Last spring, I posted Getting Through announcing the completion of a new memoir manuscript. I haven't touched that manuscript in four months. Instead, I have taken a lovely, long break filled with all the things that matter most to me: baking brownies with my grandson, road-tripping with special people, re-experiencing the joys of (ultra-light) backpacking, and coming to terms with e-assist cycling. In other words, it has been a summer to reset a life and psyche deeply affected by the fear and unrest of COVID and the Trump years.
I'm not saying the reset is complete or the fears for our collective future are gone. I'm also not saying that during this long break I have stopped thinking about memoir or memory. To the contrary. My manuscript (and what it needs) has settled comfortably into the back of my mind as a nagging voice demanding I dig deeper and do the research needed to make the work complete.
As autumn closes in with gray skies and longer nights, I will return to my work-in-progress, Pandemic Baby - Letters to My Grandson Before He Could Read. In the meantime, I'm preparing a memoir workshop I will be leading early next month. I hoped to reference a piece I posted in June 2017 titled Memoir & Why I Do It only to discover that the link to the complete essay no longer functions. To remedy that issue, I've reposted the essay below.
As to the workshop, the title remains the same as that of prior workshops I've offered, but it has been expanded to a three-hour format. Thanks to our wonderful system of public libraries, it is FREE. If you're in the Pacific Northwest and have a story you're eager to get on paper, I hope you'll join us.
Writing Memoir - What? Why? How?
Mill Creek Library
15429 Bothell Everett Hwy, Mill Creek, WA
Saturday, October 7, 2023
1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
***
Memoir & Why I Do It
A few
weeks ago, I was driving home to Seattle from eastern Washington with my
sisters. I sat in the back seat. As we drove over Snoqualmie Pass and started
the descent into the Puget Sound lowlands, I noticed two police vehicles parked
in an open area, perhaps a weigh station parking lot, to the north of the
highway. One was an SUV, the other a sedan. Both were black. They were parked
head-to-head with the drivers’ windows aligned. The SUV was on the highway
side, almost blocking the view of the sedan.
“Looks
like that’s where the cops take a break,” I said.
“But
there’s no donut shop around,” said my sister, the one riding shotgun.
We laughed
and thought nothing more of it. Five
minutes down the road, a police SUV passed on our left. A moment later they’d
pulled someone over.
“Where’d
that guy come from?” I wondered.
“Same one
we just saw,” my sister said.
“No way. The
parked cars were black. That one’s white.”
“No,” my
sister said. “It’s the same white SUV.”
So what
happened? The paint color of the cop cars obviously hadn’t changed, so one of
us had to be wrong. Was it her or me? Was the white SUV the same vehicle we’d
seen parked or another? Was it possible that when we joked about donuts, my
sister and I were actually looking at different cars?
If I were
writing a memoir that included this scene, I’d write them as different
vehicles. The two parked cars were black. The SUV that passed us was white.
That’s what I saw and that’s what I remember. I also know my sister would tell
me I was wrong. And maybe she’d be right.
I could
contact the Washington State Patrol to find out what vehicles were patrolling
the I-90 corridor that Saturday at that precise place and time. But for a
memoirist the actual color of the SUV is not of primary concern unless it is an
essential element of the story. Memoir is not the reporting of researched,
measurable facts. It is the sharing of perception and personal memory.
I write
memoir not only to remember people, places and events in my life, but also to
make sense of those events, as well as the decisions I made and paths I took. I
also write memoir because memory, how the human brain remembers or doesn’t
remember, intrigues me.
I believe
memoir—whether poetry, short essay or book-length work—is the most challenging
form of creative nonfiction because while memoir allows us the freedom to
revisit our past, it demands we dig deep with brutal honesty to make sense of
life lived, choices made, and the consequences of those choices. If a writer is
able, if I am able to write that deep personal truth, pain subsides, joy
deepens and life goes on, richer and fuller than ever before. This is my
experience writing memoir.
As a memoirist,
I write my own memories, my personal version of events I struggle to
understand. All the while I am aware that the simple act of recalling and
transcribing memory, the act of turning memory into story and hopefully into
art, alters the memory.
Memory is
a sneaky devil, a slippery thing. As soon as I come close to what I believe to
be an honest truth, shape-shifting is a risk. Especially when excavating
memories from years past. The person remembering is not the same as the person
who lived the experience. The me today—the rememberer, if you will—is not the
same me as the young woman living in Mexico City, or the ex-pat moved back to
Seattle after the disappearance of her youngest sister, or even the middle-aged
daughter caring for her aging mother. The me changes, and as it changes so too
does the way I perceive past events. The act of remembering alters the
memories.
