Chap06

Every writer has her own unique style and voice, and in memoir this style and voice inform the story being told as the author views her remembered self with compassion, humor, and even forgiveness. As Patricia Hampl notes above, readers yearn for connection via the intimacy of the first-person voice. Just as with a close friend, the quality of the voice in your ear is one of the reasons people read to begin with: that voice can nurture, entertain, provoke wisdom, and provide companionship. So it follows that developing an authentic voice of your own is one of the most important tools you’ll master as you write your memoir.

In this chapter we’ll explore some of the voices and styles used in a variety of memoirs, including memoirs by writers known in other genres. We’ll also delineate the difference between you, the narrator, and you, the character—yet another aspect of the two yous. Finally, we’ll give you some important tools from the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit to help you hone your own voice and style.

Discovering the right voice for your memoir means more than simply writing down what you remember. It means finding the voice that can best tell this story, now.

We emphasize “this” story because every memoir demands a specialized, nuanced “you.” Memoirs are almost always related in the first-person singular, since it’s your “I” that is both telling and living the story. Open any memoir to its first page, and you’ll find that “I,” that intimate, confiding, first-person voice that figuratively takes your hand and invites you into the story, as Lynn Freed does in Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home: “Only long after I was old enough to read for myself, did I really make the connection between literature and the printed word. My mother…preferred to tell her own versions of the stories that other parents read to their children…. This way she could add characters at will, eliminate others, change the plot around, and thus string out the story into a series of episodic cliff-hangers” (1–2).

Because Freed’s memoir’s focus is her development as a writer, it makes sense that its occasion of the telling is her earliest experience of storytelling. But listen to the voice here—it’s not the young child’s but rather that of Freed the writer. Freed establishes this in her first three words: “Only long after.” Even as she returns to her experiencing self, her voice here is one of experience and knowledge—a remembering narrator, important in this memoir because Freed uses her experience to teach what she has learned about writing.

How a voice sounds on the page depends, first, on the story being told and, second, on how you the author choose to tell it. As Sue William Silverman notes in Fearless Confessions,“The voice of each piece you write needs its own tone, rhythm, vocabulary, and energy” (51).

The first-person voice you choose for your memoir will move between the experiencing you and the remembering you we discussed in chapter 2. Here, for example, is Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place: “I have refused to believe that Mother will die. And by denying her cancer, even her death, I deny her life. Denial stops us from listening. I cannot hear what Mother is saying. I can only hear what I want” (75–76).

Notice how Williams moves from the experiencing self in the first sentence to the remembering self in the rest of the paragraph. Even though Refuge is written in the present tense, it’s the remembering self who judges the experiencing self and finds her wanting. In the sentence “Denial stops us from listening,” Williams has stepped even farther back by employing first-person plural. She then returns to the experiencing self after the remembering self has rendered this judgment. Note that, despite the insight of the remembering self, the experiencing self has not changed. She still “only hear[s] what [she] want[s].”

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: If you’ve written at all, you already know your writing voice sounds different from your speaking voice. For this exercise, you’ll need a recording device (your computer or phone may well have one). Pick a story from your past you know well, perhaps one that you’ve told many times but have never written down. Without any preparation (no time for worry—just do it!), record the story, with the understanding that no one but you will ever listen to this recording. You’re recording it only for the purpose of this exercise.

Don’t play back the recording immediately after you’ve made it. Instead, move on to the next step in this exercise and write down the story. You may find yourself crossing things out (or, if you’re typing, deleting them) as well as moving words or even sentences around. That’s fine—this is the written version, and that’s precisely what writers do. Take your time, perhaps even going back to polish your draft the next day.

When you’ve finished this written draft, print out a hard copy. Now comes the point of all this. Have one or more colored pens or pencils ready, then play back the recording. Using different colors for different nuances (red for word choice, for example, or blue for elision or expansion), note where what’s on the page differs from what you say in the recording.

