard can comment on the irrationality of her childhood fear while at the same time acknowledging its importance. Like a dance, moving between the two yous involves practiced steps as well as improvisation once you’ve mastered those steps.

Recent research confirms what many of us have long suspected: memory is fallible, subject not only to our own, well, subjectiveness but also to the vagaries of time. In chapter 1 we looked at some of the challenges concerning memory and truth, and we’ll consider the ethics of writing your story in chapter 7.

Consider a spotlit moment from your childhood at which everyone in your immediate family was present—a meal, say, or a car ride. Chances are, if you were to say to your brother or sister, “Remember that time Dad swerved to avoid the snake in the road and hit the Joneses’ oak tree?,” he or she might reply, “It wasn’t a snake” or “It was the Smiths’ spruce.”

The thing about memoir is that each of your versions of this memory is valid. If your sibling were to write about it, it would of course be a different story. In the end, there are as many different versions of something that was not recorded verbatim as there were people present—each true to its rememberer. You are writing your memoir. So be true to yourself—both of you. You’ll find as you write that your own recollections continue to undergo revision. In that light, the two yous offer a way to show the discrepancies between the experiencing narrator’s point of view and the you who is writing the story now.

FURTHER SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Writing: Choosing a memory from an exercise in chapter 1 or another memory that occurs to you right now, write a few paragraphs establishing the you who is remembering now, looking back on yourself in the past. Move back and forth between what you recall and how you view the incident/experience/action now. The insights you are able to bring to bear on the past as you do this illustrate the power of the remembering self and your ability to frame your experience with a depth the experiencing self cannot access.

Reading: Now read what you have written and answer the following questions: What are several possibilities for where to stand in recounting this particular memory? Is there one place that feels compelling to you? Why?

Vivian Gornick reminds us: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand” (91, emphasis added). It’s this engagement of your two yous that will lead you to your own particular truth.

As you begin to explore your story, you may use one or some combination of the above methods of moving between the two yous. Or, as you discover your voice and your story, you may come up with your own distinctive approach.

Our next chapter focuses on ways to build your memoir, exploring different structures and ways of arranging a story to heighten its effect. Structure not only organizes your text episodically but also provides scaffolding that supports the plot and meaning from within. Structure is to story what the skeleton is to our bodies. Without it, all is formless, and nothing moves forward. In chapter 3 we’ll look at specific tools to help you find the structure that enhances your unique narrative.