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Discovering a New Literary Form

Who Writes?

Passionate, contrary, innovative, undefined: memoir today has the energy of a literary movement, recalling past artistic revolutions that initiated new ways of seeing. The form has cleared most of the first hurdles, among them the rap that memoir must be tied to family dysfunction. Memoir’s diverse topics and authors of all ages squash that prejudice. Indeed, we may be living in the age of memoir. How might we know? Sheer numbers. If you follow Amazon.com’s list of the one hundred best-selling “biographies and memoirs,” you’ll find that on average fewer than 20 percent are biographies or autobiographies (maybe two are religious confessions). The rest are memoirs, by the hundreds, by the thousands. Many of these come from no-name authors who are turning to the form as a means of examining their most intimate relationships. I think of such moving works as Le Anne Schreiber’s Light Years (1996), a book that juxtaposes her withdrawal from a big-city newspaper and move to a small town with a meditation about the mortality of her father; of William Loizeaux’s Anna: A Daughter’s Life (1993), a tale of a child who didn’t reach her first birthday, though her parents and a team of doctors did everything they could to save her. These and hundreds of other emotionally venturesome memoirs share this individuality: Here is what it was like to be me, to face what I faced, to lose what I lost.

What is faced and lost is crucial. Only by lingering on something outside the self, with which he has had intimate experience, can the author disclose himself. Memoir is a relational form. Loizeaux does not just describe his torment as his daughter died of a host of congenital difficulties. He deals with the effect on his marriage, the doctors and hospital staffs with whom he and his wife became close, and the personality of Anna herself, who had four months at home with her parents before she succumbed. On the surface, the book is about her life and death. But, more importantly, it is a book that allows her life and death to bring out the emotions and changes that her father endured. Anna’s living and dying brought about a book in which Loizeaux could remember and mourn his daughter, be the person who lost her. As Khalil Gibran has said of the parent’s possessiveness toward his children, “they come through you but not from you.” It is remembering this child’s coming through Loizeaux that becomes the memoir.

Immersing himself in Anna’s passage, Loizeaux finds that it is bigger than any passage in the chronology of his life. Since he does not treat her life within the autobiographical overview of his, he can examine and linger on the multiple layers of its particular hell. (The autobiographer seldom has time to layer any phase; this is the main structural difference between it and the memoir.) A story with a limited temporal scope encompasses not less but more material. The author might explore his hopes and delusions; the cracks in his persona; his culture’s attitude toward loss before and after a death; his insecurity with how he remembers what did and didn’t happen; how trauma reconfigures his extended family—any of which may be germane to his telling. Linking experience to one’s persona, one’s culture, one’s ideas, the memoirist uses dramatic narrative and reflective analysis to bridge the details and the expanse of what he’s unleashed. Story alone won’t do it. The memoir’s prime stylistic distinction is a give-and-take between narration and analysis, one that directs the memoirist to both show and tell.

Let’s say you plan to write a memoir about the year you just spent rebuilding homes in New Orleans, post-Katrina. What’s relational? Beyond musing about the stultifying bureaucracy and the force of a natural disaster, you decide to focus on the displaced people you saw every day who want their homes fixed and their city back. You detail their initiative and frustration, their loss and vulnerability. But what of you is important in all this? Is it your homelessness—actual, emotional, symbolic—that has been stirred by their trauma? Put another way, perhaps helping others has led you to reflect on the meaning of displacement, or alienation, in your life, too. It must have something to do with your core self or else you wouldn’t have volunteered, you wouldn’t have felt your passion connected to theirs. Self and world, self and core; all this is relational.

In memoir, how we have lived with ourselves teeter-totters with how we have lived with others—not only people, but cultures, ideas, politics, religions, history, and more. This balancing act of the self in relation to the outer and the inner worlds, against the memoir’s thematic and temporal restrictions, fascinates me. What is it that makes a person become who she is, perhaps has always been? What is it that changes us? How much of the self is innate, how much of it learned? What role does self-delusion play in our identities? What is it that makes us seek the mythic entitlements of American life differently from our neighbors? Most Americans think that the better among us are self-driven like Franklin or self-actualized like Thoreau. Such idolatry props up the greatman fiction, the “I did it my way” myth, a stepwise deterministic view of life that autobiography has engendered and memoir is challenging.

