The Case Against Memoir

And now, for the sake of balance, I feel I should court doubt and examine the case against memoir.

Writing a memoir requires a cast of mind that can make you more concerned with observing your life than living it. Of course, even fiction writers can become more interested in how their experiences will become part of their work than they are in having the experiences themselves. A kind of double consciousness then develops, and you are less focused on the girl smiling at you across the room than with how, or if, you can fit her into Part 1, and if she should go before or after Chapter 2. Of course, some people (neurotics and those with anxiety disorders come to mind) live life with that kind of painful self-consciousness anyway, and perhaps writing is a reward, or a relief valve, for that continual reflexive reflection.

And what of spending all your time looking back at your life? My Dad used to only scrape the ice of the front windshield on cold days before he went to work, and I would try to reprimand him for it. His invariable response was that he was not going to drive to work in reverse.

Still, the backwards looking tendency smacks of the self-consciousness mentioned above. And shouldn’t you be looking forward in life at least until everything gets boring at 40? My nephew, when he was four or five, used to talk with the world weariness of an old salt about “when I was little.” I tell him this and he laughs, and doesn’t use that phrase around me anymore, although I know that at 17 he looks back at 7 as if across an abyss of history so wide he could never successfully cross it, even in his mind. And I am glad he doesn’t want to. Don’t write your life yet, little guy (OK, 6 foot and 185 pounds now, but still my little guy), live it while you can.

Memoirs can be mere lurid exhibitions, tawdry and obscene pandering. Think of the “CHILD CALLED IT” series, which I tried to read but felt like I was hanging around a particularly gruesome highway accident scene. Such a non-stop depiction of abuse comes off as a celebration of the very abuse it purports to be crusading against, and reading it make me feel like a minister crusading against pornography by collecting all the dirty magazines he was going to shut down.

I also don’t like memoirs that are therapy, rants of rage and shame, attempts at revenge, that come off as shrill, with the authors naked in their pain, animals caught in a trap we never see them escape, becoming objects of pity instead of pathos.
William Gass, in THE ART OF SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF NARCISSISM (Harper’s , May ’94), talks about how both fiction and history turned inward and psychological in what he calls the Age of the Novel. We became concerned more than with merely what men did, but what they felt, their motives, their feelings. Gass sees this as a bad thing, although his writing is so elliptical and dense it was hard for me to figure out exactly why. It seemed he is saying that what famous men do is more important than what ordinary men feel. He says: “History became a comic book, and autobiography the confessions of celluloid whores.”

Memoir is all the rage in writing workshops now, and that is fine if you love to write and want to explore your ability to do so. But don’t quit your day job, and don’t expect it to repair your relationships. I don’ t think they have the power to do that. If there was going to be some sticky-sweet scene of reconciliation it probably would have happened already, so don’t launch the book with that as a goal. Mary Karr, in THE ART OF MEMOIR, talks of how she vetted everything she wrote with her mother and sister as she was writing THE LIAR’S CLUB, and the process not only didn’t drive them all apart, it brought them closer together. Still, for the most part, if memoir has any power at all, it is to heal the wounds left by the relationships, but not the relationships themselves.

In terms of therapy, once again, I think it is important to see the difference between reflection and rumination. Going back to the past to understand it, maybe to overcome it, or at least put it away, is different from going back again and again to re-experience shame and fear and anger. When Freud talked of catharsis, he didn’t mean that you were supposed to trigger those feelings over and over again until you had beaten them out of yourself, but to change your perspective, your vantage point, your relationship to what happened. Maybe that is what memoir ideally does for the writer and, vicariously, for the reader.

Gass goes on to say that “an honest autobiography is as amazing a miracle as a doubled sex [a hermaphrodite] and every bit as much a freak of nature.” Even if Gass is right, and true self-knowledge is not possible, the attempt to acquire what knowledge we can is not a wasted effort. More self knowledge is better than less, makes you more able to navigate the social world successfully, keeps you from being an asshole, maybe, even if you can never achieve complete self-awareness. Writing anything is like living itself—doomed to failure and death. That doesn’t mean you don’t take a whack at it while you have the chance.