Next, consider the differences between these two versions. Are there different word choices—”lovely” instead of “awesome,” for example? Did you phrase your sentences more formally or reorder the telling to enhance its effect? Did you, like Williams, shift into another person to make a point? Maybe in the written version you chose to give more detail about a particular moment or realized that another moment didn’t need to be there at all. Each of these differences between your spoken voice and your written one is a hallmark of your writing voice. Practicing the hallmarks you discover in this exercise can help you make your writer’s voice still stronger and more distinct.

While first person is a given for the bulk of memoir, some of the more intriguing selections we’ve found are written in the third (he or she) or even the second (you) person. Shifting between persons within a narrative is an acquired skill, but there are a number of occasions where it can work to your advantage. You might, for example, find it difficult to write about a particular traumatic moment from your past, like this instance from Hilda Raz’s memoir What Becomes You, written with her son, Aaron Raz Link, a transgendered male who was born Hilda’s daughter, Sarah: “How does a mother enter the heart and skin of a human being not herself, a boy/girl she ‘grew in her center like the very air’? Can she?” (251).

Raz’s use of the third person here offers her, the writer, the perspective she needs to bring to life her difficulty with the fact that Sarah has become Aaron. Raz, who has a distinguished career specializing in literature and gender studies, shifts the moment closer to readers through its vivid language. Raz moves between first and third person in order to negotiate the difficulty she has with navigating a gender issue so close to home. In this case, the intentional distancing of third person conversely allows Raz to acknowledge that difficulty and to move closer to the reader. The way memoir writers negotiate life’s most difficult challenges, as we’ve pointed out, keeps readers engaged. Just as when we’re arguing with ourselves in our heads, the memoir writer uses different voices—in this case moving from first to third person.

Abigail Thomas employs second person to similar effect in Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life. In fact, Thomas moves among first, second, and third person throughout this unusual memoir, a pastiche of memory that ultimately serves as a moving tribute to her recently deceased second husband. Here’s the opening of one such second-person section: “For him love/marriage was a fencing match; you never allowed your opponent the upper hand. Your mate was your opponent, although it was all in good fun. You never revealed your vulnerable spot, but you went after theirs with the lightest of touches” (57).

In this passage both Thomas and her husband might be “you,” a conceit that shows that both were equally adept at the “fencing matches” that characterized their marriage. To understand why this works, imagine the passage in first person instead: “Love/marriage was a fencing match for both of us; neither of us allowed his or her opponent the upper hand.” Even this quick change of person in the passage’s first sentence shows that, for Thomas’s purposes, while first person would distance the reader from the moment (or, in this case, moments), second moves the reader into it.

It’s important to emphasize that, for the most part, first person is the logical choice for sharing your own story—it allows the writer to go inside her own story and dig deeply into the self. We offer these examples only as a possible method for you to reveal moments for which first person doesn’t seem to work or for which you need the distance of second or third person to connect with the reader or to explore complex issues at a greater remove.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Reading: Analyze a section from one of the books mentioned in this chapter and reflect on how the use of first, second, or third person affects your involvement as a reader.

Writing: One of the advantages of writing about your experiencing self in the third person is that it can help you approach material you’ve found difficult to write about until now. For this exercise, select an embarrassing moment from your past—preferably something you’ve never shared with anyone. Next, give the experiencing you a name—make her a character, in other words. Finally, create a scene for that character, using the embarrassing moment as its basis. Allow what really happened and your emotions about the scene—both then and now—free rein on the page. After all, you’re not writing about you anymore but about your character.

When you’ve finished, put the scene away until the next day. When you do read the piece, see if you’ve gotten closer to the character-you (and his emotions) by using the third person. We’ll bet you have. Writing in the third person allows us to approach problematic moments that are even now difficult to acknowledge.

If this is a scene that your memoir needs, you can now rewrite it using the first person. Or you may choose to keep it in third person or even experiment with second. The important thing is to get every scene that’s intrinsic to your story on the page. Changing person can help you do so.

