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The Past Is Never Over

The Remembered Self and the Remembering Self

What many memoirists of the past twenty years have discovered—some following Woolf ‘s lead—is how much the intervention of the rememberer, the person writing now, is pertinent to the work. Intervention may sound heavy-handed. But I mean it as the degree to which memoir writers are attentive to the interplay of the story and their remembering the story, and how this interplay helps an author discover herself. I realize there should be a concise definition for the memoir—a book about an important or difficult relationship or phase in the author’s life. But such a subject- or theme-focused definition begs the question: What actually happens as we write and remember that becomes the memoir’s narrative? Recall Mary Karr: “What I wanted most of all was to tell the truth.” But what is this truth? Where does it exist? In memory? In the writing? In the intermixing of the two? Anyone who wants to tell the truth soon learns that the truth may not want to be told. It may like staying holed up in its lair, bouldering exit and entrance. Truth-telling requires a kind of demystification of the ever-mystifying notion of how memory works. To get at the truth (fact and emotion) of what happened, we must understand, as concretely as we can, what the past is and how we relate to it in the present.

Barrett J. Mandel analyzes the shell-game quality of memory, its tendency to be, like electrons, moving and fixed simultaneously. Mandel says that memory is paradoxical. On the one hand, he writes, “I can trace events with my memory, I can peruse old documents, study snapshots, and speak to others who affirm that my past actually occurred.” On the other hand, “I have to admit that it often seems as if my past, or at least my memory of it, has not remained fixed.” Mandel cites an example: one day he finds out that one of his “cherished elementary school memories never occurred—or not in the way I had always remembered it.” The event he recalled was a “screen memory … a vivid and totally convincing substitution of a less painful version of reality than one which a person is willing to accept as his or hers. My past, I learned, wasn’t fixed at all. As vividly remembered as it was … I had to relinquish it for another past—the one which has now been labeled the real one. In short, ‘my’ past changed” (76–77).

What we learn in memoir writing is that memory has far more of its own agency than we thought, that the very act of remembering may alter what did occur. This altering, Mandel says, is key. “Since my past only truly exists in the present and since my present is always in motion, my past itself changes too—actually changes—while the illusion created is that it stays fixed” (77). If the past is both fixed and unfixed, then it is always in process. And, not surprisingly, this process lies in the present where our minds and feelings make sense of the past as we recollect the past. Mandel calls this active participation with memory “presentification.” He stresses that memory cannot exist without a present stage on which to unfold: “This presentification is not a distortion of any so-called real past; this is the only way ‘my life’ comes to me” (83; italics in original).

Mandel’s estimation of memory as a present act has great import for the memoirist. The memoir writer works now, writing and remembering. Woolf’s remembrances of a difficult childhood were wedded to her current fears of war. Those fears drove her to recall the past in a way that would have been different had the bombs not been falling and the family tragedies not been mounting up. Thus, our present situation means everything to how and what we remember. From this we can extrapolate several relationships that are anchored in present-time remembering. For one, as Mandel suggests, what we remember may or may not be accurate. It has been altered and may be altered again by our recollecting. For another, our remembering selves can rouse us to action today. The past may impinge on the present, but the present can also direct the past with a purpose. What comes back in memory may no longer dominate our lives; however, the recollection may require us to re-evaluate it. My mother’s miserly affection, which I experienced as a boy and attend to in memory today, can debilitate me now just as it did then. And I can also take responsibility for that feeling and deal with it, not let it run or ruin my life.

Let’s say I’m writing about my first year in college, for me a traumatic year: I dropped out because of a failed love affair. Writing about it, I find three levels operating: first, the events of that year that I can establish via letters, photos, a journal, and others’ reminiscences; second, the events of that year that I’ve recalled (no doubt revised and re-evaluated) numerous times in the intervening years; and third, the event of my writing about it today pushing me to say why that year and the end of the romance remain important. Thus, the drama of that first year in college appears to me the writer as an event in its time, as an event processed in the times in which it’s been recalled from then to now, and as an event I’m dealing with today.

This layered simultaneity, time over time, is the prime relational dynamic between the memoir and the memoirist: the remembering self and the remembered self.

