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MY MOTHER'S HOUSE, A Memoir, is my first book. In the course of the eight years it took me to complete it, I learned a lot about writing memoirs. I would like to share something of what I learned. Here is my first three articles on the subject:
FOUR BASICS OF MEMOIR WRITING
MEMOIR VERSUS JOURNAL WRITING AS THERAPY
TRUTH AND IMAGINATION IN THE MEMOIR
"Your site is not only perfect for a memoirist, Alexa, it is fast becoming a to-go place for writers to learn more!"
~ Carolyn Howard-Johnson, writing instructor and author of the award-winning This Is the Place
Soon I will have more articles, both by me and others, on memoir writing and other forms of writing.
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FOUR BASICS OF MEMOIR WRITING
Memoirs are immensely popular today as a form of writing about one’s life. But clarity is essential to any kind of writing, and journals and autobiographies are also versions of life-writing. Which are you pursuing? If you can clarify the type of life-writing upon which you’re embarking, it will help you focus the story you want to tell. Once you attain this clarity, you will be able to make your story more compelling.
1. AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The dictionary actually does not differentiate between memoir and autobiography. So this is the way I’ve broken it down.
Autobiography focuses on a certain period of years, determined by the author. Those years might cover childhood and teens and then stop, or they might cover the person’s middle years. Then again the autobiography might encompass all of one’s life until the present moment. The autobiographer includes everything he or she finds of interest about their life during the chosen years; and because autobiography is a story, it reveals how the people and events encountered during those years did or did not brought epiphanies and changed, or did not change, the writer.
On the other hand, memoir will immerse the reader in a certain aspect of the narrator’s life.
2. MEMOIR
The aspect which the writer selects might be a relationship with a parent (in MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, A Memoir, my entire book is about my relationship with my mother during various stages of our lives). But the memoir could as easily contend with the narrator’s experience with both parents, or with their whole family, or a spouse or child or children – even a pet.
However, the memoir might also attend to a particular struggle – with alcoholism or drugs, with being an abused spouse, with an illness, or with the particular challenges of being a teen. One short but very intense adventure might comprise a memoir as well: climbing a mountain, falling in love for the first time, surviving a trip through the desert, living for a year in Paris.
Memoirs by celebrities usually emphasize the details of the individual’s career and include whatever extraneous experiences are directly or tangentially related to their careers; but anyone could write about their careers and the experiences which relate to them. You could even write a memoir about your relationship with a house or city or other geographical area and how it shaped you, whom you met and what you learned there and who you became because of that experience.
3. MEMOIR VS. JOURNAL WRITING
Another matter that comes up for the person writing about their life is the difference between memoir and journal. A journal consists primarily of notes to oneself about various incidents. By contrast, a memoir approaches an incident or event with the same level of detail as fiction.
For instance, in a journal, you write about meeting an old flame at a local store. You name the person, the store, the day. You might even include the weather. You can see all of this in your mind. You might also say, “He was just as charming as I remember.” Or, “He’s still very manipulative.” You recognize all the parts of the description through the shorthand of your own emotions and history; but the reader recognizes none of this shorthand and so none of it has any meaning for the reader. And so, why should they read on?
Memoir – which one writes for others to read - must provide all the information missing in the journal.
4. SCENES IN MEMOIR
The memoir plays out as a story. In that way, the memoir is like fiction.
Like fiction, the narrative of the memoir is composed of scenes.
I think of a scene in a memoir as cracking the egg. If you want to enthrall your reader, you have to crack open all the physical details and feelings of each scene and let them emerge.
Any description of a locale must include colors, sounds, smells, indeed, all the sensations that create the particular ambiance in which the scene plays out.
Any dialogue must be as concise and realistic as fiction dialogue (unless taken from a dream the narrator is describing or something similar) and must move the story forward in the same way, as opposed to actual dialogue, through which we can just piddle along for quite a while before we get to the important parts of our conversations.
If a scene in a memoir is about meeting a charming old flame, you need to describe how the old flame looks. You must also “show” and not “tell” how that charm manifests itself. (Contrary to the axiom, there are times when “telling” is better than “showing,” but this is not one of them.) You must capture that charm through describing how the person dresses, their particular mannerisms and other behaviors, and through dialogue. At the same time, you could use both the charmer’s behavior and dialogue to reveal other, underlying aspects their character and foreshadow future events. Readers will then feel compelled to find out what happens next.