Just as we refer to a novel’s narrator and a poem’s speaker, we like to differentiate between the author of a memoir and the character of the author within it when we talk about the work itself. This partly harks back to the two yous, but in this case, we’d like you to think of the two yous as you, the narrator, and you, the character.

As you discovered in the exercise above, where you recorded a scene, then wrote it down, the narrator you is not really you but rather a literary construction you create to tell a particular story. She won’t have your speaking voice but rather an enhanced voice that can approach the material with both wisdom and style. As Sue William Silverman puts it, “The ‘I’ in memoir is a literary device to both enhance and explore complicated truths” (53).

In addition, the you who narrates your memoir is not only the remembering you or the experiencing you but rather a combination of both. It’s through your voice that you’ll move back and forth between these two yous, weaving a coherent and compelling story that captures your readers.

Thinking of yourself as a narrator can be enormously freeing. This is why one of the things writing teachers usually discourage in the writing workshop is the use of the second person when talking about another’s work-in-progress, as in, “When you kill the bad guy on page 7…” Most likely (we hope!), the author hasn’t killed the bad guy, on page 7 or anywhere else; a character—perhaps even the protagonist—has. It’s for this reason that we insist on separating author from character—even in memoir. The literary term implied author helps remind us that there is a creator behind every work.

We mention this term here because you might think of the implied author as the voice you use to tell a particular story. Understanding that even your memoir has an implied author can help provide the narrative distance you need to tell your story in a compelling way. In addition, as we mentioned earlier in this book, the self does not stand still. The you writing your story now has grown and changed from the you who experienced the story. Separating the narrator from yourself makes that distinction easier to navigate as well.

While the implied author is a construct from literary criticism, the delineation between you, the writer, and you, the storyteller, comes from the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit and so may be an even more easily understood construct to grasp. You might think of the writer as the physical you, the one sitting at the keyboard typing now, at this moment, and the storyteller as the you on the page, both living and reliving moments as they unfold there. Sue William Silverman likes to call these two voices “the voice of experience” and “the voice of innocence” (51).

Throughout her memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, Bich Minh Nguyen negotiates the line between the writer and the storyteller (or, as Silverman defines them, the voice of experience and the voice of innocence), as she does here, in the book’s opening sentences: “We arrived in Grand Rapids with five dollars and a knapsack of clothes. Mr. Heidenga, our sponsor, set us up with a rental house, some groceries…and gave us dresses his daughters had outgrown. He hired my father to work a filling machine at North American Feather. Mr. Heidenga wore wide sport coats and had yellow hair” (1).

Nguyen’s memoir is about moving (or, more aptly, escaping) to Michigan from Vietnam in 1975, when she was a very young girl. The first two sentences here are in the writer’s voice, as the scene is set through narrative. Then there is a transition sentence from the writer to the storyteller, who then tells us in the last sentence quoted here that “Mr. Heidenga wore wide sport coats and had yellow hair.” Where Nguyen the writer might have embellished this sentence, the very young storyteller tells us, from her child point of view, what she sees. The young storyteller, the experiencing self, is “innocent,” as she doesn’t have the distance or judgment that the reminiscent self has.

For another example, we look to Margaret Atwood’s story collection Moral Disorder: Stories (which we’ve chosen to cite because the author acknowledges that this book is as autobiographical as anything she’s ever written), in which Atwood dances between writer and storyteller just as we’ve come to expect of this celebrated writer of fiction and poetry. In this scene, the narrator’s much-younger sister has demanded she impersonate a monster, one of the sister’s favorite games that nonetheless terrifies her: “’All right,’ I’d say, though I was quite sure how it would end. ‘I’ll count to ten. Then I’m coming to get you.’ I said this last in my flat monster voice. By the time I’d reached ten, my sister would already have shut herself in the front hall closet with the winter coats and the vacuum cleaner, and would be calling in a muffled voice, ‘The game’s over! The game’s over!’” (38).