And yet the “I” of the memoir can also be the subject of the work. How do I understand the person I was then in light of the person I am now? This I-then and I-now (the pairing comes from Virginia Woolf) rings in memoir’s paradox. Though much time and many realizations may separate these two I’s, it is nigh impossible to keep the voices of today’s narrator and of yesterday’s narrator apart. They are always in flux, an example of which I will describe shortly. The thinking goes, my story is also his story; the person I am, I was—or I was, I am. Here I am in high school, in 1967, and yet that person is not me now. He is another. Still, don’t I share his traits, whether or not they are readily expressed? The truth is two-sided: I am not exactly him nor am I free of him. It feels natural to see the remembered self as a character who has an independent life, chooses for himself, indulges free will. But memoirists avoid such self-casting. The memoir writer does not situate himself in a recreated world as though he were a literary character. What the memoirist does is connect the past self to—and within—the present writer as the means of getting at the truth of his identity.

Before writing The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr thought she should fictionalize herself: “When I tried to write about my life in a novel, I discovered that I behaved better in fiction than I did in real life. The truth is that I found it easier to lie in a novel, and what I wanted most of all was to tell the truth” (Karr, cited in “The Family Sideshow”). Truth is uppermost in the minds of memoir writers because veracity won’t let them be. So as not to embarrass the living, they may rename people and places; they usually re-create dialogue since there’s no word-for-word record; and they may dramatize an event that differs from the recollections of others who were there. Sometimes memoirists must make life-and-death choices. Azar Nafisi, still fighting the Muslim theocracy in Iran, prefaces her Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by stating that “I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.”

But, even in a post–James Frey world, memoir writers are not fashioning fictionalized autobiographies or autobiographical novels, as one or two critics contend. Most memoirists do not falsify their pasts so as to build a better story.¹ The best honestly explore how they recall the past and what of themselves is and isn’t true. Before I go a step further, I want to be clear about memoir and fiction, a confluence I’ll return to often. Memoir is related to fiction because memoir, like fiction, is a narrative art: we narrate past events; always, as we write, memory tells us stories. We must guard against our own narrative gullibility. We must ask ourselves, Did it happen as I remember? Have I misremembered and, if so, how will I know? We may have some means at our disposal to verify the past: letters, journals, family records, others’ recollections. But we must understand that often our memories have erased and altered things before we search out their latest version or a version from someone else. The nature of memory, as any brain doctor will confirm, is to mix imagination and fact. But that is not the same as saying that as memoirists we can riddle our tales with fictional composites and Hollywood endings. Still, in the memoir, the truth and figuring out the truth abide. The best way to deal with the tension between fact and memory, as one uncovers the tension in the course of one’s writing, is to admit to the tension—not to cover it up.

The Struggle to Write

One reason for this confusion between memoir and fiction, between how memoir and autobiography overlap, is that the memoir form, so newly emerged, is less understood than written. Function noses out form: writers write, and analyze what they’ve done only after they’ve written. It’s this avidity to leap in and get at one’s past and present selves that’s so contagious among authors, both first-timers and pros. The hoped-for reward is self-knowledge, not self-mystification. The writing will guide us there, if we write and reflect on what we write. But, though my pep talk may sound empowering for the author, the writing alone can lead to despair. Many give up: trying to make sense now of then incurs sudden, resistless anguish. The material may get too hot to handle.

Joan, the woman in my writing group with the transplanted heart, desperately wants to tell that story—how she was a candidate on the waiting list for two years, six months of which were spent in the hospital; how two transplants failed, the first “harvest” (she was given twelve minutes to get to the hospital) canceled once bruises were discovered on the donor’s heart and the second called off by an ice storm in Oregon that delayed the plane’s arrival; how the third try was successful and she joined a family’s loss of their son, whose sudden death must be a part of her tale. One scene she’d like to write: waking to the shock of having a man’s heart in her chest and hers gone, and then wondering how long his will keep beating. But she can’t write that scene. Not yet. Joan’s vitality is easily sapped (she says she has one-third the energy of the normal person), and then there’s her mother’s illness to deal with every morning before she gets to her desk.

