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Telling the Truth in Memoir

* Playing off of last week’s post, here’s a reprint of an article I originally wrote for Write It Sideways.

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“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.” ~Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club

I don’t plan on writing a memoir. My life may be busy and fulfilling, chaotic and frustrating at times, but I doubt I could compile my 42 years into a riveting 300 page book of Me. Still, there are certain stories my gut wants me to put down on paper.

Like the one about the summer I turned twenty-two, when I climbed into the back seat of a tiny Isuzu Trooper and rode all the way from Norman, Oklahoma to the Catskills of upstate New York. So much changed for me during that trip, change embodied in the green hills of Pennsylvania as they rose and fell alongside me like waves. I left in one state of mind and returned a totally different person: tan, nursed by the woods of Rhinebeck, New York. And, in love.

And another about how, the week after my mother died, I desperately clung to whatever artifacts of hers I could, from her Bible to that pair of gaudy glasses she wore in the late eighties. Those glasses sat out on a table at my house for months, maybe a year. Why did she keep them, and why couldn’t I let them go?

As I begin to put some of these memories down into tiny essays, I realize more and more that memoir—in long form or in short—presents an ongoing challenge: that of telling the truth.

The Fact of the Matter

good-prose-cover1It isn’t that I don’t remember the details, or that I worry about who said exactly what. When it comes to memoir and memories, you “tell the stories as accurately and artfully as your abilities allow,” as Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd say in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.The Who, What, Where and When of a story shouldn’t vary between two people, but the How or Why might unfold in entirely different ways.

After my road trip from Oklahoma to New York that summer, I flew home to visit my parents and discovered that their marriage was quickly falling apart. Or perhaps, after too many years of strain, the threads holding them together finally unraveled. Either way, in the months that followed, I found myself in the middle of their divorce. By choice, but also because I didn’t know better. Certain events and conversations stick with me in uncomfortable ways, so I’ve tried to write about them. The facts are set down easily enough; it’s everything in between—and the potential effects afterward—that present the hazards.

Emotional Consequences

“There is a ripple effect each time a memoir is published, and while the memoirist cannot fully prepare for it, he or she should expect it.” ~ Anthony D’Aries in Writing Lessons: Memoir’s Truth and Consequences

file0001884795802The ripple effect, that’s what I worry about. How can I write what I saw and heard and felt and avoid shedding negative light on someone I love? Do I need to write those stories? Even more important, must I share them?

I’m a writer. It’s what I do, how I understand the world around me. And, I know I’m not alone in walking this tricky line when writing about personal experiences. So, I’ve been studying books, talking with other writers, and asking for critiques of my early drafts. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up so far:

  1. First drafts are for your eyes only. Sometimes, I have to get through all the weird and uncomfortable and (what feels like) an inventory of wrong-doing before I get to a place of real understanding or peace about an event. First drafts offer a safe haven for such writing, because I’m the only one who will be reading the work at this point anyway.
  2. Check your motives. Through each rewrite after that first draft, I ask myself, Why am I writing this? And, who is the main focus in this story? Never, ever, write for revenge. And, as Kidder and Todd in Good Prose say, “Be harder on yourself than you are on others. . . . You will not portray [them] just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.”
  3. Share the story with someone you trust. I’ve requested feedback from a family member as well as other writers on some of my recent work, asking if my story reads full of self-pity or too much criticism of another or less literary and more fit for my journal. When writing memoir, friends or family may be just as valuable as writing partners.
  4. Let it go. After I’ve checked my motives and revised an essay time and again, after I’ve discussed it with someone else (and rewritten it one more time), then I have to let it go. Like D’Aries says, we cannot control what others think or how they see an event in comparison with the way we saw and understood it. But, if we’re driven to put our stories on paper, and share them with others, then we have to be ready to face every consequence—good and bad.

When writing memoir or personal essays, how do you move beyond the anxiety of telling the truth?

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Writing to Remember

hotelI write for several reasons. Some days I write because I’ve stepped into a place, and my heart has stopped. My breathing turns short and shallow and I know there is a story to be told.

And some days I write for a few of the same reasons Margaret Atwood has said she writes:

To set down the past before it is forgotten.
To excavate the past because it has been forgotten.

I am forgetful. Painfully so. I often call one of my sisters or my best-friend-for-ages and start the conversation with, “Do you remember…?” Both my children were born on the 22nd day of their respective months, I am sure, because some power in the Universe knew I would have trouble keeping track of birthdays. On a given day, I cannot recall what I had for dinner the night before.

I accept my cloudy memory. But this past weekend, while on a trip with my sisters and my cousins, it became clear just how insufficient the brain can be when storing and recalling events.