Atwood the narrator here chooses the conditional tense—I would say, I would be calling—while Atwood the storyteller pulls us into the scene with the dialogue and the description of that front hall closet. Atwood is such a skilled writer that her zigzagging back and forth between voices is invisible to the reader—and renders the scene vivid on the page.

Some of us can point to clear delineators in our lives, with the result that we have come to regard the child, teenager, or young adult we once were as if he or she were someone other than ourselves. Applying that perspective to the you in your memoir can help you find the right voice to tell your story. Put another way, regarding your past self (or selves) as someone other than your current self offers an added layer of understanding. The separation this affords allows you to see the story elements in your past and releases you somewhat from the pressure of trying to recall what factually happened.

One of Lisa’s students, Marcia Sargent, went further, insisting that early drafts of her memoir Wing Wife: How to Be Married to a Fighter Pilot were fiction. When, at Lisa’s urging, Marcia went back and turned this thinly veiled autobiographical coming-of-age novel into the memoir it was meant to be, the perspective—and depth—gained by writing the story first as fiction was a decided advantage to the character of the experiencing self in the book.

Marcia had been relatively young and undeniably naive when she’d married her Marine fighter pilot husband. Here she is, for example, about to attend her first squadron gathering:

Even if we’ve never been in a similar situation, even in the unlikely event that we’ve never lacked confidence, we as readers nonetheless feel an immediate identification with Marcia, the character—the young wife who’s unsure of herself—because of the honesty of emotion in the voice here. That’s what you’re after when you write about you, the character—a sincere voice that connects with readers.

We recognize writers’ voices through their particular usage of language, or style. Style is one of those tools in the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit that’s most easily defined by example. So rather than give you long speeches about various aspects of style, we’ve chosen to let a number of brilliant stylists speak for themselves by discussing memoirs by Mary Karr, Eudora Welty, Mario Vargas Llosa, Margaret Atwood, and Mary Oliver.

In the sections that follow, we’ll unpack each writer’s particular tools and show you how they combine to create his or her unique style.

If we were to point to one single aspect of Mary Karr’s writing that has made each of her successive memoirs such a success, it would have to be her winning style. Karr on the page is often a wisecracking smart-ass, her language crackling, direct, and, often, hysterically funny. Here’s an example from The Liars’ Club. Karr’s Uncle Frank has appeared unexpectedly to pick up Mary and her sister Leica from school:

Uncle Frank kneeled down eye-level to tell me that Grandma had “passed away.” I remember this phrase seemed an unnaturally polite way of putting it, like something you’d hear on Bonanza. All the local terms for dying started more or less coursing through my head right then. She bought the farm, bit the big one, cashed in her chips, and my favorite: she opened herself up a worm farm. (I had the smug pleasure once of using this term up north and having a puzzled young banker-to-be then ask me if these worm farmers in Texas sold worms for fishing, or what.) (99)

With her inimitable voice and conversational style, Karr can’t resist not only cracking wise but also offering the reader an aside from her remembering self that makes light of the moment despite its difficulty. Notice how Karr uses both the phrasings of her East Texas childhood and a cultural signpost that serves as a time marker to render this scene vivid. Before she catalogs “the local terms for dying,” she tells us that they “more or less” occurred to her “right then.” Both of these latter phrasings are themselves hallmarks of Karr’s voice—down-home and downright funny and so, by extension, honest—a voice the reader trusts.

