Take data about a speaker’s age and size. “Standing under the orange hoop, I was the only freshman who could lift one ape-long arm and brush net.” This says age and size and basketball prowess while being evocative. “I tried to hunch inside the new letter jacket, but my bony wrists stuck out.” This adds an element of psychology—self-consciousness.
Rather than simply describing his father’s physique in Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt dispenses data about the price on his father’s head and then occupies a child’s mind pondering his father’s actual noggin being paid for.
[My father] fought with the Old IRA and for some desperate act he wound up a fugitive with a price on his head.
When I was a child I would look at my father, the thinning hair, the collapsing teeth, and wonder why anybody would give money for a head like that. When I was thirteen my father’s mother told me a secret: as a wee lad your poor father was dropped on his head. It was an accident. He was never the same after, and you must remember that people dropped on their heads can be a bit peculiar.
McCourt’s talent for verbal wit packed into a child’s mindset means the paternal bean serves as an occasion for dispensing other, more dramatic data. He lets us hear in his grandmother’s voice how he learned about his father’s dropped-on head. This foreshadows the family’s coming disasters and promises drama, piquing a reader’s curiosity. In the course of all that, he gives us a carnal portrait of the old man, too.
George Orwell’s moving memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, also palms off key data in a subtle way. Rather than start with the political sects and conflicts within the revolutionary ranks, he focuses on his encounter with a single Italian freedom fighter. The description of the young guy locates the book as a song of praise to the peasant people Orwell futilely fought alongside against fascism. It’s one of dozens such portraits, and it shows us why he’s there.
He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or -six, with reddish yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map, which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in the face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though likely as not he was a Communist. . . . As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hope he liked me as well as I liked him.
By speculating whether he’s an Anarchist or a Communist, Orwell lets us in on the dissent within the leftist ranks while saving us the boredom of a lengthy political disquisition. He knows he has to make us care about the people first, so he shares a sliver of how he came to care. What makes Orwell a genius is trusting that this small, strange moment that touched him so deeply could also touch a reader if he told it frankly enough.
In any good memoir, the writer tries to meet the reader where she is by offering information in the way it’s felt—to reflect the writer’s inner values and cares either in clever linguistic form (like McCourt) or dramatic scene (like Orwell).
14 | Personal Run-Ins with Fake Voices
“The difference between mad people and sane people,” Brave Orchid explained to the children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
As I’ve detailed elsewhere, it took me fifteen years of scribbling—first in poetry, then in fiction—to dredge up nerve to tell my childhood story in a voice that fit my face. Before then, I hid from readers on pages that sugarcoated any emotional truths about us all, part of an overall effort to sanitize our past and remold myself into somebody smarter, faster, funnier than harsh reality had afforded me to become.
Literature, when I was growing up, had been the stuff of cool, diffident, hypereducated white guys. And I was solidly blue-collar, crown princess of the crap job—crayfish trucker, waitress, T-shirt factory seamstress—a dropout with an itinerant past. In my zip code of origin, I’d hazard that I was the library’s most devoted New Yorker customer. John Cheever’s tales of East Coast swells who drank their Scotch neat won me. They had swimming pools, they used summer as a verb, and I wanted to sound like them despite the fact that the only books I identified much with were by writers of color like Maya Angelou. Reading Angelou’s first in 1971, it wasn’t just You can write about this? but You can write about us? Even though her family was black and mine white, I hewed more to her worldview than to the four-in-hand tie knotters riding the club car or going to the Yale game in Cheever’s and Salinger’s and Fitzgerald’s books.
During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.
By twenty-two I was soaking myself in the French poets who’d enthralled T. S. Eliot. At my age, he’d been writing Prufrock and studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, which unlike Eliot, I pronounced “the Sore Bone.” Also unlike him, I read these guys in translation. From biographies of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, I tried to fashion an outlaw poet mask. I wore black clothes and scarlet lipstick and borrowed Mother’s old beret.
I scribbled languid, vague poems about Paris—a place I’d barely been—and a man I’d left there but barely remembered. And those young poems of mine were sequined and embroidered with classical references to writers I’d hardly read—the Cynic Diogenes, whose motto, “Live like a dog,” fitted (I thought) my faux-punk Patti Smith facade.
What did I write about? Wanting to get laid, not getting laid, getting laid badly. Wanting a guy to leave, wanting a guy not to leave. Then he leaves. In a persona poem, an old gambler makes stiff statements about the nature of chance à la Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Throw of the Dice.” (Daddy had often gone out to shoot craps when we’d needed money for school clothes.)
Try to find a poet whose talent differed from mine more than Eliot—tight as a rolled umbrella, somebody once called him—or insurance executive Wallace Stevens or prim Miss Dickinson. It’d be hard. They’re poets known for experimental bents and hermetic symbolic systems that can forge intense psychological spaces in a reader’s head. Their voices also tend toward the reticent. In a similar vein was New York School wizard John Ashbery, a glib, easeful, prolific god whose cool stream of consciousness I worshiped. My critical thesis on him topped a hundred pages—this on a poet who admits he’s indecipherable and cares not one whit if the reader gets him. This whole herd of poets—all but Dickinson classically educated—operates on elision and emotional reserve.