When you’re in the thick of immediate family, conversations turn intimate. One night, we talked about my mother, her death, those days when we went through her things. I brought up how my sisters and I discovered cash in her linen cabinet buried under the towels, waved my hands and talked about it with complete confidence. But then my sister stopped me and said, “No, that didn’t happened at her house. We were at the bank. It was hidden inside her will. In her safe deposit box.” Until then, I could see–plain as day–the three of us standing in her bathroom, a hand lifting the towels, and someone saying, “Look.”

Both my sisters agreed we were at the bank, and of course it makes more sense. As they described their own recollections, my brain began to put the pieces in the right order (and place) again.

Still, it was strange. I kept asking, why when I remember that moment would I put us in the bathroom instead of at the bank?

Today, I’m asking: Does it matter?

Last summer, I took a one-week workshop on writing creative nonfiction with Lisa Romeo, in which she talked about that exact aspect of writing nonfiction: our fallible minds and why some details don’t matter. In her lesson, she asks:

Are you — when you are writing memoir, personal essay and other forms of creative nonfiction — creating an official document, meant to preserve in perpetuity the accuracy of a specific event down to the last detail? …what matters and what doesn’t to the story you are telling?

I’ve written the beginnings to an essay about those weeks after my mother died, partly to “set down the past” and partly to “excavate the past.” Now, when I go back to that piece for rewrites, I will have to ask what helps or halts the story (meaning what do I need to include or what can I leave out). Would it matter to a reader where I stood more than what I saw? More importantly, what is the story I really want to tell? Sometimes in a personal essay, the when and where matter much less than the why.

What do you do when memory fails?

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Writing about Place

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It’s not just about showing the reader a particular exterior landscape. It’s about giving them a particular interior landscape. ~ Cathy Day, “Teaching Tuesday: Setting”

If you’ve taken a writing course or workshop, you may have been given the prompt, “Where I’m from.” The first time I wrote with those three words in mind, I went back to a place and time in my youth when I was just beginning to notice family dynamics, beginning to identify but not quite understand:

Where I’m from is a two-lane road that winds into a cul-de-sac where the house on Hix still stands. As the front door opens, a long, low creak breaks the silence and makes you wonder, for a second, why we never bothered to grease the hinges.

The house is full of light and seems peaceful. And, it is most days. But down the cold, tile steps of the entryway and off to the left is the kitchen. There, bathed in the morning sunshine, I sit with my mother and her mother and the Sunday paper and watch them cut out coupons.

No one speaks, yet there is heavy presence. Not angry, but resigned. Weathered. Cognizant of something fragile, I eat my cereal with care.

Without my grandmother asking, my mother gets up and refills their cups of coffee.

“Can I get you some breakfast, Mama?” she says.

“No, baby, I’m fine.” Then quiet again, except for the sound of scissors tearing into paper.

It’s funny to see what details come to mind when writing about place (whether you’re interest is fiction or non). There’s so much I could have described: the two-story house with floor-to-ceiling windows, the pasture out back, and the creek beyond. But, it makes sense after I read Cathy Day’s quote above why I might consider more intimate details. I appreciate those kind of details even more, after studying this article by Dorothy Allison on place (published online at Tin House). Allison breaks it down with clarity and power:

[Place] is who you are and what is all around you, what you use, or don’t use, what you need, or fear, or want.

. . .

Place is not just what your feet are crossing to get to somewhere…it is something the writer puts on the page–articulates with deliberate purpose. If you keep giving me these eyes that note all the details–if you tell me the lawn is manicured but you don’t tell me that it makes your character both deeply happy and slightly anxious–then I’m a little bit frustrated with you.

. . . . Place is emotion. . . .

Place is people.

I’m thinking a lot about place these days; I’m writing historical fiction, where the landscape is integral to the story. As I struggle to bring into view the time period and what characters see on the outside–the exterior, I keep thinking about the aspects of the character themselves that will breathe life into their interior landscape as well.

Questions that appear at the end of Cathy Day’s post help, questions which certainly probe a writer about the “brick and mortar” details but ones that help the writer investigate deeper. Such as:

  • What are the conflicts between neighbor and neighbor?
  • Who is happiest about living or being in this place? who is least happy? (I might add: why?)
  • How “modern” is it in comparison to the world around it? Is it behind the times? Or does it have its finger on the pulse of fads and fashions? Do the people here look up or down at any other place?

Click HERE to read more of Cathy Day’s post, and HERE to read the full lesson on place by Dorothy Allison.

What strikes you most about place?

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