Before you go thinking that wisecracking is a hallmark of southern style, let’s take a look at the lovely, wise voice of Eudora Welty. While it’s true Welty can be wickedly funny (if you haven’t read her classic “Why I Live at the P.O.,” we encourage you to stop reading right this minute and do so), her humor emerges not from the wisecrack or quick rejoinder but rather from the characters themselves. Here, in One Writer’s Beginnings, she relates a tale about her mother’s attorney father, Ned Andrews, in which Ned defends a fortuneteller who predicts a man’s death and then is accused of his murder when the man is found dead of a gunshot wound in his bed the next day:

Ned Andrews’ defense centered on the well-known fact that the old man kept his loaded gun mounted at all times over the head of his bed. This was the gun that had shot him. The old man could have discharged it perfectly easily himself, Ned argued, by carelessly bouncing on the bed a little bit. He proposed to prove it, and led the jury of dubious mountaineers to watch him do it. Leading them all the way up the mountain to the old man’s cabin, he mounted the gun in place on its rests, having first loaded it with blank shells, and while they watched he mimicked the old man and made a running jump onto the bed. The gun jarred loose, tumbled down, and fired at him. He rested his case. The fortuneteller was without any more ado declared not guilty. (52–53)

Notice here how Welty lets her character carry the story. Yes, it’s being told by a third-person narrator (Welty herself), but Ned’s cleverness is revealed through the details of the story itself. She shows Ned to be thorough and rather courtly too in this excerpt. Unlike Karr’s down-home style, Welty employs a sage storyteller who uses an enhanced version of the language of her particular place (Mississippi) to render the story vivid to the reader.

Award-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s A Writer’s Reality pulls back the curtain on some of the real-life moments that precipitated his novels. As Vargas Llosa puts it, “The novelist…reveals those demons that obsess him—his nostalgia, his guilt, sometimes his resentment…. The personal experiences that were the first stimulus to write the novel are so insidiously disguised during the process of creation that when the novel is finished, no one, often not even the novelist himself, can easily hear that autobiographical heart that inevitably beats in all fiction” (57).

Vargas Llosa’s stance here is of the teacher, which is why he assumes a third-person, authoritative voice to explain his own process. But even when he moves into first person to show “those demons that obsess him,” Vargas Llosa retains this self-referential distance as he circles closer and closer to when, as a nine-year-old boy, his family moved to Piura, a time about which he still obsesses. “My mother says that the reason is that that year I saw the sea for the first time” (58), Vargas Llosa tells us first, going into some historical depth regarding this theory before suggesting: “The main reason that my stay in Piura affected me so deeply was that in that year some of my friends, in an afternoon when we tried to swim in the almost dead waters of the Piura River, told me something that constituted an emotional earthquake for me: that babies did not come from Paris, that it was not true that white storks brought them to life from exotic regions” (59).

Let’s pause here to compare Mario Vargas Llosa’s style with that of Mary Karr and Eudora Welty. Karr, as we noted, assumes a jaunty vernacular that lends her narrative sass. Welty offers a discerning and shrewd narrator who allows the character to reveal the story. Vargas Llosa’s style resembles neither of these. The phrasings are formal (which may be because his native language is Spanish); the language is careful and considered. In fact, even when he finally homes in on the life-changing incident in Piura, he maintains an emotional distance from his narrative, telling the reader that he learns “something that constituted an emotional earthquake.” His relation of what he learns is similarly styled to keep a distance between the narrator and his emotions—yes, it’s amusing that a nine-year-old boy still believed babies were delivered by storks, but the deeper emotional chaos that the news seems to have created within Vargas Llosa is not shown on the page. The passage assumes the weight of a coming-of-age moment.

Vargas Llosa’s formal, more intellectual style here does not, as one might initially believe, distance the reader from the narrative. Instead, it serves as a lasso, at first swinging in wide arcs, then circling in closer and closer to the heart of the matter, until we learn, a bit further on, that Vargas Llosa and his friends also spent many hours that summer spying on a green house that he learned years later was a brothel.

In the young boy’s mind, the mysteries of childbirth become entangled with the green house, even though at that time he doesn’t know they’re both about sex. Even when, years later, he realizes they are, they lose none of their mystery but only fire his imagination more. In the end, Vargas Llosa has no choice but to turn his fascinations with these (and several other, seemingly unrelated) fictional seeds into his novel The Green House.