I am not
the same woman or the same writer today as I was in 2002 when I began The Thirty-Ninth Victim. If I were to
write that story today with the life experience, knowledge and understanding I now
possess, I have no doubt it would be a different book from the one I wrote
fifteen years ago. My perspective has changed. But that in no way invalidates
the memories recalled or the story told back in 2002 when I began writing or in
2008 when the book was published.
Here’s
another way to think about memory. There’s plenty of evidence about eyewitnesses
to the same crime reporting extremely different versions of what they saw, just
as my sister and I saw different colored police vehicles. Witnesses have also
changed testimony over time. Were they wrong? Did time and distance, life
experience and perspective, change the way they saw the event?
Truth, like
the perception of beauty, is individual. Imagine you are in a crowded bookshop
reading. Look around you. If you were to describe the event, you might include
furniture or wall color, the aroma of rich coffee, the sounds of voices and
music. You might add an emotional layer. How are you feeling? How was your day?
What is causing you fear, sadness, joy? That story of the event would be your
truth. But what about if you were blind or deaf? Then your memory would be
markedly different. What if you’d just had a fight with a loved one or just
celebrated a milestone? Would your telling of the reading be the same if you were
to write your memoir right now or later this evening, a week or month from
tonight, or ten years from today? Would the versions be the same if you wrote
the piece multiple times? If everyone in the room wrote a description, I
venture that they would be quite different. Sure, there’d be some consistent
facts—a middle-aged reader, a dozen people on an assortment of chairs, a
barista in the back room—but the details each chose to include or omit would
vary widely. If everyone wrote of the event ten years from today, the stories
would vary both from each other’s as well as from personal versions written on
the spot. Such is the truth of memoir.
Another
challenge the memoirist faces is that of shaping memory into story, ideally
story with universal appeal, story that readers can relate to, feel connected
with, be inspired or entertained by. As William
Zinsser explains in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
“A good memoir requires two elements—one of art, the other of craft. The first
is integrity of intention … Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are,
who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us. If a writer seriously
embarks on that quest, readers will be nourished by the journey, bringing along
many associations with quests of their own.
The other
element is carpentry. Good memoirs are a careful act of construction. We like
to think that an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. It
won’t work … Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative order
on a jumble of half-remembered events. With that feat of manipulation they
arrive at a truth that is theirs alone, not quite like that of anybody else who
was present at the same events.”
Zinsser
uses Henry David Thoreau to illustrate this. He reminds us that Thoreau did not
simply return to Concord and transcribe his notes. Walden took eight years and almost as many drafts to complete.
Memoir,
like fiction, needs narrative structure: plot line, character development,
beginning, middle and end. Just as in
fiction writing, the writer must also consider genre. The Swenson Book
Development website (http://www.swensonbookdevelopment.com/blog/2013/the-many-subgenres-of-memoir/)
lists sixteen “subgenres” of memoir including travel, humor and grief. So a memoir must be crafted, but truth must be
retained. The writer’s truth must be honored.
Why write
memoir in the face of such challenge? Factual, perceptional and emotional truth
are all aspects of personal truth, and all equally valid and essential to a
memoirist. Yet finding and sharing personal truth and facing those who may not
accept my version, my personal truth, of shared events is not easy.
I write
memoir because I’m fascinated by memory, by how the human brain processes and
retains information as well as how it deals with extreme stress. I laid the
groundwork for memoir writing in my late teens when I began my first journal.
But let’s not confuse memoir with journal or diary writing. Memoir writing is
the art and craft of taking a life event and creating a story in much the same
way as one writes a short story or novel, with the added challenge of creating
universal interest in what is essentially a personal experience.
I’ve
written two book-length memoirs and am working on a third. I’ve explored three
different aspects of my life, three areas to excavate pain, examine it from all
sides, accept it, and then set it aside and move along in this short journey of
life. I’ve also taught college classes, given conference presentations, led
library workshops on memoir writing, but still I feel like a fraud, like I
don’t really know what I’m talking about, like I’m snorkeling in murky water,
blinded by the agitation around me. Such is the nature of memoir.
I wrote The Thirty-Ninth Victim to understand my
sister’s murder and how our early family dynamics may have contributed to her
dangerous missteps and flawed decisions. I wrote a yet unpublished memoir I’m calling Moving Mom to try to make sense of
motherhood, memory loss, and the consequences of writing memoir as I cared for
my mother and witnessed her deepening dementia. I’m currently working on a new story about the
years I spent as an undocumented ex-pat in the Mexico City of the early 1980s.
With the
first memoir, I struggled with collective memory and family myth as well as
with the effects of emotion on how we choose to remember or to avoid memories
of events we’d rather have never experienced.