© Mike Welch 2015

Memoir, Part 4

Much of what makes good memoir writing is what makes any writing good. A strong and compelling voice, a knack for storytelling, the ability to use metaphor, an instinct for all those rhetorical devices they teach you about in private school (you don’t have to know what synecdoche and antimetabole and antistrophe are to use them effectively), a structure that gives the reader the chance to grab hold of the story and then not lose it, conflict, change, resolution, realism (if that is what you are going for) style, diction, pacing and on and on ad infinitum.

I think you need to be well read in memoir in order to write one. This doesn’t mean you need to read every memoir ever written, but you do need to know what the masters of the genre have done with it, to get a feel for all the possibilities, to see what styles and techniques resonate with you. I loved THIS BOY’S LIFE (Tobias Wolfe) and CLOSING TIME (Joe Queenan) because the narrators of both had a lot of snark and bark to them, and because they weren’t afraid to portray their parents naked, with all the warts and carbuncles and pustules in evidence (not that they cut themselves much slack either, and they were looking more for truth, I think, than revenge), and because they somehow managed to come out of childhood without exploding into a million confused and frustrated pieces, even emerging into adulthood with a certain degree of wisdom and compassion. Even if they are only telling their version of their lives, and we decide to question it, they have revealed themselves to us merely by the writerly choices they have made. This is one of the great ironies of memoir—it tells us more about the writer than those he or she writes about, and it often does so obliquely, through the choice of scene and structure and even at the atomic, or word, level.

Structure is the toughest nut for me to crack. I think of all the ways you might structure any kind of book. Start with the crime novel. Usually, we start after the murder has been committed. The detective works forward in time, but what he discovers is not chronological. He might discover what happened to the victim last first, for example. In this way, the writer keeps the tension ratcheted up; as if the protagonist is putting together a puzzle and we are on waiting on pins and needles trying to force ourselves to see the pattern, the whole, emerge from all those disjointed pieces.

But can you write a memoir that way? Doesn’t the reader already know whether you survived the illness, quit the addiction, etc? Yes, for the most part. And most memoirs are about hope and light, so we don’t expect the writer to, for example, try to reconcile with his parents and not be able to. Who would read a memoir wherein the writer was more messed up and unhappy at the end than at the beginning? Then again, you don’t usually read a crime novel where the crime is not solved.

There can still be narrative suspense in memoir. Try starting at the very beginning, with a child with all the odds stacked against him or her, and then flash forward to the end, wherein that child has become a relatively happy (or at least content, which I think is a more realistic hope) adult. Then the reader asks “how the hell did that kid ever make it?” I was watching an old HBO Series called The Wire last night. In it, some drug gangsters break into a five year-old’s house and kill his parents right in front of him. The cop says to her partner about the little boy—“how do you come back from that?” Good question, and a good memoir, if it can be written well.

I still think plot needs to be present in order for a book to be good. Calvin Trillin jokes about going to memoir writing camp and breaking down and admitting he made it all up, and had a happy childhood. But even a happy life has interesting things and important things that happened in it, and I just don’t think someone who writes with pellucid prose about pretty much nothing can ever be interesting. At least not to me. Proust did write about eating those stupid cookies, but he ended up writing about a lot more.

We, most of us, are not rock stars or movie stars, not rich or politicians (or rich politicians—sometimes it seems like all of the above fall rightly together under the rubric celebrity or public figure). We will read the mundane details of a famous person’s life in an almost superstitious, totemic way, as if we could become them if we shopped at the same stores and went to the same same church and espoused the same philosophies, from trickle-down economics to Scientology.

