Living to tell the tale.
by
Jane Taylor McDonnell

_________________________________________________________________


LIVING TO TELL THE TALE A Guide to Writing Memoir Jane Taylor McDonnell

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First published in Penguin Books 1998

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Copyright t Jane Taylor McDonnell, 1998

Foreword copyright ( Vivian Gornick, 1998

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from
the following copyrighted works "Note from the Dead" by Sebastian Barry.
Originally appeared in Imvisibledublin, edited by Dermot Bolger (Raven
Arts Press, 1991). By permission of the author. Object Lessons: The Life
of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time by Eavan Boland. Copyright K) 1995
by Eavan Boland. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Angeh's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank Mccourt. Copyright (9 1996 by Frank
Mccourt. Reprinted with the permission of Scnbner, a division of Simon &
Schuster. News from the Bordwr by Jane Taylor McDonnell (Ticknor &
Fields, 1993). By permission of the author. This Bow's Life by Tobias
Wolff. Copyright (r) 1989 by Tobias Wolff. Used by permission of
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA McDonnell, Jane
Taylor. Living to tell the tale: a guide to writing memoir/Jane Taylor
McDollnell, foreword by Vivian Gornick. Includes bibliographical
references (p. ).

ISBN 0 14 02. 6530 9

1. Autobiography Authorship. 2. Biography as a literary form. 3. Report
writing. 1. Title.

CT25. M34 1998

808'. 06fi92 dc21 97-34341

Printed in the United States of America Set in New Baskerville Designed
by Helene Berinsky

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For my family Jim, Paul, and Kate

@Foreword.

BEGINNING WITH AUGUSTINE, memoir writing has given trouble, and to this
day readers and writers alike seem preoccupied with trying to puzzle out
the genre, Does it tell the truth or just give the facts? Report a life
or set the record straight? Do journalism or make art? Inevitably, if
the memoir is so good that it "reads like a novel, " one hears the
confused assertion that every act of writing is an act of invention so,
really, autobiography is just another way of making fiction Not so. A
memoir is a work of nonfiction. But it is true that the concerns of the
memoirist are the same as those of the novelist. Memoir writing shares
with fiction writing the obligation to lift from the raw material of
life a tale that will shape experience, transform an event, deliver
wisdom. It differs from fiction writing in the way it approaches the
task, vii the chief difference being that a fictional "I" can be, and
often is, an unreliable narrator, the nonfictional "I" can never be. In
memoir, the reader must be persuaded that the narrator is speaking
truth. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual
events, it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer
is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to
the memoirist is not what matters, it matters only what the memoirist
makes of what happened. For that, the power of a writing imagination is
required. As V. S. Pritchett once said of the genre, "It's all in the
art. You get no credit for living. " The situation may be revealing, but
it's the writing that provides revelation, and revelation comes only
with a story well told. In every work of literature there's a situation
and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the
plot, the story is the emotional insight that preoccupies the writer. In
his Confessions, Augustine tells the tale of his conversion to
Christianity, that's the situation. In this tale, he moves from an
inchoate to a coherent sense of being, from an idling existence into a
purposeful one, from a state of ignorance to one of truth, that's the
story. Inevitably, it is a story of self-discovery and selfdefinition.

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition. That is,
definition out in the world, not in the void. The memoirist, like the
poet and the novelist, must engage with the world because engagement
makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom
that counts. Every writer has to persuade the reader that he or she
knows something and is writing as honestly as possible to arrive at what
that something is. The questions are always the same, What is the
situation, and what is the story? What is the experience being shaped,
the insight expressed, the self revealed? These questions are asked of
the nonfictional witness as- well as of the fictional storyteller. Jane
McDonnell herself a student, practitioner, and teacher of memoir writing
has a strong grasp of the issues that dominate today's discussion of an
honorable and little understood genre. The book she has written is a
fine and useful introduction to the complexity of the form, its
pleasures, its perils, its immense possibilities. Step by lucid step,
Living to Tell the Tale opens the reader to the excitement and alarm of
translating into shaped experience a story taken from one's very own
life. One of the most appealing elements of this book is derived from
McDonnell's acute understanding that teaching people how to think like
writers about events and circumstances in which they were principal
actors turns out to be as dramatic an exercise as the attempt at
psychoanalysis, fraught with anxiety, a struggle to focus, difficult to
achieve distance, and painfully hard to identify the real story. The
would-be memoirist can do no better than to havejane McDonnell for a
guide. The chapter headings alone tell us how well she understands the
project "Talking Back to Your Inner Censor", "Learning to Remember",
"How to Find Your Plot", "To Tell or Not to Tell" and what sort of an
inner journey she is asking her student memoirists to go on. She knows
that "what happened" is the least of it. She wants her readers to go
down into themselves as far as they can, and stay there as long as
possible. Living to Tell the Tale is the work of a gifted teacher, her
knowledge is deep, her style patient, her inclination compassionate.
She's been where you are now, she knows how to help you go forward.
Vivian Garnick x Acknowledgments I AM VERY GRATEFUL to all the students
who have taken my class, "Witness Narratives, Memoirs of Survival, "
over the years that I have taught it at Carleton College. They have
helped me think through the issues of personal writing, particularly
writing about difficult events. I am especially indebted to the
following who gave me permission to quote from their works, Rachel
Bercovitz, Jessica Dockter, Sarah Kaplowitz, and Dominic Saucedo.
Special thanks go to my friends, Sigrund Leonhard and Damgar Tisdale,
and to my daughter, Kate McDonnell, for allowing me to quote from their
writings. I am also very grateful to the Prose Writers group at Carleton
for advice and support. I want to acknowledge the gracious and
thoughtful help given by my editor at Penguin, Caroline White, and the
enthusiasm, creativity and plain hard work of my agent, Gloria Norris,
without whom this book would not have been written. Thanks as well to
Jane Von Mehren of Viking Penguin who helped with this book. I am also
very grateful to Vivian Gornick for writing the Foreword and for leading
the way in her wonderful writing class at the Loft in Minneapolis many
years ago.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION, Necessary Fictions of the Self

1. BACK TALK Getting Started by Talking Back to Your Inner Censors

2. SPOTS OF TIME, Learning to Remember

3. JUST MAKE IT UP, THEN SEE IF IT IS TRUE, Imagination Coming to the
Aid of Memory ..

4. USING PHOTOGRAPHS AND OTHER DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

5. A STORY IN SEARCH OF ITS SUBJECT, How to Find Your Plot

6. THE SELF IN THE STORY, Finding Your Voice

7. TO TELL O R NOT TO TELL

Ethical Considerations in Writing a Memoir

RECOMMENDED READING

Introduction

NECESSARY FICTIONS OF THE SELF

WRITING IS A SECOND CHANCE at life. Although we can never go back in
time to change the past, we can reexperience, interpret, and make peace
with our past lives. When we write a personal narrative we find new
meanings and, at the same time, we discover connections with our former
selves. I think all writing constitutes an effort to establish our own
meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment. In
fact, writing sometimes seems to me to be the only way to give shape to
life, to complete the process which is merely begun by living. This book
is intended to help you start to write a memoir, or perhaps to finish a
piece of writing already begun. It is about learning to trust your inner
narrative voice, getting through the hard times in writing, and learning
to "listen" to the story itself. I hope that you will find enough ideas,
examples of effective writing, exercises, and just plain inspiration to
help any writer who has "lived to tell the tale." THE OTHER DAY I
watched some children play near my house, "Bang, bang. You're dead."
"No, I'm not." "Yes you are. I shot you." "No, I'm not dead. I decide
whether I'm dead or not."

This second child was asserting something fundamental. He wanted to tell
the story in his own way, and he was saying he was the writer of his own
life, of his own script. In some sense, we are all (those of us lucky
enough to survive) writers of our own lives, whether it is externally in
play, as these children demonstrated, or internally as we move through
our day. We have in our heads that inner voice which narrates the story
of our lives. Sometimes you may be most aware of it as you fall asleep
at night, or perhaps in a moment of crisis you discover that you are
"talking" yourself through a difficult time. It isn't enough just to
live a life, we must be continually explaining it to ourselves, sorting,
remembering, casting out the less important stuff, interpreting,
sometimes justifying ourselves to ourselves. Through memoir we can
effectively capture this Introduction winner voice. Sometimes I think of
memoir as the extended-prose-narrative equivalent of the Iyric voice
which we find in poetry. The same poetic intensity, immediacy, reliance
on vivid imagery, and direct appeal to the reader are often found in the
modern memoir. Sometimes the voice sounds more like a historian, or a
letter writer, or maybe even like the voiceover commentator of a
documentary film. Whatever your own inner voice sounds like, you can
learn to capture it and transcribe it onto the page. And when you do,
you will feel a satisfaction unlike anything you have ever felt before,
your life will add up to more than the living of it ever did. I haven't
always lived by that belief. For a long time I kept a postcard message
on my office door at the college where I have taught for the past
twenty-six years. It read something like this, THE GREATEST POVERTY IS
NOT BEING ABLE TO WRITE, AND HAVING OTHERS WRITE YOUR STORY FOR YOU. I m
not quite sure why I kept it up on my office door for so long. It's true
I had taught English literature for some years, and later, when I began
to teach Women's Studies, I wanted my students to see the saying on my
door as they came to my office for conferences. They sometimes struggled
over their own writing, and I wanted them to know I was thinking of them
as well as of the literature of minority American writers we were
discovering together at the time. But something else drew me to this
little motto. I was uneasily aware that I myself was not writing, I was
not living up to the standards I had set for my students. As I
encouraged them to write, as I talked of the human need to tell our
stories, I was denying something very important in myself. I knew this,
but couldn't quite bring it to full consciousness for many years. I grew
up in a writing family. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it was
a family of bad writers and failed (good) writers. My father,
grandfather, one aunt, a great-uncle, myself we all wrote as children
and we all passed through times of intimidation as adults. That is, all
except the great-uncle who made a career of writing rather bad
historical novels. Uncle Rob lived for years in New York and was, I
later learned, an intimate of J. Edgar Hoover. His favorite subject was
Mary, Queen of Scots and his greatest triumph was seeing his book turned
into an Italian opera. I remember visiting him as a child, being marched
dutifully across the southern town where my father's family lived. His
house no more than a peeling shack leaning against a filling station was
full of antiques, a huge Chippendale highboy, Hepplewhite chairs,
cathedral glass, a stereopticon (with pictures of the Leaning Tower of
Pisa), and the most wonderful little trinkets I had ever seen. I was
usually given a small token, perhaps an engraved gold hatchet that once
hung from a great-grandfather's watch fob. Sometimes I lost the little
trinket when we were outside the door. On one frightening occasion, my
ner Introduction w vousness as a child and my eagerness to please all
the adults around me somehow caused me to drop the hatchet into a deep
sidewalk crack just outside his door. There was an anxious moment as we
all tried to fish it out, without being seen from the window. Uncle Rob
was the writer. The rest of us just wanted to be writers, never quite
daring to live the kind of life which my great-uncle managed to turn
into a legend even during his own lifetime. He finally retired to his
little southern town, now a large city, and spent his "declining" years
writing venomous letters to the editor of the local newspaper. He also
began writing poetry. There was one particularly sentimental poem, about
a family plantation home, which was almost saved by a wonderful image of
peacocks freezing their toes on a cold winter's night. Uncle Rob lived
to be one hundred and four, and deeded all his treasures to the
plantation house. On his deathbed in a nursing home, he was never told
that all the antiques (except the Chippendale highboy which was simply
too heavy) had been cleared out of the house, next to the Texaco
station, and loaded onto a truck by robbers in the dead of one hot
southern night. My grandfather wrote stories and family records to be
passed on to his children and grandchildren. My father took up writing
little books when he was a child. A famous one that luckily was saved
began with the memorable lines, "The sun rose in all its gorgeous and
glory. I asked my parents if I could go to Africa. They said Yes, but be
careful.  " All during my childhood, we quoted those lines. Whenever my
brother and I asked to do something a little risky, the reply was often
the wry "Yes, but be careful. " Thus the stories we each wrote became a
part of family lore, the written was woven into the lived experience.
Every summer when I was growing up, I started writing a new novel.
Usually I never got past the first chapter or two. The illustrations,
full-page and placed every other page, slowed me down. For my reading, I
favored Victorian children's books, especially the ones in which
children died. The demise of Beth in Little Wotrzn was, of course, read
over and over, but I preferred The Byrd's Christmas Carol, because that
book dared to kill off the heroine herself. Needless to say, these books
didn't provide very good models for my own writing. Furthermore,
persistent feelings of inadequacy briefly banished during high school
and college, where I took every writing class available and edited the
literary journal kept me from writing. Later I needed to make a living,
and then I had children and still needed to make a living. Perhaps I
simply couldn't imagine a writer's life as my own. Maybe the image of
Uncle Rob showing me the "Maestro's" letter, about the Italian opera of
Mary, Queen of Scots was too foreign an image for me to apply to myself.
Eventually, later in life than many people, in my Introduction w I
forties in fact, I did start to write. And as I look back on this time,
it is obvious to me that I was impelled by a crisis to start to put
things down on paper. I found myself the mother of an autistic son, more
verbal and capable than most, but also a child who suffered in a way I
had never witnessed before. Life itself and everything about it learning
to speak, trying to figure people out, coping with other children who
sometimes teased him relentlessly, dealing with change were sometimes
impossibly difficult for Paul. And the rest of us myself, my husband and
daughter, as well as our extended families all suffered with him. I
think that what we all experienced was a kind of fracturing of the self.
At times my whole life seemed permeated with conflict and ambiguity. One
summer Paul was fifteen and suicidal. We placed him in an Adolescent Day
Treatment program where he started intensive therapy and treatment with
antidepressants, but even so, we all felt we were teetering on an edge.
I took out one of my many empty notebooks, pasted a hopeful picture of
pink peonies on the cover (my grandmother had been famous for her
peonies and they meant safety and luck to me) and I started to write. I
wrote first thing in the morning on the back porch, as the early sun
picked out each fine spider's thread across the wet grass. I wrote over
a bitter cup of coffee in the hospital cafeteria where Paul was a
patient and in the hot car in the parking lot as I waited to drive him
home. Knowing that I could indeed lose him, I wrote first to hold on to
my son, and then to hold on to to the last fifteen years of my own life.
It wasn't long, however, before I discovered that I wrote to let go as
well as to hold on. I knew I must face the real possibility that I could
lose Paul and I wanted to prepare myself for the unimaginable. But I
also wanted the last fifteen years spent raising children to add up to
something even if I lost him. I wanted to establish my own
meaningfulness in the midst of sorrow. And I wanted to refuse the
temptations of despair. Finally I began to know for myself what I had
been telling my students for so many years. I learned still more from
writing another narrative several years later. This time I wrote about
my father's last illness and death from brain cancer. When I began to
write about my father's loss, at the age of almost ninety-five, of
everything that had kept him so vividly alive for so many years, I was
plunged once again into the same almost unbearable situation as witness.
My father's brain cancer took away his eyesight and his written
language, then, it took away his spoken language, his love of music, and
finally his sense of time and of space. Thus twice I felt I was "chosen"
to tell a painful story.