*****
MEMOIR VERSUS JOURNAL WRITING AS THERAPY
About six years into the endless rewriting of my first book, MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, A Memoir, people commented, “Well, at least it’s good therapy.” Well, no, I had to say. Therapy is therapy. Writing is writing.
It’s true that I needed to tell the story of my fifty-plus years of relationship with my mother. But this need came as much from my writer’s soul, to capture The Story, as to get the personal story out of myself. This writer’s need comprises one of the two exceptions to that fact that journal writing, not memoir, is the primary form of life-writing that works as therapy.
The quest of therapy is to learn about your feelings, needs, desires, and so on, in order to realize the meaning of your life and perhaps change accordingly. Journaling helps you achieve this. In a journal, you are concerned with telling yourself your story, clarifying it for yourself. Memoir, however, is a story form about some aspect of your life that you share with, and must interest, others.
In a journal you write, “I ran into John at the supermarket yesterday.” You don’t have to describe the special ambiance of that supermarket in that part of town. You don’t have to explain who John is because you already know. “John” is a kind of shorthand for a whole experience of this man.
Of course you might decide to jot down some salient details about John today and/or yesterday, either for yourself or for reference if you eventually do write a memoir. But in a journal, this is a choice, not a necessity. Moreover, you needn’t describe John in complete sentences. Phrases that make sense to you will work just fine in a journal. And you can choose not to write such details as well.
Then there’s dialogue. “We talked about – ” and, journaling, you can report what John and you talked about. Or you can choose to repeat the some or all of the actual exchange. I once had a conversation with someone who was making me crazy. The only way I could understand how he did it was to write every word either of us said after a particularly grueling chat. But if you do write down everything the two of you said, you do not have to edit it for a journal; whereas with a memoir you must shape the dialogue, including deleting everything that does not move the story along.
Chronology is yet another factor separating a journal from a memoir. In a journal, scenes flow onto the pages as you remember them. But a memoir requires deliberate story structure. The scenes need not follow a straight line; you can have flashbacks and other deviations. But you must decide on their order.
And, naturally, in a journal you can use cliches because, again, this material is only for yourself. “I remember when he broke my heart.” You know what you mean. You do not need to entice anyone else by depicting your singular experience of a broken heart.
Finally, in a journal, you can provide a lot of exposition. But a memoir is like fiction in that too much exposition bogs down your tale, and the tale is the thing you are pursuing. Taking on a memoir, you are a writer.
All the people in a memoir are characters. They are as three-dimensional, as fully portrayed, as in fiction, except that they are real. At the same time, you are totally focused on getting each scene exactly right, getting down the tone of voice of each character as well as their small, telling behaviors, presenting dialogue that reflects the characters and keeps the story moving, describing the setting so vividly that it becomes intrinsic to the story, and capturing the precise emotions of the moment in a way that entices or repels or otherwise affects the reader viscerally and emotionally – and linking all the scenes in the right way.
This kind of attention to the story separates you, the writer, from you, the person who would use writing as therapy.
However,
as mentioned earlier, there is one other time when a memoir can be
theraputic. In order to strip away the superficialities of an emotional
scene and get to its core, in order to avoid cliches, it is often
necessary to put away your writer self, go back in time and immerse
yourself in your memory.
Feel
everything in the moment you want to describe as intensely as possible.
Feel it emotionally and in your body and how and where in your body it
manifests itself. Become acutely aware of how you are feeling and what
you are seeing, hearing, smelling; and notice how everything in the
external world appears to you in the emotional state into which you’ve
placed yourself. Pay attention until you can describe it all exactly.
But then return to your writer self and get it all down.
For
ultimately the memoirist is always looking at their material with the
writer’s objectivity, polishing each scene again and again, and
rechecking the way the scenes are linked to build a story that will
engage, if not compel, the reader, which is the primary goal of the
story-teller.
*****
TRUTH AND IMAGINATION IN MEMOIRS
Recently in a writing class, I was working on my next memoir. But I just couldn’t get the right angle on my material, and I therefore could not hold the group’s interest. One suggestion after my third rewrite was, “Embellish it.” Someone else said, “Just make things up. You can do that in a memoir.” Several heads nodded in agreement.
