Fact or Fiction: It Might Depend on How You Feel
“You’ve got this all wrong. It was cold,” My brother Bob insisted. “The fiercest cold I’ve ever felt.” He pulled his arms in close to his sides and visibly shuddered even though we were standing in a hot, New England kitchen in July, 2014.
He had just read a section of my memoir about my husband’s death in Vietnam in 1969. Bob is two years older than me so I couldn’t attribute his faulty memory to our relative youth back then. I was twenty-two and Bob, twenty-four, when my husband was killed. We were adults. So, why, almost fifty years later, did he recall a broiling hot day in spring as frigid?
I tried a rational approach: “The funeral was on May 29th. It was almost 100 degrees that day. Don’t you remember – Uncle Ephraim had a heat stroke in the middle of it?”
My brother and I are emotionally close in spite of the fact that he is 180 degrees different from me in his political views. We can argue with hammer and tongs about taxes and politics but we’ve never disagreed vehemently about the weather. It felt eerie to be debating something I’d written that was so irrelevant to the event itself. But he continued to insist; it was cold, freezing cold, that day.
This dispute with him about air temperature on one of the most terrible days of my life stayed with me after my book was published and went out into the world. I wondered, briefly, what other details readers/critics might challenge and whether I should worry.
I resolved that it didn’t matter if my brother thought it was cold; that this was his emotional […]
Musings on Memoir
In memoir, a self is speaking and rendering the world. The real subject is your consciousness in the light of history. The objective is to be personal and impersonal all at once. In a sense it is to be a witness and a storyteller.
The hallmark of memoir is the expression of both Now and Then. It is a kind of shuttling back and forth between the past and present, interrogating the experience back then and expressing what that experience means to us now.
We can also think about this as the “I” that was then and the “I” that is now. Or, imagine that your present self is having a conversation with your much younger self.
Memoir begins with a kind of intuition of meaning. The event itself usually happened years ago and a memory, a scene, lingers. I remember weeping in a kitchen in a lonely apartment in a foreign country in 1968 and devouring a box of graham crackers – a big box. Whenever the memory came back, I was uncomfortable. When I eventually described the scene by writing about it, the events before and after came flooding back and I started to get closer to the story.
Memories survive on fleeting things – a wisp of a fragrance, a plaid shirt your father wore, a song that reminds you of another song. These details are the starting point for the deeper story..
Writing memoir is a way to figure out who you used to be and who you are today. It is mental and emotional time travel and sometimes it might involve actual travel.
The memoirist Patricia Hampl wanted to understand who she was as a free-thinking […]
What is Memoir?
Beginning a memoir project is like being an explorer of unexcavated territory, except that territory is within you. You are an anthropologist, a psychologist and a sky diver all at once without leaving your writing table. You take risks on the journey as you delve deeper and deeper into the ravines of memory, but the journey itself is your challenge, a way to stretch yourself and grow as a writer.
A memoir is a story that is true. It can consist of looking back at a single summer, or the span of a lifetime. It is some aspect of life, some theme about which you want to reflect so it becomes a process of unearthing memories and then turning them over and over like a stone embedded with fossils. The more we look the more we see.
There are two basic ingredients in a strong memoir. The first is honesty. The memoirist makes a commitment to tell the emotional truth. Sometimes when the writing is not coming easily, it is often because we’re avoiding what needs to be written. It’s not about baring secrets – it’s simply telling the emotional truth about what you’ve chosen to write about.
Russell Baker told the story of writing a complete manuscript – 450 pages – of a well-researched and documented family story. He included a slew of facts about his family’s genealogy and history. But in the end he realized that, although he was accurate in the reporting of facts about his family, he had been dishonest about his portrayal of his mother. He said, “I had been unwilling to write honestly… and that dishonesty left a […]
Why I Write
A recent issue of The Writer magazine featured writer Alice Hoffman speaking about how and why she writes. On the subject of reading and writing she says “Writing serves the purpose that reading used to serve for me. I always feel like reading save my life because it was a place for me to escape. I feel like quitting all the time, but the act of writing is like being in an ecstatic state. It’s like being high because you are not there. You’re experiencing something on a different plane.”
I feel what she means about writing, but what exactly do I feel? Making a list is always a good thing to do when this kind of question comes up. Here is my list of eighteen reasons why I write:
To understand what I’m thinking.
To revisit places and people of the past via my imagination.
To entertain myself.
To feel the magic triangle between ideas, the pen on the page and the written result.
To dig for buried treasure.
To reflect on common things.
To reflect on extraordinary things.
To approach an understanding of human nature.
To contemplate death.
To open a window in my brain.
To translate experience into understanding.
To be with others through language.
To discover my childhood.
To describe.
To play with words.
To find lost worlds.
To remember
To forget.
Writing about buried thoughts in memoir and the personal essay
Memoir and personal essays are all about the self but sometimes something impedes our pursuit of the “I” character. Here we are, writing about our “selves” and there is a hesitation to explore deeper consciousness or personality, or interiority of thoughts. What stops us? Take for example, our reaction to passing a roadside accident. We may be horrified about what we see and at the same time burning with curiosity to see the mangled vehicles and the EMTs prying out a body with the Jaws of Life. Concentrating on that secret desire to watch, to see possibly something horrific, is the challenge for anyone who wants to explore and reflect on one’s personal response in a moment like this – or any moment in time. We bury these thoughts, wishes desires, quickly, and hesitate to return. BUT – sometimes we really want to write about how it felt to be in that situation. How do we go back and dredge up our true feelings?
Carl Klaus speaks about “fixedness” in his book, The Made-up Self.” That resistance to drill deeper through our habitual thoughts down to a less-recognized (or less acceptable) self.
The question is not to dig up and record macabre thoughts, it is how to think deeply on how we respond, what we truly think in any situation.
In her essay Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf speaks about the importance of “scene making” to get at buried thoughts. She differentiates between private (reflective) thoughts and public approaches to delve into memory. The private are the scenes which we remember but can’t make sense of – the public are the roads we try to build into memory by saying this happened, then this, then this. […]