Furthermore, in both cases I had to be, at least partly, just a watcher,
a bystander, a witness to a pain I could neither comprehend nor assuage.
Both times when I started to write, I began to realize that the
Introduction * very things which helped me to write these books my
capacity for language, for imagined truth, and my memory were not
available in the same way to my son or to my father. It therefore seemed
all the more important that I tell these stories. Always during this
time I was reading memoirs. For years before this, I had looked down on
memoirs or autobiographies as somehow inferior to fiction. Because these
books proported to tell the "truth" I thought of them as relatively
naive, as simple transcriptions of life. "Real" literature was fiction
or poetry. Now suddenly, I found myself seeking out memoirs especially
those that were personal testimonies to survival. I searched the shelves
of bookstores for personal accounts of grief and loss, of mental
illness, of addiction and recovery, accounts of AIDS, mothers' accounts
of handicapped children, books written by deaf people and by the
children of deaf parents, books by doctors and neurologists. I searched
for autobiographical books about childhood, finding Tobias Wolff's This
Boy s Life, Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments, Patricia Hampl's A
Romantic Education, Annie Dillard's An american Childhood. Many of these
books seemed to me to be as good (in a literary sense) as any of the
novels I was reading at the time. Some of them, of course, were by well
known writers who had also written novels or poems, but now felt the
need to tell some part of their story in a different form. But others
were written by people who were simply driven by the need to bear
witness to their survival. In almost all of them I discovered something
of value to myself personally, as well as to myself as writer and as
teacher. But because of the "racking" or shelving conventions of the
book trade, I found many of these memoirs scattered around bookstores,
under parenting, health, travel, or family, for example. Soon I started
to teach a college course called "Witness Narratives, Memoirs of
Survival" in which I introduced my students to some of the most moving
of these books, Natalie Kusz's Road Song, Eva Hoffman's Lost in
Translation, Maya Angelou's I Know VW1Y the Caged Bird Sings, Lucy
Grealy's Autobiography of a Face. I taught short pieces by Tim O'Brien,
James Baldwin, and Mary Mccarthy. I recommended dozens of other books
and made a place in the class for students to write their own personal
narratives. Among my undergraduate students over the years there have
been many who have written about their experiences with childhood sexual
abuse, about their struggles with anorexia, about their parents'
divorce, about the suicide of a classmate. Over and over again I have
been amazed that they could write about such experiences when still so
young. They seemed to have found not only the courage to confront such
experiences in writing, but also the wisdom to begin to see the shape of
such a story, how to tell it to others who have not experienced it
directly. ONE OF THE THINGS I learned in teaching my class (and in
writing my own personal narratives) was that, even with all the
attention it has received lately, the "crisis memoir" (as most
contemporary memoirs seem to be) has rarely been explored in depth, or
even sufficiently valued as the rich and complex form that it is. This
is true, even though we are experiencing a kind of literary renascence
in personal writing at this moment in time. The personal essay, journals
and diaries, autobiographical writing, and especially what is now called
"fictive autobiography, " as well as the memoir and creative nonfiction
in all its forms, are making a comeback. From Maxine Hong Kingston's The
Woman Warrior to Frank Mccourt's Angela's Ashes, the memoir of an
individual's survival has become a contemporary form that is enjoying
immense new popularity. So prominent is the literary memoir that it has
been the featured subject of The New York Times Magazine and The Women's
Review of Books. Again and again, we are reminded that the writer who
might earlier have written an autobiographical novel is now writing
frankly in the first person, engaging the reader directly and intimately
with an account of his or her own life history. Furthermore, in the last
ten years there have been published hundreds of books which might be
called crisis narratives or memoirs of survival stories of illness,
abuse, emigration, cultural dislocations of all sorts. In fact, one
writer on personal narrative claims that "every autobiography is a story
of crisis, in that it recounts change, turning points, conversions,
critical lettings-go and breaks with the past. . . " (Chandler, page 9)
All writing is in some way therapeutic. And although the main intention
of this book is not to provide help in getting through crises, I do
recognize that some of the insights learned in a therapeutic setting
also apply to the processes of writing (and vice versa). The crisis
narrative obviously has its beginnings in the therapeutic impulse, in
the desire to bear witness to some painful truth experienced either
individually or collectively, in the wish to tell in order, finally, to
heal. Likewise, the insights gained through writing will always help us
in living our lives. Traumatic events, however, call into question the
very issues which personal writing explores, the construction of the
self, attachment to others, assumptions of safety, and, perhaps most
importantly of all, a sense of the meaningful order of creation, as
Judith Herman notes, in her book Trauma and Recovery. In this kind of
writing the narrative act is an act of recovery in both senses of the
word, recovery of memories which have been lost or partly lost, and
reconstitution of a lost or broken self. This self, having been in some
way fragmented or dislocated, both recovers and is recovered.
Introduction * Philip Roth, who wrote a memoir about his father's last
illness and death, has written, "We are all writing fictitious versions
of our lives all the time, contradictory but mutually entangling stories
that, however subtly or grossly falsified, constitute our hold on
reality and are the closest thing we have to truth." Many things,
however, can happen to disrupt our inner flow of narrative, our
necessary fictions of the self. The inner narrative we experience from
the time we first know ourselves to be selves, the voice in our heads
which speaks to us more or less continually sorting, arranging,
interpreting, and making sense of our lives is a very fragile voice.
Grief and loss, addictions, major illness, imprisonment, war these and
many other experiences can cause us not only to forget memories, but
also to lose our trust in other people, as well as our trust in a
dependable "reality" or the "meaningfulness of creation. " As such
crises force us to question inherited and communal values, we may lose
for a while our very ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Many of
the narratives discussed here (both published and unpublished) grow out
of experiences of crisis. They may deal with large subjects, but they
deal with them in immediate and comprehensible ways. Furthermore, many
narratives of crisis actually explore a fractured self. As they speak of
the experience, they also reflect on how the experience is perceived and
remembered (or misremembered) by the teller. Often, especially when
illness or cultural dislocation is involved, they question basic
assumptions about language and the nature of reality. Sometimes they
even consider how the story can (and cannot) be told. In fact, one of
the major attractions of contemporary memoirs is that they not only
"show" and "tell, " give scenes and summary, but they also reflect on
the very process of telling itself. These books show an "examined life"
in a particular sense of the word. A flexible form of writing, memoir
can combine the techniques of fiction with essay writing, the personal
with the public dimensions of an experience, and the documentary account
with poetic and evocative recreations of experience. A dramatic story
can be told, but there is also room for reflection on memory and the
imagination and on the creation of a sense of self in the world. Of
course in all of this, the very act of writing is a part of recovery. In
the telling, the writer becomes a survivor one who has changed, but
lived to tell the tale. These narratives, and the one you may wish to
write, seek to reconstitute the lost self and reconceive the
traumatizing experience as a survivor's story. In them the more mature
writer can reflect with profound sympathy on that earlier self which
suffered but did not yet know the meaning of the suffering. Furthermore,
the best examples of this kind of writing are more than just private.
They are also deeply spiritual and historical accounts that bear witness
to some universal trauma experienced on a personal level. Introduction w
! SO WHY have I written this book? you might ask. For one thing, it is
the kind of book I (and others I know) have been searching for in
bookstores. As I was writing my own personal narratives, I found many
relevant classes and workshops, but no books which sufficiently valued
this kind of writing or offered advice on handling the problems specific
to first-person narrative. No guidebook that I could find explored the
intimate connections between memory and imagination, or the ethical
issues of writing about other people's roles in our own lives, or the
fictional strategies which can be used in shaping memoir. As far as I
know, there have been no guides for the writer who wishes to turn a
story of survival into a work of creative nonfiction. I hope, therefore,
that this book will both introduce you to the richness of this literary
form and offer inspiration for your own writing. I will attempt to help
you in several different ways. One is to identify common problems and
doubts encountered in writing personal narrative, such as the seeming
inadequacy of memory, questions about the place of the imagination in a
truthful account, or concerns about how to plot an "already known"
series of events. I will draw on my own experience as a writer of
memoir, partly because that is what I know best, but also because I
believe we each encounter similar problems. And to show how others have
dealt with difficulties in writing, I will give examples from both
published writers and student pieces. In each case I will try to make
explicit the strategies they used to overcome various problems in
writing personal narratives. Every chapter will end with practical
exercises intended to help you over the trouble spots. The first half of
the book should help you to generate material (and to turn off the inner
censors to allowyou to get on with the oh).  The second half of the book
will introduce you to many techiques which you can use as you shape your
story. A suggested reading list at the end of the book recommends recent
memoirs on many different subjects. By the end of the book you will, I
hope, begin to learn to trust the memories you have retained, to find
other "documentary" sources such as letters or family photos or medical
records to supplement sketchy memories, to use your imagination to
speculate about a past you cannot remember or know, and finally to apply
some techniques of fiction writing to your nonfiction writing. I call
all of this learning to "listen to the story. " Such respectful
"listening" ultimately has to do with letting go and allowing the true
subject to emerge. It happens only later, after we have done a lot of
hard work. But there does come a time and I hope this book will testify
to the possibility of that time when suddenly the scales fall from our
eyes and we begin to see. There is a story there! It has a shape and a
subject. It is your story and it speaks to others. BACK TALK Getting
Started by Talking Back to Your Inner Censors IN THE INTRODUCTION I
talked about the inner voice we have in our heads which narrates the
course of our lives for us. I implied that we need to start listening to
that voice if we want to write. I didn't mention, however, another kind
of speaker which intrudes all too often, that of our inner censor, the
editorializing voice which points out what is wrong, not what is right
about us. All writers must, at some point, confront these negative
messages, but memoir writers may face particularly strong prohibitions.
After all, the form demands both honesty and creativity, scrupulous
attention to outer reality, as well as faithfulness to an inner vision.
We are impelled to write because we have some personal story we want to
share with others, yet we are often afraid of telling it the wrong way
or of offending others who have been a part of our own story. In Bird By
Bird, Anne Lamott identifies a couple of real stinkers in her own head,
"First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly Well,
that's not very interesting, is it?  And there's the emaciated German
male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And
there are your parents... . " (Page 26) Now think for a moment about the
voices in your own head which tell you you can't write and shouldn't
even dream of trying to set anything down on paper. Maybe it is your
ex-husband who was in the habit of telling you you couldn't write
(possibly because he came home and found a cold stove). Or it was your
mother who thought you should be out mowing the lawn before guests came
for dinner, not sitting out on the roof of the chicken house writing
gloomy poems. You may wonder why I am telling you first off that you
need to listen to the "vinegar-lipped Reader Lady" or her cronies. After
all, don't we want to shut up these voices? You will see, however, that
we need to give those voices a place. And then we need to firmly shut
them away out of sight. Naming the Inner Censors l Whenever I start to
teach a class of students who want to write personal narratives, I ask
them to name their inner censors. I invite them to voice their fears,
which Back Talk they soon discover are really everybody's fears. One of
the first things they always mention is the assumption that their own
experience isn't significant enough. Some even go so far as to say that
nothing "big" has ever happened to them. One student told the class that
nothing very important had ever happened to her, then during the break I
overheard her telling another student about being held hostage in her
high school library by another student who had become psychotic. I
joined the conversation and pointed out that this event was significant
and could become a vivid written piece. As she told it, the story was
very funny, she hadn't been really frightened, the other student wasn't
armed and he just wanted to ramble on about the FBI or the CIA. She felt
sad for him, but she also minimized the importance of the event for
herself. In the end, she wrote a wonderful narrative about another high
school friend who died, not about the hostage-taking student. Perhaps my
student didn't want to tell the story of the hostage-taking because it
really was not as important to her as the story of the friend who died.
Or it may be that she couldn't see the shape of the hostage story, and
therefore couldn't imagine it written. In any case, she got beyond the
feeling that nothing significant had ever happened to her. There are
other common worries. Almost every one feels a special pressure to be
honest and trustworthy, and just as importantly, to be perceived as
honest and trustworthy. We all want both to be believed and to sound
believable. For this reason, my students and I often discuss the
reliability of the voice of the narrator in various published pieces we
read together. They are very quick to notice any falseness of tone, and
are especially wary of any suggestion of sentimentality. In identifying
these problems in other writers, they voice common concerns about how
their own writing might be perceived by others. As you read the work of
others, you might ask yourself, does the writer seem too detached,
inappropriately ironical, or evasive? Does he or she skip over or
minimize something important? Your own responses to other people's
writing will become very important as you work through your own writing.
My students name other fears as well. Some will admit that writing a
personal narrative about some traumatic event can heighten the
temptation to write a revenge narrative. In fact, many people are afraid
they might appear to be writing only as an act of selfjustification.
Insisting on too much "specialness, " acting the part of the tragedy
king or queen, perversely feeding on one's grief or anger or depression
and refusing to get over it all of these are pitfalls of memoir writing
and are often feared by the beginning writer. Such fears may be behind
the concern that one's own experience isn't "significant" enough, that
Back Talk * we might simply be insisting on our own specialness out of
egotistical self-preoccupation and that our readers might dismiss us for
that very reason. My students often say they don't remember enough, or
they fear that their memories may be false or incomplete or inaccurate.
And so on. I'm sure you can name a dozen other reasons why you can't
write or shouldn't write. So what should you do now? First of all, I
suggest that you actively confront those inner censors. Stop and listen
to the voice and write it down. Here is what a student of mine wrote,
Memoir writing is all about waiting until the scary seems safe enough to
write about. But the problem is that you want the reader to feel the
scariness come out of the words on the page. You want to make the reader
feel your pain, but you don't want to relive the experience itself.
Writing is hard.

And it is not always safe.

Writing brings back people you haven't thought about for years.

Writing coaxes out your family, all of the friends you're ever had,
every person you have met, and every experience you have had in your
whole life. And when the writing is over, you sit in a small room with
your notebook in your lap, underneath the light of a lamp. All around
you, filling the room, lined up in the shadows, taking up your light,
are the images of all the things your writing brought out of your
memory. These images join you in your dreams as you sleep, accompany you
as you walk to class. . . Writing a Dialogue For the author of the
excerpt above, writing out her reluctance to confront her past was an
important step. After she had named her demons, so to speak, she went on
to write a wonderful piece. But I suggested to the class that they need
to do more than just write out their fears. I asked them to answer that
negative voice and to make sure that they have the last word. This is an
exercise that I recommend for you also. Take out a piece of paper. You
might even want to set aside a whole (little) notebook for this
exercise. Now write a dialogue between these two selves, your good
angel, who tells you you have an important story to tell, and your bad
angel, who insists on the opposite. During the Renaissance, many people
wrote dialogues between "self" and "soul, " in which their better,
spiritual side struggled with their more worldly or doubtful or
disabling side. Their impulse may have been mostly religious, but such a
dialogue can be an important exercise and resource for any writer living
in any century. Here is an example of the dialogue I once wrote between
myself and my inner voices, I have an important No you don't. It's too
sad a story to tell.

late to write. You are too old, too much time has gone by and besides
you didn't keep many records. So what? The memories Yes, but when you
write must be there somewhere. Well then, my imagination can step into
the breach, and I can make up what I don't remember. You've got to be
kidding! Why should I listen to my seventh grade teacher at this point
in my life? I can find an hour a day. That's because it's rich. I
haven't yet found the shape of the story. Give me time. them they come
out sounding so flat and dry. Your seventh grade teacher told you you
have no imagination. Okay, okay. You win this time around. But remember
you just don't have time to write. Maybe. ..  but your writing is so
disorganized. All right. I'll shut up for now. When you write such a
dialogue, it is important that you make sure you (your better self) has
the last word. When you are finished, close that notebook and put it on
a high shelf. Your censor has had a chance to speak and has been
listened to seriously. He or she has been given a place, but now can be
firmly told to shut up. Later, if this voice insists again on intruding
into your writing time, take the notebook out and write another
dialogue. Again, be honest. Admit all your doubts and fears, but then
put them aside on a high shelf, in another room, in a drawer or a
closet, some place where you can imagine those voices contained.
Sometimes we have to voice our doubts and fears (and our sorrows)

before moving on. I found out the hard way that if I didn't let these
voices speak in my head, they kept popping up anyway. Paradoxically, it
was only by allowing them to speak that I could shut them up. I have a
friend, an artist, who was refused tenure, but who responded in a
wonderfully creative and healthy way. She went to the local
five-and-dime and bought all their little ceramic angels. She brought
them home and painted them with little tatooes and tears and called them
the tatooed angels who bring bad news. She did this in the kitchen,
while she talked on the phone to her friends and family. After a couple
of weeks, all the bad news had been expressed and acknowledged and she
was ready to go on and paint some angels of good fortune. She was able
to move on from that place of grief and disappointment by first
acknowledging it and expressing it creatively. You might look for your
own little creative rituals, anything that helps you through the hard
times of doubt and uncertainty, so that you can go back to writing.
Finding a Place of Safety Writing a dialogue is one way to silence those
voices that might get in your way. Another way is to find a place of
safety where you can write free of interruptions. My students often talk
about needing a room to themselves when they write, they can't just sit
in the computer lab and write a personal narrative. A friend of mine,
who was raped at the age of twenty, wanted for years afterward to write
about the experience. She never felt safe enough to do so until many
years after the event when she asked her husband to sit across the room
from her, not talking to her but reading the newspaper. Only then was
she able to write. Another friend told me she had to lie flat on the
floor and feel the hard solidness of the world, as she began to write.
It may not be as difficult for you to start to write, but in any case
finding a place of safety and quiet away from interruptions might be
necessary. EXERCISES ( 1 ) Write a dialogue with those voices in your
head that tell you you cannot write. In this dialogue, name your fears
as accurately as you can (don't be ashamed to name them even if they
seem very silly). Be sure to give yourself (not your negative voices)
the last word. (2) Keep a separate notebook for your negative internal
voices.

Give them a chance to express themselves, but when they are finished
close the notebook and put it away. Keep a separate notebook for your
real writing. Treat that other negative self respectfully, but then put
him or her firmly back in place. "SPOTS OF TIME" Learning to Remember
MEMORY IS ESSENTIAL TO THE MEMOIR. I need hardly remind you that you
must remember past events in order to tell them, or that when you start
to write you might feel discouraged because of what you have forgotten.
Be reassured, however, that any writer who sets out to write a
first-person narrative is likely to run across problems with memory too
many trivial memories, too few vivid memories, family lies substituting
for memory, merged memories, and the like. As you will see in this
chapter, however, these problems are not necessarily impediments to
writing, with a little work they can become rich resources for telling a
complex story. How we remember, what we forget, what preoccupies us
about our past, which memories we avoid, which ones we obsessively
retell all of this can be the stuff of memoir writing. In other words,
memory itself, in all its richness and in its deceptiveness (even
including what we don't remember), can be a subject of memoir. In this
chapter, I will identify problems we commonly experience with memory,
then discuss ways around these problems. You will see how writers of
memoir often draw on single small images to generate whole passages.
They frequently reflect on the process of remembering (or forgetting) in
itself as an important resource for telling the story. I hope this
chapter will help you not just to trust available memories, but also to
value "thinking small, " to realize that the memories we keep are
tremendously important precisely because they are the ones we have
retained. The exercises at the end of this chapter spell out strategies
for "learning to remember" fruitfully. Making Lists I have a friend who,
in her sixties, started trying to reconstruct early experiences which
she had forgotten. She was very frustrated by what she did not remember,
so I suggested she write a list of what she did remember, and also a
list of what she did not remember. Not so surprisingly, she began to
remember much more as a result of writing these two lists. Here is some
of what she did remember, Steering the car while grandpa drove, going
into the ditch. Dressing up the cat, putting her in the carriage. Sunday
school in a family of agnostics. My mother, temper, doing nails and
hair. My mother's attempted suicide. Here is some of what she did not
remember, How old was my Grandmother when she died? Was she buried? If,
so where? What year did Grandpa take up with his mistress? When was I
taken from my mother? Who picked me up? What was said? Even a cursory
look at these two lists reveals not only rich subject matter, but some
clues as to how the story might be told. After working on several
passages and feeling a lot of frustration over her loss of memory, my
friend decided to start with the scene in which, at the age of eleven,
she was taken from her mother and sent alone on a train to live with
other relatives. This scene provided her with a way into the story. It
was a decisive moment of departure, a rupture from the past, and it
introduced a pause in time, the time on the train when the child is
suspended between worlds. This scene gave a starting point from which
the writer could explore the past and ask specifically how the child
happened to be on the train in the first place. Mostly, I wanted to
suggest to my friend that she write about what she didn't know, as well
as what she did remember. She didn't have to remember everything, or
confirm everything through letters and other documents. The gaps and
losses in memory are clues to family silences around important secrets,
and to why certain decisions were made. They tell us something about why
the child lost or erased certain memories. For example, I told my friend
she might explore why she remembers her mother's attempted suicide, but
not who picked her up on the other side of the country when she was sent
away from her mother. What we forget as well as what we remember can be
a rich resource for the memoir writer. It is important that you identify
and explore those gaps or silences in your own history. Allow yourself
to speculate about what you don't know, and don't remember. A later
chapter will help you to find and use tangible resources for writing
besides memory those letters, deeds, wills, divorce documents, medical
records, and other documents which can supplement lost or flawed
memories. For now, rather than worrying about gaps and silences, realize
they are actually vital to the story. =Spots of Time" * Thinking Small
In a piece on memory and the imagination, Patricia Hampl reminds us that
"We only store memories of value. " It doesn't matter how small your
memories are, they can become a rich resource for your writing. Forget
about grand schemes for now, and find a memory that is little, but that
you keep going back to. As you explore that memory, search for one or
two or three sharp details. You might well discover that these details
are enough to get you started writing. Here is the way Harry Crews, in A
Childhood, The Biography of a Place, tells the story of his first
memory. Notice in this passage that he includes a few sharp sensual
memories, he also admits what he did not know at the time when he
experienced this moment. It has always seemed to me that I was not so
much born into this life as awakened to it. I remember very distinctly
the awakening and the morning it happened. It was my first glimpse of
myself, and all that I know now the stories, and everything conjured up
by them. ..  I obviously knew none of then, particularly anything about
my real daddy, whom I was not to hear of until I was nearly six years
old, not his name, not even that he was my daddy. Or if I did hear of
him, I have no memory of it. I awoke in the middle of the morning in
early summer from the place I'd been sleeping in the curving roots of a
giant oak tree in front of a large white house... . At my feet was a
white dog whose name was Sam. I looked at the dog and at the house and
at the red gown with little pearl-colored buttons I was wearing, and I
knew that the gown had been made for me by my Grandma Hazelton and that
the dog belonged to me. He went everywhere I went, and he always took
precious care of me. (Quoted on pages 1 and 2 of Dillard and Conley,
Modern American Memoirs) Notice how Crews thinks small, the dog, the red
gown with the little pearl-colored buttons, the house, the tree, these
details are vivid enough to evoke a scene of awakening. In fact, the
scene follows his own sequential looking first at one object then
another, "I looked at the dog and at the house. ..  " But by telling us
what he didn't know, he alerts us to a mystery, something that might
well generate a narrative to follow. In doing this, Crews separates the
childprotagonist of four as he appears in this narrative from himself as
an older writer, or as the narrative voice who tells us what he did not
know as a young child. (This kind of separation of voices will be
discussed in a later chapter. ) aspots of Time" w Writing About What You
Don't Remember Most writers starting out (myself included) believe that
we must remember accurately and well and then transcribe our memories.
We believe vivid recall is absolutely essential to good writing. But, as
I hope you are beginning to see, this isn't really true. Vivian Gornick
is another writer who skillfully inserts what she didn't know into a
passage telling us what she does remember. You can see from the
following excerpt from her book Fierce Attachments that exploring a
vague memory, even a memory later identified as false or partial, can
give rise to vivid writing, I lived in that tenement between the ages of
six and twenty-one. There were twenty apartments, four to a floor, and
all I remember is a building full of women. I hardly remember the men at
all. They were everywhere, of course husbands, fathers, brothers but I
remember only the women. And I remember them all crude like Mrs. Drucker
or fierce like my mother. They never spoke as though they knew who they
were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often
acted as though they knew. ..  There would be years of apparent calm,
then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness, two or three lives
scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again,
sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I the
girl growing in their midst, being made in their image I absorbed them
as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me
thirty years to understand how much of them I understood. (Pages 3-4)
Once again we are being set up for a revelation. The fact that the
author does not know or remember certain things only enriches the
narrative. And again the writer separates her wise, knowing, narrator
voice from the girl-protagonist who merely absorbs all this chaos as
though breathing it in. Notice how much she conveys by using words like
"all I remember," "I hardly remember," "I remember only, " or "It has
taken me thirty years to understand. " She doesn't pretend to a
knowledge she doesn't have, but she skillfully uses what she does know.
Using All the Senses to Evoke Memories Now, let's suppose you have
written a list of what you don't remember, as well as a list of the
memories you have retained. Perhaps you have even started to explore the
loss of memory but still feel you are getting nowhere. Sometimes we
don't remember at all because we lack the language for establishing a
memory. Such can be the case with our earliest experiences, and with
traumatic experiences that lie outside our frame of reference, our
worldview, or our language. We may be too young to have mastered enough
language skills for laying down a memory in the first place, but recent
research on post-traumatic stress syndrome and on repressed memories
indicates that such memory losses may occur at any time in our lives.
Some experiences seem so awful that we simply have no words for them.
Instead, we store such memories as sense impressions (sound, sight,
smell) or viscerally as bodily sensations such as the feeling of falling
or of being smothered. Such impressions can be very useful to the writer
of memoir. The memories themselves might be there just below the
surface, ready to be tapped. Trying to reconstruct a scene through
sight, smell, sound, or sensation can be an evocative way of writing,
even if you do not remember a scene exactly as it happened. In her book
Trauma and Recaueyy, Judith Herman gives psychological insight into the
loss and recovery of memory, which can be very helpful to the writer as
well as the patient. Herman reminds us that "Traumatic memory is. ..
wordless and static. " (Page 173) Such memories might seem to be like a
series of still snapshots, they don't progress or develop in time and
the images might be disconnected from feelings. Extreme trauma, she
reminds us, such as that of warfare or of sexual assault, might be
stored in this way, rather than in readily recalled language-based
memories. Any experience of radical cultural dislocation can involve
such memory loss or absence. Moving from one country to another, one
language to another, es especially if it happens at a crucial moment in
a child's development, can have this effect. Immigrant narratives, as
well as certain other cross-cultural writings, frequently mention this
kind of loss. The writers recount more than the loss of a home or a
country, even the sense of a dependable outside reality is lost, as well
as the inner narrative which each of us uses to construct a "self. "
Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman's account of moving from Poland to
Canada at the age of thirteen, is a brilliant example of such a
narrative. When she goes to bed at night in Vancouver, Eva can no longer
name her experiences, she tries out different adjectives and nouns for
the people she has met during the day, but finds that there are simply
no suitable words available in her consciousness. She has lost her inner
voice. Sometimes in a class I will ask my students to make a list of
images or single words and phrases, whatever comes to their minds, as
they attempt to recall an experience. If certain memories (and not just
traumatic ones) are stored mostly in sense impressions, then I tell them
to use what they've got. But I ask my students to write lists for
another reason as well. I want them to turn off the editorial mind that
wants to sort and shape, to order and evaluate and interpret experience.
At the beginning, simply getting an event down on paper is far more
important. At times it is useful to write of the experience with the
perspective of one sense only, sight or sound or taste or smell, for
example. Or you might try to evoke each of these senses. A therapist who
works with combat veterans describes her approach to recovery through
telling in this way, "We ask them to reel it off in great detail, as
though they are watching a movie, and with all the senses included. We
ask them what they are seeing, what they are hearing, what they are
smelling, what they are feeling... ." (Herman, page 177) You could do
the same, just start with what you've got, no matter how fragmentary and
inchoate it may seem. Here is how the writer Natalie Kusz recounts the
traumatic experience of being anesthe ized for surgery following an
attack by sled dogs in her book Road Song. Kusz was a young child when
this happened, and all she had to draw on for writing about it later
were some very basic sense impressions. The following passage, however,
shows how rich these fragmentary impressions are, There is a certain
sound in the ears, like the crashing of rapids between stone walls, and
a certain aluminum taste in the throat familiar spirits who enter the
moment before one succumbs to anesthesia. For that long instant, all of
the senses are heightened voices in the air grow louder, lights overhead
brighter and it always seemed to me that the moment before death must be
quite like this, that in the body's final second it must enlarge out
side itself to capture as much as the senses can hold, enveloping and
drawing them quickly within, before the spirit leaves, and with it all
awareness. It was only after being anesthe ized many times that I
learned not to fight it, not to claw ineffectually against
unconsciousness and wake convulsing on the other side, but instead to
relax into it, to close my eyes and lean backward into the operating
table, further and further, as if the earth would open and my body would
tumble into it whole, shoulders first. In the middle of it all, I would
twitch like a dreamer falling from a cliff but this was no great
nuisance, and was small cost for the lung-deep relief of abandoning
desperation, of relinquishing hold on that which I did not control in
the first place. (Pages 104-105) Notice how, in this passage, Kusz draws
on the sense of hearing ("the crashing of rapids between stone walls"),
taste ("a certain aluminum taste in the throat"), proprioception, or the
sense of the body in space ("lean backward into the operating table,
further and further, as if the earth would open and my body would tumble
into it whole, shoulders first," "I would twitch like a dreamer falling
from a cliff. "). These are the simple visceral experiences of being
anesthe ized. The interpretation of the experience obviously comes to
her later as the adult reflects on what the experience might mean ("it
always seemed to me that the moment before death must be quite like
this" ). Turning a Vague Memo Into a Vivid Moment Sometimes the problem
isn't loss of memory, but too many memories. At times, when we start to
write we have the feeling that we have simply remembered too many
extraneous details, and the task we have before us as writers is to sort
through the mass of details to get to the one core image which will
speak to the reader. Paradoxically, psychologists tell us that we need
to forget in order to remember. The mind seems to be so constituted that
each day, mostly by way of dreams, we must sort through the mountain of
details which makes up our daily experience in order to hang on to those
few things worth remembering. And to do this, we must forget the rest.
When I started to write, I was appalled by how much I had forgotten. It
seemed that whole years had been wiped out of my life. If I did recall
events, it was through what I call "habitual" memory. I retained merged
memories of similar events that happened over and over again, but not
single vivid moments. And this kind of generic memory, I felt, was not
very useful in writing. I wanted each individual moment. All my memories
were merged, jumbled together. I couldn't pick out the single, striking
image that would capture a reader's attention. It was a long time before
I began to realize that a generic memory can become a particular one, it
can be reexperienced through the writing itself so that the vague memory
of repeated events can become the single compelling memory which stands
for all the others. Annie Dillard, in a wonderful image, observes that
writers "cannibalize" their memories and warns us that if we want to
preserve our memories as memories, we had better not write. She notes
how vivid the written-out "made-up" memory becomes, it actually
supplants the real memory and as such is experienced more vividly than
the memory itself. At first I was troubled by the experience of
supplanting memory by writing. I felt I was being dishonest when I
embellished my poor memories so that they became something entirely new,
"made-up," in fact. Now I am not so worried about this process, I think
of it as a natural part of writing. Here is one such memory of mine,
experienced many times and not remembered as a single time, but told now
as a single event so that it stands for all that is forgotten, I am
standing in front of the theater marquee in our small town. It is seven
o'clock in the evening and the lights are flickering rapidly. I am
holding the hand of a beautiful two-year-old boy, my son, who stands
entranced by the lights, fixated, hardly moving. Each night at seven he
insists on coming to watch them, and I bring him willingly, cheerfully
explaining to our friends as they enter the theater why I am there, how
much he loves these lights. At first I see nothing strange in this. Paul
loves lights. aspots of Time" He turns them off and on for hours each
day. He knows where every light switch is in our house and the houses of
our friends and in many of the stores downtown. His world is lights and
light switches. (Page 1) This is the first paragraph of News From the
Border, my account of my son's autism and of all of our lives "under the
aspect of autism. " I needed to find some concrete way to introduce the
reader to autism in the young child, while simultaneously showing my own
ignorance of it at that time. The experience of watching the flickering
lights at the movie theater across the street from our house became the
single image which I hoped would bear the burden of so much else. Paul's
singleminded focus on lights, his fascination with what for other
children would only be a passing interest, my willingness to share with
him his pleasure in something so simple, and my ignorance and innocence
about what his fascination might mean I tried to suggest all of this in
my brief recollection. Later in the book the reader learns how to
interpret this image of Paul and the lights and begins to understand
that autistic children have sensory dysfunctions which are expressed in
odd repetitive behaviors. At the beginning I just wanted to transform my
"flawed" memories into a single memorable image. Without really knowing
it, I was finding a "spot of time, " the poet Wordsworth's name for such
moments of awareness, or rather for images which precede awareness.
Wordsworth identified these moments as mostly coming from childhood, but
whether they come from the child's or the adult's experience, these
memories "nourish" and "invisibly repair" the mind. For the writer, they
are moments of grace that fuse feeling with incident in such a way that
those moments bear the burden of meaning for much else and it is usually
only later that we realize this. In my case, the image of lights became
a central one for showing the alertness of a child who nevertheless
failed to develop normally later. Here is another passage which uses
that simple image, I remember another scene. Two years earlier. In the
delivery room, we watch the first moments of this new baby. Taken up in
a bundle of loose blankets, he is placed on the warming table. Crying,
rolling vigorously from side to side, he kicks, breaks free of the folds
of the fabric and opens his eyes. Most newborns that I have seen are
curled in on themselves, as if they need to fold themselves away from
the onslaught of the world for fear it be seen too soon, too suddenly.
Not this one. This baby seems to open his eyes to the full sense of
things all at once. Eyes opened wide, he stops crying and stares at the
lights on the ceiling. "He's a keeper, " exclaims the attending nurse,
and in my new mother's egotism, this seems like a wonderful omen. I
think I have never aspots of Timex seen such sudden sense, such full,
startled awareness, such awakening to the world. (Page 1) As I continued
to write, I found myself returning over and over again to the image of
lights to a two-year-old child fascinated by flickering lights, a
newborn noticing the light on the ceiling of the delivery room, and then
a year-old child trying to say his first word ("ight"), and somehow
failing. From such a welter of images and memories, I decided to focus
on that one image light as a way into the first year of my child's life.
Single images can be wonderful entry points into our narratives. As you
start to write about a difficult past, consider all these examples. You
might simply write down the sense impressions you have retained about an
experience, as Kusz did in writing about the experience of anesthesia.
You might find a single image, as I did in the flickering lights of a
movie theater. Here are some exercises to get you started. EXERCISES (1)
Write about an experience using one sense only.