The quotidian gives Joan plenty to work with, but now another fin cuts the surface. Before her surgery, Joan was locked in with no past or future—she could only wait, in dread and hope, for another’s death. A few years later, when she begins writing (a friend took notes during her surgery and recuperation), she is over-come by grief. A man has died and she has lived: two unrelated beings are now inextricable. What is she remembering? Is it the shock his heart suffered from the loss of his body? Is it the trauma of her twice-thwarted expectation that two harvests came to naught? Is it the responsibility that she must live for both? Now these and other emotions well up in eerie, invasive detail until she has to stop: The writing she attempts goes only so close to the experience, then won’t go any closer. Everything she is writing now she is discovering now, and every discovery now must be felt. The heart-fullness allows her to live. But there is much strain, ebbing from the conflicted hearts of her memory, and to tell it all may be impossible.

Now and Then: Virginia Woolf

The first personal narrative to interweave the author’s I-now and I-then is Virginia Woolf’s stunning and incomplete “A Sketch of the Past.” This ninety-five-page memoir-essay was posthumously published with four other pieces under the title Moments of Being. (The history of its publication is interesting: “A Sketch” was first published in 1976; its second half, reworked and expanded by Woolf, was discovered in 1980, necessitating a second edition in 1985 of the “complete” “Sketch.”) The work is diary and journal, meditation and memoir, written sporadically during 1939 and 1940 and planned as her autobiography. It may be only coincidence that these were difficult years for Woolf because of the threat of war, which she engages forcefully in the piece. Woolf went no further than what amounts to a second draft. She died, a suicide, in March 1941, four and a half months after the final entry in the “Sketch.” A series of a dozen dated entries, the book is fragmented, undisciplined, and impassioned: Woolf, at age sixty, mainly recalls her mother, father, sisters, brothers, half sisters, and half brothers and her family’s summer home at St. Ives in Cornwall. Her most disturbing admission is that her stepbrother Gerald Duckworth fondled her “privates” when she was thirteen. As in her novels, Woolf details individual lives and places with animated and felt imagery. She microscopically enlarges her most precious memories. To our joy, she is incapable of giving equal weight to equal events. She ends the time of her recollections around 1900, when she was eighteen. A world gone forty years ago. And yet not gone at all.

The beginning ten pages are a salvo in which Woolf reflects on how her memory will shape this very remembrance she is writing. Her perceptions are briefly examined, then exampled in the remaining pages. At the onset of the second entry, she discovers “a possible form for these notes.” She would like to remember the past by making “the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast” (italics added). She believes the past is or should be “much affected by the present moment,” though her remunerative task at hand is to finish the biography of art critic and Bloomsbury friend Roger Fry. Thus, she “has no energy at the moment to spend upon the horrid labour that it needs to make an orderly and expressed work of art” (75).

The self-consciousness of the opening pages is beguiling. The book Woolf didn’t write, and the one she left us, may be better than any we might imagine. (In part, Woolf is known for the thoughtful development of ideas and emotions in her intimate diaries, letters, and essays. Though less artistically composed than her novels, her personal writing abounds with inspired commentary.) The first entry of “A Sketch” is written at Monks House, near Rodmell, Sussex, and the River Ouse, on Tuesday, April 18, 1939. Before her family memories (some going back more than fifty years) become the focus, Woolf considers how she remembers, what memory means, what “one’s memoirs” might be. All of a sudden, consideration turns to criticism and she begins thinking about new methods of representing the self and the past. She first says that most memoirs are failures because the writers “leave out the person to whom things happened” (65). They err on the side of overnarrating events, and gossip, instead of uncovering the character of the rememberer, a character alive as much now as then. To flesh out the author, it is important to know who the parents were, their class, their proclivities. It is more crucial, however, to know the perception of the rememberer. Woolf follows suit, recalling first pictures—a nursery and the sensual feelings of St. Ives’s air, beach scenes, wave sounds. So strong are these memories that she tests them against a view of her present surroundings. “At times,” she writes, “I can go back to St. Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen” (67).