But the rest of us must do more than merely give an outline of what has happened to us, the old vertebra without the spine I talked about earlier, in order to interest the reader in our story. And it is not just what you tell the reader, but how you tell it. You need suspense, you need to link things in a way that makes it clear what you think the causes and effects of your experiences were (even if you don’t explicitly state them), you must not tell the punch line of the joke first. You must emphasize and de-emphasize things in ways that focuses the reader’s attention in the way you want it to be directed. This is structure.

What are some of the structures of really good memoir? We’ve already talked about how Augustine and Franklin structure their experiences to portray themselves as quintessentially Christian and quintessentially American. Dave Eggers, in A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, puts structure itself on trial by playing on your expectations of what he will do with it. Carolyn Knapp, in DRINKING, A LOVE STORY (great title) structures the book around the idea that her drinking is like a bad boyfriend, one that she knows she needs to leave but can’t. And she keeps this focus throughout, through all her experiences, the experiences any woman would have growing up, always drinking, not able to stop, and those experiences becoming warped because of that-- the bad boyfriend keeping her isolated from friends and family and ultimately even from herself.

This is a structure that works, I think, because the metaphor for the bad boyfriend is a natural one, an organic one, an apt one. Other memoirs suffer from a structure that is more of a gimmick than a mimesis of a life. Think of those books wherein someone sets out to do something outlandish, to read the OED or to walk around the world, or some other nutty thing. These activities are not organic, but are imposed on a life. They are not something the person would otherwise have done if they weren’t planning to write a book. The literary enterprise is not a description of life, but the life itself. These don’t generally work, at least not as memoir. A J Jacobs’s THE KNOW IT ALL—ONE MAN’S HUMBLE QUEST TO BECOME THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE WORLD, for example, in which he tries to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, is funny, but not a memoir. And the gimmick, the book being a kind of one trick pony, gets pretty thin by the end.

Then there are authors like David Sedaris and James Thurber. These guys are hilarious, but there characters are so distorted for effect that I don’t think you can call them memoirists. They are humorists. These characters are equivalent to those writing them approximately in the way that Alvy Singer is equivalent to Woody Allen in ANNIE HALL. Calvin Trillin, on the other hand, while self-mocking, creates a much more three dimensional character of himself.

Trillin is interesting in another sense. To me, two of his books, while ostensibly biographies of an old school friend and of his wife, REMEMBERING DENNY, and ABOUT ALICE, are also memoir. In the tradition of the New School, he is a journalist who does put himself in the story. And his reactions to the people he writes about tell us as much about him as they do about them.

Show, don’t tell. This is something that gets said in my class ten times a session. When I think about it, it means two different things. One has to do with the balance between scene and summary, dramatization and documentation. If I tell you my brother and I had an awful fight that ruined our relationship, I am documenting. I need to show the fight and our reactions to it, show the thing in the context of both our lives, for it to have any meaning. And if I explicitly say it ruined our relationship, I condescend to the reader, not letting him of her make up their own minds. But I do have an objection to this dictum, and that is this—when the writer’s conclusion about what the events mean is startling or new, he or she should tell us how he thinks and feels about it all.

And it must be remembered that summary implies scene and vice versa—it is always a mixture of the two we are dealing with. I can say “those ten years were hard, lots of times I was broke, and it was always cold, it seemed, and I was hungry.” This is the barest summary of many scenes, but we still see it as somehow as a scene. On the other end of the spectrum, you can take a moment’s reaction and unpack it for thirty pages. The decision on how to balance the two has to do with pacing, and this is another thing about writing that is both partly teachable and partly instinctive.

© Mike Welch 2015

Memoir, Part 3

When students come into my class, they often come in thinking they know what memoir is. Trying to write one makes them question this assumption. I think the same thing would be true if it was a fiction class, and we were attempting short stories. You only begin to wonder about what these consist of at the word by word, brick by brick, molecular level, when you try to create your own. Maybe sports gives us a metaphor here, or any kind of performance—you can watch a pitcher throw a 90 mph fastball, and you know that you can throw a ball too, but when you try you find your fastball is a slow boat to China while that of a masterful pitcher is a clipper ship.

