Thinking About Memoir, page 4
Write two pages of what you are no longer certain of.
Write two pages of an unshakable belief.
What you no longer need to remember I smoked for a long time. Once in a while I start up again, smoke for a month or two (or four) and then stop. The stopping, when it finally arrives, requires no effort, no sacrifice. One minute I’m chain-smoking, the next I’m not. When I’m smoking I can’t imagine quitting, and when I’ve quit I can’t imagine starting again. My problem is I never really got over thinking smoking was cool. I taught myself how to French inhale in front of a mirror. I don’t really need that particular skill anymore. Nor do I need to strike a match using one hand, sophisticated though that used to seem.
I read an essay in which the writer told of how his father had taught him to fold The New York Times the long way, the way that makes it possible to read in a NYC subway. He realized he no longer needed that skill, so hard-won, alas. (I forget why, maybe because of computer screens.) My second husband used to bemoan the fact that everything he knew about a previous lover was no longer necessary, they had broken up, he had married me, and all that expertise about her was going to go to waste. You have to know I looked at him differently after he said that. Even though I was young, I knew something was wrong with this statement. As if knowing someone is the emotional equivalent of skillful driving. As if it would get you somewhere.
Write two pages about something someone said that you filed away for future reference.
Write two pages about the moment you knew something was over.
In the summer we kids used to walk atop a split-rail fence on our way to the beach. It was knotted and crooked and covered with rose bushes, and it took a lot of balance and determination to stay up and not get stung by bees or pricked by thorns. I was good at it, looked forward to it every morning. Now, fifty-five years later, where there used to be a split-rail fence there are brick walls too high to see over, let alone climb. (This is not really an obsolete skill, but one rendered impossible by age.) I never did learn to drive a stick, but I gather most cars are automatic now. I think of the young men in high school whose main claim to fame was their artistry in the make-out department. I wonder if people bother to make out anymore. I hope so. Getting there is half the fun.
Maybe it is 99 percent of the fun.
Write two pages of no fun at all.
Write two pages about a skill painfully acquired and now no longer needed.
Write two pages of what you wish you could still do.
Memory and metaphor Chuck’s daughter Hannah is choreographing a dance about memory using flashlights and darkness. This seems to me the perfect metaphor for the way memory does and doesn’t work: vivid but disjointed. I confess—everything seems to refer back to me these days, I hope this isn’t something I’ve been doing for years and am only just noticing—that I mostly remember unhappiness, vague uneasiness, as if I’d spent my childhood ankle-deep in standing water. So I’m curious about why I don’t have any happy memories and my friend Chuck says, with his customary incisiveness, “You don’t ponder happiness.”
Ponder sticks in my head. Lovely word. Maybe it comes from pond, because of reflection, although Narcissus fell in love with his own good looks and did no further work. So I look it up and it derives from a word that means “to weigh.” Never mind. Each time you look at ponder, there is that calm round circle of water, you can’t get away from it.
Write two pages involving a flashlight.
Write two pages that end with “You can’t get away from it.”
But all this makes me feel better about a recent conversation in which one of my grown daughters agreed with another of my grown daughters that, between them, they had only one happy memory of childhood.
“Only one!” says my friend Claudette. “And they had to share it!”
Write two pages of something that makes you laugh every time.
four
Structure
Structuring memoir There are as many different kinds of memoir as there are motives for writing one. There is memoir written as pure story: You start at the beginning and end where you are now, a breathless headlong rush through what happened. You can start at the end and look back, or with some middle moment, an event that precipitated change and clarity, or the need for clarity. Put the point of your compass there and start circling: big circles, small circles, overlapping circles. You can put together fragments that contain moments of crisis or confusion or hilarity, or moments that stick in the mind for no apparent reason, and while they may not follow chronology in terms of time, they may make an emotional progression. Ilene Beckerman has written a perfect memoir called Love, Loss, and What I Wore, an account of her life illustrated by what she was wearing at important moments. I believe someone else has fashioned a memoir comprised entirely of lists.
When I began writing Safekeeping—which is, for lack of a better word, a sort of memoir—I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I couldn’t stop. What were these little pieces I was feverishly scribbling? They had started coming a few weeks after an old friend died, a man I’d been married to once upon a time, someone I’d known half my life. The pages piled up. Memories, moments, scenes, nothing longer than a few pages, some only a line or two. There was no narrative flow. There was no narrative at all. But these bits and pieces kept flying out of me, and I kept writing them down. I didn’t know if what I was doing would amount to anything, but I never cross-examine the muse.
I left out long boring patches of life I could barely recall. I left out jobs, shrink appointments, lousy boyfriends. I left out a scene that contained two naked people and a scimitar. But I still found plenty to write. I changed voices from first to third when it felt right. I mixed up past and present. There was no chronological sense to it, no order. It was popcorn. The only thing I was sure of was that I would stop with my friend’s death. Grief had been the catalyst; grief would be the end.