How marvelous that she reports her mental state in the throes of remembering early childhood. She does not merely catalog the past, nor tell the psychiatrist the lurid details. Her own psychotherapist, she moves from analysis to objective fact to a self-possessed intimacy. She is aware of her present “rapture” with recollecting St. Ives. And then, as quickly as she raises the ship of the past, she questions its seaworthiness. She writes that life makes childhood memories “less strong … less isolated, less complete” by adding “much that makes [memories] more complex” (67). Looking back over an accumulation of years gives memories their depth. More is made of them as we mature; we need to cherish or resolve what is recalled. The question is, can such memories ever be recollected for what they were? Woolf says no. To revisit such brief scenes and moods is “misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important” (69). The more important the memory, the harder it is to retrieve. But memories are imprinted and, because of their imprint, contain wholeness. Woolf labels such memories “exceptional,” which means the few and the intense. For her the exceptional memory always possesses “being,” while other parts of life—conversation, meals, weather, train rides, running a press, waiting around (Woolf says the unconsciousness of life is “a kind of nondescript cotton wool”)—comprise “non-being” or boredom (70–71).

The exceptional moments are “moments of being” (70). They are physically overwhelming and, over time, represent a legendary quality about the self. The moments require days and weeks of unexceptional life to pad and pace the distance between them as moments. The quotidian life is a complement to these peaks of being. Moments are enlarged by our memory; this grandiosity makes much about the past seem more exceptional than it probably was. Moments are self-selective: they highlight, expand, over-power, and change the past. Moments argue for their being as they wrangle with the present to be heard, to be part of a dialogue, to frame the picture of, at least, a part of one’s life. Woolf becomes animated by this idea. Given the time and the calm, the ideal way to write her life would be to contrast the intense present, one being-full and intense, with a part of the past, itself equally being-full and intense, and make their dueling exceptionalities work on each other.

Without doubt, the present is full of being: England is under attack. What would the past recollected during this dire present be like were she to write of it under these imposed conditions? Woolf ventures forth. Her first attempt is placid, before the bombing of London has begun, while the second is much different because it includes the bombs.

On July 19, 1939, Woolf has just returned from an uneventful crossing of the Channel. Before she writes about one of her stepsister Stella Duckworth’s lovers, she longs to recall the past because the present is running “so smoothly.” It is like the “sliding surface of a deep river.” “Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else” (98). How curious that a smooth present is tantamount to seeing the past smoothed of its turmoil.

But once the bombs start falling on London, everything changes. The destruction agitates Woolf about how and what she remembers. Upset, she recalls the pain of so much unexpressed feeling for her parents. She begins “venting that old grievance” once again. Her mother died prematurely and her father, whom she “alternately loved and hated,” became a ward to his daughters, particularly Stella and Vanessa. That sullied thought shifts her back to the present. Aflutter, she enquires of her husband Leonard whether he thinks there’s a “third voice” between the past and the present that can express her “vague idea.” She wonders “whether I make up or tell the truth when I see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails and tacking this way and that through daily life as I yield to them.” She wonders if anyone cares: “Which of the people watching the incendiary bomb extinguished on the hill last night would understand what I mean if they read this?” (133). Remembering her difficult aging father and a Nazi bomb in her midst isolates her in rough seas. To calm down, she recalls sailing at St. Ives, which momentarily stabilizes the lurching. To calm down, she tries taking control of the present so she can take control of the past.

Is Woolf suggesting that what we remember about ourselves can be—perhaps should be—influenced or changed by present circumstances? Is she suggesting that depending upon the degree of unsettlement, the past can mislead the present as much as the present misleads the past? If the past’s moments of being are what we tend to recall, while the present mixes, pell-mell, being and non-being, must we write out of an exceptional present whose energy, in turn, ignites a more luminous portrayal of the past? Does it matter that who we are can change who we were? Won’t the past always be the same in memory, whether we are rushing to a bomb shelter or disembarking from an uneventful passage over the English Channel?

Such are the questions Woolf posed about her life and, by extension, our lives as well. I think of Woolf’s “Sketch” as the gauntlet to this generation of memoir writers. On one hand, this probing memoir is enthralling because it’s unfinished. Woolf may have left off completing this autobiography because she was forced to deal with the raw emotions the work unleashed in her life. Attempting a memoir about a past that felt sketchy and disruptive during the daily scare of an expanding war may have brought a sense of failure on her, which her depression only worsened. Memoir, too, can usher in a tragic consequence. Recalling life’s disappointments may lead a writer back to a past where the exceptional moments are all bad ones, which, in turn, rain doom (like German bombs) upon the present. On the other hand, Woolf’s incompleteness, her mulling over the possibility of the form itself as she writes the form, is just as enthralling. She gives birth to a radical idea—the interconnectedness of past and present in the act of memoir writing—which is as profound and lasting as anything else she bequeathed us in her work.