Just as perception affects memory, emotion and memory are also strongly
linked.
I’m from a
family of nine siblings. Just as witnesses to a crime report widely divergent
versions of the same event, so too my siblings and I hold different memories of
our early years. World events and family circumstances changed. Kids grew into
teens. Parenting styles transformed through the years.
Then
there’s memory loss due to the emotional blocking of memories too painful to
endure or the altering of memories to create a more manageable personal
reality. As I watched my mother slowly lose memory after my father’s death in 2002
until her own death eleven years later in 2013, I couldn’t help but question
what brought on such a dramatic decline. The simple physiological
explanation—mini infract syndrome—felt inadequate. I believe my mother could no
longer handle the emotional overload of loss. Losing her youngest daughter to
murder had been traumatic enough, but now she’d lost the love of her life, her
reason for living, her life partner of fifty-five years. With Dad gone, and
only a few years later his dog, Mom had no one to take care of, to keep alive.
So she let go. But the remarkable thing was that in memory loss she became in
some ways the happy carefree woman she must have once been, the woman I only
caught a glimpse of at a point in her life when she no longer remembered my
name, when she confused me with a favorite sister who always made her laugh. A
comparison I was happy to embrace.
Now as I
work on The Ex-Mexican Wives Club,
I’m reminded of a complaint I’ve heard echoed repeatedly throughout a lifetime
of teaching English as a Second Language. “Teacher, I cannot remember
anything,” my students tell me. The burden of learning a new language in a
foreign culture layered over the trauma of immigration and day-to-day survival
jumbles the mind. I experienced the same frustration when I was learning
Spanish, a feeling of such confusion that all memory, even the simplest To Do
list, slipped from grasp. Was this because the memory was stored in Spanish and
I was trying to remember or visualize it in English?
In “Working
memory: looking back and looking forward” published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (1 October 2003) http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v4/n10/execsumm/nrn1201.html
Alan Baddeley wrote, “The concept of working memory proposes that a dedicated
system maintains and stores information in the short term, and that this system
underlies human thought processes. Current views of working memory involve a
central executive and two storage systems: the phonological loop and the
visuospatial sketchpad.”
I imagine
two storage systems, two file drawers or computer files, one full of sound, the
other images, both in neat alphabetical order. When you learn a second
language, do these drawers or files become a muddled mess? My minimal research
shows equally minimal research has been conducted to address that question.
My current
memoir project focuses on a six-year period I experienced over thirty years ago,
in a culture utterly different from that of my youth, at a time when I spoke
fluent Spanish. Is it linguistic and cultural differences that challenge my
ability to remember people and events? Perhaps trying to retrieve memories in
English creates a barrier to events experienced and remembered in Spanish.
Perhaps returning to Mexico and relearning Spanish would allow greater access
to memory.
Or is it
that one moment, the moment I opened the letter from my mother telling me my
youngest sister had gone missing? Did that moment short-circuit my memory?
That’s my husband’s theory. At first I laughed him off. But shock treatment was
once used to block memory or deter behavior. Life experiences can do the same.
That’s what PTSD does, block some memories and intensify others.
So I keep
writing. I have a treasure trove of letters, journals and photographs I am mining.
I have contact with some, but not all, of the friends I once shared Mexico
with. I have the ease of modern day research at my fingertips. And I have
timed-writing practice. I set a timer, alone or in a group, plant my feet on
the ground and go deep in hopes of being surprised by the memories that emerge
on the page.
With all
the challenges and pitfalls a memoirist faces, why publish? Why do I share my
work—either as blog posts, magazine pieces or as books? This is a question
every memoirist must address, a difficult question, especially if the memoir
explores painful events involving others who may not want the story to be told
or who do not agree with your version of events. Given that few of us live in a
vacuum, it’s likely that our work will include characters in addition to the
narrator. How do we justify writing about others and why publish?
I walk a razor’s edge. I am from a very large first family that is not at all fond of
having a writer amongst them, particularly a memoirist. I understand their
position, but that does not change who I am or what I do. When I write memoir, I
include others where their lives intersect with my own and are essential to the
story I’m writing. I do not tell their stories or pretend to know where their
truths lie. I tell my own.
I
publish because finding voice necessitates the bearing of witness to that
voice. I began writing to understand, and I published my first memoir because I
understood that if I did not publish I was allowing others to censor my voice.
Personal growth and strength came in learning from readers that my story
touched many lives in a variety of positive ways. I found voice, and I found
myself, by seeking publication for that first memoir. I will continue to write
and publish memoir despite the challenges, and I hope you will do the same.