But I hadn’t died. Everywhere around me life went on. My eldest daughter had a daughter, and she named her after me, an honor I didn’t feel worthy of. My grandmotherly visit was painful, guilt-ridden, but it contained a miracle, and when I realized that this was where I wanted to end, I began to see a kind of emotional chronology. The pieces tumbled back and forth, but something was evolving.
My editor turned it down. She wanted me to write a novel about that marriage, what went wrong, what went right, then friendship, illness, and death. But life doesn’t arrange itself conveniently into chapters—not mine, anyway. And I didn’t want to write a novel. My life didn’t feel like a novel. It felt like a million moments. I didn’t want to make anything fit together. I didn’t want to make anything up. I didn’t want it to make sense the way I understand a novel to make a kind of sense. I didn’t want anywhere to hide. I didn’t want to be able to duck. I wanted the shock of truth. I wanted moments that felt like body blows. I wanted moments of pure hilarity, connected to nothing that came before or after. I wanted it to feel like the way I’ve lived my life. And I wanted to tell the truth. My truth doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigzags, detours, doubles back. Most truths I have to learn over and over again.
There is no hard-and-fast rule about structure; you can invent your own. This morning I thought, well, imagine your memoir as a sheet of paper and the structure is like an origami bird you fashion from it. I called my sister Eliza to try this out on her, since her daughter PanPan is a terrific origami maker. “I love her cranes,” I said to Eliza. “Isn’t it a good metaphor for structure?”
A little pause.
“Well,” she said, “one morning I came down and she was surrounded by 500 hopping toads.”
Write an ode to a part of your body. You could probably structure an entire memoir using different parts of the human body.
Write two pages about your feet.
Where there’s a will My sister Judy suggests that a good way to get going on memoir is to write your will. You have to decide who gets all your treasures, and this involves looking at them, and remembering where you found them. She reminds me that when my youngest daughter, Catherine, was a little girl, Judy took care of her for a week while her father and I went to Mexico. Catherine was fascinated by all Judy’s stuff and said, joyfully, “I can’t wait for you to die so I can have your things!”
Recently I heard Catherine say to one of her twin boys, as she carried him around my backyard, “Just think! Some day all this will be partially yours!”
A lawyer tells me that when writing your will, the legal term for one’s possessions is “the natural objects of my bounty.” How lovely that is, implying nothing of getting and spending, nothing that smacks of commercialism.
Write two pages about your treasures.
Write two pages about the unnatural objects of your bounty.
Who would want what’s on my mantel? All those little boxes. They are not pretty, and there is nothing inside except beads and lost earrings. I can’t imagine anyone wanting the rusty finial of a bird’s head. I must remember to tell my family that there is no need to be sentimental. “Treasure” is a subjective term. One of my possessions is a black plastic ashtray filled with a collection of my father’s skipping stones. My friend Paul has a collection of manhole covers. (“Don’t ask,” he says.) Judy tells me, before we’re off the phone, “I want my stuff buried with me.”
Write two pages of what you can’t pass down.
Write two pages about what you want to take with you.
Later Judy tells me that if we come back, she wants to come back as a pebble in a tidal pool, or a minnow swimming around the pebble. “Why not come back as the whole tidal pool?” I suggest. Then I tell her that I have always wanted to be a whole school of fish, to see what it feels like to wheel around in the water.
There is the briefest of pauses. “Typical,” my sister says.
Write two pages ending with “That’s typical.”
More about my sister Judy took me to her favorite store. I saw an art-deco teapot and sugar bowl, and pointed them out to her. “I know,” she said, “I love them, but they’re twenty-eight dollars.”
I bought them, and after a brief scuffle with myself, I presented them to my sister. “Oh, no,” she said, but I insisted, happy to discover that now that I’m sixty-five I don’t have to have everything.
Write two pages about a scuffle with yourself.
Write two pages about what you don’t have to have.
Noticing the difference A couple of years ago my sister Judy and I were each given a box of truffles. The tiny print said two pieces contained 310 calories and there were six pieces in each box. We were sitting on the bus headed downtown, quietly doing our calculations: Judy was dividing by two and I was multiplying by three. When she realized what I was doing, a look came over her face that is hard to describe. “I lost all hope for you,” she says now. The difference between us could not have been more clearly defined than in that moment. (One of the differences, she would be quick to point out.)
There are those people who can eat one piece of chocolate, one piece of cake, drink one glass of wine. There are even people who smoke one or two cigarettes a week. And then there are people for whom one of anything is not even an option.
Write two pages about when a striking difference between you and another person became clear.
Write two pages that involve memories of chocolate.