The biggest mistake beginners make is to forget that they are telling a story and merely laying down incidents and events with no linkage between them, no causality, without an arc that includes a conflict, rising tension, resolution, change. It is as if they are laying out the vertebra but forgetting the spine. This kind of fragmented and haphazard story is not really a story at all. While some would argue that this is more true to the chaotic and random nature of real life, to the very limited nature of our free will (this idea being au courant in intellectual circles, very Postmodern and world weary and cynical), it is not the way we understand life, and it goes against our instinctive understanding of what story is. In fact, we always find pattern, the warp and woof in the carpet, even if the pattern is not immediately apparent—we’re trained to do so, and neurologists tell us we are genetically programmed that way too.

I will often point out to my students that their pieces read more like appointment books than diaries. An appointment book lists the whats of life, the happenings, but the diary talks about the whys. Events without judgment and interpretation (which don’t have to be overt but implied, more shown than told, left to the reader to infer) are mere lists, collections of raw data. History, even personal history, is not just one thing after another, but one thing connected in an inevitable way to both what came before and after according to the interpretive vision of the author.

We really do know what story is some instinctual level. My nephew loved stories as a kid, and used to solicit me for as many as I could possibly produce for him. I would sometimes play with his notion of what story was, encouraging him to take the role of teacher and lecture me about it.

“Tell me a story, Mikey!”

“About who?"

"How about one about the lady who went to the supermarket one day to buy some ice cream, and in the parking lot…”

“Not about some boring lady doing boring stuff, tell me one about Superman.”

“OK, one day Superman gets up at 6 am, on a cold rainy day, and brushes his teeth and eats his Cheerios,”

“And then what?”

“He gets on the school bus.”

“And there are bad kids on the school bus.”

“No, just regular kids.”

“And the bus goes off the road, and…”

“No, it’s an uneventful ride to school.”

At which point the little fellow hi-jacks my story and puts Superman and the whole planet in great peril, a peril Superman can only defeat with the aid of my nephew himself, who also has special powers that are kept hidden by him until such crisis forces him to reveal himself…

Every kid knows what a story is. But an adult freezes up, over-thinks, perhaps does not know what to make of their own life, doesn’t trust what they do think about it, or thinks that this is journalism, or a research paper, where you keep yourself out of it. Without putting yourself in the memoir, there is no memoir.

Stories need a lot of evocative, sensory detail, ones that make your character(s) distinct, ones that drive the story forward. This is a talent that is not so easy to teach. If you are going to draw a character, no matter how exhaustively, you only can choose a miniscule fraction of all the infinite detail there is about that character, their environment, their experiences. To draw a compelling and appealing character, one that coheres and sticks in the imagination of the reader, creating a kind of living dream where we experience the memoirist’s life as if it was a movie, a vision in our mind’s eye—you start with detail and observation. Relevant ones. But picking the perfect detail, right words in the right place at the right time, is more art than science. I don’t make a point of it to my students, but there is a place where my teaching leaves off and the students’ talents begin. What we do is try to identify when someone has chosen detail well, in the hopes that the talent of that person can be learned, at least to a degree, by observation, by consideration of why the choices work so well.

And what of voice? Not style or diction but voice. To me, voice is our conception of the character of the speaker as given to us through his or her words, by what they say and how they say it, and even what they choose not to say. To create a true and clear voice readers will feel the need to listen to is also something that you must grope your way towards in the dark. I tell my students that you have a voice when you can have your piece, without your name on it, read by someone else and everyone in the class can tell it was written by you. This means there is a consistency to your voice, but a great voice is another thing entirely. Still, it is interesting and instructive to discuss what makes a strong voice, and a compelling one. Although it would be hard to come up with hard and fast rules for creating voice, students are able to distinguish pretty readily between pieces that really have a voice, and those that don’t.