Whenever we (that is, Lynn and Lisa) talk about voice, we find ourselves citing Margaret Atwood. That’s because, no matter what this queen of letters turns her pen to, her distinctive clever, witty, and, above all, arch style rings, and zings, true.

In Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood offers her own unique perspective on both writing and being a writer. Here, for example, she explores the duplicity that she insists is the root of a writer’s art: “What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’?…By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward—the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth—and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing” (35).

What’s particularly delightful about Atwood’s style is its insistence on (to co-opt one of her word choices) “regularity.” In talking about the writer when she’s not writing, she might have used a phrase like “her everyday life” or “her daily chores.” Instead, she chooses to name some specific activities—dog walking, breakfast eating, car washing—rendering the moment both more individual and more universal. It’s this insistence on detailing the everyday, even within the most unusual of moments, that places an added stamp on Atwood’s style. Whatever she says she does or doesn’t do, we sense the hand of the writer at work.

By their very nature, poets bring a distinctive tang to their prose writing styles. In earlier chapters we’ve cited Mark Doty and Rachel Hadas, both of whom have written memoirs in addition to their many books of poetry, and in this chapter we refer to a memoir by poet Hilda Raz. Mary Oliver is another poet whose prose writings reflect her individual style.

While Long Life is a collection of essays and occasional writings, her inclusion of childhood remembrances even in these forms is a hallmark of Oliver’s style. The following, for example, comes from an essay about Wordsworth:

When I was a child, living in a small town surrounded by woods and a winding creek—woods more pastoral than truly wild—my great pleasure, and my secret, was to fashion for myself a number of little houses. They were huts, really, made of sticks and grass, maybe a small heap of fresh leaves inside. There was never a closure but always an open doorway, and I would sit just inside, looking out into the world. Such architectures were the capsules of safety, and freedom as well, open to the wind, made of grass and smelling like leaves and flowers. (22)

Poets are collectors of the details of everyday life who can later recount (and reorder) those details so that the moments they recollect are resurrected for the reader. Notice the accumulation of details here: the winding creek, the little huts “made of sticks and grass,” “smelling like leaves and flowers.”

At the same time, Oliver employs a conversational style, so that the reader feels as if he’s listening to her speak rather than reading her words on the page. Markers of this style include the interjection—phrases set between dashes, like this one—and the colloquial tic, like “really” or the currently popular “well.” This juxtaposition of poetic and narrative elements results in Oliver’s unique voice and style, which are both elegiac and conversational. The result creates an intimacy between writer and reader, so that Oliver’s voice, with its distinct details and easy style, whispers confidentially in the reader’s ear.

Like the voices of the masters we’ve cited above, your writing voice will be uniquely your own. The spotlight exercises earlier in this chapter are good first steps for honing that voice. Now we’d like to share a few more techniques from the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit that will help you sharpen your voice still more.

The term cinema vérité comes to us from French cinema, but the camera’s-eye view to which it refers has become so common since the advent of handheld cameras that its originality when it was first pioneered is often overlooked. Imagine any scene in film where you, the viewer, are placed in the scene—often from the protagonist’s point of view—and you will grasp the essence of cinema verité.

As a writer, and especially as a writer of memoir, you can use cinema verité to striking effect. First, bear in mind that when you experienced what you are writing about, you could not see yourself. In other words, your memory allows you to become the camera. This gives you a unique perspective (in writing terms, point of view) of the goings-on. Because you’re facing in a certain direction, you can’t see everything—you can see the person next to you only in profile, what’s behind you not at all. This means that, as the story’s teller, you can imagine what you can’t see, but you can’t report it as if you actually saw it.