(2) Write of the experience, drawing on each of the senses (sight,
sound, touch, smell, taste, proprioception or the sense of the body in
space), but with out giving any commentary or interpretation of the
experience. (3) Choose one vague memory of something that happened over
and over again. Retell this generic memory as if it happened just once.
In telling it as a single, one-time memory, try to evoke the experience
as a single vivid moment in time. (4) List all the things you do not
remember, such as a birth or a death, but which you know are important
to your story. After making the list, chose one or two facts and explore
them as important, although unremembered. You can introduce this
material through interviews with family members or through letters.
(Later chapters will tell you more about how to go about doing this. )
"JUST MAKE IT UP, THEN SEE IF IT IS TRUE" Imagination Coming to the Aid
of Memory YOU CAN LEARN to trust even flawed memories, but what if you
simply do not remember something you want to write about? What if you
weren't present at an event which is, nevertheless, an important part of
the story you want to tell? The discussion and exercises offered in this
chapter build on those in the last chapter. The title of this chapter
comes from a comment Vivian Gornick made in a class I took with her at
The Loft in Minneapolis. Gornick was responding to a student who
complained that he simply could not remember an experience he needed to
write about. "Well, just make it up, " she said. "Then see if it is
true." Those words stayed with me far longer than I would have guessed
at the time. I thought about them again and again as I was struggling to
finish my first book. Well, yes, I thought to myself, of course we have
to make up a lot. If we can't remember the exact words someone said (and
usually we don't) we have to fabricate. And there are so many other
elements as well, the physical setting, what the characters looked like,
maybe facts like the weather, the time of year. We may have forgotten
any of these details, or perhaps we never knew them in the first place.
As I thought about Gornick's words, I kept wondering about her advice to
"see if it is true. " That's the catch, I thought. How does one decide
which made-up moments are "real" and which are not? Of course, there are
some touchstones. For example, you can ask yourself what behavior or
gesture or words would be characteristic of someone you know? Or you
might think about what didn't happen, but should have by the logic of
events. Occasionally, in creative nonfiction, you will need to make real
events seem plausible by adding somewhat fictionalized passages leading
up to those events. Or you may want to write about a past event which
affected you deeply, but which you did not experience directly. The best
way to deal with such problems is to acknowledge them directly as
problems and to involve your reader in your efforts to recreate an
unknown or partly forgotten past. These problems can become rich
resources for writing, because it is your reflections on what you cannot
know and what you imagine to be true, your frustrations at not knowing
more, and your willingness to actively engage the unknown which,
finally, will give your narrative candor and power. Think of stories
from your past or from your family's past. Maybe there are some stories
about which you know very little, but which continue to haunt you.
Perhaps you think of your grandfather's unexplained desertion of his
family long ago. Or you keep wondering about your mother's breakdown
when she was a teenager, she has told you a little bit, but not very
much, and you suspect that this experience might explain a lot of later
events. Maybe you have heard the story of a family move and a change of
job which has never quite been explained. Whatever the secrets are (the
never-quite-told stories), they can be a powerful part of your ongoing
narrative of yourself to yourself. You may often find yourself
speculating about such stories, whether they are discussed in your
family or not. So what do you do if you are trying to write your own
story and your life history involves some unknown stories from your past
or your family's past? Do you just make it up by embellishing the few
facts you do have? Do you search for documents, and write only what is
completely verifiable (from legal records, family correspondence, etc.
)? There isn't any one right way to solve this dilemma, no template you
can apply to your own writing which will always work in every case.
Instead, as you will see, there are a range of options. How to Use a
Little Knowledge Sometimes the problem is that you know a little bit,
but not very much, about a powerful family story. Let's say this is
something which happened in the past, but which you can't uncover by
asking more questions or searching for documents. You know a few facts,
you wish desperately that you knew more, but you can't ask (your mother,
your brother, your aunt, your friend), for whatever reason. This is a
case where invention might be openly acknowledged and might,
furthermore, be a necessary part of the memoir writer's response to the
unknown. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Wamor is one of the most
important and influential modern memoirs we have, yet it is highly
fictionalized. In fact, fiction-making is a necessary part of this book
precisely because it is a memoir and not a novel. I know this sounds
paradoxical, yet it is the imaginative response to stories from the past
(the protagonist's mother's stories from old China) and to troubling
memories from a more recent time which make this book what it is.
Because the author knows so little about some things, she must make up a
lot. This is a book well worth reading closely, especially the short
first chapter in which the protagonist is told a story by her mother
about her pregnant aunt who drowned herself in the family well. Very
little is known about that aunt, furthermore, even to mention the fact
of her existence is to break a powerful family taboo. And yet Kingston
is, of course, powerfully drawn to this forbidden story told by her
mother as a cautionary tale, "Now that you have started to menstruate,
what happened to her could happen to you. Don't humiliate us. " She
can't help but speculate about this aunt, "No Name Woman." Kingston
wonders if the aunt may have been a victim of rape or seduction. She
first considers the possibility of forced "consent, " spinning out a
number of possible scenarios to explain why her aunt got pregnant at a
time when her husband was abroad. Then she speculates that she might
have been the victim of her own vanity, "She plied her secret comb. And
sure enough she cursed the year, the family, the village, and herself. "
Or she may have been "Unusually beloved, the precious only daughter,
spoiled and mirror gazing because of the affection the family lavished
on her. " Kingston goes on to speculate about who the man was, about how
the man and the other villagers sought revenge on her for becoming
pregnant. And so forth. Such stories, precisely because so little is
known, are rich material for the memoirist, "Unless I see her life
branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help, " Kingston tells
us. The "No Name Woman" must be reimagined before Kingston can go on to
tell "real" facts about her own life and history, and that is why she
begins her own personal narrative with what she doesn't know about her
family's past. As an exercise for yourself, take a story about which you
have just a few facts. Speculate as Kingston does, take some of these
tag phrases, these invitations to reflection and speculation, and
complete them, I only know that. ..

Perhaps this is what happened. .. She/He must have thought this. .. I
have not been told all of this story because. .. Nobody knows why. .. I
think he/she did this because. .. One of my students found herself very
preoccupied with the story of her mother's abuse by her grandfather. My
student happened to overhear this story when, as a young child, she was
hiding in the closet of an older sister's room. She overheard her two
older sisters talking about the abuse, but because she felt guilty about
hearing the story by eavesdropping, she thought she could not ask them,
or her mother, to tell her more. The story about eavesdropping became
the entry point into the student's narrative about being the third
daughter in her family. Though she decided not to begin the piece with
this memory, it helped her to understand her position in the family. She
wrote and rewrote the scene until she got sick of it, but after that she
was able to go on with the rest of her narrative. Her intense
preoccupation with this secret, precisely because it was a secret known
by everyone but not "officially" known by her, compelled her to write
about it first. Later she went on to write about herself as the beloved
third child in the family, someone who was always thought of as the
"baby" and protected from certain painful stories. Using a Place to
Imagine the Past In the following sections, I will quote from two
contemporary Irish writers, Eavan Boland and Sebastian Barry. Like
Kingston, they also write about a past they do not know directly, yet
both end up "witnessing" to that past. Their pieces, however, are
somewhat different from Kingston's. Boland and Barry invite us into a
physical scene where an event took place. By using scenes which they
know well (Dublin streets, an old house), both of them lead us
imaginatively into the past. In her book Object Lessons, Boland writes
about her grandmother, who died during childbirth in the National
Maternity Hospital in Dublin. She has learned only a few facts about her
grandmother's life from her mother, yet she finds herself returning
again and again to the last scenes of her life outside the hospital. In
the early days of October, in the year 1909, a woman entered a Dublin
hospital, near the center of the city. The building is still there. If
you approach from the south, with the Dublin hills behind you, and look
down a tunnel of grace made by the houses of Fitzwilliam and Merrion
squares, your view will end abruptly in this, the National Maternity
Hospital, red brick and out of character, blocking the vista. .. October
is a beautiful month in the city. If you turn around and go back towards
the hills, away from the hospital, the roads are narrow and gracious
above the canal. The woman who entered the hospital may have passed them
as she made her way to it. If, for instance, she drove around Stephen's
Green, having arrived on the late-morning train from Drogheda, she may
also have noticed a trick of light peculiar to that time of year, In the
dark corridor of Lower Leeson Street, sunlight cuts the houses in half.
Halfway up the brick the reflection of the houses opposite builds
another street, chimneys, roofs, gutters made of unglittering shadow.
She may not have come that way. She might have traveled down the
unglamorous back streets that lead more directly to the hospital. Fenian
Street. Hogan Place. Past the mills. Past the Dodder River on its way to
the Liffey. Up the slight gradient which would still, in that year, be
cobbled. The prewinter chill, which can be felt on some October
mornings, could have struck extra music out of the horses' hooves.

It is not a long drive. But whatever she saw that morning, it is lost.
Whatever that journey yielded the child with a hoop who never existed,
the woman with the red hat I am now inventing they were her last
glimpses of the outside world. This is the way we make the past. This is
the way I will make it here. Listening for hooves. Glimpsing the red hat
which was never there in the first place. Giving eyesight and evidence
to a woman we never knew and cannot now recover. And for all our
violations, the past waits for us. The road from the train to the
hospital opens out over and over again, vacant and glittering, offering
shadows and hats and hoops. Again and again I visit it and reinvent it.
But the woman who actually traveled it had no such license. Hers was a
real journey. She did not come back. On October 10 she died in the
National Maternity Hospital. She was thirty-one years of age. She was my
grandmother. (Pages S5) Notice that Boland doesn't tell us this is her
grandmother until the very end of the passage. Instead she deliberately
reconstructs the scene which "the woman" might have traveled through,
mentioning the October chill, a seasonal trick of the light, a glimpse
of a woman in a red hat, a child with a hoop. Boland does not pretend
omniscience but rather insists on the deliberateness of her own
imaginative re construction ("the child with a hoop who never existed,
the woman with a red hat I am now inventing. ..  "). She admits that she
cannot ever really know what her grandmother saw and felt that day which
was to be the last day of her life in the outside world. Restraining any
impulse to "know" what cannot be known, she instead invites the reader
on her imaginative journey ("If you approach from the south. ..  ," "If
you turn around and go back to the hills. ..  " ). This passage from
Object Lessons is as much a meditation on history and the imagination, a
reflection on the "license" allowed the memoir writer, as it is a
factual account. The extraordinary power of this passage comes from the
imaginative reconstruction around the edges of those few known events.
The writer's preoccupation with this largely unknown past, her
understanding that to write about it she must in a sense violate it, her
recognition that her grandmother "had no such license" to tell her own
story, all of these things inform the passage, and make it much more
than a mere recitation of events would have been. This passage
demonstrates how the imagination can come to the aid of memory, and how
a piece of writing can be more powerful precisely because so little is
known. As an exercise for your own writing, try completing the following
sentence fragments, When I return to that place where she/he was. .. The
weather at that time of year would have been. ..  Maybe she saw. ..
Maybe he traveled by a different road. .. If you wish, write a
speculative passage about what a place means to you, or what a past
event means to you at this moment in time. Place can be powerfully
evocative. If we know that an event happened in a particular place, but
we know little about feelings, motivations or events leading up to that
moment in the past, we can write about the place instead, as Boland did.
Enacting a Discovx The following excerpt from Sebastian Barry's "Note
From the Dead, " included in the anthology Dublines, is similar to
Boland's piece in that the writer here is also tentative, he too
hypothesizes a past which cannot be known directly. But in this case the
writing enacts a discorgly of a message from the past. It is the
writer's presence in the scene of his discovery which makes this piece
so compelling. One evening in 1974, I took a stroll through the old
house in Mounttoy Square where I was living in a flat, poking into dead
rooms, toeing odds and ends of boxes and drawers. You could walk a big
dog in a place like that and count it exercised. No one else was in, or
maybe the scholar who lived upstairs was picking over some page of Joyce
above, silent and mesmerized. And I felt that sense of other lives, I
saw clearly, separately, the old brownness of the paint that was no
longer paint in the halls, but a ghost, a coffin-coloured remnant of
true paint. I heard the steps, the countless steps, the privacy of those
roomkeepers going out for whatever private purchases into the greater
city. Dark winter as always, the late day full of gloom outside the
windows, every object I saw beginning to speak its story, to clamour to
be heard, to explain, to detail disaster and the victory of sudden joys.
Each old table had been picked and purchased new once, pennies pinched
to have it, each door had been opened and shut a million times. .. The
lower landing was readying up for revelation, for a tiny information to
me, a preparation, a hint at the very stuff of life. . . I wandered into
the most battered room of the house where there wasn't even a frame in
the window, only a jagged sheet of thick plastic over the hole, and the
night wind icing in, and the streetlamps forward and blunt in the
debris. Here was a little tin box. I prised it open with a nail and took
out a piece of old blue writing paper, the sort I used to write to my
father on when he was away in London, old blue paper folded a few times
into a small irregular shape. It had the dirt outside of something often
handled but less often unfolded, as if it had been taken from spot to
spot, extracted from book to niche to tin, over the span of a life. So
settled in its folds it was almost difficult to open it. The surface
inside looked quite crisp and new, as if it had just been written on,
and the writing was in fresh pencil. The paper spoke, you could hear its
voice, in the list of names and the few bleak sentences, In this room on
the night of January the 2nd the coldest night of the year we went to
bed all hale, and awoke to find three of our number dead, Jamie (Brown)
aged 7 Mary and Christie Finlay, months, 11 years from suffocation. And
the rest not much better. Under this, there was an entry in a different
hand, or the same hand at a different time, a tireder hand perhaps,
listing two others, two of the old ones, who died we suppose from the
late effects of the same cause. I, Jane Finlay, mother, write this down,
the names of our loved ones. We must never forget this. (Pages 299-300)
This discovery is, of course, stunning to the writer. But the power of
its presentation to us is partly dependent on the language of the writer
of the note, Jane Finlay. Her simple words would affect anyone reading
her little message. Yet the scene might have lost its power if Barry had
come upon these words too soon. They must be approached, and approached
very slowly, as he moves through those rooms where he lives only
temporarily. Somewhat like Boland, he reflects on his discovery, and he
takes us with him, as readers, we must of necessity follow him
emotionally, What was to be done with such a discovery? What did it
mean? When I was long gone out of that house I used to think of that
room, think of that family sleeping there in the great privacy, the
secrecy of poverty, and that coldest night of the year, and that woman
of the elegant words writing down the record of the event. .. I suppose
I was the first person to read that piece of notepaper since the last
hand belonging to it had passed away from the world so thoroughly that
even it, a precious document, an heirloom, a history, had not been
safekept. It had lain in its tin box for decades in a room of rubble. ..
I'm sure I took it with me, stuffed it in my jacket. I'm sure I took it
with me out of that room and I'm equally sure I lost it. Not in safe
hands! Or at best it sits among old papers of mine in some old box in my
mother's house, waiting for a fresh reader, a second hearer, a better
seer. I hope Jane Finlay died a nicer death than her people did that
night, when it got so cold, and they stopped up the window with rags,
that fine old Georgian window, and minute by minute their lungs used up
the precious air, and warm enough they died, and cold she awoke, to
rise, and shake her dead, and write her note. (quoted on pages 299-301
of Donovan & Kennelly, Dublines)