There are other basic differences between people. As my friend Chuck pointed out, there are people who go on vacation and count the number of days left in the vacation, and those who count the number of days left until they get to go home. My daughter Jen and I took a trip to Scotland a few years ago. We planned it in advance, and two weeks before we left we began counting the days until we got home. We missed our dogs, but that doesn’t really explain it. And it’s not that we didn’t have a wonderful time. We did.
Write two pages of what goes through your mind while you’re packing for a trip.
Write two pages of feeling homesick.
Use specific details Back when I was a literary agent I received a proposal from a woman named Virginia Dabney who wanted to write about her mother’s farm, where she had grown up. In her proposal, she wrote about the birds singing outside the window, and some other things I can’t remember. Nothing caught my attention until she talked about the cold winters and the unheated house, and how, to keep her children warm, her mother put newspapers between the sheets and blankets for insulation. Now that was interesting. I wrote her back saying I didn’t want to hear anything about the beauty of the birdsong, but please tell me more about those newspapers.
A year later I received a manuscript called Once There Was a Farm: A Country Childhood Remembered, which was bought and published by Random House.
Details. Specifics. Eliminate all abstract nouns.
Write two pages of how you kept/keep warm.
Write two pages of details about being cold.
Keep track of what you notice What you look at is part of who you are. Keep an eye on yourself. See where what you notice takes you. There’s an old man who sometimes stands on the side of a busy road across from a place that sells mushroom soil and gravel and heaps of black crumbly earth and white pebbles for driveways. Often the lot is filled with big pyramids of one substance or another. In December there are Christmas trees. The man just stands there, staring. He is short and a little fat. What is he doing? What is he watching for? It makes no sense to me. I’m too shy to stop my car and ask.
I want to shift gears now and say I’ve seen him standing there in all kinds of weather—rain, snow, hot sun—but I’m probably making that up to add drama and mystery. Adding that kind of detail is the way fiction starts its engine—It was a dark and stormy afternoon and . . . but I want answers. What on earth is he there for? Is he spying? Waiting for a friend? He doesn’t stand in the attitude of waiting. He doesn’t look hopeful. He is just staring.
Once I walked up Sixth Avenue with a poet friend. We were standing in front of a flower store, and my friend had his notebook open, scribbling away. Maybe it was a legal pad. The proprietor came out, nervously asking if something was wrong. Was my friend an inspector? An engineer? My friend said no, and explained he was writing a poem. There were unpleasant words of some kind, I can’t remember what was said or misunderstood, but the shop owner asked us to move on, and we did. My friend frowned, and whispered his threat: “The poem just changed.”
Write two pages of a question you wish you’d asked.
Write two pages of revenge that nobody notices.
Another strange person My daughter-in-law Kirsten told me of a woman seen riding a bicycle somewhere in Montana. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a tweed jacket, not really the right gear for the terrain or the transport. Later, people came upon her bicycle lying at the side of the road and they were alarmed enough to investigate. They found her with a garbage bag over her head, and when they pulled it off she was smoking a cigarette under there. She was terribly annoyed.
Write two pages about finding someone doing something inexplicable.
Write two pages of unwelcome assistance.
The need for story Recently I went to a conference given by the Brain Injury Association of New York State, and I sat in on a talk given by the director of a traumatic brain injury rehab facility. She said the first thing they do to assist a person who has experienced a loss, not just of memory but of self, is to make a story. With the help of family and friends they write a story of the patient’s life—the events, names, and faces.
It is basic, our need for story, perhaps because it is such a handy way to carry our experiences around—story as container, so to speak. But the shape can be anything at all. So you can think of your memoir as a soup pot, or a trapeze, or a funnel, and if this helps you, great. What helped me was deciding what my memoir wasn’t going to be—it wasn’t going to be shackled by chronology.
My advice is to start writing and continue writing. A shape will eventually suggest itself to you. I realize I have said this all before, but I can’t emphasize enough that you trust the writing and the shape will appear.
Be sure to include what you can’t make fit neatly into your idea of yourself, or whatever it is that ruffles the smooth surface of your life story. Suppose at some point your mother told you that you had a half sister who was ten years older than you. Suppose you discover that you had a brother who died before you were born, and nobody will talk about it, so that piece of information has lain in isolation. Suppose you once discovered love letters in your father’s raincoat pocket, and never asked questions. So where does this stuff go? It doesn’t fit anywhere. It was a meteor, or a crack, but nothing more came of it. To which I say, well, what is the “anywhere” this doesn’t fit? Start there.
Oh, I was just going to skip over all that, you say. Nope. You’re going to have to write it.
Write two pages of something you wish you didn’t know.
Write two pages of something you regret revealing.
Shapes and sounds I think it was either E. M. Forster or Henry James who described a novel as a big baggy monster. We are talking here only about memoir, but if you could somehow put your entire life into a huge bag, what would be the prevailing sound?
Write two pages that begin with “Get me out of here.”