Another kind of paradigm I use with my classes is my (fictional) Aunt Martha. I portray her as getting drunk and dropping the Thanksgiving turkey every year. The what is that she drops it every year. Of course, even this bare-boned a description implies judgment—was it every year? Was it characteristic of her to do this kind of thing? Or was it a fluke that happened once, but that you latched on to because of your own unexamined reasons, because you need to put her in an unflattering light?

Still, except for in the most minimal way, there has not been much in judgment and interpretation here. The why, the interpretation, the judgment, is the heart of the memoir. What is the spine that holds this little bit of vertebra on it? Are you a cursed family, and this is just another example of that? Is Aunt Martha the spinster being retrospectively scapegoated, being blamed for the failure of all those crappy holidays that everyone always hoped would be great, and never were?

Spinster— a loaded term, one word that carries much interpretation and judgment, and it is only a noun. A noun, much less an adjective or adverb— such powerful creatures are words. If the story has an argument, and they all do, you need to not just show your result, but the work you got to get there. If she is a scapegoat, if she really is, show how she takes care of grandma and grandpa in their fading old age while her sister, your mother, ignores them, and how your mother treats her like she was Cinderella.

And remember that interpretation is a process of infinite possibility. Maybe the story is about how you are more like Aunt Martha than you would like to think, or it is about how women of a certain time and place were denied opportunities they are not denied now, or maybe it is actually about how we are really in the matrix, in Plato’s cave, and none of it is real. Interpretation is endless in its possibilities.

With the above in mind, I reassure my students, who are almost always intimidated by the sheer size of the task they have undertaken. All those blank pages, and the huge English language, and you alone at the keyboard trying to fashion something that someone, anyone (even yourself) would want to read. It’s daunting.

Every journey must be accomplished one step at a time. And a memoir can be written scene by scene. And those scenes don’t have to originally be laid down in the order they will later appear, with the necessary linkages between them in place. Just write the scenes—75 of them should do (75,000 words, a decent sized book), scenes that have a logic and meaning, scenes that cohere in a way that we can say they somehow mean. Don’t even worry initially whether the scenes seem to have a common theme, or whether they can be made to cohere in some larger way. Just write the scenes. Ones that evoke emotion in you. We all have such scenes, but sometimes overlook them because we think they are not the right kind of scenes for a book.

What you care about is the best measure of what scenes you need to use. Don’t start with a meaning and look for scenes—remember the scenes, and look for the meaning. As you do so, connections will be made in your brain and on the page. We are creatures who look for meaning, for pattern, and I guarantee that as you write meaning will emerge. But you have to start writing first, I think. You can’t impose meaning from above, but work up to it from below, at the word level—get something you remember on the page, And then something else. You can’t go anywhere from nowhere. You can’t worry that you have started at the wrong place, because you can’t start in the wrong place when everything is connected, which it is.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Memoir, Part 2

If I am not sure I know what memoir is, I am also not sure if I think one with real transcendence and resolution and truth can be written. Didn’t the Greeks say that you can’t say a man is happy until he is dead? (You can’t know what the story is about until it is over). Then there is the problem of writing as propaganda, and writing as self-glorification, and also the problem of self-knowledge. Is anyone really capable of it? Even when we try to make a clean breast of things, don’t we, as Freud told us, always plead guilty to a lesser offense? And can’t even openness be used as a method of concealment?

And yet I keep thinking about the memoirs that I have read that smack of true insight. They are literary and psychological marvels. Maybe we are all forever in the process of writing our own story, even if we don’t write it down. Marion is right, at least in some cases: memoir can be a portal to self-discovery and it can reassure the disaffected and disenfranchised they are not alone.