Vivid memoirs use the eye of the camera to marvelous effect. Here, for example, is Patricia Hampl, in A Romantic Education, remembering her grandmother offering her freshly baked rye bread: “The loaf was round, heavy and my grandmother held it to her bosom like a member of the family as she hacked off what was not a slice, but a hunk” (79). By giving us the child’s point of view here, we, like the child Hampl, feel the grandmother’s looming presence as well as the subliminal terror as she “hack[s] off…a hunk” of what she is holding so closely—the narrator can imagine being the object held just that way. Note the visceral language and the specificity of the image and how they convey emotion as well.

Our discussion of first, second, and third person earlier in this chapter also illustrates point of view as the “I” or “you” or “he/she” controls the amount of distance and limits the vision of the narrator.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Seeing visceral details through a camera’s eye can help you convey their emotional weight. To try this yourself, pick a scene from your childhood where you are observing adults. Make notes to answer the following: Where are you? Where are they? What is going on? How do you feel about the physical presence of the adults in your view? Give a visceral detail for each that conveys your emotional response as well. To extend the exercise, write the scene in first person and then in third person. Compare the effect of each.

Once you really begin to think about the limits of point of view, you will inevitably need to consider how to incorporate what you don’t know into your memoir. Memoirists use a variety of methods from the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit for showing the reader things the memoirists couldn’t possibly have known firsthand, including having another character tell the narrator about the event, photographs, letters (or e-mails)—or their imaginations.

Learning the truth about something later from someone else is not just a trope of the memoir but a fact of life. But what if you never do learn the truth? What if you must use the last tool we mentioned, your imagination, to complete your memoir? In Booker Award-winning author Penelope Lively’s Making It Up, which she calls an “antimemoir,” the author chooses to dance between what she remembers and what she has imagined. As she notes in her preface, “Now, at the other end of life, storytelling is an ingrained habit…. This book is fiction…. My own life serves as the prompt; I have homed in upon the rocks, the rapids, the whirlpools, and written the alternative stories”(1–2 emphasis added).

Lively begins each section with an italicized event from her life and then uses something from that moment as the jumping-off point for an imagined narrative. In “Transatlantic,” for example, she mentions a one-day encounter, when she’s an undergraduate at Oxford, with an American professor whom she is assigned to show around. At the end of the day, the professor gives her his card and tells her, “My university has postgraduate programs that might appeal to you. Let me know if you’re interested” (116). Lively never follows up on this offer. But in the fiction that follows the anecdote, she imagines an alternative life where she did.

Narrating imagined stories of what didn’t happen can help you get closer to what did happen. You can even use them in your memoir, as Joan Didion does so eloquently in The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion continually circles back to the moment just before her husband, John, died, imagining that, via magical thinking, she might alter its outcome.

You can also use your imagination to write about something that happened to someone else that directly affects the story you are trying to tell but that, for one reason or another, you cannot ever know with complete certainty. What was going through your loved one’s mind, for example, just before he or she died? How did the person you were arguing with feel about what you were saying? Did your mother have the same reaction you did when your father walked out the door for the last time? In chapter 7 we’ll discuss walking the tightrope between authenticity and the self-truth of your story.

In such instances, for one reason or another, you can’t ask the other person how she was feeling. But it’s possible that now, as the remembering narrator, you can imagine how she might have felt, or, as Ellen Meloy puts it in Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, “The human spirit…yearns for glimpses into the ‘interiority’ of a being that is different, not us, something not quite comprehensible, something that moves in its own complete universe. To bat-listen, to touch an otherworld with more than one sense, to reclaim daily the notion of layered miracles” (319).

We’d like to close this discussion with a reminder that while readers initially start a new book for the story, they stick around because they’ve come to care about the storyteller. Tell your story in a compelling voice, and you’ll never lack for readers who care.

We hope these six chapters have helped you nurture the seeds of your memoir. In the next, and final, chapter we’ll explore what happens when you finish your draft, including strategies for revision and rewriting, the trials and tribulations of being true to your story and its inhabitants, and how to bring your memoir out into the world.