In Lost in Place (1995), Mark Salzman tells of his teenage devotion to kung fu and his fall from its embrace. In one passage, Mark’s father tells his son that some of his bravado from the martial arts that he’s learning is, well, ridiculous, and that Mark, even at fourteen, should be questioning what his teacher is telling him. His father punctuates his mini-lecture by saying, “Just be yourself, Mark. You’ll do just fine as you are” (60). In response, Salzman writes a paragraph in which he argues with his father and with himself about the meaning of this phrase. He does so by abutting his remembered (1975) self and the intervening selves (roughly 1975–94) who have thought about it. First is his reaction to his father, what he, Mark, was feeling at the time, and second is his mature, later-in-life reaction to what his father was posing to him, what he has felt over time.

Be yourself! What a can of worms he opened there. Of course I was trying to be myself! That was the whole point of the kung fu; to become the me I thought I ought to become, instead of some half-assed loser. Anyway, who was to say who I really was? I didn’t even know that—that was half my problem right there. All I knew was that when you’re a really little kid, your parents praise you when you do something they like. If you do something they don’t like, they say, “You’re not the sort of person who does that! Don’t try to be somebody you’re not! Be yourself!” So maybe, I reasoned, being yourself means being the person your parents or teachers want you to be. Do we have anything to do with who we are at all? As we get older, we think of ourselves as having unique personalities, and we take credit for these personalities when we do something good, as if we created these personalities ourselves. But maybe we didn’t! Maybe our personalities were shaped by how people around us responded to us. So who are we? As I said, this was a can of worms I didn’t care to dip into—at least not that day. (60–61)

We can hear the voice of the narrator shifting from the defensive feeling of the moment to the more “reasoned” feeling that comes with writing and with time. This is how I felt that day and this is how I have also felt about how I felt since that day. Thus, Salzman isn’t content merely to dramatize the scene with his father, staying “in character,” that is, in the fourteen-year-old’s self-consciousness. He intercedes from now: with explanatory narrative he shows us that he understands what he’s writing about—it is still a source of conflict that the writing is helping him work through—namely, the difficult truth about growing up, getting “used to disappointment” (68). Accepting disappointment is Salzman’s theme, the thing that defines his father’s life and that Mark must come to know about himself and their relationship. While this theme is embodied in the story, it is the memoirist’s current examination and editing of his younger self that propels the book beyond a chronicle of adolescence to a memoir of self-disclosure. Simply put, Salzman’s voice, in this passage and in many others, is honest about what he’s discovering he did and didn’t know and, thus, one we trust.

Salzman juxtaposes remembered and remembering selves with flawless ease. Many of us miss seeing the mix as craft because the author keeps the story moving. Only at set moments does Salzman intercede in this manner; instead, he keeps the narrative drama strong and the self-changing chronology (the rise and fall of kung fu and other adolescent interests, which eventually disappoint him) central. But the psychological impact of the narrator’s self-knowledge in memoir (knowing what when) is also central. It’s the memoir’s primary compositional conflict: voices from then to now are constantly revising what we remember. Those voices, collected over time and spoken now, may best reflect how we perceive ourselves, having lived with ourselves as long as we have.

The Present Overtakes

Mark Salzman’s mixing of narrative voices in Lost in Place is the result of much revision, of his listening to and adding in those voices as he drafted. It is also the result of time passing, first as he discovered the “disappointment” story and second as he filtered it through his memory and his sensibility. Enough time lets our many-voiced narrators speak, listen, and interact. This is one reason why writers come to the memoir: they feel that a sufficient amount of passing time will clarify their present perspective. But what of a memoir writer who has not yet lived past the time of her story, who is shaken as it unfolds in her current life and yet is drawn to write of it anyway?

One woman who has been trying to uncover her story is Sheila, a member of my memoir-writing group. Her struggle to find the person she is writing about is always apparent. She begins by focusing on her first marriage. As a senior in high school, she dates a man, Jerry, who’s two years older. They go steady, break up, get back together, and eventually marry. She recalls getting married as what she was supposed to do, being “naive on my part.” With no children, Sheila spends much time making a structured home for Jerry, with dinner on the table at 5:30 sharp. But Sheila suspects something is wrong. Jerry has become quieter, complaining that he’s not sleeping well. He has terrible dreams and is frustrated with his small business, supplying materials to contractors. One of his problems is with work. He refuses to work for anyone else, fearful of having his reading disability discovered. (Sheila says this was not identified at the time but was probably dyslexia.) She doesn’t know to what extent Jerry’s business is failing because he will go weeks without speaking to her. Sheila has a dreadful feeling that he’s in psychological danger. She can feel his foundering in depression. She begins to wonder, in her writing, when and how she knew this. One night Jerry doesn’t come home; she calls his business but there’s no answer. She calls the police and reports that he’s gone missing. The next day, she calls the police around noon. They tell her they cannot file a missing person’s report for several days. This is a Tuesday. By Wednesday, with no word from Jerry or the police, Sheila drives to the business with a friend. They climb a fence, smell exhaust fumes coming from a closed-up ware-house, and find his parked car. Jerry’s rigged a hose from the tailpipe into the car window. He’s killed himself.

