|
What
is the Contemporary Memoir?
by: Karen Propp
It’s no accident that the United
States is the country in which the memoir is most alive—ideally, the
form allows for the democratization of the individual. All lives are
important, says the memoir. Every “I” has a voice. And speaking personally,
even intimately, about one’s self seems to be a particularly American
pastime. (Think Oprah. Think therapist’s offices. Think the confessional
poets of the 1970s.)
The contemporary memoir is a form of autobiography, in that the writer
is recounting true events from his or her own life. But the memoir is
different from the autobiography in some crucial ways. Memoirs usually
tell of a certain aspect of a life rather than the whole life. Memoir,
says writer William Zinsser, is a “window into a life.” He means that
memoir frames a particularly vivid or charged part of a life. Sometimes
that charged time is childhood, but equally often that window could
be, for example: the years spent training for a particular career; the
first year of parenting; an illness or other crisis; a spiritual conversion;
family; unemployment; prison. . . The field’s wide open. Often the most
challenging part of writing a memoir is deciding where to place the
frame. Into what window do you want your readers to see?
Another way memoirs differ from autobiography is that memoirs are less
concerned with setting down the facts of an historical record and are
more concerned with how you experienced events and what you think of
those events. I want to record how the world comes at me,” says essayist
Philip Lopate. Your memoir is the lens through which you see. And one
of rewards of memoir writing is that often it’s a way of seeing the
more clearly.
A memoir is meant to be read by other people. Memoirs are crafted and
shaped and revised. A good memoir takes time and toil. And though the
memoir may recount fairly recent events, it won’t be evaluating “the
day before” because memoirs take longer than that to write.
Memoirs should also not be confused with diaries or journals, or even
blogging, which mostly recount events as they happen. Diaries and journals
are written mostly just for the writer. In these forms, the writer should
let the words pour out without giving much thought to form or content.
This kind of writing can be a useful tool with which to “vent” or “work
through” your feelings, but should not be confused with the end result.
Story is memoir’s closest cousin. Sometimes called first-person narrative
or first-person account, a memoir tells a story. Deciding what story
to tell and how to tell it is what will distinguish a memoir. Deciding
what story to tell means not only deciding whether to tell the story
of the fire that ravaged your apartment building or the time you had
a near-death experience, but also whether to begin the story with the
moment you first smelled smoke or with a description of what your apartment
looked like intact or with a time after the fire when you itemized your
possessions. Deciding how to tell the story means deciding when to use
dialogue, how to convey and develop a character (yourself; the insurance
agent), when to describe, summarize, flashback . . . A memoir does not
have to move in chronological order. Often they move fluidly back and
forth in time. The memoirist has the fiction writer’s toolbox at his
or her disposal. It may help if you think of a memoir as something that
reads like a work of fiction… but is true.
The contemporary memoir is really a recent phenomenon. Some works in
the past were certainly cut from the same cloth as the contemporary
memoir – Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden, and Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, to name a few.
But the start of the contemporary memoir movement is often pinpointed
as Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, a beautifully written account of
a somewhat average boyhood, published in 1967. Gradually other memoirs
of note began appearing, such as Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life
and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. It became a craze, with memoirs
sprouting all over the shelves of bookstores and frequently climbing
the bestseller lists. And then there was Frank McCourt’s Angela’s
Ashes, published in 1996, which became one of the most popular books
of our time.
The memoir craze has leveled off a little since then, but memoirs continue
to be published and read by millions of readers. For better or worse,
the contemporary memoir has become an established and respectable form
of literature. It seems it’s here to stay.
It’s important to understand that memoirs usually deal with a specific
aspect of your life. If you tried to include your whole life or even
a large segment of it, there would simply be too much to tell. Nor would
you have a well-crafted story. You would have something closer to a
historical autobiography. Or, perhaps, a mess.
Benjamin Franklin wrote a famous autobiography that chronicled many
major events in his very eventful life. It’s called, appropriately enough,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. If he were alive today,
however, and desired to write a contemporary memoir, he would write
a substantially different book. He might write about his experience
discovering electricity by flying a kite. Or he might write about the
week in which the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Or he might
write about his relationship with one of his mistresses. Or his wife.
The point is: he would have to choose a specific aspect of his life
for the book.
Finding the subject is one of the most challenging tasks for a memoir
writer. Most beginning writers need trial and error to find their true
subject or subjects. As a general rule, areas of your life that you
find particularly charged or difficult or even terrifying yield the
most interesting material and make your writing especially interesting.
And what’s terrifying for you may not necessarily be the time you were
robbed at gunpoint, but something subtler and deeper. For example, a
silence in your childhood home that masked a shameful past or your career
as a bodybuilder who lies and cheats in order to win. Memoir allows
you to dig deep and dredge up. Memoir allows you to show yourself to
the reader warts and all. If the reader only sees your “best” sides,
they are less willing to care. The more honest you are about yourself,
the better the reader will trust and like you. And this takes courage;
the courage to really enter into an experience you have had and ask
yourself challenging questions about the material. Expect to be changed
by your writing. Expect to be surprised.
When I was writing the memoir that eventually became In Sickness
& In Health: A Love Story, the most difficult part was finding my
true subject. Although I always knew I wanted to write about the experience
of prostate cancer from a woman’s point of view (something that had
not been done before and that I thought was important) it took me trial
and error, as well as time and emotional distance, to find what was
really my story. My first drafts were heavy on medical information,
with many details about the hospital and visits to doctors. I worked
from notes I’d taken at the time. Going through the experience I did
in fact become something of an expert on a particular disease. But gradually
I realized that I was not really meant to write a nonfiction cancer
narrative. I’m not a medical expert. I’m not a science writer. What
I really had to write was a memoir of a marriage touched by prostate
cancer. And that, it turned out, was both easy and difficult. Easy because
that was really what I knew and cared about. And difficult because I
had to dig deep and figure out what I truly thought and felt.
--Why have memoirs become so popular? Certainly one reason is that,
as a society, we have become more open.
Many topics that were once taboo are now shared freely – addiction,
abuse, incest, homosexuality, illness, poverty, racism… the list goes
on. Our openness has also made us more curious about people different
from ourselves – other races, religions, occupations, etc. If you’re
a Muslim growing up in Alabama, we want to hear about it. If you and
your entire family have wrestled with a gambling addiction, we’re interested.
As William Zinsser, editor of Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft
of Memoir, wrote:
"Until this decade memoir writers tended to stop short of harsh reality,
cloaking with modesty their most private and shameful memories. Today
no remembered episode is too sordid, no family too dysfunctional, to
be trotted out for the wonderment of the masses in books and magazines
and on talk shows."
Such openness is largely a good development. But there is such a thing
as too much sharing. We’ve all had the experience of someone telling
us much more than we want to know. The primary risk with memoirs is
that they can easily become indulgent, rambling tracts full of self-glorification
and/or self-mutilation. In short, they can come off as mostly… me, me,
me, me, me!
And that can be very boring.
The memoir writer must be aware of this risk. If you want to write a
good memoir, you must be able to answer the question of: Who cares?
People will indeed care about your story if… you tell a good story.
And if that story has some universal meaning that touches on lives other
than your own. Just as with good fiction, the aim is to create something
that is both entertaining and meaningful. You need to keep the reader
turning pages. And you need to offer some universal truths about the
human experience that reader can ponder and relate to. In short, you
memoir must be crafted so it provides the maximum amount of entertainment
and enlightenment.
|