reading and writing

Chapter Title: Writing the Memoir

Chapter Author(s): Judith Barrington Book Title: The Handbook of Creative Writing

Book Editor(s): Steven Earnshaw

Published by: Edinburgh University Press

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9

Writing the Memoir

Judith Barrington

What is memoir?

This chapter is about literary memoir. If that sounds a little pretentious, I use the word ‘lit- erary’ because, although all memoirs recount life experiences, the kind of book I’m describ- ing here aspires to affect its readers through the quality of its writing rather than through the scandalous or gossipy nature of its subject. In order to write this kind of memoir, you don’t have to be famous but, rather, to want to turn your life experiences into well-honed sentences and paragraphs.

The literary memoir has recently surged in popularity, but it has been around for a long time. In 1920, Virginia Woolf was part of ‘The Memoir Club’, a group convened by Molly McCarthy with many of the writers and artists we know of as ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. Before that, the groundwork for the memoir was laid by many of the great essayists.

In trying to define the modern memoir, it is important to understand that it is a differ- ent genre from autobiography. A quick key to understanding the difference between the two lies in the choice of a preposition: autobiography is a story of a life; memoir is a story from a life. The latter makes no pretense of capturing the whole span from birth to the time of writing; in fact, one of the important skills of memoir writing is the selection of the theme that will bind the work together and set boundaries around it. Thus you will discover, if you read Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987), that her chosen theme is her relationship with her mother, described in the context of their walks together in New York City. The author resists the temptation to digress into stories that have no immediate bearing on the subject, and indeed Gornick’s book tells nothing about many other aspects of her life. By setting boundaries such as these, whether the memoir is book-length or just a few pages, the writer keeps the focus on one aspect of a life and offers the reader an in- depth exploration.

Of course memoirs can be about any kind of life experience. Some are lighthearted and in places laugh-out-loud funny like Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals (1956). Others, like Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1996), blend a personal story into an important historical record. J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1956) is a small gem rooted in domestic life while Ernest Shackleton’s South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage (1998) embraces huge frozen tracts of an unfamiliar world.

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110 The Handbook of Creative Writing

It may seem obvious that memoir is also different from fiction; after all, one is ‘true’ and the other imaginary. But the line between these two genres is not always clear. Not everything in a memoir is factually accurate: who can remember the exact dialogue that took place at breakfast forty years ago? And if you can make up dialogue, change the name of a character to protect his privacy, or reorder events to make the story work better, then how is it different from fiction?

One way that memoir is different is that it prompts readers to approach it differently. When you name your work ‘memoir’ or ‘fiction’, you are entering into a kind of contract with your reader. You are saying ‘this really happened’, or ‘this is imaginary’. And if you are going to honour that contract, your raw material as a memoirist can only be what you have actually experienced. It is up to you to decide how imaginatively you transform the facts – exactly how far you allow yourself to go to fill in memory gaps and make a good story out of it. But whatever you decide, your reader expects you to remain limited by your experience, unless you turn to fiction, in which you can, of course, embrace people, places, and events you have never personally known. While imagination plays a role in both fiction and memoir, the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts of your life experience, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe.

Writers of memoir vary in how much they feel free to reorganise their experience. One thing to bear in mind, though, is that you will gain little of value if you end up abusing the reader’s trust. Making up a ‘better ending’ to your story, while presenting it as true, or, worse still, inventing a whole piece of your life because it makes a good memoir, will often backfire.

Even if no one ever finds out that you tampered with the facts, your memoir will suffer if you are dishonest. It is very difficult to be both candid and deceptive at the same time, and a memoir does need to be candid. Tampering with the truth will lead you to writing a bit too carefully – which in turn will rob your style of the ease that goes with honesty. Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing; it has a faint odour of prevarication about it.

None of this should prevent you from speculating. Your readers will appreciate an honest desire to make sense of the facts, however few you may have. Musing on what might have been the tale behind that old photograph of your grandmother, or telling the reader how you’ve always imagined your parents’ early lives, is not the same as presenting your speculations as fact. Mary Gordon, for example, in The Shadow Man (1996), speculates about her father who died when she was seven, using imaginary conversations and, at one point, actually writing in his voice. But none of this is presented as anything other than her search for the real man behind the idealised figure she had preserved over the years.

Retrospection or musing

What I call ‘musing’ is an important ingredient of literary memoir. You try to tell a good story, as you would if writing a novel or short story, using the fictional techniques of scene and summary to move through time. But unlike the fiction writer, you can also reflect out loud on your own story, bringing retrospection to bear on the events.