It’s a stunning and disturbing story, and the group and I are curious where this opening volley will take her. And then we hear the second installment. Eight months after Jerry’s suicide, a man named Martin calls her, someone she once dated in high school. He has heard she is widowed and asks to see her. He is interested in psychology and in her plight; Sheila, who is open and vulnerable, responds favorably to him the next two years. Amateur shrink Martin begins taking Sheila apart. While they date, she is under a psychiatrist’s care. She tells me, in an e-mail, that those sessions consisted of “his asking me a question and my answering with uncontrolled sobbing. We did not get very far.” Feeling that she must choose between her psychiatrist and her psychologist, Martin, she chooses the latter and marries him. Once they move to San Diego, Martin becomes “more verbally abusive than ever. He had always been analyzing me, my motives, my life, and continually making me feel bad about myself.” It’s not long before Sheila seeks treatment from another psychiatrist, who ends up helping her divorce Martin. At the time, she writes, “I realized I had married two different men [Jerry and Martin] with major psychological problems, and I vowed not to remarry until I felt I would not attract a person like that.” Martin, though, remains a part of her life via frequent phone calls. Seventeen years later, after Sheila has married a third time, she learns one day that Martin, like Jerry, has committed suicide.

For Sheila, the thematic muck is obvious: “I wanted my memoir to be about my long struggle to free myself from attracting suicidal types.” Though she knows today that these men died because of their own problems with depression, that fact doesn’t settle what’s roiled her for decades. She wants to know what it was “about me, without my knowing it, that contributed to their deaths.”

Though Sheila’s story may sound desperate, she is not herself desperate. At sixty, she is well adjusted; her marriage is good, and she values writing and therapy. The therapy of memoir, however, reopens old wounds, as becomes very clear to her and to us when, a few weeks later, she brings in a third installment. She has written what has just occurred, part of it torn from the week’s headlines. One of her friends, a man named Bill who had battled with a woman for years about custody of their fourteen-year-old son, Evan, and had been given a court order to stay away from both the boy and the woman, has killed the boy and himself. After Bill murders Evan and before he kills himself, he calls several friends. Sheila is one of them. She doesn’t get the call, but he leaves a message on her machine. He speaks not only of the horror he has just committed but also in a voice that sounds to Sheila like the despairing voices of her first and second husbands were they to have left her messages before suiciding.

In shock, Sheila is grieving the loss of a friend and his son. In writing about her grief, she is unsure what she’s feeling. Suddenly, this one event has fused her life and her writing. In the wake of the murder-suicide, Sheila loses the safety in which she was examining how suicide and intimacy cohabit, somewhat safely, in memory. Her life, in its uncanny ability to stay on theme, has got in memoir’s way, and it stops her from writing for a while. And yet she tells us that she can’t escape the feeling that the deaths of all these men she’s known have something in common. What is it? That the world is more out of control and more directed than she thought? If true, what is that saying about her? She doesn’t know. Maybe she’s not supposed to.

Sheila’s story is unusual in that the very theme of her work—men’s suicides—has merged the past with the present. For me, her story dramatically exemplifies the interaction of life and memoir writing. For Sheila, her memoir is now overrun by the changeable present, which, I remind her, is always exercising its dominion over the past. Time has assuaged her theme and time has again blown it apart. Her tale depicts how psychologically alive the body of memory is: it is both an elder, offering the wisdom of experience, and a child, wanting our attention now.

After Bill’s and Evan’s deaths, and, in part, because of the writing, Sheila is thrown into a “debilitating funk.” With a therapist, she finds that she has been able to work through the “post-traumatic stress.” She wants to begin writing again, and I wonder how Sheila might tell her story.