The main lesson in my failed attempts at writing my own memoir, if there is one, is to not lose your nerve, to not give up (which I have not done yet). Mary Karr, in THE ART OF MEMOIR, talks about how long and labor intensive was her attempt to write her latest memoir, LIT: “I threw out over 1200 pages of my last memoir and broke my delete key changing my mind.” She talks about how long it took her to finally decide what all three of her memoirs were about, to find her true voice, which whispered to her while her idea of what a writer should sound like shouted. Karr finally found transcendence and change and a way to structure it all so that it made sense to the reader. Often, she felt at sea, and both the structure and her voice emerged from her subconscious so slowly that she didn’t notice she had figured them out until she suddenly noticed her writing had, seemingly by magic, acquired them, the way some people will struggle with a language that special moment when it seems suddenly they have been granted the gifts of both understanding and speech.
Karr does not try to vanquish doubt, but courts it as the acid test of the validity of her work. So I take heart. 50 or 75 or 100 rewrites and maybe my doubt that my emotionally Gothic childhood did not mean something, and I have not changed, will itself change.

From another vantage point, doubt can be the greatest enemy. My doubt that I deserve to tell a story about myself where I am not the loser or the villain is very strong. This is the way my parents and my depression taught me to think about myself, and so in a way speaking truthfully about it all is a monumentally disobedient act. I contradict Mom and Dad and my faulty brain chemistry all at once if I do so.

A lot of people in memoir class have trouble with this aspect of writing, their doubt and fear of their own vision, of their version of their own life. They feel others have more of a right to tell their story than they do themselves. This worry about getting it wrong is even stronger than the fear that people will be angry, litigious or hurt by what you have said. People often seem to be looking for permission to claim their own version, but I avoid granting it like the plague. It is not a decision anyone else can make for you, any more than I would tell you to go and tell your family everything you have been holding in lo all these many years.

Kathryn Harrison, in THE KISS: A MEMOIR, writes about how her father victimized her by luring her into an incestuous affair. Some people excoriated her for being the perpetrator and not the victim, and others for not keeping it all a secret. But she had the courage to speak her story which, at some basic level, is the courage to be who you really are, who you know you are, regardless of what other people need you to be.

Not that the tendency for everyone to paint themselves as a victim is necessarily good. Sometimes I think we are creating a society where status comes from how abused you are. A rush to the bottom is a rush to the top. But there are true victims, and truth in their stories. I think my real complaint is with those memoirists who seek refuge in the status of victim, instead of striving to re-take control of their lives. Should everyone be allowed to see themselves as victim? I think of THE SOPRANOS, wherein Tony goes to see Dr Melfi. He is rewriting his life in such a way that he gets to erase all the horror he has caused. Yes, he has been a victim, but also a victimizer. Which brings us back to doubt and honesty, the cornerstones of a good memoir. Yes, my childhood was emotionally Dickensian, pathetic, Gothic, with my mother fluctuating wildly between rage and disinterest, and my father’s bi-polar illness lending an absurdist quality to the whole thing, but I have to admit that for a time (just a time?) I became a self-absorbed, self-pitying jerk, an emotional abuser, a fist fighter ,a drunk, and what would be called a slut if I was a woman (which , contrary to popular belief, is not necessarily a happy condition for a man to be in).

Sometimes, as with the dueling banjos in DELIVERANCE, our stories of ourselves compete with those of others. For all of us, we are first defined, and our narrative begun, by our parents. They tell us who they are. So does the cultural context we come up in. Hence memoirs like Black Elk Speaks, The Hunger of Memory (Richard Rodriguez), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, among others. For some of these writers, they are authoring themselves for the first time, an act of great personal and political courage.

In my family, my narrative role was both as loser and sinner—to Dad an all purpose dope, schlemiel, schlimazel, a craven coward, and to Mom a ne’er do well, an amoral, selfish narcissist with an eye only on the main chance, a sinner, malefactor, miscreant, and general all around bad actor. For a long time I took it for granted that all these things were true. My sense of irony was not yet developed enough to see that the pot was calling the kettle black. It was only in reinventing my role in therapy (there is a specific school called Narrative Psychology dealing with this) that I got some traction in my attempts to pull myself out of the narrative quicksand I was in.