In this respect memoir is similar to personal essay. As Montaigne said, ‘in an essay, the track of a person’s thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure’. When you write memoir, like the essayist, you invite the reader into your thinking process, going beyond the telling of a good story to reveal how, looking back on it, you now understand that story, perhaps asking questions like, ‘How did it affect my later life?’ or ‘What was the full significance of these events?’

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Writing the Memoir 111

This brings up one of memoir’s unique challenges. When you write in this genre, you have to wear at least three different hats: that of the narrator who tells the story, that of the interpreter who tries to make sense of the story, and that of the protagonist or hero of the story.

Often the musing is buried inside the narration, and the reader merely gets the sense that the memoirist has done a lot of thinking about his or her experience. But sometimes it stands out separately, as an interruption of the narrative thread. This example may help make clear what I mean by musing. My book, Lifesaving: A Memoir (2000) begins like this:

I must have been twelve when my father, my mother, and I participated in the Shoreham to Littlehampton yacht race. Actually, I did that race more than once, but I’m talking about the only time my mother came along – the time that turned into full-blown family story. The way I see it, the story is about my mother’s lifelong terror of the sea and my father’s pigheadedness. Or perhaps it is about the absurd pretenses of the British middle-class, par- ticularly the male of that species, whose dignity must be preserved at all costs . . . (Barrington 2000: 13)

This speculation about the underlying meaning of the story continues for another four sentences. Then the third paragraph picks up the narrative again with the words, ‘It should have been an easy day’s sail: straight down the river from the yacht club’.

If you interject this kind of speculation into the narrative, it is important how you transi- tion in and out of it. In the above example, I introduced the musing with the phrase, ‘The way I see it’. It is clear at that point that I, who have begun as the storyteller, am about to become the interpreter, using retrospective wisdom, to shed some light on the meaning of the story. When transitioning back into the narrative, the reference to sailing is enough to cue the reader back to the yacht race that was introduced in the first paragraph.

The nuts and bolts of memoir

In many ways, memoir calls upon your narrative skills much as fiction does. You need to understand how to handle the passage of time, using summary techniques to cover a long period in a few pages or sentences, and breaking this up with scenes that slow down the action and move in close to your characters.

One way of understanding scene and summary is to think of them in cinematic terms: the summary is the long shot – the one that pulls back to a great distance, embracing first the whole house, then the street, then the neighbourhood, and then, becoming an aerial shot, it takes in the whole city. This view can include a lot of details, but they are all seen from the same distance, none apparently more important than another.

A scene, on the other hand, is the close-up, the camera zooming in through the kitchen window, picking out the two figures talking at the table and going up close to the face of first one speaker then the other. Many details of the kitchen are lost with this shot: maybe a blurry blue pitcher on a sideboard can be discerned; perhaps there is a vague impression of yellow walls and an open door. But in this scene it is the speakers’ mannerisms and what they say that matter.

A summary uses verbs that don’t refer to what happens on any particular day. If it were written in French or Spanish, it would use the imperfect tense to indicate the ongoing nature of what is being described. But we don’t have that tense in English. Thus, Esmeralda Santiago, in her memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), begins a section with the words,

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112 The Handbook of Creative Writing

‘I started school in the middle of hurricane season’. Never focusing on a particular day or week, she captures a whole chunk of time with her verbs: ‘I loved the neat rows of desks lined up’, ‘I walked home from school full of importance’, ‘I learned that there were chil- dren whose fathers were drunks’ (Santiago 1993: 30).

This is very different from a scene. Here is the opening of a scene taken from the same memoir:

Sunday morning before breakfast Abuela handed me my piqué dress, washed and ironed. ‘We’re going to Mass,’ she said, pulling out a small white mantilla, which I was to wear during the service. ‘Can we have breakfast first, Abuela. I’m hungry’. ‘No. We have to fast before church. Don’t ask why. It’s too complicated to explain’. (Santiago 1993: 96)

As you can see, this pinpoints the exact time (‘Sunday morning before breakfast’). When you read a past tense verb such as ‘handed’ or ‘said’, you know it happened on a particular occasion, just that one time. It’s not ongoing like the summary.

Many scenes, like this one, contain dialogue. To do this well, you must not only listen carefully to how people actually speak, but you must also select judiciously from all the things they might say. It’s no good protesting, ‘but that is exactly what she said’, even if it is. A transcript of real life does not make for an engaging story. Your job is to shape, to select, and to add focus.