I was startled at the ease with which these writers were willing to fictionalize a memoir. For one thing, James Frey was still being hotly discussed – and condemned – for calling something that was largely fiction true. For another, their view was so antithetical to my own. I have always believed that if you possess the insight and skill to really capture an event, the truth of it will provide all the drama necessary to rivet the reader.
This is not to say that every event about which a memoirist writes requires every last detail to be exact. The memoirist relies upon her memories, which contain lacunae and distortions. I remember the event one way; the other person in the recalled scene remembers it differently. Maybe I don’t recall a particular conversation or essential incident at all.
However, if you are absolutely certain your memory is correct, then that is the way to write the story. You simply do your best. As Tobias Wolff says, “It all has to do with the intention.” That intention, as Colleen Mondor writes, is to tell “an honest story.”
But what about the times when you’re not certain your memory is correct? One approach to the material is to tell your readers, “This is the way I remember it.” Your uncertainty can in fact become part of the story, part of the ambiguity of a life of which you are trying to make sense in your memoir.
Keep in mind, thought, that another requirement of the memoir is that you must keep the story moving forward. Sometimes this precludes signaling the reader that the next scene may be inaccurate.
In “MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, A Memoir,” my first book, about ninety-five percent of the dialogue between my mother and myself is exact. We were very close –sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad – and all the episodes and periods of our relationship about which I write were very emotional, fraught with an intensity that made the details, especially our verbal exchanges, indelible in my mind. Moreover, my mother had a flair for language that added to my awareness of her use of it.
But what words did my mother use when she explained her treatments of the cancer she eventually conquered? I just couldn’t hear her in my mind. Should I tell the reader, “Well, here my memory is a little hazy about exactly what we said, but it went something like this.” However, throughout the rest of the book, I’ve got our sundry conflicts, diatribes and conversations nailed. Ultimately, I decided that pulling the reader into my memory process by explaining it would also take them out of their experience of the story. I recalled enough bits and pieces of what Mother and I said to inventively fill in the rest as best I could. So, for the sake of the narrative, that’s what I did.
Similarly, you may indeed recall an event exactly, but that very exactitude might derail the momentum of the story or distract the reader from the meaning of the scene. In my book an incident occurs in which I deliberately altered a detail for both reasons. In reality the scene took place while my mother was sitting on the toilet. I switched it to the kitchen table.
Then there are those moments you are recounting in which you cannot possibly know what the other person felt. They never told you, and you were not there when the incident occurred.
If you make up the scene and don’t inform the reader, you will be deceiving her. But another way to resolve this quandary is to say, “I can imagine the terror/pain/joy she must have felt when – ” and then, knowing the person, go on to imagine those emotions for the reader. Similarly, you can “just imagine” the way this person thought or what she must have done when she got that job or caught that plane.
Some memoirists employ very large swaths of fiction among their memories. But where the intention is an honest story, the writer will indicate to the reader in some way that these are fabricated deviations from what actually happened. The problem comes when no such signal is sent.
While Frey is the ultimate liar, another memoirist, for the sake of story convenience, might give us composite characters – while leading the reader to believe they are actual people. To me, that choice exceeds legitimate alterations.
In the end, the key thing is for the writer to maintain integrity and the trust of readers. The public already must contend with a staggeringly obscured reality. Most politicians lie; some lie like crazy. They all spin reality. The corporate media quotes the lies and spin without discrimination or investigation, while coming up with its own myths. Digital cameras can transform any visual reality into any other visual reality. What is true? What really happened? We can’t even depend upon the food we eat to be real.
Currently, one company is considering placing mouse genes in pigs and not labeling the meat as such. Once they get that down, they will clone the pigs. Then we’ll be eating the genetically exact same animal over and over, with its genetically identical mouse genes, and not even know it. Indeed, I once read that a species is defined as "a closed gene pool." If this is true, then what about experiments in which human genes are spliced into salmon (or some other animal)? What is human? What is salmon?
We ought at least to be able to rely upon someone who is sharing with us some aspect of their own life story, from which they learned this or that, and from which we might learn the same, to tell it truthfully.
Thank you for visiting my site.
Alexa Wolf
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