One way is to tell the tale only from the perspective of the young woman who endured and survived her first husband’s suicide. Okay, but how does she limit the emotional participation of the later suicides, which are surely part of how she might portray that younger self? Telling about each suicide chronologically might show a culmination. But each suicide and her feelings may get mixed up. The force of their accumulation is inescapable. These male death-events have already coded themselves as part of her DNA’s memory: the code retains a record of its evolution—where it’s been, how it’s been modified, how it’s been expressed. Moreover, today the code is selecting for her emotional survival, insisting that there is no other way to write this story than to intermix the years.

If we know that we grow and change as individuals, why do we believe that our memories of traumatic events don’t also grow and change? Why do we think that such events are isolated in their time and somehow just as isolated when we recollect them? I want to answer these queries because it seems that we are finally learning that memories evolve as their rememberers evolve. It may be the rightness of this idea that has so many people reaching to the memoir form, perhaps to verify it for themselves as well as to express the potency, both aesthetic and experiential, of remembrance.

Detaching Now from Then

Here is an example of how one memoirist has bridged from the person who is struggling with the past today and the person who struggled in the past. Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (1987) uses the interplay between now and then to stage and reveal her childhood sexual abuse. Fraser narrates the story of her past abuse in present tense. She discloses in past tense that which she understands today about the past. It may sound disorienting but it’s not, for we soon discover why she adopted this form. Writing the book over a three-year period, Fraser brought the past back so vividly into her life that for her emotional security the past needed to be separated from the present. An instance of Fraser’s method comes from the second chapter, “The Other.” It begins with an account of her current knowledge about her father in the past tense:

When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine, whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I did not remember my daddy ever having touched me sexually. I did not remember my daddy ever seeing me naked. In the future, whenever my daddy approached me sexually I turned into my other self, and afterwards I did not remember anything that had happened.

Even now, I don’t know the full truth of that other little girl I created to do the things I was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do, [sic] the things my father made me do, the things I did to please him but which paid off with a precocious and dangerous power. She loved my father, freeing me to hate him. She became his guilty sex partner and my mother’s jealous rival, allowing me to lead a more normal life. She knew everything about me. I knew nothing about her, yet some connection always remained. (15)

As the memory heats up and challenges the author to flesh out her feelings, her “other self”—the little girl about to be abused—arrives in present tense. Fraser shifts from her narrator now to the persona, the four-year-old, who was the target of the father’s daily sexual advances. Italics highlight the current recovered material, which, as she gets closer and closer to it, becomes dissociated from her adult narrator and is rendered in third person.

Through the bathroom door I hear my father splashing in the tub. Holding my breath, I slide under his bed, grabbing for Smoky [her cat]. Now the bath plug is being pulled. With a gurgle, the scummy water sucks down the drain.

By the time daddy stomps out of the bathroom, saronged in a towel, my other self is curled on his feather pillow, sucking her thumb and wearing Smoky’s dirty pink ribbon. A breeze blows the curtains inward, just like the hair of a fairytale princess, giving her goose bumps. Whose little girl are you? (27)

Fraser’s “other self” is “sucking her thumb,” sprouting “goose bumps” from the inward-blowing curtains. “I” has become “she.” And because of the transformation, she achieves something remarkable. The author has merged “I” and “she” in order to juxtapose childhood abuse and adult remembrance. These voices become mutually supportive; working together, they enact the story and the means by which the story can be told. Neither the abuse nor its recollection dominate. They are coequals, as if to say Fraser’s true self is a never-ending release from and return to what her child self was forced to endure.

Margaret Atwood noted in a blurb that My Father’s House reads like “a detective novel—except that the detective is a part of the narrator’s self, and so is the murder victim.” As the author recollects the events, detective and victim slowly become aware of each other. Fraser’s interweaving of these two takes time, and she is careful to prepare us at each juncture. Eventually our recognition of their watery coexistence in her is what intrigues us the most. What’s more, these parallel selves call forth the memoir’s guiding narrator, who lives now. She sees how complex the multitimed and many-voiced narrative self can be. She builds a structure to reveal the past in the present tense and in the present intensity of recovered memory. She has the courage to bring the memory back full force, feel it again, then keep it corralled, the horses wildly running at the fence, for the rest of her life.