Some of the most common mistakes in writing dialogue involve the attributions (the ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’). These are needed much less than you might think, since the usual practice is to use a new line for each new speaker. If the conversation only involves two speakers, you’ll hardly need any attributions. It is also unwise to shore up the dialogue with descriptive verbs such as ‘he snapped’ or ‘she mused’, or to qualify the verbs with phrases like ‘in an endearing tone’, or ‘with a sarcastic edge to her voice’. If you pick the right words within the dialogue itself, you won’t need this kind of clarification.

These techniques are common to most narrative prose. What is more specifically related to memoir is the question of retrospection. You can use scene and summary to narrate your way through the many different time periods. But in memoir there is another time that is always present, either explicitly or implicitly, and that time is now. The reader must have a sense that the narrator is rooted in a particular moment from which he or she may look back, may speak in present tense, or may even look forward to the future. It doesn’t matter what the exact date, or even the decade, of the ‘now’ is: all that matters is that the reader senses that it exists and that it anchors a logical time span. It is from this ‘now’ that the memoirist muses on the story being told.

Because there is always an implied now, difficulties sometimes arise if you choose to narrate the events themselves in present tense, which has become a somewhat popular narrative style in recent times. Here is an example of past-tense narration, which, in turn, moves further back in time using the past perfect tense: ‘When I turned fourteen, I decided to sell my pony. Several years earlier, I had sworn I would keep him for his whole life’. Here is that narrative in the present tense: ‘When I turn fourteen, I decide to sell my pony’. All right so far, but what comes next? ‘Several years earlier, I had sworn . . .’? Or is it, ‘Several years earlier, I have sworn . . .’? Or perhaps, ‘Several years earlier, I swore . . .’? None of these sounds perfect to my ear, but we do somehow manage to land on a tense that conveys the meaning adequately.

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Writing the Memoir 113

The real problem arises if we want to add a piece of musing: perhaps a sentence like, ‘I feel ashamed of being so fickle in the face of teenage temptations’. If this sentence is inserted into the past tense narration, it is perfectly clear that it is a piece of retrospection on the part of the adult speaking now. On the other hand, if it is inserted into the present tense narration, it becomes ambiguous: ‘When I turn fourteen, I decide to sell my pony. Several years earlier, I had sworn I would keep him for his whole life. I feel ashamed of being so fickle in the face of teenage temptations’. The third sentence here might be a continuation of the narrative, describing how the narrator felt at the time, or, equally, it might be retrospection from much later – from now. You will have to juggle your words to make clear which it is.

Writing about living people

There are sticky ethical questions that may come up when you set out to write a personal story. It might involve less-than-flattering portrayals of family members, friends, associ- ates, or simply those who crossed your path and left you with an unfavourable impression of them. Sometimes, when you set out to write a memoir, your anxiety about these issues becomes a concern about legal matters: you worry that someone will sue you. But in almost every case, this is a misplaced anxiety. People are not at all inclined to sue, since it is expen- sive and will bring more attention to whatever they don’t want made public. In any case, although the law varies in different countries, generally anyone upset by your work would have to prove both that it is untrue and that it causes them actual harm, rather than simply hurt feelings. Your anxiety is much more likely to stem from your own fears of dealing with the person concerned, or your own difficulties in reliving the story.

This is not to say you should disregard the consequences to others. You must weigh up your need to write a story that is true to how you experienced it, with the harm that might be done to others. You might be writing about a failed relationship; perhaps your memoir involves your closeted gay brother, your teenage daughter’s first period, or a close friend’s mental breakdown. There are often solutions to these problems that go beyond the simple choice of telling or not telling. You can be selective about what to include. You can show the person concerned what you’ve written and find out how he or she feels about it. You can change names, disguise places, and so on. But if you decide to make some of these adjustments, you should leave them until you have finished writing the memoir. It’s only when your work is published that these things matter. Aim for absolute honesty while you are generating it.

Believe it or not, we often overestimate the power of our words. In interviewing mem- oirists, I discovered that several writers who had feared the reaction of family members or friends, actually had good experiences as a result of their writing. People were sometimes able to talk about something that had previously kept them apart.

On the other hand, we must not underestimate the consequences our words could have in some situations. I have a friend, for example, who wrote about her time as a teacher in China. Describing her relationships with friends she made there was not likely to be solved by changing names. At the time, associating with someone from the West was frowned upon in China and making those friendships public could have resulted in people losing jobs, or losing their right to leave the country. Similarly, publishing true stories about illegal immigrants or doctors who assist in a suicide, can bring trouble to those we depict. As writers, it is our business both to think about and to understand fully what can happen to people when we reveal what we know about them.