Once again, the writer uses his imagination to come to the aid of memory
or historical record. The discovery itself becomes important here, for
Barry comprehends the importance of his find. And even though this piece
bears powerful witness to a tragedy largely unknown, he also feels he
tells the story inadequately. But, oddly, it is his feeling of
inadequacy which makes this piece so affecting. We know instinctively
that any relation of this story would be insufficient. He writes as the
memoirist writes, fully aware of the limitations of his own telling, but
at the same time fully honest about the effects of his discovery. As you
think about this passage, you might write something similar. Perhaps you
have discovered a letter from the past, or you have found a message
scrawled on a wall by a child who lived in your home long ago, or you
heard the story of an event which happened in your neighborhood long
before you moved in. Try writing out your approach to this bit of
information the way Barry does, placing the discovery within the context
of its significance to you as the finder. You might complete statements
such as these, When I found the letter, it was just the wrong time of my
life for such a discovery. ..  (Or it was just the right time. ..  ) I
often wonder what they thought as they looked out this window. ..  I
lost that piece of paper and now I think that. .. Imagining a Scene
Where You Were Not Present Both Boland and Barry are preoccupied with
events they didn't directly experience. Here is another example of such
a telling, but with a difference, this time the writer actually imagines
herself into the mind and feelings of her subject. But in doing so, this
writer is also careful to remind us that she is, in fact, merely
imagining what cannot be known directly. This is a passage from one of
my students in a college writing class, a student who told me at the
beginning of the term that she wanted to write about the suicide of a
high school acquaintance. She hadn't known this other student very well,
yet the dead girl appeared in her dreams over and over again. Not
surprisingly, something about that death continued to preoccupy my
student, but it was a while before she realized that she could write
about what she hadn't witnessed, that she could make it up, then see if
it was true. Here is how she told the story of the girl's death, What
happened that day? I am compelled by my wonder, by my need for answers
to re-enact the scene over and over in my head. She's sitting at the
coffee table balancing her checkbook.

Balancing her life and something doesn't fit. Nothing ever fits. The
sadness holds the teeter-totter at one end. No matter what she puts on
the other side, there is no balance. Her parents are in the kitchen.
They are fighting again. This time it's serious. Her mother has had
enough of the disrespect, of being ignored, of the lies, and the
cheating. Her father flips through the newspaper as if she isn't even
there. "I'm leaving! Do you hear me? Leaving! " Her father glances up as
if to say "Don't forget to close the door behind you. " It seems that
nothing will stop her this time. Nothing? It's a beautiful day in early
February. It seems out of place in the middle of winter. But everyone is
thankful for the birdcalls and puddles at the curb. I remember it had
been especially cold up until this day. The sun is heating up the room
where she sits, and together with the shouting the temperature becomes
unbearable. So silently, calmly she puts down her pen and walks to her
parents' bedroom. It's the largest, safest room in the house. She
remembers how she tried on her mother's clothes and smelled her father's
cologne. The nights she spent in their bed when the lightning flashed
and the thunder boomed. Today it's the sun that sends her to this
refuge. She must have hesitated. This I believe. She must have fumbled.

Grabbed the door to turn away, made a noise to make someone stop her.
Yet, no one listened. So she goes to the drawer that's haunted her life
of late. Digging around for the cold steel. She begins to cry or tremble
or scream. No. They would have heard this. There is no noise, no motion,
no emotion. To do what she did you remain stoic, you hold yourself
together for the most emphatic moment of your life. Deciding, I guess,
would be the hard part. The rest is easy. She clutches the black
machine. The gun that will take her life.

Kill her. Dead. But it's not this harsh today. The sun coming in the
window now lights up the white room. It's so bright that she shades her
eyes from the glare. White, everywhere.

The small black object becomes the center of her focus as the only item
in the room that she can look at. The only item in the room that doesn't
mock her with its pure whiteness. Just what everyone thought she was. My
imagination fails here. I cannot recreate suicide. The gun to her head
or in her mouth. The , last deep breath, the pulling of the trigger, the
deafening blast ... Kids play on the street outside her house. I used to
ride my bike through this neighborhood as a child admiring the large
houses. Thinking that one day I'd have a house just like this one or
that one. In a neighborhood like this kids always play on the street.
There's always laughter and childish taunting. The sound that silences.
Time stops and the children are gone as if they'd never been playing in
the street, riding their bikes through the neighborhood. Inside, the
white walls are stained red. Pureness tainted. What they'd forgotten was
the golden, red hair. Her defining aspect in the middle of whiteness.
She wasn't perfect, she had color and depth and sorrow. No one ever knew
what her red hair meant and now it's touched every part of the room. ..
There are some things the writer knew about that day. She knew it had
been cold, but that day in February was unexpectedly sunny and warm.
Perhaps she knew what the bedroom looked like that it was the largest
and whitest room in the house. She knew the girl had red hair. And that
she killed herself with a gun, which had been kept in a bedside drawer.
She probably didn't know that her friend had been trying to balance her
checkbook or that her parents were fighting in the kitchen or that they
often fought. She may have known these things, but even if she did not,
they seem to fit with this imagined scene. The neighborhood she does
know, the big houses that she, the writer, had often envied. Ironically,
it is a large, safe neighborhood where children are often outside
playing in the streets.

Notice also how she introduces herself into the scene, ("I am compelled
by my wonder"), and then later pauses and qualifies ("She must have
hesitated. This I believe. "). And later still, "My imagination fails
here. I cannot recreate suicide. " Part of the power of this scene, in
fact, comes precisely because it is told from the perspective of someone
who was not there yet who was deeply affected by the event. This is
firstperson witnessing of a particular kind which demonstrates one of
the peculiar advantages of memoir writing. We can't help but believe the
writer, partly because she dares to recreate an experience in her
imagination, and perhaps even more because she dares to testify to a
terrible "truth" (a suicide) which can only be imagined.

Mahing t/p Scenes to Introduce a Memory There are other writing problems
where the imagination can come to the aid of memory, where in fact it is
only the imagination which can help us out. Sometimes we need to bring
together several small memories to create a whole scene, and sometimes
this

involves making up part of the story as a kind of "glue" to hold
together the events which we know happened. The resulting piece can
become a seamless fabric of "real" and "made up" moments, and the reader
may not even know where one leaves off and the other begins.

The following is from a chapter in my book News from the Border about
living in London'the year my son was three. This was before we knew he
was autistic, and I needed to find a way to convey my confusion and his
distress. I needed to show Paul's specific behaviors which would
eventually point the way to the diagnosis of autism, but I had to be
careful not to overinterpret those early times or to give away what I
would later learn. I needed to keep the reader in a kind of suspense,
and to take the reader along with me as I tried to understand what was
going on with my son.

In working through all this, I chose an actual scene and then decided to
lead up to it with a made-up scene. The imagined scene, however, is
something that might well have happened. This is the scene which
actually happened, Then, taking Paul by one hand and pulling the cart
behind me with the other, I started for the crosswalk, the zebra
crossing. But he wasn't ready to be cooperative. He lagged behind me, so
that I had to drag him into the street as soon as I saw the crossing l
light. Then the light changed just as we were halfway across. I looked
up and saw a large lorry bearing down on us. I knew the driver had time
to brake, but he probably expected us to cross and he slowed down only
slightly.

I took all this in in a flash. Abruptly Paul broke free of my hand and
lay down in the middle of the street. The truck stopped, but only just
in time, and now cars were screeching to a stop and honking. I tried to
pull Paul up and also hang on to my cart, which was starting to roll
away from me. I couldn't do both. And then, there at my elbow was an old
woman, so small that she hardly came up to my shoulder.

"Here, love, let me help you. " She took the cart, and I bent to pick up
Paul and carry him across the street.

At the other side, I put him down, and through my tears turned to thank
her.

She smiled, the sweetest smile I had seen in weeks, and reached out to
pat my arm. "That's all right, dear. I have a retarded son, too. I know
what it's like. I remember."

And then she was gone and I stood staring. "Retarded? " But Paul's not
retarded.

Or was he?


All the rest of the way home, the old woman's words rang in my ears. She
had appeared at my shoulder like an angel of mercy, yet she had said
those awful words, those words meant to comfort but which had hurt so
terribly. (Page 37)


It was really true that Paul had lain in the middle of a busy London
street and an old woman had stopped to help me and then spoken those
words. The point about this scene for me later as I was writing about it
was my pain. It seemed to be a good way to show my confusion about what
it was I was dealing with in this child, my feelings of isolation and my
need for comfort.

So far so good, but I also knew that the reader was likely to ask why
Paul (autism or no autism) would lie down in the middle of a busy London
street in the first place. I needed to motivate his action, even if in
reality it had come out of the blue and seemed to be completely
unmotivated. So I began to invent. I created a scene outside a
greengrocer's in which Paul pulled an apple out from under a pyramid of
apples, causing them all to cascade onto the sidewalk. This made the
child very unhappy, obviously. But I decided to set the stage further
for the street episode which was to follow. So I created another little
scene in which I tore around a grocery store grabbing the items I needed
to cook that evening, all the while shoving a screaming Paul back into
his seat in the grocery cart. This is what I wrote, Grimly whipping
around the aisles (I had to finish this shopping), I stuffed food almost
at random into the cart, running to find the few things Paul would eat
and the supplies we needed for dinner that night. Mint sauce, raisins,
milk, rice, Cheddar cheese.

By now it was hard to ignore the panic in Paul's voice. Several times
other shoppers, staring at me with stony faces, seemed about to say
something, then quickly glanced away. Other children had stopped their
crying and were staring with fascination at Paul.

Coming up at last to the checkout lines, I saw they were all full, I
would have to stand here and wait with this screaming child. I kept
shoving Paul back down into his seat. Then feeling terribly guilty, I
would try to comfort him. But he was beyond comfort, way beyond it.

Then I caught sight of a display of lollipops, the candy that Jim
sometimes used for bribing Paul. I had been very determined to try to
keep this candy away from Paul and was even rather censorious with Jim
and his mother when they gave him sweets. But now I snatched a lollipop,
the biggest one of all, off the rack. Tearing the wrapper loose, I
stuffed it into Paul's mouth.

He gagged slightly, and started to take it out of his mouth, to howl
again. But he stopped, midhowl, and started sucking on the lollipop,
pausing just enough to catch his breath in hiccups. His face was
streaked with tears and dirt. He looked a most forlorn, lost little boy,
and I noticed other shoppers still watching us in a covert and deeply
disapproving way. (Pages 36-37)



l I have to confess this part never happened. And yet something like it
did happen over and over again, in different ways, at different times.
For example, Paul was difficult in grocery stores (and other crowded
places). My husband did appease him with sweets (although I never did I
tended to buy him puzzles or toys instead, another form of bribery). So
it made sense to put all this together in one scene at one time, to use
the apple scene, then the grocery store events, to lead up to the moment
in the street and the old woman's words and the pain I felt, which was
very real.

Some writers might not approve of this form of invention and prefer to
stick closely to actual events, rather than partly reimagined ones, to
use single memories rather than merged ones. But I think that memories
do have to be reexperienced when we write about them, and frequently
they have to be rearranged. If you are uncomfortable about relying so
heavily on the imagination, the next chapter will offer alternative ways
of dealing with these problems in memoir writing.

EXERCISES (1) Take an event you did not directly experience, but which
you want to write about, and deliberately interpolate yourself into the
scene. Imagine the place, the light, the weather, etc. even though you
cannot know exactly what any of this was like at the time the event took
place. You might say "I imagine that she must have seen. ..  " or "I can
see him entering the room. .."

(2) Involve your reader in the scene, using such phrases as "If you
enter the room on a cold winter's day. ..  " Sentences inviting the
reader (as "you") into the scene can break down possible defenses which
a reader might have since you are writing about something unknown.

(3) Use words like "probably" or "perhaps. " You might say something
like "Perhaps he opened the letter at the end of the day. .." Or "She
probably wasn't aware of the accident until much later. .."

(4) In general, be openly hypothe ical in making up your scene.

Your reader will be more likely to stay with you if you honestly
acknowledge your ignorance as well as your ways of reconceiving a scene.
Admit the things you do not know and use your writer's "license" to
reconstruct lost information. Remember that the power of the memoir lies
precisely in this honesty of voice, this willing exposure of self in
telling what you do not know and in dwelling on those things that
preoccupy you.



USING PHOTOGRAPHS AND OTHER DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE I

l THERE IS A STRANGE kind of presence in pictures. We can see and feel
and hold them in our hands. They are a material reality, an
incontrovertible testimony to the truth of an occasion. Until the modern
age and the possibility of manipulating pictures through technology,
pictures were the truth. Even now, old family pictures carry a
particular weight in our minds. Susan Sontag claims that family
photographs have become a "defense against anxiety" for those
individuals who feel themselves robbed of a past. They reinstate
"symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of
family life. " Most of us, in fact, have had the experience of opening a
family album and being filled with a sense of the past which is suddenly
there, a part of our present reality.


Photographs are a wonderful resource for the creative nonfiction writer.
In this chapter you will find passages about photographs, as well as
some suggestions of how to write about pictures. But there are other
forms of documentation which will also be discussed here, such as
medical records, deeds to land, job evaluations, and the like.

Even these examples will not exhaust all the possibilities. As you start
to write, you might want to consider not just letters, diaries,
journals, and photo albums (all commonly mentioned sources), but also
the resources you can find in a library. If you are writing about a
historical moment, you might want to look at period magazines and
newspapers. Even the advertisements can trigger memories of a time you
thought you had forgotten. Many libraries have special collections of
photos, papers, and artifacts.

If more specialized resources are not readily available to you, a good
local reference room of the library may supply useful material,
encyclopedias and various kinds of dictionaries (of medicine, of
navigation, plants, birds, etc. ). The Chronicle of the Twentieth
Century is a wonderful resource, as is The People's Chronology.

It never hurts to visit the place you are writing about. Visiting a
childhood home or neighborhood as an adult lets you see the place in a
totally different way but it also is likely to trigger very sensual
memories of experiences you have long forgotten. Many people say the
sense of smell is possibly the most evocative of all the senses in
recalling a place or a time. The slight smell of gas from a stove always
takes me back to my grandmother's kitchen. Then I think of the small
rocking chair with the red cushion beside the stove, as well as the
basement just beneath the kitchen where one aunt tried to grow
mushrooms.

Photographs as a Resource for the Writer Photographs are extremely
valuable for the writer trying to remember or to reinvoke a past which
seems to be gone. I sometimes ask my students to bring a photograph to
class and to write about it. It's interesting to see what emerges,
because there is often some new revelation, even from an old and very
familiar picture. Having to write about it can make a photograph seem
like something we are seeing for the first time.

Sometimes I ask the students to exchange photographs and write about
someone else's picture. When we do this, we have none of the surrounding
context for the picture, none of the family stories or mew ries which
situate it within a particular time or place or meaning. We are simply
describing what is there, what we see printed on the paper. And this can
be a very useful exercise of the imagination.

I have often used pictures to restart myself writing when I felt I had
nothing more to say. Once while I was visiting my father I was trying to
write part of the first chapter of my book News from the Border. Years
before this I had put together a set of pictures for him to hang on the
wall of his library. Within a single frame I had collected many small
prints of his children and his grandchildren. Now, sitting in that room,
staring at that collection of pictures, I was suddenly able to write
something about one of them.

One particular photo drew me in ways I didn't at first understand.

It seemed to have a power that went far beyond the meaning of that
single occasion. Here is what I wrote, We spent Paul's first summer in
France and England, and should have been very happy. I have a picture
taken at this time, June 1973, our garden on the edge of the little
village of Contignac in the south of France.

Paul, at ten months and just learning to stand, is holding onto one side
of a metal lawn chair. My seventy-three-year-old father, who has come
with us to baby-sit while Jim and I write our dissertations, stands on
the other side of the chair. He is looking at Paul. He has just taken a
pebble from the corner of Paul's cheek. The sun comes through the green
leaves of the lime trees, it shines through the wispy blond curls at the
baby's neck. Both faces have a look of open innocence.

Every morning at that time, my father took the baby down the hill to
greet an old man. This old man belonged to the farming family, and he
was put out by his daughter to sit all day by the side of the

r l

road or, if it was raining, in the mouth of the mushroom cave. My father
spoke no French, the old French man, who was deaf and senile, spoke no
English. But with the baby, together they communicated. For them it was
enough.

Looking at that picture now, I want to pick up the baby, to re-enter
that time. I want to blow kisses through his silky hair, to plant them
on his small, hard skull. I didn't know then the fragility of that
moment, over which already the dark wing was passing. I didn't know, and
wouldn't know for another fifteen years, that the brain cells had
clumped differently at the base of that little skull, that the
cerebellum was too small, the cisterna magna too large. (Pages 2-3)

Only after I had written and rewritten this passage did I discover that
I was at least three selves within it. First of all I was the
experiencing self who took the picture (how else would I know that my
father had just removed a pebble from Paul's mouth). Even so, I wasn't a
participant in that moment shared by grandfather and grandson, I was
simply standing there, camera in hand, observing.

Later as I reworked this first chapter again and again, I realized this
was how I wanted to show myself in the whole first chapter, I wanted to
emphasize the fact that I was a watcher, a bystander, a witness to
something I hadn't yet begun to understand. Paul's autism wasn't yet
diagnosed (although the reader knows this will be a book about autism)
and I was at this time merely an observer of behaviors I couldn't yet
interpret. Only later after rewriting this passage many times did I
discover that it was the picture that helped me to position myself in
relation to the story in this way as observer in the whole first
chapter.

But there is a second self in this passage, one who is not present in
the scene itself. This is the person sitting in my father's house many
years later, looking at that picture. The second self here is the
recollecting self, the one that feels such longing for a past that never
really existed, who feels a desperate desire for a pure untroubled past
where the baby is whole and complete and there are no worries. This is
the self that wants to pick up that baby and to hold him secure against
the knowledge I didn't yet have in 1973, but do have as I am looking at
this moment caught in time.

In other words I wanted to return to that past and to relive the
innocence which the picture visually suggests. These are feelings which
I (and many other late twentieth-century writers) would usually edit out
as illegitimate, as sentimental. But by writing about them as evoked by
a picture, thus separating myself in part from those feelings, I could
acknowledge them.

Finally, there is a third self in this passage, one separate from the
observer and the recollecting self. The third self enters this scene as
a writer reconstructing both the moment when the picture was taken and
all the succeeding moments of looking at the picture and remembering. As
a writer I know that a few months before the moment of looking at the
picture Paul had an MRI, a Magnetic Resonance Image scan, which showed
that he had the brain abnormalities typical of autism.

So perhaps more than anything else this passage is informed by the
present circumstances during which I started to write the book. Paul was
fifteen, he was deeply depressedx and I feared for his life. It was a
time when I was held in suspense, when I didn't know if we would go
forward or not, if he would go forward or not. And while writing about
that picture I was deeply aware of all of those feelings. There is a
plurality of selves in this passage I am picture taker, anguished viewer
of a picture already taken, and writer of the selves who do both of
these things that I later realized I could evoke only through writing
about a picture.