People who confuse therapy and memoir also confuse criticism of their writing with criticism of their very selves. I try to be very careful to clearly make a distinction between the two.

Memoir can be a healthy endeavor, then (although it is also a refuge for propagandists and self deluded narcissists). Sometimes you need to overcome guilt and confusion in order to write one. Some memoirs seem to think that you can elevate yourself at the expense of others. This kind of zero-sum game thinking does not often make a good memoir. Karr, in Liar’s Club, does portray her parents warts and all, but she does the same to herself. And in the end, she finds a way to bless them, and herself, with acceptance and compassion. It is something I have not found the ability to do yet.

It is important to understand that memoir that is greatly therapeutic is not necessarily great memoir. And great memoir is not necessarily memoir that will sell, what with the publishing industry’s conviction that the sensational is more attractive than the thoughtful, the lurid more compelling than the nuanced, the memoir that shouts simple platitudes more worthy than one that whispers about complexity and nuance. Also, what is valued in memoir goes in and out of fashion the way skinny and fat ties for men do.

Not everyone writes with depth, insight and voice. But everyone can learn to write memoir, and like any other skill from shooting a basketball to singing opera, practice will make you better, if not necessarily world class.

It is comforting to know we are not alone, and fiction and memoir are one of the few places we get access to the secret lives of others. And yet we are fascinated too with those who, besides that bedrock humanity, are different. We are taken with the offbeat and the off putting, the odd, the eccentric, the outed and the outré.

It’s a rush, this access—when I read MENNONITE IN A LITTLE BLACK DRESS, by Rhoda Janzen, I found her experience about as  far removed from mine as one’s could possibly be—that of a Mennonite woman growing up in a culture she often felt at odds with, both as a woman and as a Mennonite.  What do I know of the secret lives of Mennonites (besides the underwear)? Or the secret lives of any kind of woman, for that matter. Janzen rebels, and I can relate to rebellion, but she finds love and acceptance in her heart for the very people who made her life so hard. The dress and religion and family were way too tight a fit for her, but she made alterations and kept all three. She entertains and there is some instruction cleverly mixed in (like you mix medicine in with your dog’s food). If my students can do these two very deceptively difficult things, I count them successful. I try to hold myself to the same standard.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Memoir, Part I

I teach a class called Introduction to Memoir at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy NY. The class being about memoir, about the personal, the private, and the interior, I learn a lot about my students. I’m sure they learn about me too, even if I don’t use my own attempts at memoir writing as an example for them. In spite of this process of coming to know one another, I have been keeping one big secret from them: I AM NOT ENTIRELY SURE I KNOW WHAT MEMOIR IS.

Oh, I have some idea, but not a crystal clear one, like I think a teacher should. I can expound on the what, how and why of the memoir as literary genre, but if you asked me to give a definition that included all that is memoir, and excluded all that is not, I would not be able to do it. And I have a bone to pick with the ways that some people have defined it in the past. So my class is not so much a top-down lecture about the form, but an exploration undertaken as a kind of corporate venture to a New World of Truth, however provisional and contingent that truth turns out to be.

So let’s go with the ‘what’ of memoir first. It is not fiction, not history, but it appropriates approaches from both of those genres. It finds truth in what actually happened to a person, however fictional it may be in terms to being a selective and interpretive enterprise. It tries to find universal, general, abstract human truth in the particular and concrete experiences of a single person. In that sense, it is didactic. Hopefully, it is also entertaining. In fact, I think you can justify memoir on the basis of its mere entertainment value. I don’t read truly engaging stuff often enough. Funny and articulate and surprising will do for me.