If you want to write about someone who severely hurt you, it is particularly difficult to tread a path to good writing, which is always the ultimate goal. You may find yourself not

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114 The Handbook of Creative Writing

caring, or even delighting in, the consequences to family members, medical professionals, teachers, or others who abused their power over you in the past. But be aware of revenge as a motive for the writing. Your readers will be uncomfortable if they sense that you are retaliating. It may be anger that gets you started, but your writing will not flourish until you give your full allegiance to the story itself, letting go of any desire on your part to gain sympathy from readers or to punish the wrongdoer.

Two memoirs that in my view tread this difficult path successfully are: Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood (2000) and Alexandra Fuller‘s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2001).

Pitfalls

There are many hazards in writing a memoir. Tone, for example, is important. Since you are writing about yourself, it is important not to strike your reader as self-aggrandising. You can be funny or serious, but whatever your choice, you should aim for being self-revealing without seeming self-obsessed. Work hard on not beginning paragraphs with ‘I’; vary your sentence structure to bury the first person inside it; and check for all those unnecessary phrases like ‘I thought’, ‘I looked’, or ‘I heard’. Just give the thought, the sight or the sound without inserting yourself between it and the reader.

Another possible pitfall is that your memoir will become too internal. By this I mean that it will become a story entirely about your psyche or your emotional development. Readers don’t want to feel as if they’re eavesdropping on a therapy session, but, perversely, they do want to understand how you were affected by your story and what you learned. These things can become apparent through the storytelling, without inserting lengthy passages about your personal growth, your dreams, or your journal writings. Follow the old, but good, advice: show it, don’t tell it.

An engaging memoir is set in a real world. It conveys a sense of period by including details from the culture, from public events, or from the history within which your personal story took place. Don’t get so absorbed in your own life that you forget to include the music that played on the radio or the war that broke out while you were coming of age.

One last challenge is the difficulty of working with a writing group or with an editor on your manuscript. By the time you show the work to someone else, you should be ready to look at it and to discuss it as a piece of writing. This is why, when I teach memoir, I suggest that anyone giving feedback be scrupulous about his or her language. They should not refer to the narrator as ‘you’, but as ‘the narrator’, even though they know perfectly well that the narrator is, in fact, you. Surprisingly, this will help you to separate criticism of the writing from what you might perceive as criticism of your life. Imagine an editor saying, ‘Well, on page 76, when you lose your temper with your frail old mother’, as opposed to, ‘Well, on page 76, when the narrator loses her temper with her frail old mother’.

I set out a more detailed blueprint for such critique sessions in my book, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art (Barrington 1997: 167).

Exercises

Here are a few exercises to get you started.

1. Think of an incident in your life that one or more people see very differently than you. Tell the story beginning with the words, ‘This is how I see what happened’. Do not reveal how anyone else sees it.

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Writing the Memoir 115

2. Pick a season from your childhood and write an account of it all in summary. From that summary, write two full scenes with dialogue.

3. If you wrote the story in exercise 2 in a past tense, re-write it narrating in the present. If you wrote it in present, switch to the past. Note what works better and what is difficult in each rendition.

4. Choose a house you once lived in and remember well. Draw a plan of one floor, showing rooms, doors, windows, pieces of furniture, etc. Ask someone else to randomly mark an ‘X’ in one room (or if necessary, close your eyes and do it yourself). Write a detailed description of that room, paying attention to all five senses. Then write something that happened, or didn’t happen, in that room.

References

Ackerley, J. R. (1956), My Dog Tulip, London: Secker and Warburg. Barrington, Judith (1997), Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Portland: The Eighth Mountain

Press. Barrington, Judith (2000), Lifesaving: A Memoir, Portland: The Eighth Mountain Press. Durrell, Gerald (1956), My Family and Other Animals, London: Hart-Davis. Fuller, Alexandra (2001), Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, New York: Random House. Gordon, Mary (1996), The Shadow Man, New York: Random House. Gornick, Vivian (1987), Fierce Attachments, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Levi, Primo (1996), Survival in Auschwitz, New York: Simon & Schuster. Sage, Lorna (2000), Bad Blood, London: Fourth Estate. Santiago, Esmeralda (1993), When I Was Puerto Rican, New York: Addison-Wesley. Shackleton, Ernest (1998), South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage, New York: Carroll & Graf.

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