Truth and Lies in Photographs Pictures can do other things as well. Mary
Mccarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood includes old family
photographs which tell the truth against the testimony of her cruel
relatives who mistreated her and her brothers after their parents'
deaths. But one of the pictures, as she points out, tells a lie. The
picture shows her and her three brothers, as children, with a pony. It's
a happy picture. It shows four privileged children who are lucky enough
to ride ponies in the summer. Here is how she writes about this photo,
One of the family photographs that has recently come to light shows the
four of us children, looking very happy, with a pony on which Preston
and Sheridan are sitting. We are all dressed up, I am not wearing my
glasses, and my straight hair is softly curled. The pony was a stage
prop. He used to be led up and down our street by an itinerant
photographer, soliciting trade. The photograph, of course, was sent out
west to the Preston family, who were in no position to know that this
was the only time we had ever been close to a pony. (Page 85)

What the picture doesn't show is that the children are undernourished
(their clothing and the soft focus hide that), that Mary has been
regularly beaten for "telling lies, " and that the toys sent to them by
the relatives out West are put away on high shelves. It doesn't show
these children put to bed every night with their mouths sealed shut by
sticky adhesive tape "to prevent mouth breathing, " nor does it show the
tape being removed every morning with ether.

Reading the book, we are privy to all those secrets which Mary's uncle
and aunts try so desperately to hide. The lie of the happy pony picture
is all the more damning within the context of a whole "narrative"



built by the adults who tell lies to the children and to each other, and
within the context of the truth for which Mary is sometimes punished.
But the lies go even deeper than this. Because their parents have died,
the truth of the children's early experience is contested, and they are
in a sense stripped of both language and memory. The people most likely
to confirm their early memories have died and their guardians "rewrite"
their early years by telling the children that their memories are lies.

Thus it is easy to see how important photographs would be to a story
which has been reformulated by guardians as a lie or a "false" memory.
Within this context, pictures become desperately valued. Mccarthy shows
the pony picture as a lie, but she also shows some true pictures of
happy moments when she was a young child at birthday parties and outings
with her indulgent parents before their deaths.

Other Resources, Medical and Other Documents Family movies and videos
are a wonderful resource for those who have been able to make
recordings. But there are many other resources you may turn to, letters
(other people's as well as your own), medical records, and legal
documentation, for example.

Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is an account of the author's
breakdown and hospitalization as a young woman. Kaysen gives a direct,
unmediated, sensory-based account of what it felt like to be in Mclean
Psychiatric Hospital for almost two years, at the age of eighteen and
nineteen. Surprisingly, what she tells us is very funny. But she also
offers us her medical records, which are very different from the direct
account of the experience itself.

Think of the problems involved in writing such a book, telling the story
of your mental breakdown and hospitalization at the age of eighteen has
got to be a difficult task. Large parts of your memory might be wiped
out through either drugs or the confusion of the illness itself. Even if
you have vivid memories, you may be tempted to doubt their veracity. You
also have the task of describing an experience many of your readers have
never had and might fear. You have to take your readers across a border
many of them don't want to cross, or at least to translate your
experience into terms they can understand.

Kaysen gives a brilliant, minimalist portrayal of the everyday life of
the hospital, what patterns look like on the floor, the regulation
"checks" on the patients every fifteen minutes, the feeling of time
passing too fast or too slow. She does not give background, history, or
information about her family. Instead we get the impression that her
life might have begun the first day in the hospital.

To give a sense of this experience, she describes it as a "parallel
universe", t l


People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is
if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real
question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.

And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of
them, worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying,
perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and
resemble it, but are not in it. (Page 5)

l So what place does medical documentation have in this portrayal?

Interestingly, Girl, Interrupted includes Kaysen's photocopied hospital
admission and discharge records, diagnostic sheets, and the standard
description of "Borderline Personality Disorder" taken from The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These pages,
however, seem to have little to do with the description of the
experience itself. It's as if these two forms of writing exist in
parallel universes.

I suspect that Kaysen was really stung by her medical records. At times
they sound very damning, as in the following passage about Borderline
Personality Disorder, An essential feature of this disorder is a
pervasive pattern of instability of self-image, interpersonal
relationships , and mood, beginning in early adulthood and present in a
variety of contexts.

A marked and persistent identity disturbance is almost invariably
present. This is often pervasive, and is manifested by uncertainty about
several life issues, such as self-image, sexual orientation, longterm
goals or career choice, types of friends or lovers to have, and which
values to adopt. The person often experiences this instability of
self-image as chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom. (Page
Obviously, Kaysen has to engage with this description at a certain point
in the narrative, and she does so at the end. "So these were the charges
against me. I didn't read them until twenty-five years later," she
begins the chapter called "My Diagnosis. " Then she comments, "It's a
fairly accurate picture of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like
reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound.
" (Page 150)

This kind of documentation is not used to confirm the reality or
authenticity of the experience, but rather to drag against the reality
of the experience itself. It's the discontinuities between the medical
understanding of her breakdown and the writer's direct perception of it
that is the point here. We see from this example how documentation can
be used ironically to raise doubts in the reader's mind, or to leave I ,
l certain issues unresolved, such as the question of who's "right" and
who's "wrong" about the possibility of full recovery.

Of course Kaysen is the writer of the book, so in the end she has to be
the one who is right. At least she has the last word. She is the one who
chooses to position these documents in a certain relationship to the
text itself. And since the documents appear in a disruptive way and are
not really integrated into the text which tells the story of the
experience itself, we tend to trust them less than we would have if she
had given them a more authoritative position.

As you write about your own difficult experience, you might want to do
the same thing Kaysen does, simply present documents as a parallel
account of an experience you also convey directly, without resolving the
differences between the two points of view. Divorce proceedings, medical
files, school reports, or annual reviews given for your job might all be
useful in this way. They can either verify the truth of a memory, or
they can be used ironically, as Kaysen uses medical records, to show the
gap between official records and felt experience.

Here is another example in which the writer, a friend of mine, uses the
personal statement for her tenure evaluation (which she must write, but
which she finds herself unable to write) as an ironic way of introducing
us to her complex past. She meets with the Dean of the college, Nothing
ever changes. Here I am unable to do my work.

The college has never exempted anyone in the process of going through
tenure from writing a selfevaluation, Raymond says. He looks surprised
about my request.

He is sitting on the other side of the table with the new books
published by his faculty, with the Smithsonian, the New Yorker, A Brief
History of Time and The Closing of the American Mind. There is more,
buried under another stack of papers. He leans back, his elbows on the
arms of the chair on which the name of the college is printed, the tips
of his finger touching as if in prayer. But he keeps his eyes open, a
rare thing since intense reflection usually forces him to talk without
the distraction of the visual sense, eyes directed towards the ceiling
or maybe the sky above. And since the issues of the college require him
to think with intensity and concentration, most of his meetings take
place, for him, in the dark, and for his partner, in the uncertainty as
to whether the dean knows with whom he is talking.

How about making an exception, I say. It can't go on like this.

I have tried every week-end of the term, and every time it was a failure
...

The dean and the tenure candidate go on talking about what is expected
in this sort of evaluation. He continues to try to soothe her with a
series of reassurances, but she cannot reconcile within herself the
discrepancy between the public and private parts of her story. Instead,
she begins to tell us, her readers, something about herself, her sense
that she has somehow betrayed her family left behind in Germany. Then
she says to the dean, You don't expect, I say I mean, you wouldn't want
to see my family trekking through the winter of 1945 and getting caught
in the bombing of Dresden, and nearly freezing to death on the road, or
say, the way they survived later you wouldn't want to read that in a
statement about my professional development for a tenure evaluation!

Aha, we her readers think. This is the core of a wonderful and terrible
story, but who would have thought that a writer's block over a tenure
statement could yield such rich material? Ironically, it is just the
right device for beginning such a story. The naively optimistic
conventions of a tenure statement ("something about offering to open the
young minds of our students with the precious perspective of a foreign
language. ..  ") provide the perfect foil for the deeper and more
traumatic story.


Using Legal Documents Legal documents deeds to land, marriage, birth,
and death certificates, divorce documents, adoption records, wills,
records of court proceedings, and other such things are also very useful
in generating material for writing. The language in these different
kinds of documents can be used to great effect, especially when we
really don't know much else about the events they recount.

In a piece of unpublished writing, I used legal documents to try to
discover something about my grandmother's home in the Shenandoah Valley.
This is a place I grew up knowing through childhood visits, yet feel I
cannot know in a deeper sense. The house and farm have preoccupied me
all my life, partly because they have been in the family for more than
two hundred years, yet they seem lost to me now. Here is what I wrote,
Recently my uncle sent me some xeroxed documents from the county
historical society concerning the land and the family. One is a will
datedjuly 22, 1806. Another a deed of property dating from the twentieth
day of August, 1765. On that date "James Trotter and Mary his wife, of
the county of Augusta and Colony of Virginia Plantation, " sold the land
to my family, for the sum of "90 pounds current money of Virginia. "



This place is described as "one certain tract or parcel of land
containing one hundred seventy acres lying and being in the County of
Augusta. " With the land, the family also received "all Houses Buildings
Gardens Orchards Improvements Wood and Trees Marshes Swamps Meadows Ways
Waters Water Courses Easements Profits Commodities hired tenants and
appurtenances. ..  " To this "William Sproul and his heirs" the document
says, "will go all Privileges Incomes Advantages and Appurtenances."

To me the language of this document is wonderfully rich because it is so
much of its time and place. But legal language, even today, is archaic
and therefore well suited to providing a very different view of
property, for example, than actually living on the land would provide.
As I thought about this language, I began to realize both its aptness
and its ironic distance from the house and farm I knew so well as a
child. I tried to explore this difference, One tall order, I think. But
nothing less than the truth. It is not just this William Sproul who
received all this, but his heirs who were and are named William Sproul.
Or if not William Sproul, then at least John Sproul. In the house there
is not a single picture of my mother, who was born there and lived there
all her childhood, the eldest child of her generation, nor is there a
picture of my grandmother who lived there for sixty-five years.

In fact, of course there is not a single picture of many of the people
who lived and worked on this land. I learn that, before a member of the
family suffered reverses in a distillery business and had to pay off a
note that had been secured by several farms and other property, my great
great grandfather and his cousins held thousands of acres in this
valley. And there was only one way that I know of to amass this kind of
property in early nineteenth century MIRGINIA, and only one way to work
it, to turn it into productive land.

The family story of this lost property and distillery brought me to
another, darker story, one which few members of the family want to talk
about today. Again it is a legal paper, in this case a will, which tells
the story both so vividly and so inadequately.

Another document tells this story. There they are among handsaws,
sausage cutters, 67 head of sheep, and one stack of inferior hay in the
field, among bedsteads, looking glasses, Hymnals, Buck's Theological
Dictionary, Blair's Sermons and Dick's Philosophy, among cotton bed
sheets, guns and salt sellars, and exactly on the page between the
bushels of corn "growing in the ground" on one side and on the other,
"one measuring line and a pair of saddle bags" seventeen slaves.


Using Photographs and Other Documentive Evidence The inventory of the
personal estate of John Sproul, deceased, "given under our hands this
26th day of September, 1849, " includes seventeen slaves, each with
their monetary value. Tom, at seventy, is valued at zero, Henry, who is
twenty, is worth $550. Between them in value, are various children and
adults. Hannah, a two year old girl, is worth $125. The boy Barclay, who
is sixteen, but whose hip is out of joint, is worth only $25.

There they are. And this is their only record.


I felt, as I tried to begin writing about my family and their slaves,
that the best way to approach the issue (so little mentioned today and
sometimes in fact denied) was through legal documentation. The deed and
the will don't lie. They are the truth yet the way in which they tell
the story is so very particular, so special to the times in which they
were written, so different from the way we would tell that story today
after so much history has been uncovered, and so many black writers such
as Toni Morrison have written about the reality of slavery.

As I worked on that piece I wanted to exploit some of these differences
in language. But I was also aware that, in a sense, this time of slavery
was a past that is unapproachable by me or by anyone else. Too much
information is lost to us and slavery is too foreign to our present
consciousness, even when that consciousness includes a knowledge of
history, to write about it easily. Perhaps it is the very difficulties
of approach which will in the end make the most interesting form of
writing.

EXERCISES In this chapter we have seen some of the ways in which
documentation can be used to support and confirm memory, as well as ways
it can be used ironically to suggest that the "experts, " for all their
pictures and medical records, might not tell the truth after all. To
practice using such documentation, try the following exercises, ( 1 )
Find a family photograph of an important occasion and write about it in
the following ways, (a) Write about the real "truth" of that occasion,
perhaps telling a story which is different from the accepted meaning of
the occasion or from your memory of that time. (b) Write about the way
the picture really tells a lie. For example, people who hate each other
might be standing together and smiling for the camera, etc. (c) Write
from the different points of view of the participants within the
picture. Give their differences from each other and from your own sense
of that picture. You might want to interview the people involved for
this exercise.

(d) Write about the picture from the point of


view of a later generation, perhaps one not yet born.

(e) If you are in the picture, write about it as participant, as later
observer, and maybe even as writer exploring the past and speculating
about what it might mean in the future.

(2) Look for documentation of your own personal experience written by
others. This documentation might consist of letters written by a
parent-er spouse, a brother or a sister. It might be medical records, or
legal records such as deeds or birth certificates. The language of these
latter forms of documentation is often strikingly different from the
language you use yourself, and the ironic distance between the two
languages can inspire your writing and transform your story.


A STORY IN SEARCH OF ITS SUBJECT How to Find Your Plot BY NOW, you have
learned something about trusting your memories (even if you still feel
they are partial or flawed), you have discovered that the imagination
can come to the aid of memory, and you have seen how you can use
photographs or other forms of documentation to generate more material.
Let's say you have gotten lots of stuff down on paper, but don't know
where it is headed. You can't see the shape of the story yet. This
chapter will help you discover your plot.

Notice I say "discover" your plot, not make it up or invent it.

I say this because I believe plot is not something that is imposed on
the story, it is something organic, arising from the material itself. In
saying this, of course, I am making a distinction often made today
between "plot" and "story. " I am assuming that the story is a given,
something found in life itself, the plot is the shape the story must
eventually take and it may not be obvious at first.

One of the first things I often ask my students to do at this stage of
their writing is to outline the chapter of a book or a smaller piece
which they have read. I've tried this myself when I have gotten stuck on
thinking through my plot. It's an exercise I recommend,  because by
looking at how someone else thinks through the issue of structure you
will begin to see more clearly how you might organize your own piece. I
suggest that you find a piece of writing which you particularly admire,
and then take it apart bit by bit. Here are some elements to look for as
you read, then again as you set out to plot your own piece of writing,
(1) Is there a question implied at the beginning? Or is there a central
mystery which needs to be explored? By exploring their questions or
mysteries, you can see how other writers have worked out a plot.

(2) Is there a "base" story behind your narrative or the one you are
outlining? Another way to think about this is to identify the mythic
substructure behind many pieces of writing. It may be the "American
success story, " the pioneer narrative, the Cinderella story, or the
Prodigal Son story. It's surprising how often narratives build on a
familiar base story which * LIVING TO TELL THE TALE readers will
recognize and which will establish expectations to be fulfilled or
frustrated in the new narrative.

(3) Where does the writer slow down and create a scene and where does he
or she speed up and summarize? Try plotting your own piece by singling
out the important moments where you might want to pause and develop a
scene fully, then identify the material which might be summarized. This
will determine how you will treat time in your narrative.

(4) Does the writer plot the piece chronologically, thematically, or, as
frequently happens, both together? You might try developing themes in
your own writing, as well as (or instead of) following a linear sequence
of events.

(5) You might also consider how some pieces are plotted according to an
emotional sequence, a sequence of feelings such as those often
identified in the stages of grief. Some writers lay out their structure
in this way, and it can work extremely well.

(6) Some writers develop their plot around the experience of reversal
(of fortune or expectations) and revelation (the moment at which you
begin to see what you could not understand before). This notion of
plotting is as old as Aristotle, and it is particularly relevant to the
crisis narratives of today.

I will examine in depth each of these six suggestions and the advantages
of each method. You might find yourself using just one of these
techniques for your own narrative, or you might discover that you really
want to draw on most or all of them.

Asking the Questions Stop now and think of those questions which
generated your writing in the first place. Sometimes these are the
deeper questions which you dare to articulate only after you have been
writing for a while. As Marilyn Chandler claims in her book, A Healing
Art, Regeneration Through Autobiography, "Questions define the zone of
inquiry that gives a book its shape. " (Page 111 ) Chandler finds that
these questions are often posed quite explicitly and "In each case the
writing is presented as a quest for answers to questions that break
taboos, penetrate forbidden territories, name hidden things, and
challenge basic beliefs." (Page 11)

An example of such a question is the one Paulette Alden, who wrote
Crossing the Moon, a book on her journey through infertility, tells us
that she asked herself. In answering the question "How did I come to be
a woman without a child? " she must challenge some basic assumptions
learned in her Southern upbringing which defined a woman who does not
have children as "the most selfish woman in the world. " She must also
confront the conflict between her aching desire to have children and her
equally strong wish to live the life of a writer unencumbered by
children. The answers generated by this one simple question are found
not only in the story of her medical treatments for infertility, but
also in the story of herself as a writer and a "southern girl", So how
was it, I wondered, that I had arrived at this point in my life, almost
thirty-nine years old, no child? When I looked back, I could see why,
and even when, I took a sharp turn away from motherhood. I could also
see why motherhood would catch up with me. (Page 17)

This passage sets up the expectations we will have for the plot that
follows. She lets us know that first she will explore that time of her
life when she "took a sharp turn away from motherhood, " and also that
time when motherhood will "catch up" with her. Notice that she doesn't
indicate here how she will resolve this seemingly unresolvable conflict.
That enigma, as Roland Barthes calls it, will draw us forward through
the narrative. We will want to know, above all, how she comes to terms
with this conflict.

In her essay "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It"), Gloria
Steinem uses an equally compelling question in her short piece about her
mother.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine
how differently we would be

described and will be, after our deaths by each of the family members
who believe they know us. The only question is, Why are some mysteries
more important than others? (Page 129)

The central question with which she introduces the whole narrative is
why her family never asked the question about the causes of her mother's
mental illness. The mystery is why there was no mystery in her mother's
progressively incapacitating illness, whereas the changes in her Uncle
Ed were a mystery worthy of careful examination. To the others, her
mother's decline seemed merely to be a fact of life, since it was
sometimes the way of women to become "nervous" and to succumb to
paranoid delusions and hallucinations.

To the kind ones and those who liked her, this new Ruth was simply a sad
event, perhaps a mental case, a family problem to be accepted and cared
for until some natural process made her better. To the less kind or
those who had resented her earlier independence, she was a willful
failure, someone who lived in a filthy house, a woman who simply would
not pull herself together.

Unlike the case of my uncle Ed, exterior events were never suggested as
reason enough for her problems. Giving up her own career was never cited
as her personal parallel of the Depression. (Nor was there discussion of
the Depression itself, though my mother, like millions of others, had
made potato soup and cut up blankets to make my sister's winter clothes.
) Her fears of dependence and poverty were no match for my uncle's
possible politcal beliefs. The real influence of newspaper editors who
had praised her reporting was not taken as seriously as the possible
influence of one radical professor [on Steinem's Uncle Ed]. (Page 131)

You can see why such a question is startling and how it could provide
Steinem with both the entry point of her narrative and its sequence of
information. She understands why the fate of her Uncle Ed, who changed
from "brilliant young electrical engineer to the town handyman. ..
[living] in a house near an abandoned airstrip" was "a mystery of
importance in our family. " But she cannot understand why her mother's
tragic transformation from competent young reporter, wife, and mother to
a "terrorized woman" who "was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on
to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate
enough to read a book, " (page 131) is assumed to be a natural event.

This narrative has a larger social and historical context (the
Depression), but the specific question was at first the smaller
psychological one. Christa Wolf, writing about growing up in Nazi
Germany, asks, "How did we become what we are? " but the applications of
this larger political question are all personal in her book A Model
Childhood. Elie Wiesel in Night asks about what happened to the Jews in
Nazi Germany, but because his central questions are ultimately
unanswerable, he answers in parables. Frequently he starts passages of
his book with words like this, "Let me tell you a story."

Similarly, Susanna Kaysen begins her narrative about her mental illness
and hospitalization when she was a young woman by asking the question
she knew was on most people's minds, "How did I get in there?" which
also implies the question "Could it happen to them?"

All of these writers are looking for answers to "questions that break
taboos, penetrate forbidden territories, name hidden things, and
challenge basic beliefs, " as Marilyn Chandler notes. It is the question
itself which generates the plot.

Finding Your sbase Story"

It is those stubborn questions that won't go away which can generate the
most interesting narratives. In the case of Steinem's narrative, the
uncle's life (thought to have been "corrupted" by one radical professor
during the Depression) is taken as a kind of "base narrative, " a story
which produces the expected questions and the unsurprising answers. The
uncle's story line is already plotted in a way, it is the story of the
Depression. We have all heard it in one form or another. But the story
of the housewife who had a "nervous breakdown" which "followed years of
trying to take care of a baby, be the wife of a kind but financially
irresponsible man with show-business dreams, and keep her much-loved job
as reporter and newspaper editor," (page 131) is in a sense an unknown
story.

In telling this story, Steinem follows the chronology of her mother's
life history (reimagining her mother's feelings at various times), and
at the same time follows her own growing awareness of her mother's life
experience. At the end she sums it up in this way, "Dying seems less sad
than having lived too little. But at least we're now asking questions
about all the Ruths and all our family mysteries. " (Page 146) It's not
surprising that Steinem, as a major voice in the contemporary women's
movement, ends her piece by encouraging all of us to begin to ask those
unasked questions about our own mothers and grandmothers.

