Memoir - again
Working with my Memoir group I’ve been, once again, astonished by the courage with which writers are willing to go towards their lives and wrestle with the values that lie (perhaps the pun on ‘lie’ should be intentional) behind the facts. One woman was writing about a sister she hadn’t seen in over 40 years (because of adoptions laws) and her narrative was one in which she approached again and again her sense that she ‘should’ feel something particular for this person, her sister, but actually she didn’t, and couldn’t, and didn’t want to. She asked questions that had no easy answers, always returned to the gap that existed between what she wanted to be the case, what she hoped would be the case, and what actually existed when seen by the cold light of dawn.
Another woman wrote an astounding piece in which she tried to recreate the moment (at age 5) she first felt the symptoms of the disease that would so damage her body and cause so much pain for the rest of her life. How can one remember these things, and is the memory likely to be accurate? Or will it be pieced together later out of things that one is told? And will that information be accurate? And, above all, what did it feel like just before the symptoms struck, when life was, for the very last second, ordinary, normal, easy…? How does one get to the heart of that?
Perhaps one never can. Perhaps it’s simply the attempt to do so that matters. Perhaps truth has its limits, its sell-by date. We can only ever give a gesture towards the complex thoughts that swirl through us at those moments.
Many years ago Virginia Woolf pioneered the idea of the stream of consciousness in writing. This was, as many of you will know, the technique of recording a seemingly unedited stream of ideas, such as they might be if we had a tape recorder (which hadn’t been invented at that time) embedded in our brains, recording every little wayward thought. James Joyce, of course, was famous for getting inside Molly Bloom’s head in this way.
The trouble with this approach is that thoughts move far faster than anyone’s ability to record them, so it is always a case of the edited highlights only, and the emphasis is on ‘edited’.
In my work with Memoirists, however, I think I’ve come across something even more vital than this – the sorts of narratives I’ve just tried to describe. And that is the narrative the circles around, like a dog at a bone, trying to find truth and uncover memory, by attacking an event from different angles, over and over again. In terms of the readability of the writing this can be a bit of a challenge if one is expecting neatly crafted sentences of clarity and poise. The mind doesn’t work that way, although the brain can. This type of circling, sometimes repetitive, hypnotic narrative is what we see in Faulkner at times, and he was certainly worth making the effort to understand.
I suspect that this way of writing is, in fact, a new departure in writing generally. Some of my colleagues don’t like it, don’t understand it, and urge memoirists not to write it. They want things to be tidy and literary.
But the mind isn’t tidy and literary – at least not when it’s being authentic.
on October 22nd, 2008 at 10:02 am
Seeking solace on this rainy morning, I came to your blog after two pre-dawn hours of slogging through my own memoir. And here you are — spurring me on by reminding me why I do it - a nourishing respite, indeed.
And thank you also for reminding me of Virginia Woolf, who, late in life, wrote to a friend:
“I sometimes think only autobiography is literature. Novels are what we peel off and come at last to the core which is only you or me.”
Now it’s back to making story from life. I couldn’t do it without you.
MLou
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on October 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I’m so glad to have provided some solace and encouragement for you as you work on the Memoir, Mary Lou, because it probably is the hardest work any of us can ever do, truly. But that doesn’t mean we can do it less than fully. Virginia Woolf had an important point, too….
We are here, after all, to try and make more sense of our world, each day, and we need each others’ support; all of us.
Allan
on October 22nd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Which reminds me of Jill Kerr Conway who said in a lecture to a sell-out crowd at the JFK Libary back in 1999:
“To write about one’s life, one can’t not deal with free will or one’s deepest moral concerns.
Reading memoirs and autobiographies are ways to shape up to those questions for ourselves. Just as the author must think in order to write the memoir, the ensuing narrative provides a reader with a benchmark to gauge her or his progress.”
And it’s the struggle to locate those benchmarks in “the ensuing narrative” which you help me to embrace, dear administrator, with your books and your teachings.
Thank you.
MLou
on October 22nd, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Oh, what a great quotation that is! How well she puts it. That’s one to remember for all time.
Thank you, again, Mary Lou. yours struggle is an honorable one. In fact, the struggle to write and understand one’s life is really the only game in town.
As ever, Allan
on October 23rd, 2008 at 12:43 am
Thanks for helping me stay “in the game.” MLou