My mentor, Marion Roach Smith, who teaches the more advanced course at the ACCR (and who authored the wonderful book about the craft of memoir called THE MEMOIR PROJECT: A THOROUGHLY NON-STANDARDIZED TEXT FOR WRITING AND LIFE) feels that memoir should tell a story with some of the standard elements of fiction: conflict, resolution, change, epiphany, transcendence. I don’t think all memoirs do this, and I know the one I am working on does not (at least not yet, but I am hoping perhaps the writing itself may somehow bring me the insight and change that I seek).

I think of a great memoir by Joe Queenan called CLOSING TIME, wherein he describes growing up poor with an alcoholic abusive father and a manic depressive mother. There is little to be learned, except perhaps the desperate nature of poverty, and that if you are a very bright and lucky poor kid, it might help you to read a lot of books (which he calls the siege weapons the poor use to breach the walls of the middle class). Queenan is the same wiseacre as a kid as he is as an adult. No transcendence. He does learn that the priesthood is not for him, and that suffering is more often dehumanizing than ennobling, but there is no great conflict or confusion, no journey of discovery, no triumphs, just a life so skillfully drawn, a life so desperate and yet so funny, that it is my favorite in the genre.

And besides, there is change of a sort. Sometimes the change comes in the reader and not the writer, when expectations are frustrated. I expected Queenan to make some pronouncements about poverty, about how he learned to overcome it, and about perhaps how society can eliminate it, but he doesn’t set his sights that high. He is content to tell us that he has no answers, that he was lucky to get out, and that the poor will always be with us. That is still a lesson, though implied.

I think of Chekhov as Queenan’s analogue in fiction. Think of his short story THE KISS. Officer Ryabovitch obsesses over a woman who accidentally kissed him at a ball and then disappeared, and we think that the story will end one of two ways—he will find her and be turned down, or find her and be united with her (or maybe find her and lose her, and win her and wish he hadn’t). We never suspect that all the obsessing will come to nothing, that he will never try to find her, that he will allow his life to be lived without any of it being resolved. And so we are changed, because our expectation was thwarted, and we are forced to face the idea that in real life a lot of things don’t get resolved.

I tell my students honestly that in the memoir that I am writing, there is no resolution. At least not yet. Maybe there will be in time, if I find some way to make peace with my childhood, my life, of depression, OCD and anxiety. But I haven’t done it yet. This makes me wonder if the resolution in a lot of memoirs is forced. Maybe some of these people write in their journals and diaries with an eye towards a coherent story about their lives, but my old diaries and journals, which weren’t, don’t read that way. And the whole thing begs the question—How can I say that any version of my life is true if my own understanding of it is so fragile and malleable? If I write it pre-transcendence it is a much different memoir than if I don’t.

This makes me think of what Augustine’s CONFESSIONS would have been like if he was still enjoying the good life, placing body above soul, and generally having some fun when he wrote it. Less of a drag, I am sure.

Of course, he needs to strive towards the divine because he is writing less with an eye towards truth and more because he is propagandizing (another thing that calls into question how true any memoir can be). Augustine is using his life as an exemplum with which to win recruits to his version and vision of Christianity, his story of coming to God being the vehicle, just as Ben Franklin was consciously using himself as an example of America in The Autobiography of Ben Franklin (breaking from his brother and finding success in the same way the country breaks from England and through brains and hard work and a certain kind of godliness and purity finds success too). Shit, even George Bush, in DECISION POINTS, has an epiphany (God tells him to stop taking coke and stop screwing up one business after another and go screw up the entire county instead), as does Hitler in MEIN KAMPF, wherein he suddenly sees the truth about the Aryans and the Jews and his role as the one chosen to redeem the former and eliminate the latter.

So I find it hard to come by epiphany, and am suspicious of it as being a pernicious thing, and I don’t know if my life is an example of anything. If it is not, I don’t want to phony it up by writing it like it is.

Next week, more on the ‘what’ of memoir.

© 2015 Mike Welch