The base story of Eva Hoffman's book Lost in Translation is the
immigrant story. But in this case, instead of extolling the virtues of
coming to the new world from war-torn Europe, the story we are all
familiar with as the immigrant-makes-good-and-liveshappily-ever-after,
she writes against the grain. Hoffman tells her story as one of enormous
loss. A language, a culture, a set of beliefs and expectations about how
life should be lived all are lost for her and her family. In her own
case, she recovers, learns

l a new language and becomes acclimated to the new world. But for her
parents the losses are permanent.

Natalie Kusz also writes with the immigrant story as the base narrative.
In Road Song, the family (the father is already a refugee from Europe)
moves from southern California to Alaska where they attempt to survive
brutal winters as new immigrants. The story of Natalie's terrible
childhood injury from a sled-dog attack is told against the background
of the broader story of family survival in the wilderness. In this case,
rather than question the base story, the writer tells it fully, as a
story of heroic survival and the strength of a family that stays
together in spite of almost overwhelming odds.

Scene and Summar, The Use of Time in Your Narrative Earlier I pointed
out the usefulness of identifying the important moments in your
narrative, which may require you to slow down and write them out richly
and completely. These are moments when you describe a place vividly,
give dialogue, and dramatize an action fully. But there will be other
instances when you will want to speed up and summarize months or even
years. You certainly don't need to give every event in your life equal
weight, if you tried to do this you would never finish writing.

As an example of skilled use of scene and summary, here is a passage
from Tobias Wolff's book This Boy's Life, a story of child abuse and
survival. The child, Tobias, has been sent ahead to live with his future
stepfather, Dwight, while his mother finishes a job and packs up the old
house. We already know that Dwight is stupid and mean-spirited, that he
envies his young stepson and is out to get him in any way he can. The
boy Tobias doesn't realize that he can tell his mother that he is
miserable in this new home, "I was bound to accept as my home a place I
did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended
by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it."

Notice how Wolff moves from summary (in this case a summary of several
months) into one particular vivid scene, My mother finally gave Dwight a
date in March. Once he knew she was coming he began to talk about his
plans for renovating the house, but he drank at night and didn't get
anything done. A couple of weeks before she quit her job he brought home
a trunkful of paint. .. Dwight spread out his tarps and for several
nights running we stayed up late painting the ceilings and walls. When
we had finished those, Dwight looked around, saw that it was good, and
kept going. He painted the coffee table white. He painted all the beds
white, and the

chests of drawers, and the dining-room table. ..  it was stark,
industrial strength, eye-frying white. ..

The narrative of the painting is interrupted here by an account of a
phone call from the mother, followed by more summary, then it resumes
with the immediate scene, ...  Dwight and I finished painting the
dining-room chairs. Then he lit a cigarette and looked around, his brush
still in his hands. He gazed pensively at the piano. He said, "Sort of
stands out, doesn't it?"

I looked at it with him. It was an old Baldwin upright, cased in black
walnut. ..  It was just a piece of furniture, so dark in all this
whiteness that it seemed to be pulsing. You really couldn't look
anywhere else.

I agreed that it stood out.


We went to work on it. Using fine bristles so our brush strokes wouldn't
show, we painted the bench, the pedestal, the fluted columns. .. the
carved scrollwork. ..  the elaborate inlaid picture above the keyboard,
a picture of a girl with braided yellow hair leaning out of her gabled
window to listen to a redbird on a branch. .. Finally, because the
antique yellow of the ivory looked wrong to Dwight against the new
white, we very carefully painted the keys, all except the black ones, of
course. (Pages 10X106)


This is a fine scene and a wonderful place to stop and give more
detailed information about the house the mother is soon to walk into. We
know, of course, that life with this man will be disastrous. That one
small scene of painting white everything in the house seems the perfect
way to show how pathetic the man's efforts are, how controlled the child
is, and how deceived the mother since she will soon enter a house (and a
situation) that has been totally whitewashed.

Theme or Chronology?

Most narratives of personal experience follow some kind of rough
chronology at least, but often writers rearrange the order of events for
better effect. Furthermore, some information is usually suppressed, and
certain events may be given more importance than they had seemed to have
in "real life."

The modern literary memoir is frequently a very "shaped" book, it is a
narrative which focuses on one particular event or crisis. Some people
now draw a distinction between autobiography, which is a more or less
chronological, responsible reporting of one's life history, and a
memoir, which is a shaped narrative, written around a single theme. This
is a distinction which I would like to uphold.

When I was writing my book about my autistic son, I struggled with what
to include and what to leave out.



After all, if you enter a life anywhere, according to any subject, you
will soon find that that subject connects with every other issue in your
life. So how was I to decide what did and did not belong in a book about
raising a child with autism? What other aspects of my life my marriage,
my other child, my job, my family of origin belonged and would therefore
enrich the narrative, make it seem full and more convincing? And which
events or issues did not belong and would end up simply distracting the
reader from following the story line? A consideration of plot always
involves the question of selectivity, of what to include and what to
omit.

In my own case, I tried to solve this issue by pulling back from the
narrative and asking myself if what I was writing belonged here because
in some way it had to do with the central theme of raising an autistic
child. This was a story of our lives "under the aspect of autism. " Many
more things happened to each of us, and we can all (including my son) be
summed up in many more ways than as people who have in some way
struggled with autism, but that was the theme of this book.

Other recent memoirs do the same thing. Tobias Wolff tells his stor, v
under the aspect of abuse and escape from the entrapment of his life.
Eva Hoffman tells her story under the aspect of her move from Poland to
Canada at the age of thirteen, and the sub sequent loss of her language
and her culture. Lucy Grealy tells her life story under the aspect of
cancer, Ewing's Sarcoma to be exact.

Lucy Grealy's book is worth considering in a little more detail.

Her title tells us this is The Autobiography of a Face, and we know from
this that her narrative will focus on questions of illness and recovery,
on the surgeries and treatments she underwent, and of how all of this
affected her sense of herself as well as her sense of her appearance.

But rather than present a simple chronology, Grealy begins at a midpoint
in her narrative, when she is a teenager and has survived her surgeries
and treatments and the cancer itself, but still has to come to terms
with her appearance. Then she takes us back to the beginning, to the
story of her being hit on the jaw when running around a grade-school
playground. In later chapters, she brings her narrative to the end of
this particular story of cancer survived, to the point where the title
is no longer relevant. At the end of her book Grealy lets us know that
the rest of her story will be an autobiography of much more than a face.
So she ends her narrative there.

After her first chapter she basically tells her story roughly
chronologically, but organizes each chapter around a theme. One of these
themes is her love of animals as a child and this gives her the title
and the organizing principle for many of the chapters, including one
called "Petting Zoo. " Interestingly, this zoo

is actually a laboratory full of caged animals kept in the hospital for
experimentation. When Lucy, together with some other children on her
ward, persuade a candy striper to take them for a Sunday stroll through
the hospital to see the "zoo, " they discover a depth of misery far
worse than their own suffering, bad as that is, Desperation saturated
the room in those loud, whining cries, pacing back and forth, back and
forth. I was overwhelmed. On each cage door was a sign with handwritten
details about the dog, filled with alien words. .. Despite the warning,
I let the dogs lick my fingers through the bars.

The tenor of the expedition was shifting rapidly, taking on a slow,
almost viscous quality. Our teenaged grownup tried to hurry us along,
now aware that she'd made a mistake. ..

It was too much now. There was a sound of monkeys in the next room, but
we turned and left. In the elevator no one spoke, in the tunnels no one
spoke. A sad, groping presence accompanied us all the way back to the
ward. ..  Sooner or later we all have to learn the words with which to
name our own private losses, but then we just stood there in front of
the nurses' desk, speechless. (Pages 51-52)

The scene of the children visiting the "petting zoo" is a way of
conveying their own pain and confusion, and their need to find
(eventually) the words for their own losses. Many of Grealy's chapters
work in this way. She chooses a theme through which she can both advance
the story line chronologically, and explore a particular issue
confronting the child as she faces her cancer treatments.

Plotting Through a Sequence of Feelings A plot is, of course, more than
the answer to a single question, and it is more than a reflection of a
base story, a set of scenes and summaries, or an exploration of one
particular theme. Plot implies a sequence of events, a beginning, a
before and after, causality, etc. Memoir writing, fictive autobiography,
the personal essay all of these forms of personal writing have a plot,
but the sequences found in those plots may be different from what you
find in fiction. Frequently this kind of writing follows an emotional
sequence, the plot outlines a progression in the feelings of the
narrator or protagonist, rather than a sequence of events or actions.

In her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kublerross not only discusses
the lessons we have to learn from the dying, but also gives us many
small vignettes about specific people. Her work has been widely read and
used to explain psychological processes we all undergo at various times
in our lives, not just when we hear we are terminally ill. But I have
also found her

insights surprisingly applicable to writing, especially to plotting.
Many kinds of stories which involve loss, change, or even radical
questioning of the past, can be plotted according to the stages of grief
she identifies, denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression,
acceptance.

If you are writing about a significant loss or change in your life, you
might consider the stages of grief. Even if the stages for you occur in
a different sequence, you might plot your piece according to certain
emotional stages using those events or vignettes which might demonstrate
denial, for example, or bargaining.

Here, for example, are some details Kubler-Ross gives us about one woman
who denied the bad news she had received about her health. This woman's
very human response results in some intriguing maneuvers, One of our
patients described a long and expensive ritual, as she called it, to
support her denial. She was convinced that the X-rays were "mixed up",
she asked for reassurance that her pathology report could not possibly
be back so soon and that another patient's report must have been marked
with her name. When none of this could be confirmed, she quickly asked
to leave the hospital, looking for another physician in the vain hope
"to get a better explanation for my troubles. " (Page Details such as
these are richly evocative and would make vivid first scenes of a piece
of writing. Now imagine that you are writing about your own bad news
whatever it might be. How were you tempted to deny the news? Did you
take specific actions to delay recognition?

To show how a single scene can be structured around an emotional state
in this case shock followed by denial I will quote a passage from
chapter 3 of my book News from the Border, where I am told by a doctor
(the first specialist we consulted) that our son was retarded. Shock,
isolation, then a strong reaction of denial, are expressed in this scene
through some small visual details.

Dr. Tremain opened his office door and, staring at the floor, gestured
with his hand for me to come in. Just inside the door, Paul pushed a
chair against the wall, climbed onto it, and reached for the light
switch. I took him down and tried to hold him in my lap.

"I believe your son is retarded" was what the doctor was saying.

I stared at him, but his face was blurred and seemed far away, even
though I knew he was right there, just across his desk on the other side
of this bright, expensively furnished room. Dimly, I became aware that
Paul was struggling in my arms. I was holding him too tightly and I
loosened my grip. Paul wiggled his shoulders and tried to slide out of
my grasp and onto the floor, but I lifted him back onto my lap and
stared at the doctor over his head.

The sound of the doctor's voice seemed to be coming to me in waves. I
caught "probably only moderately retarded, " then heard "need to run
some tests."

Retarded. Suddenly, and intensely, I wanted Jim there beside me. But
then I knew I didn't want him there. None of this would be true
withoutjim there to hear it. I stared at a heavy crystal ashtray on the
table beside me. Paul picked up the ashtray and was about to drop it on
the glass-topped table. I caught it just in time. (Pages 17-18)

Oddly, it was that crystal ashtray which I remembered most vividly about
the scene. It was only in writing the scene later that I realized how
symbolic (almost too heavily symbolic) it was. I decided to use the
detail anyway, trusting my memory as a storehouse of important images,
and believing that "we only store memory images of value, " as Patricia
Hampl has reminded us.

But it was my shock, numbness, disbelief, and my stangely irrational
form of denial none of this could be true withoutjim (my husband) there
to hear it which I mostly wanted to get across to the reader at this
point.


Plotting a Whole Piece Around a Moment of Rgvelation The scene above
shows a moment of "reversal, " the moment when bad news is given and the
course of a life history changes. Another major moment in a narrative is
the one in which something is realized or understood for the first time.
In thinking about your own piece of writing, you might try to answer
questions such as these, "When did I realize that I would not be able to
go home. ..  ? My mother was going to die ...  ? I had a serious
illness. ..  ? I would have to start over in my life. ..?  " By
answering your own such questions, you may see where your story is
headed. The meaning of the events may begin to unfold for you.

Here is an example from the writing of a young person my daughter, a
student in her last year of high school. This little college application
essay might have grown from the sentence, "I first realized that. ..."
Here is what my daughter wrote, I remember sitting in my Granddad's
musty house on a rainy afternoon, and waiting for something to happen. I
was probably only fourteen at the time, and I wanted desperately to go
to the beach. But no, I had to sit and wait for the weather to clear
before I could do anything. His house was a stone pillar, it seemed that
nothing came of anything

there, nothing ever happened. And my granddad was the same in a way, he
was just a fact of life. He was immortal. He was in his nineties at the
time, and he still had good health. The only things that were wrong with
his health were that he was nearsighted, and he had lost a lot of
hearing. He still had a thick mop of iron-gray hair. And he still lived
in his own house in the middle of nowhere, a place he named Achahtee
(which is Ithaca backwards, but with two "E's" instead of an "I" at the
end). He still smoked his pipe on the back porch, and he still read a
lot of books. In fact, he was the most well-read person I have ever
known.

Then, this rainy afternoon, he came up to me, pointed to the drenched
window, and asked me to tell him what rain sounded like. He couldn't
remember, he said, it had been so long. I was shocked, I didn't know
what to say. I couldn't answer him. I babbled something at him, the
first thing I could come up with, and was left completely stricken as he
walked away, and for a long time after. I knew that he was hard of
hearing, but he had just showed me what it was like to be old and to
lose something so simple and so precious as the sound of rain. He was no
longer immortal to me.

This passage provides the needed framework for an essay reflecting on
the death of a much-loved grandfather. However, the death itself isn't
in the foreground of the piece. It is the grandfather's deafa Story in
Search of Its Subject w ness and his inability to hear or even remember
the sound of rain which teaches her the terrible truth, he is not a fact
of life, he is mortal and will someday die.

His death follows almost naturally in the writing, after that one
shocking moment of revelation several years before. This piece is a
small crisis narrative, in which the writer comes to terms with the fact
of death.

EXERCISES (1) Start by outlining the plot of a chapter of a memoir, or a
smaller piece of writing. Write out the order of events as given, the
order of the information that is given, the moments when the writer
pauses to give us a scene and when that writer speeds up to give a
summary of events, etc. Now apply what you have learned to your own
writing.


(2) Look at what you have written so far. Step back and see if you can
sum your story up in one sentence, "This story is about. .."

(3) Now that you have identified the central subject matter of the
story, ask yourself "What is the mystery? " or -What is the central
question? " What is the reader most likely to ask of this story? What
did you not know when you started to write?

(4) Use the stages of grief identified by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross as a
plotting device to explore an experience involving unwelcome change or
loss. Try to find moments in your own narrative which might demonstrate
each of the feelings she identified, denial, anger, bargaining,
depression and acceptance. Then write a short scene around each one.

(5) Decide which parts of your narrative could be written as summary,
condensing a large sweep of time into a paragraph or two. Then decide
what events are so revealing or so striking that they must be written
out as scenes. Slow down at those moments and write out the event as
completely as you can.

(6) Look for your themes in the midst of a chronological telling.

You might find that you want to reorganize passages (or chapters) around
these themes.

(7) Look for the "base story" in your narrative. This might be an
oft-repeated story such as the Cinderella story about the youngest and
poorest and most abandoned child, whose life comes out right in the end.
It might be a narrative like the old man Lear's story of betrayal and
rage, followed by reconciliation. It could be an immigrant's story or a
story of the frontier. You might discover that you are really writing a
story of exile, or of a paradise lost. Look for the familiar story
behind your own, then write either with it or against it. Use your own
story to confirm or to question the wisdom of time-honored stories.



(8) Identify the moment at which you realized something important and
write your story around that moment of enlightenment. This can be a
"before and after" story, and you can use the moment of revelation at
several different possible places in the narrative. You might start the
narrative with it, then move backwards in time to the "beginning" and
then forward again to the end. Or you might save that moment for the
very end of your narrative. Experiment with different ways of doing
this.




THE SELF IN THE STORY Finding Your Voice THE VOICE OF THE NARRATOR in a
memoir should be a trustworthy one. An unreliable narrator, interesting
as that might be in fiction, wouldn't work at all in nonfiction. The
writer of memoir enters into a particular kind of contract with the
reader, declaring that the narrative is a true one, and to convince the
reader to keep reading the voice must be trustworthy. The reader must
never sense that some important information is being withheld, or that
the narrator is being manipulative or self-serving. Even over-arguing or
over-explaining something can turn your reader off. This chapter is
designed to help you avoid these pitfalls and to develop a strong,
likable "self in the story."

Establishing a reliable narrator doesn't mean that the writer cannot
expand on or reimagine the truth.

As we have already seen, imaginative recreation of remembered events is
an essential part of the memoir. But the narrator must sound trustworthy
even when exercising the imagination.

But what is this "voice" in the memoir? When we discuss reading and
writing today, we often hear talk about voice, and it can mean a number
of things. First of all, it suggests style, habits of speech, what we
sound like in spoken or written language. Voice also means attitude, our
approach to what we are writing, what makes us angry or sad or happy. In
other words, voice is the personality behind the storytelling. And of
course it is this voice, more than the story itself, which will finally
determine whether or not the writing is interesting to your reader.


I didn't raise this issue earlier because I have found that when we
become too self-conscious about our voices, we can become intimidated
and stop writing. It is often more productive to write out a lot of your
story before you step back and begin to consider matters of voice. About
two-thirds of the way through a class of mine, I begin to talk to my
students about this subject. One of the things I tell them is that after
a short time of hearing them speak and hearing their voices in writing,
I can usually tell whose paper it is I am reading, even if they leave
off the name. There are rhythms of speech I begin to hear, habits of
phrasing, a certain sense of humor, maybe a particular use of irony.
Some of the voices are straightforward,


even bold. Others tend to be more intimate, almost innocent-sounding,
yet revealing. Some are quiet, others more flamboyant. And all of them
speak with these voices more or less unconsciously.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot that happens to a speaking voice when
it turns into a writing voice. The challenge here is to maintain the
individuality of the voice and at the same time appeal more generally to
the reader. How do you create a voice that is trustworthy and
interesting at the same time? How do you project a personality in your
writing without getting in the way of the story itself?

In what follows, I will discuss matters of honesty and discrimination
(what you choose to tell and what you want to leave out), then I want to
distinguish different possible voices in your narrative. It is important
to note that the narrator is frequently separate from the protagonist.
Both are aspects of your writing and of who you are, but they might
emerge as different voices in your narrative. Some of the exercises and
examples which follow are designed to help you distinguish these
different voices and use them appropriately.

Finally, I will explore another aspect of memoir writing which is very
important, and that is the musing or reflecting voice. This voice
neither presents a dramatic scene, nor summarizes events, but rather
pulls back from the narrative and thinks out loud. It is this musing
voice which can be most distinctive in the memoir, in fact, it may be
the most compelling feature about memoir writing at this moment in time.

Honesty Honesty is vital when writing a first person narrative. A memoir
is not the place for deliberate deception, evasion, or cunning. When we
begin to write, however, we often feel the urge to tell all. We confuse
honesty with confession, integrity with self-exposure. Some reviewers
and commentators have fallen into the trap of comparing the new literary
memoir with talk shows, where guests confess their darkest secrets
without considering how this will affect other people or whether it is
wise in terms of the rest of their own lives. Good memoir writing does
not do that.

Remember, you can chose to tell or not. There may be some parts of your
life history that you do not want to share with anyone, and you are
under no compulsion to tell all. It is important that you take ownership
of your story and understand that you can choose how to tell it.

Learn to "listen to the story. " The story will tell you what needs to
be included. This can be a hard concept to grasp, since you are always
aware that the story you are telling has already happened, and thus is
already fixed in a certain form. Nevertheless, a memoir writer, like a
fiction writer, must learn to step back and listen to what the stor, v
is trying to tell them.



The same principles that guide good fiction also guide us in writing
effective nonfiction. In fiction writing we are encouraged to think of
what belongs in the story, not what happened in life, and that's exactly
what you should do in nonfiction writing too. The same principles of
selection (what to include, what to omit) belong here as well.

Admitting Your Flaws An attractive voice in personal narrative is one
with flaws. None of us wants to read about a perfect person who has
every problem under control and who never suffers any doubt,
uncertainty, or fears for the future. Even in a memoir, we must not be
too wise too soon, we can't be wise before wisdom is earned through
experience and through making mistakes. We can't be a six-year-old
knowing what we know at forty, nor can we remove ourselves so far from a
scene of suffering or uncertainty that nothing is left for the reader to
feel or discover.

At some point while I was writing News from the Border, I began to
realize that, if I wanted to tell the story of my son's autism, I had to
admit more of my own flaws. Many of the books similar to mine left out
this part of the story. Parents often seemed to be too heroic, too
focused on the child, or just too shadowy. Even though ours was a
success story, it was certainly not a miracle story, nor did I have all
the answers, by any means. I had to tell the dark side, and my voice had
to be real.

This was very scary, because I quickly found out that I had to tell the
story of my drinking and of my discovery that I had gone over the edge
into alcoholism. I felt very exposed as I set out to tell this story.
All those old fears of sounding like confessional television came back
to haunt me. Furthermore, I began to think that if I wrote about what
was really going on in my family, I would have to skip town when the
book came out. Then I started having fantasies that I would sneak into
all the book stores in the country and rip out pages 175 through More
seriously, and from a purely writing perspective, I kept wondering if a
story of alcoholism really belonged in a story about autism. I didn't
want this story to take over, to swamp the central theme. I needed to
admit my mistakes, but not dwell on them for so long as to distract the
reader from the story of me as the mother of an autistic son. Here is
what I finally wrote, I sat at the kitchen table, a glass of sherry at
my elbow. A copy of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth lay open before
me, I had one hundred pages left to reread before class the next day,
but I didn't feel ready to face Lily Bart's agonizing death through an
overdose of chloral hydrate. I was fed up with her this time around.
Spread open on top of the book The Sey in the Story w was a Family Day
magazine that I had picked up earlier that afternoon at the grocery
store checkout stand. A stew bubbled on the stove, Paul was playing with
his pipes and the hose in the backyard, Kate was still next door at the
day-care center. I would have to pick her up in half an hour, but for
now I was just sitting there, idly flipping through the magazine,
sipping sherry.

I circled one page in the magazine, glancing at it, moving on, then
flipping back, "Do You Have a Problem with Alcohol? " was printed in
bold, blurry letters at the top of the page. Then underneath, the author
suggested that I "take the easy ten-minute test."

Taking a large sip from the glass of sherry, I picked up a pencil and
started marking the answers, 1. Have you ever felt guilty about your
drinking? (Well, yes.

Hasn't everyone? )

2. Do you drink to feel better about yourself? To handle stress?

To feel normal? To reward yourself after a hard day's work? (Yes to all
of these. What's a drink for, anyway? )

3. Have you ever had a blackout when you were drinking? (No, what is a
blackout? Sounds awful. )

4. Has your family suffered financially because of your drinking?

(No! Of course not. )

5. Have you ever been in trouble with the law because of your drinking?
(Heavens, no. )

6. Have you ever missed work because of your drinking? (Of course not.
But, I wondered, what about all those sore throats and cases of flu I am
always getting? )

Well, what about them? I paused to look out the window. Paul was soaked,
but I decided he was good for at least another ten minutes. He had built
a dam on the sidewalk with rocks and sand, and he was absorbed with
flooding it with the hose, trying to see how much pressure the dam would
take before it gave. Sand and rocks were all over the edge of the lawn,
as well as the sidewalk. I knewjim would be furious when he came home,
but what could I do, how could I take care of everything anyway? I
poured myself another large glass of sherry and went back to the
questionnaire. (Pages 175-176)

As you can see from this passage, I tried to find a way of telling this
story humorously (it gets more serious later in the chapter), but also
to bring the matter of my own flaw my drinking back to the main story of
autism as seen in the passage about the child flooding the yard. I also
used the scene as a way of showing the dissention between my husbandjim
and myself. The significance of my drinking emerges, but does not
overwhelm the central story about raising a son with autism.


The Humorous Voice What I am about to discuss next is pretty obvious,
nevertheless, it needs to be said. There is humor in almost any
situation (as you can see from the example above), and sometimes a
tragedy can look ridiculous if viewed from another angle. Furthermore,
when we trust ourselves (and our voices) enough to be willing to see how
funny some events were, we immediately solve one of the problems of
memoir writing, and that is the temptation to be too solemn.

As we saw earlier, among the pitfalls we fear when we begin to write the
story of our lives is the fear that we might sound too "special," that
we might act like a tragedy king or queen, as though no one has ever
suffered as we have. This might be acceptable if we are writing about
other people, but when we take ourselves too seriously, we can sound
insufferable. The scene above depends on humor to express this painful
revelation. But sometimes a whole book is funny, relying on comedic
devices to carry us through a story of great suffering. Two recently
published books do this, Mary Karr's The Liar's Club uses the American
tall tale and Frank Mccourt's Angela's Ashes uses Irish stage routines.
Both are stories of terrible childhoods, of poverty, neglect, and the
ravages of alcoholism or mental illness in a parent. They are also
survivor's stories that use humor to tell us the writers have survived
intact enough to laugh at their pasts. In the following passage from
Mccourt's book, the family is living in Limerick, in a small house next
to a lavatory installed in Victorian times to serve the whole
neighborhood. Frank and his brother Malachy come home from school one
day to discover that the neighborhood toilet has overflowed into their
kitchen.

Two weeks before Christmas Malachy and I come home in a heavy rain and
when we push in the door we find the kitchen empty. ..  There's a noise
upstairs and when we go up we find Dad and Mam and the missing furniture
...  Mam tells us there was a terrible flood, that the rain came down
the lane and poured in under the door. ..  People emptying their buckets
made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen. She thinks
we should stay upstairs as long as there is rain. We'll be warm through
the winter months and then we can go downstairs in the springtime if
there is any sign of a dryness in the walls or the floor. Dad says it's
like going away on our holidays to a warm foreign place like Italy.
Malachy says the [picture of the] Pope is still on the wall downstairs
and he's going to be all cold and couldn't we bring him up? but Mam says
No, he's going to stay where he is because I don't want him on the wall
glaring at me in the bed. Isn't it enough that we dragged him all the
way from

Brooklyn to Belfast to Dublin to Limerick? All I want is a little peace,
ease and comfort. (Page 96)

One of the pleasures of this scene is the attractiveness of the voice.
The child tells the story in all innocence, reporting simple fact and
relating straight what other members of the family said. The words of
these other characters are woven into the texture of the narration,
"Malachy says the Pope is still on the wall downstairs and he's going to
be all cold and couldn't we bring him up? but Mam says, No, he's going
to stay where he is... ."

This kind of narration isn't easy to achieve, and it can even get a bit
tiresome if you overdo it. But you might try using this kind of voice if
the speech you grew up with is an unusual dialect, or a highly flavored
local form of speech. Here is another passage from Mccourt's book which
exploits some ethnic differences in language and custom. The mother is
trying to get some meat for their Christmas dinner, but all she has to
pay for it is a "docket, " which is rather like food stamps, No goose,
says the butcher, no ham. No fancy items when you bring the docket from
the St. Vincent dePaul. What you can have now, missus, is black pudding
and tripe or a sheep's head or a nice pig's head. No harm in a pig's
head, missus, plenty of meat and children love it, slice that cheek,
slather it with mustard and you're in heaven, though I suppose they
wouldn't have the likes of that in America where they're mad for the
steak and all classes of poultry, flying, walking or swimming itself. .
.

Mam says the pig's head isn't right for Christmas and he says tis more
than the Holy Family had in that cold stable in Bethlehem long ago. You
wouldn't find them complaining if someone offered them a nice fat pig's
head.

No, they wouldn't complain, says Mam, but they'd never eat the pig's
head. They were Jewish.

And what does that have to do with it? A pig's head is a pig's head.

And ajew is ajew and tis against their religion and I don't blame them.

The butcher says, Are you a bit of an expert, missus, on the Jews and
the pig?

I am not, says Mam, but there was a Jewish woman, Mrs. Leibowitz, in New
York, and I don't know what we would have done without her. (Page The
reality behind this little butcher-shop vignette is three malnourished
children waiting at home for something to eat, three others dead from
starvation and disease, a husband who drinks up the week's wages if he
is lucky enough to get a job, and no coals for cooking the pig's head if
she does take it.

As you can see from these two passages, the "voice" could very well be a
stage voice, in fact Frank

Mccourt appeared on the stage with his brother Malachy, doing an Irish
musical revue about their childhood and youth. Written language is
identical to spoken language here.

Here is another example of an informal voice which uses humor to deal
with a sometimes painful subject. This is a passage from a "coming-out
story" written by a student of mine. For a long time, when she was in
high school, she couldn't admit to her friends that she wasn't really
interested in boys. To get along with these friends, she made up crushes
on boys which she didn't really have. Here she is with them, sitting in
a circle, passing bowls of popcorn and Doritos and playing Trulh or
Dare, I tried explaining that I didn't like anyone. But in all
actuality, I didn't really understand this whole like concept. I mean,
it wasn't as though some guy made my palms sweat and my heart beat
faster just by being near him. Guys were just, well, guys. No more, no
less.

"Every one likes someone, " they insisted again.

Well, if everyone likes someone and since I'm included in that everyone
category, I suppose that means that I do like someone. Besides even if I
really don't I can't let them know that because then I would seem weird.
And in eighth grade if you're weird, you're dead.

"I guess I like Alan, " I told them to satisfy my Truth or Dare
requirement. And I supposed I could like Alan. After all, he sat next to
me in Social Studies and he laughed at all my jokes, so there could be
some "like" there.

Unfortunately Alan liked me. And despite the rigid code of the pinkie
swear, word got around that I liked him back. After the requisite
awkward phone conversations, note passing and uncomfortable moments in
the hall, Alan and I eventually titled ourselves boyfriend and
girlfriend. We followed the eighth grade courtship rules, his parents
drove us to and from the local discount movie theater where we saw My
Girl and we attended the Valentine's Day dance together. Our
relationship lasted the five months until school let out and then we
drifted back to our status of being really good friends.

That was five years and seven fabricated crushes ago. ..


This student was writing some years later from a position of security,
so she was able to look back on her younger self with that wonderful
mixture of ruefulness and affection. She had learned how to separate the
protagonist self (the eighth-grade girl fearful of losing friendships)
and the mature narrative self telling the story.



The Voice of the Narrator and the Voice of the Protagonist In memoir
writing, unlike fiction, the voice is already chosen. The voice is yours
right? True, but that voice need not speak in a monotone, the voice of
the memoir can be complex and various. For one thing, you may
distinguish between yourself as the teller and yourself as the actor in
the tale. Both the protagonist and the narrator are you, but often those
two selves will come out sounding different.

The most obvious kind of narrative where this happens is that of
childhood experience. A fouryear-old child (you as protagonist of the
story) will not have the same words or concepts which you have at your
command later as an adult telling the story. You may want to write some
passages in the child's voice, using the child's perception, in other
passages you may reflect as an adult on that earlier moment in time.

Here is an example of how I wrote about an experience I had as a
four-year-old child. The images are taken from the child's experience,
but the perspective is that of the adult, Out of nowhere a memory came
to me. It was. .. February 18, 1943, and I was on our front porch steps
in Richmond, Virginia. My fourth birthday and I was sitting alone.
Slowly, I kicked my heels back against the brick steps. I think I was
wearing leggings, but even through the wool, I felt the solid, hard
dependableness of the world, where it began just at the back of my legs.

The pale southern February sun warmed my hands. The trees were lacy
against the sky, the city hummed in the distance, and my mother was just
inside baking a cake for my birthday. Very early that morning, before I
was supposed to be awake, I had hidden behind a curtain to watch her
wheel a small black doll-baby buggy, a second-hand carriage she had
bought from a neighbor, up the walk and into the house. It was going to
be my birthday present and I wasn't supposed to know it, but I was
filled with joy, with the secret pleasure of a gift securely
anticipated.

I was four years old and I felt an enormous satisfaction in that fact.
My brother was just one, and I was pleased that he didn't even know it.
And then, as if a kaleidoscope had shifted and a pattern suddenly came
into view, I felt something I had never felt before. It seemed at that
moment that I knew myself, knew who I was. I seemed to come into myself.
I knew that I existed in the world. My heart was beating, the world
glowed around me, and I was a part of it, a part of the living air,
sitting there on the steps in the shimmering winter sunshine. And that
knowledge alone was enough to fill me with an almost unbearable
happiness.

I stopped kicking my heels against the brick and held myself very still,
held myself for a small moment at the heart of the living universe. And
knew I had been blessed. (Pages 264-265)

In this passage, it is clearly the four-year-old child who is proud of
being four and feels superior to her baby brother, it is she who hides
behind the curtain to watch her mother wheel the baby buggy up the walk,
who feels the sunshine on her hands and the hardness of the brick behind
her legs. But it is the adult who narrates the scene, composing it from
memories. I know that, as a four-year-old, I did feel a moment of
enormous joy, but I could never have described it then in the language
that I use now.

Sometimes it is helpful to work deliberately to separate these two
voices, protagonist and narrator, in your narrative. By doing so you can
learn how to be faithful to the experience of your former self, to give
all your feelings and perceptions and flaws of the moment. At the same
time if you want to direct the narrative thematically, you can do so as
a narrator looking over the shoulder of your experiencing self. An
exercise I sometimes give my class is designed to help you do that.
Imagine a former self, yourself at one particular time of your life, and
describe that former self, as if he or she were sitting across the room.
Describe clothing, gestures, the setting, etc.

After you have done this, stop and listen to this former self.

What is he or she trying to tell you? This is part of the process of
learning to listen to the story.

By doing this little exercise, you might begin to see ways in which you
may have been putting words into the mouth of a younger self, and not
really attending to the differences between your writer self now, and
the self that was experiencing events in the past. Here is how one
student used this exercise.

This is not me.

There she sits on the couch, curled up underneath a blanket. Her thin
body is awkwardly spread out over pillows, feet hitting the end of the
short couch. ..  She is encased in an afghan blanket, enclosed by
greens, reds, oranges. She looks like a worm, but she doesn't care. This
is where she is comfortable.

Usually this is where she sits to do homework, positioned so that her
knees support her reading. She studies her high school textbooks until
her head begins to droop, and she nods off to sleep. Someone always
enters the room in the middle of this, usually her father, and he tells
her that she is not really studying or sleeping. She wakes up with a
start then, saying that she is not really tired, that of course she can
concentrate on her work now. Asks him to just leave her alone. ..

She sits on the couch weekday afternoons, studying-sleeping.

Sometimes she goes there after dinner too. She is even there on weekend
nights, when all of the other kids in school are out drinking, going out
to eat, or watching videos at some one's house. She knows this because
they always tell the stories before classes start again on Monday
mornings. She hears the stories, knows that these are lifelong memories
in formation. But, each time that the weekend comes, she just sits on
the couch, curled up in a blanket.

Writing this was a kind of breakthrough for my student. She had started
by writing about herself as a very good child and teenager. But as she
got into the story more and more, she began to focus on significant
losses in her life, including the loss of her grandmother who had died
at her home. These losses were also somehow tied to the fact that she
was such a "good girl, " who asked so little for herself.

It was only when she began to see the "girl on the couch" and to listen
to her that this writer began to see some of the connections between the
different strands of her narrative. She now had an image for herself as
withdrawn from all the activity that took place in the family. At the
end of the narrative, however, after exploring her feelings of loss, she
felt that she could become one with that girl on the sofa, and after
that the girl was no longer trapped there. The writing enacted the
escape, but only after the writer had first separated the protagonist
self from the narrating self. Later my student merged the two selves in
the narrative and no longer wrote of herself as "she."


The Reflecting Voice One of the reasons that the literary memoir is
making such a comeback, I believe, is that readers have begun to miss
that more expansive voice, the musing, reflective voice that is willing
to share an experience in all its fullness. It's true some novels still
use that voice within a character or as part of an omniscient narration,
but in recent years we have seen a great deal of clipped, minimalist
writing.

The reflective voice is so important to memoir writing because
self-revelation without reflection or understanding is merely
self-exposure. We want the author of a memoir to have grown up, to have
learned from earlier mistakes or experiences, and to be wiser for it. A
writer who merely tells us (or even shows us) how awful life was will
quickly lose our interest.

I have read a few books which are like this, they show the sheer
awfulness of a life on drugs, or the unrelenting grief suffered after a
spouse's death, but that is all they show. I usually stop reading these
books before the end. If the narrator continues to wallow in
"unprocessed" grief, on and on and on, I get bored or worse, I get very
irritated. It's not that I want all literature to be "uplifting, " or
every story to have a happy ending, but if there is no poetry and no
understanding or insight, then I am left dissatisfied.

The reflecting or musing voice can also be a retrospective voice, it is
the stance we take when we look back over events which have occurred in
the past. And this voice is different from the one which does either
scene or summy (which I talked about in the plot chapter), although
sometimes one voice can move into another. The following passage from
This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff, illustrates this.



When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are
rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and
that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and
monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a
special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.

That assurance burns very bright at certain moments. It was burning
bright for me when Chuck and I left Seattle and started the long drive
home. I had just dumped a load of stolen goods. My wallet was thick with
bills which I would lose at cards one night, but which I then believed
would keep me going for months. In a couple of weeks I was leaving for
California. ..

Chuck felt good too. ..  We sang along with the radio and shared a
bottle of Canadian Club. ..  The deejay was playing songs from two or
three years before, songs that already made us nostalgic. The farther we
got from Seattle the louder we sang. (Pages 286-287)


Notice how the voice here starts out as the reflecting voice ("When we
are green, still half-created. ..  ), goes on to summarize without
refection ("I had just dumped a load of stolen goods. ..  "), and then
enters the scene itself ("We sang along with the radio and shared a
bottle of Canadian Club. ..  ").

A student of mine, a Latino who had been raised by his Irish mother and
her parents in a small town in Oregon, was very interested in this scene
and wanted to figure out what made it work so well. He wanted to find
some way to explore the cultural dislocations he sometimes felt as a
child of Mexican and Irish American parents, and thought that Wolff's
explorations of a different sort of cultural dislocation would help him.
This student went on to complete a fine memoir piece, which included the
following passage. It takes place after the death of his Irish
grandfather, and he has been taken out of the house by some of his
uncles. The excerpt shows a rite of passage that takes place for him
that day, Johnny, Al, Joe and Tony are smoking Camel Reds and pushing
drinks around on the table. If there were more glasses of beer it would
seem like an odd game of chess where no piece is bigger than another.
They are silent at moments and laughing at others. These are the four
men I see most often in my life, although Johnny less than others... .
They've chosen to come to the Riverside Inn tonight

after the funeral. The air in the house was suffocating thick with
grandfather's death. They wandered out of the house to this restaurant
on the side of the river where "there would be music, " someone had
said. But we're sitting outside in weather that is almost chilly, and
the door to the lounge is closed. We can only see the man inside,
mouthing Iyrics\to a song.

I have gone through some odd rite of passage tonight.


You hangin' in there kiddo? asks Tony. I nod yes and Uncle Joe puts down
a glass of something, rests his hand on my shoulder and smiles.

Dominc's okay he says to the rest of the group. Assuring them in some
way that I wouldn't bust out and cry. He's a strong kid.

Looking away from the patio and across the river I'm studying the
weakness of the moonlight. It barely reflects the swirls and sway of the
water. "This is the kind of night grandfather would hunt worms," I
mumble to myself. I'm surprised though. I've caught myself in the act
because now I know that grandfather won't be out tonight. I've said it
and I sit silently watching the other men around the table coming to
this realization too.

This student moves from scene to summary to reflection at the end of the
piece very skillfully. He doesn't completely pull out of the scene, as
Wolff does by giving us a piece of wisdom about ourselves when we are
young, but he does reflect on the meaning of what he has just said about
his grandfather digging worms. This student went on to write about his
growing awareness of the prejudice in his town towards Mexican
Americans, and this scene after his Irish grandfather's funeral
functions as a pivotal point where he moves from child to young adult.

The following exercises will help you to identify different possible
voices in your own writing and to use them for writing reflection,
scene, and summary, as well as for separating your protagonist self from
your narrating self.

EXERCISES (1) If at any point you get stuck in your writing, try to
imagine your protagonist self as different from your narrator self. Sit
that self across the room from you, and imagine him or her as different
from your present-day self. Now take five or ten minutes to write a
purely descriptive passage about that former self. Imagine clothes,
gestures, attitude, body language, and so forth, but always keep to
description, not evaluation or commentary.

(2) Now, try to listen to that earlier self. What does she or he have to
tell you about that moment in time long ago? What does that earlier self
know? What

does that protagonist self not know? Pick up your pen or pencil again
and try to write down the words that earlier self is telling you about
the direct experience of that moment in time.

(3) Look at books or essays you particularly admire and study the way in
which the author uses different voices, the reflective voice, the voice
which gives a summary, and the voice that enters into a scene
completely.

(4) Write a humorous summary of a time in your past in which you admit
your faults.

(5) Pick a moment in your past where you were young. Write about the
moment using only the language you would have used at that time of your
life.

(6) Now write about that same moment using the language you use today.
Notice the differences in the two voices.

(7) Write about an event using the language of the participants in it,
but not your own language. Use the habits of speech, the dialogue of the
other characters, to give a summary of the scene. To Tell or Not to Tell
TO TELL O R NOT TO TELL Ethical Considerations in Writing a Memoir
EVERYONE WHO WISHES TO PUBLISH a personal narrative, and most people who
write about their experiences struggle with certain ethical issues which
have to do with the lives of other people. If you are writing family
stories, and especially if you reveal family secrets, you may fear
hurting people who are dear to you. Or you may even be afraid of
reprisal. If you are writing about people who have done you some wrong,
you may fear other repercussions, maybe even a lawsuit. Think of the
doctor that gave you a wrong diagnosis, the teacher who shamed you in
front of the whole fourth grade class, the uncle who hired your father
in his firm, then refused to pay him a decent wage. Of course, you have
grudges against all of these people (or did at one time), yet you
probably want to resist sounding aggrieved or mean-spirited.


Even the most innocent description can sometimes displease. One of the
things I have often thought about is that the moment we start to write
we start to mythologize. We shape other people's lives into a form they
may not approve of, or even recognize. We might choose their
eccentricities as the most vivid way of giving a character sketch, and
we think we are being affectionate. The person so portrayed, however,
might very well not sense the affection, but instead feel embarrassed.

This might be a good time to return to the dialogue exercise from the
beginning of the book, focusing specifically on your fears of exposure,
embarrassment, or shame, as well as your fears of giving offense or of
causing reprisal. Write a dialogue with those voices in your head that
say you shouldn't be writing and you certainly shouldn't be thinking of
publishing. Write out all your fears and consider them carefully. Some
might be so strong and rational that you decide not to write certain
passages, or at least not to show them to other people. In other cases,
you might decide that your fears are largely groundless.

After you have identified some of your fears as groundless and others as
too important to ignore, attempt to make some distinctions between those
that remain. Use your common sense and decide where you want to rewrite,
where you want to seek permission for publishing from the people
involved, and where you feel you can go ahead and write exactly as you
wish.

Libel and Invasion of Privacy The most important of your worriesn of
course, is the possibility of a lawsuit claiming libel. Let's suppose
that you are seeking to publish a piece in which you portray a real
person in a bad light, the doctor who gave you a wrong diagnosis when
she might have known better, the neighbor who harassed you by refusing
to turn down the noise during loud parties or who put broken glass in
your driveway.

Let's suppose now that you want to publish an account of these wrongs.
In these cases, your editor and your publisher have an interest in
seeing that your writing doesn't provoke a lawsuit. Once they have
accepted a piece, they frequently ask their in-house counsel for
guidance before publication, and you will need to follow their
recommendations.

But what kinds of changes are you likely to have to make in your piece
of writing before it gets published? When I published my first book, I
was advised to change the names and identifying characteristics of the
people who did some wrong to my son. Doctors, teachers, and others who
made mistakes and actually in almost all cases I would call what they
did merely a mistake, since no maliciousness was ever intended were
disguised in this way.


To Tell or Not to Tell *

With the doctors and teachers who had been obtuse, I just went ahead and
wrote out the scenes in question. I took a lot of trouble to disguise
their identities, however, giving them different names and different
physical characteristics, and sometimes even combining several
characters into one. I still had nagging feelings about one or two of
them who were so kind and caring (even though they were mistaken about
my son's diagnosis), that I hesitated to include them in the book. But I
had to let the story itself tell me what belonged. I chose to tell of
their mistakes, because they were an important part of the story of
autism where misdiagnosis and even mistreatment is often a problem.


My son, in writing his afterword to the book, was much more concerned
about telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Perhaps because he has autism, he wanted strict accuracy in a way that I
did not. I was much more concerned with getting the emotional truth of
the story on paper, even if it meant changing chronology and the details
of an occasion or a character.

In Paul's case, however, our publisher asked us to prepare statements to
be signed by each of the people whose real names he had used. This is
probably what you will have to do if you too wish to be strictly
accurate. In these cases, the person has the oportunity to refuse to
sign or possibly to ask for changes before publication.


In the case of public figures, the rules of the game are a little
different. Usually, someone who is a public figure (an elected
representative, for example) has a harder time bringing a successful
suit against a writer and publisher simply because their lives are
already more public. In such cases, however, you should write carefully
and fairly. A mean-spirited or rancorous account might damage your own
credibility as well as land you in legal trouble. Work hard on the tone
of your writing, and when in doubt consult others, in particular your
editor.

Family Writing about family members can be a little trickier than
writing about people whom you have known only in a casual or
professional capacity. I struggled with my own hesitations and fears as
I was writing my first book. At first I wrote only for myself and I
wrote in pencil and in a notebook. Later, as the story began to grow and
become an entity in itself, I began to "listen to the story. " I was no
longer so concerned with real people and real events, or with giving
offense. The story itself began to carry me, to let me know what was
important and belonged in an account of a family struggling with autism.

At that point I began to heighten some events that occured in my family
and sometimes to combine several moments into a single occasion. I
decided to all To Tell or Not to Tell *

r .

low the story to demand its own shape, and then I got out of its way.
Many writers are very uncomfortable doing this. Like my son, they value
strict verifiable accuracy more highly than I do. You have to make this
decision for yourself. If you are writing about public or historical
events, you should check and recheck your facts. If, on the other hand,
you are writing a very personal story, as I was, your piece might turn
out to be very close to fiction. In fact, some literature which is
called "fiction" recounts events that are true in the strictest sense of
the word.

Having said all this, however, I have to confess that my book did give
offense to some members of my extended family. My immediate family was
very involved in the writing of the book, in the sense that they read
all passages where they appeared and they always had veto power over the
way they were characterized in these passages. But others were, I felt,
too far removed from the immediate story to have a stake in how it was
written. I knew that if I stopped and consulted everyone who appeared in
the book (or whose parents or sister or brother appeared in the book),
it would never get written, much less published. So I decided to deal
with the fallout later, and that is exactly what happened. Some people
did say (usually indirectly through others) that they had been hurt by
the way I wrote about my extended family. In one case, mentioning
relative poverty was deemed shamefulxanother case, portraying one part
of my family as worldly achievers (but not as scholarly) gave offense.

I brooded for months (and even years) over the ways I characterized my
larger family, but never came up with a way of doing it differently. I
felt that once I had made the decision to write and to publish I was
bound to offend someone. Novelists I know have said the same. Even in a
work of fiction, real people can find themselves portrayed in the story
and take umbrage. Sometimes, in fact, they are even offended that they
don't appear when others do.

Dealing With Family or Community Secrets Writing about family secrets is
one of the most difficult dilemmas you are likely to face. Just about
all families have secrets they wish to keep hidden. Often there are
different versions of what happened in the past. Sometimes over many
years of telling stories, families re-create memories to suit some
larger purpose, perhaps to protect an idealized version of themselves,
even at the cost of "truth. " Most of the time, they probably aren't
even aware that they do this.

There are some important rules of thumb here, however. If you write
about family secrets (the suicide of a great grandfather, the
homosexuality of a cousin who is not "out, " the feud between different
family members that has gone on for generations, etc. ), you might want
to consult the people in question. If your To Tell or Not to Tell
portrayal of them is very revealing, show them passages and ask their
permission to write about them in the ways you have chosen. In certain
cases you should probably give them veto power.

In other instances, where the story is an old, old one and all the
direct participants have long since died, you might decide just to go
ahead and write. You may call or write to people who know the story or
some part of it and give them a chance to supplement or even to correct
your memory. Give them a chance to tell the story their own way and, if
their interpretation of events is different from yours, get permission
to include it. As we have seen in earlier chapters, this can add to the
layers of narrative and enrich your writing immeasurably.

Some of my students wrote or called family members when they worked on
pieces for my class. In most cases, a mother or a sister cooperated
enthusiastically with the project, filling in bits the writer was too
young to know or remembered differently. One student writer began
passages of her narrative with direct quotations from her mother's
letters. For another, a phone conversation with her sister concerning a
terrible accident and injury suffered by the sister provided the perfect
closure for her piece. This conversation moved both sisters to a new
level of understanding, one which they might not have reached so quickly
if the writing hadn't prompted the phone call. As they learned, life and
art do sometimes intertwine in wonderful ways and writing can help us
complete the process begun by living.

Sometimes, however, family secrets pose great difficulties for the
writer. If you as writer insist on remembering accurately (as accurately
as possible), you may be punished for holding on to the memory.
Knowledge or memory can be experienced as a terrible burden. In fact, in
every family, we are sometimes told, there is one member designated to
hear the secrets of the past and then forbidden to retell those secrets.
Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir of growing up Chinese-American, The Woman
Warrior, which we looked at earlier, begins with the mother telling the
daughter, "You must not tell anyone. ..  what I am about to tell you. In
China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the
family well. We say that your father has brothers because it is as if
she had never been born."

The mother burdens the child with a secret from the past which has been
so repressed in official family history that the story about the dead
aunt is a story about "No Name Woman. " For the father, whose sister it
was who gave birth to her illegitimate child in a pig sty then killed
herself and her baby, "it is as if she had never been born. " Of course,
Kingston, like any bright child burdened with too much knowledge, must
begin her wonderful narrative by telling this story. And thus a taboo is
broken, a family rule vio To Tell or Not to Tell w m

lated, the aunt's story is told, and she is reborn in narrative.

A recent book, Seamus Deane's Reading in thedark, also illustrates these
different aspects of memory beautifully. The child in this narrative is
never named (as Kingston never names herself in her narrative), his
childhood is also lived among ghosts, and he too is burdened with an
unbearable secret from the past. In this case, he grows up in Derry, in
Northern Ireland, the second child of a Catholic family to which some
terrible unknown betrayal has happened in the past. At first the "ghost"
in the narrative is merely "a shadow," "somebody unhappy" sensed at the
turning of the stairs by the mother who sends her young son downstairs
until the ghost passes. The child expresses an innocent wish to stand
beside his mother and face whatever it is she has to face, "I don't mind
feeling it. It's a bit like the smell of damp clothes isn't it? " he
asks hopefully.

But later the child's stubborn questioning gets him into a lot of
trouble, and he quickly finds out that learning things straight is taken
as an act of treachery in the family. He is told the dark secret about a
family betrayal involving the IRA but is implicitly forbidden to retell
it. He knows, but he will be banished for know i. Thus after hearing the
story from his dying grandfath+, the narrator "left him and went
straight home, home, where I could never talk to my father or my mother
properly again. " (Page 126)


But even before this event, very early in his narrative, Deane retells a
true story as a lie in order to show how important it is to lie or to
deny in order to maintain the family and the community. The protagonist
has witnessed the death of a child who was killed by a reversing lorry,
the large truck backing up over a little boy. Shortly afterwards a
policeman arrives and is so overcome that he vomits.

I think he felt sick. His distress reached me, airborne, like a smell,
in a small vertigo, I sat down on the wall. ..  For months, I kept
seeing the lorry reversing, and Rory Hannaway's arm going out as he was
wound under. Somebody told me that one of the policemen had vomited on
the other side of the lorry. I felt the vertigo again on hearing this
and, with it, pity for the man. But this seemed wrong, everyone hated
the police, told us to stay away from them, that they were a bad lot. So
I said nothing, especially as I had felt scarcely anything for Rory's
mother or the lorry driver. ..  " (Page 11-12).

As it exists, this memory, though true, is unacceptable. It is only when
another child retells "in detail how young Rory had been run over by a
police car which had not even stopped" (page 12) that the protagonist
finds "the subtle sense of treachery I had felt from the start" somehow
allayed. The random cruelty of fate is unacceptable, as is a policeman's
pain and sympathy for the dead boy and the grieving mother. It is much
easier to assign wrong to the police than to fate or to one's own
family, as this child is later asked to do when he learns the truth
about his own grandfather and mother.

Although Deane's book is published as a novel, the issues it raises
apply also to memoir. The book has been widely assumed to be
autobiographical, and even though Deane has said that he knows of three
families with the kind of history told in his book, he also admits that
large parts of his book are drawn from his own life and that he couldn't
have published this book until after the death of his mother. Reading in
the Dark is an important book to examine closely if you too are
struggling with shape-shifting stories from the past in your family or
community. Deane's book enacts the narrative strategies of concealment
and erasure of memory which are in fact its subject, and which are
frequent subjects of memoir. For example, the child wrote out the
forbidden story in Irish, but in doing so he still revealed nothing, I
decided to write it all out in an exercise book, partly to get it clear,
partly to rehearse it and decide which details to include or leave out.
But the fear that someone would find it and read it overcame me. So,
with the help of a dictionary, I translated it all into Irish, taking
more than a week to do it. Then \f I destroyed the English version,
burning it in front of my mother's eyes, even though she told me I would
clog up the fire with the paper. (Page 194)

The boy reads the Irish essay aloud to his father, who cannot understand
it, but "said he liked to hear the language spoken in the house. " His
mother, who also knows no Irish, nevertheless guesses what her son is
doing revealing that he knows the story, but in a way that the father
cannot understand. In the end, we have to believe that the narrator did
the only thing he could possibly have done, he kept the mother's secret
and participated in the family's silence for many years. But we are also
grateful that the story that had to remain unspoken in life could become
the powerfully written after death.

"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, " Emily Dickinson cautioned us,
echoing Hamlet's famous dictum, "By indirections, find directions out."
All the narrative strategies of indirection multiple tellings,
"official" family versions, myths and ghost stories from the past,
letters and other documents that contradict memories are particularly
useful in the contemporary memoir. It is precisely the "truth" claims of
the form which can make the memoir so rich. The truth is rarely simple
and straightforward, families rarely agree on events from the past, and
memory itself is slippery. Telling a story in multiple ways enriches it
and makes it more interesting, rather than less. And To Tell or Not to
Tell the narrator's voice (yours), musing on the process by which a
memory is constructed and reconstructed also adds a new dimension to the
telling. I hope you can see, from all this, that many stories can be
told, including some family secrets, through these different strategies
of indirection.

PERHAPS YOU TOO have a painful story to tell. Maybe it is one which you
can only tell to yourself, or write in pencil in a notebook which you
keep on a high shelf. Or maybe you will eventually try to publish your
story. Only you can decide what it is you want to do. But whatever it
is, I hope that this book will help, that it will give you ideas and
reassurance and focus and that it will be a companion to you on your own
Journey.

FXERCISES (1) Distinguish between writing for yourself and writing for
the eyes of others. Remember you "own" your own truths, and owe nobody
an apology if you are writing for yourself alone. Ask family members to
respect your privacy and give them the same.

(2) If you want to take your writing one step further and make it
available to others, either through publication or private distribution,
try to make some other distinctions. List those people who are central
to the narrative and those that are tangential. For those people whose
lives are intimately connected with yours or with your story, ask for
permission before you share your writing with lots of other people,
especially if you wish to publish.

(3) If you are in doubt about whether or not your writing could be
construed as libelous, consult an expert in publishing law. There are
handbooks which will provide some guidance, for example The Associated
Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, but remember that this manual is
written with reporting in mind where the rules are somewhat different
from memoir publishing. If you have a publisher, seek advice from your
editor and understand the parts of your contract concerning warranty and
indemnification.

Recommended Reading The following is a list of books which I have found
particularly moving or helpful. The list, of course, follows my own
preferences and chance acquaintance and does not reflect a systematic
reading through of the contemporary memoir. Where the title does not
explain the contents, I have added a brief explanation in parentheses.
Included are the secondary sources mentioned. Books discussed in the
text are preceeded by an asterisk (*).

* Alden, Paulette Bates. Crossing the Moon, A Journey Through
Infertility, 1996.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (the childhood of the
black writer, dancer, singer, and poet), 1969.

Ascher, Barbara Lazear. Landscape Without Gravity (her brother's death
from AIDS), 1993.

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son (growing up black in America),
1955.

* Barry, Sebastian. "Note From the Dead, " from Dublines, Katie Donovan
and Brendan Kennelly, eds.,  1996.

Beauvoir, Simone de. A Very Easy Death (the death of her mother), 1985.

Bernstein, Jane. Loving Rachel (life with a blind daughter), 1988.

., * Boland, Eavan. Object Lessons, The Life of the Woman and the Poet
in Our Time (memoir of the female Irish poet), 1995.

Busselle, Rebecca. An Exposure of the Heart (a photographer's year among
the disabled), 1989.

Cary, Lorene. Black Ice (a black girl attending an all-white school),
1991.

* Chandler, Marilyn. A Healing Art, Regeneration Through Autobiography,
1990.

Clark, Clara Claiborne. The Seige, the First Eight Years of an Autistic
Child's Life (a mother's account), 1967.

Conroy, Frank. Stop-Time, The Classic Memoir of Adolescence, 1965.

* Crews, Harry. A Childhood, The Biography of a Place, 1978.

* Deane, Seamus. Reading in the Dark (growing up in Derry, Northern
Ireland), 1997.

Dew, Robb Foeman. The Family Heart, A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out,
1994.

Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood, 1987.

Dillard, Annie and Cort Conley, eds. Modern American Memoirs (an
anthology), 1995.

Fields, Wayne. What the River Knows (a journey of personal discovery
while searching for the origin of a river), 1990.

Finger, Anne. Past Due, A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth,
1990.

Gilbert, Sandra. Wrongful Death, a Medical Tragedy (death of her
husband), 1995.

Gordon, Mary. The Shadow Man, A Daughter's Search for Her Father, 1996,
* Gornick, Viaian. Fierceattachments (mother- daughter ties), 1987.

Graham, Lautie. Rebuilding the House (death of her husband), 1990.

* Grealy, Luiy. Autobiography of a Face (growing up with cancer and
disfigurement), 1994.

Greer, G+maine. Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (the search to learyabout a
dead father), 1989.


l Recommended Reading *

Hammer, Signed. By Her Own Hand, Memoirs of a Suicide'sdaughter, 1991.

Hampl, Patricia. A Romantic Education (growing up in St. Paul and
journey to Prague), 1981.

Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss (a daughter seduced by her father), 1997.

* Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery, 1992.

Heron, Echo. Intensive Care, The Story of a Nurse, 1987.

Hill, Susan. Family (death of a premature child), 1989.

* Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation (immigration to Canada from Poland),
1989.

Hoffman, Richard. Half the House (child abuse), 1995.

Israeloff, Roberta. In Confidence, Four Years of Therapy, 1990.


Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind, A Memoir of Moods and Madness,
1995.

Johnson, Fenton. Geography of the Heart (death of a gay partner), 1996.

* Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted (mental illness), 1993.

Karr, Mary. The Liar's Club (a troubled childhood with a mentally ill
mother), 1995.

Kehoe, Louise. In This Dark House (a search to discover the true
identity of a father), 1995.

* Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a Girlhood Among
Ghosts (growing up Chinese-American), 1975.

* Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying, 1969.

Kupfer, Fern. Before and After Zachariah (a brain-damaged child), 1982.

* Kusz, Natalie. Road Song (growing up in Alaska and survival after a
sled-dog attack), 1990.

Landsman, Julie. Basic Needs, A Year with Street Kids in a City School,
1993.

Lear, Martha Weinman. Heart-Sounds, The Story of Love and Loss
(husband's illness and death from heart disease), 1980.

Mairs, Nancy. Remembering the Bone House (a personal history \

\

\


told by examining houses lived in, as well as the "bone house," the
body), 1989.

* Mccarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 1957.

* Mccourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes (a childhood in the slums of Limerick,
Ireland), 1996.

* McDonnell, Jane Taylor. News From the Border, A Mother's Memoir of her
Autistic Son, (with an afterword by Paul McDonnell)

1993.

Millett, Kate. The Looney-Bin Trip (struggle with manicdepression and
with the authorities), 1990.

Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time, Becoming a Man, and Last Watch of the
Night (a gay man writes of battling AIDS), 1992-1994.

Morrison, Blake. And When Did You Last See Your father? A Son's Memoir
of Love and Loss, 1993.

Nyala, Hannah. Point Last Seen (a wilderness tracker fleeing an abusive
marriage), 1997.

Norris, Kathleen. Dakota, A Spiritual Geography, 1993.

Phillips, Jane. The Magic Daughter, A Memoir of Living with Multiple
Personality Disorder, 1995.

Ratushinskaya, Irina. Grey Is the Color of Hope (four years in a
Siberian labor camp), 1988.

Rice, Rebecca. A Time to Mourn, One Woman's Journey Through Widowhood,
1990.

Rhett, Kathryn. Survival Stories, Memoirs of Crisis, 1997.

Rhodes, Richard. A Hole in the World (child abuse and neglect), 1990.

Roth, Philip. Patrimony (father's death from brain cancer), 1991.

Sacks, Oliver. A Leg to Stand On (the famous neurologist writes of his
own injury and recovery), 1984.

Schreiber, Leanne. Midstream, The Story of a Mother's Death and a
Daughter's Renezual, 1990.

Sidransky, Ruth. In Silence, Growing up Hearing in a Deaf World, 1990.

* Steinem, Gloria. "Ruth's Song, Because She Could Not Sing Recommended
Reading It, " (account of childhood with mentally ill mother), from
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983.

Taylor, Nick. A Necessary End (death of parents), 1993.

Walker, Lou Ann. A Loss for Words, The Story of Deafness in a Family
(growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf parents), 1986.

Wexler, Alice. Mappingeate, a Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic
Research (a family with Huntingdon's Disease), 1995.

* Wiesel, Elie. Night (the survivor of a Nazi death camp), 1960.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge, An Unnatural History of Family and
Place (cancer deaths and ecology), 1991.

* Wolf, Christa. A Model Childhood, (growing up in Nazi Germany), 1980.

Wolff, Geoffrey. The Duke of Deception, Memories of My Father (Geoffrey
and Tobias are brothers), 1979.

* Wolff, Tobias. This Boy's Life (child abuse and escape), 1989.

The End.