By contrast, I was a feral American half aborigine, drinking and pogoing around rock clubs while hotly suffering my disintegrating, hard-drinking, well-armed family.
During this time, my idea of fessing up was to obscure any actual memory and siphon all feeling off till there was naught but sawdust on the page. “Tell the truth but tell it slant,” Dickinson had said, not “Drape gauze all over it so it can’t be seen.” There’s a difference between mystery and obscurity, poet Donald Justice once said. About real mystery—Hilary Mantel’s run-ins with ghosts, say—a writer can say every dang thing she knows without lessening the enigma’s power; obscurity is just hiding out of cowardice what fundamentally needs unveiling.
Here’s an execrable excerpt from my 1978 poem “Civilization and Its Discontents”—a pretentious reference to Freud’s masterpiece. It was my way of writing about Mother’s breakdown, during which she’d set fire to our toys and menac
ed us with butcher knife raised.
In 1959 some doctors sedated
a Texas housewife, fastened electrodes to her
temples and flipped on the current. Her hair,
singed, curled loosely around her eyes
which are pale green and dumb in the photo
of her release. This
is where the story ends for the housewife
who had once danced flamenco in a bowling alley.
It’s hard to say how much of her
daughter burned away. She evaporated
into puberty and gin and became
a victim of rumor.
I won’t bother to say what all is wrong with this—the snotty, devil-may-care tone, which would better fit a jokester fool like Letterman; or the crap line breaks—violent enjambments and uneven syllabic pattern chosen for no reason. There’s no data about who the woman is or why you should care. Plus it’s in no way true. Mother never danced flamenco in a bowling alley. Nobody ever did or would—a fine example of my limited fictional imagination. Puberty and gin mean nothing—they’re a gesture. About what? Who knows? How postpubescent and hard-drinking and world-weary I was?
Mother did way more interesting stuff. When she adjudged the small-town supermarket’s Parmesan unworthy, she upended the whole cheese display. She wagged a shotgun at the ice cream truck when its bells woke her from a nap. She owned a couture suit from Paris and gave me Sartre’s Nausea to read when I was in sixth grade.
But I was somehow stifled from speaking directly about the far-more-interesting facts, much less the events that ran through my nightmares and kept me dragging to a shrink’s office.
If I wrote vaguely enough, I risked nothing. No one could understand what was going on. I once heard a quote by Marvin Bell on his early work: “I knew I was an experimental poet. My poems didn’t make sense.”
In a private workshop with Etheridge Knight—an ex-con from Mississippi and elsewhere, ashy of knee and with hands rusty enough to strike a match on—he scolded me about the pretentious pages I turned in. Way before poetry slams, he used to take us into bars or onto crowded buses to read out loud. Facing a listing drunk or a footsore commuter, you figure out pretty quick how irrelevant much of your drivel is.
During this time, my much-loved old man was killing himself with drink. And the one poem Etheridge kinda liked of mine was about a suicidal dog. (The first line was “Don’t do it, Dog.”) That jokey riff was as close as I could come to the deep mourning that corroded my insides like battery acid as I drove Etheridge crazy with my evasions, spiraling around the home-based subjects haunting me.
In a poem called “Invisible Man,” I actually faked both being black and knowing about scientific notions of entropy. In another called “The Double Helix,” I quacked on about genetics, a subject that I only knew existed through the similarly titled memoir by Francis Crick and James D. Watson.
Then I had a lightning stroke of luck. I blindly bumbled into one of the planet’s best conversations about memoir. Age twenty-three, loose as a hard-slammed Ping-Pong ball, I found myself rolling into a graduate program in poetry—the only one that would take me sans college diploma, and then only on probation till I proved I wasn’t as dumb as I looked (which I probably couldn’t have been).
I remember the room and the gray metal chair from which I first heard Geoffrey Wolff read about his con-man father. It was August in Vermont, and hot. Somebody turned off the gale-force floor fan as he stepped to the light wood podium so we could hear him better.
With his Hemingway beard and polo shirt, Geoffrey looked like he’d be equally at home propping up a martini glass in some smoky jazz dive or on a Cuban swordfish boat. His wife was an elegant woman whose opinions people cared about. A Princeton grad who wrote for Esquire and the Washington Post, Geoffrey had all the credentials you’d need, but he wore them lightly. He was handsome and hearty, but he brooked no shit and seemed worried about nothing more than getting words down in the right order. At parties he dispensed pricey cognac, told riveting stories, and talked about jazz.
The summer of 1978, the stuffy room he was reading in held fewer than a hundred exhausted, mostly young writers and their not-yet-forty-year-old professors.
But the minute he started to read, a fine current sizzled through the air. People who’d been slumped in their chairs—mentors and tormentors mostly exhausted from a day spent poring over our medium-shitty pages—straightened up. We leaned forward. The occasional fly buzz became audible.
Geoffrey had a strong voice, but he read from the book haltingly. It hurt him to read, you could tell. He plowed on, though, stopping sometimes to drink water, and nobody shifted. Hell, I hardly blinked. He was showing me a form of courage I knew I didn’t have. He was like some action-movie hero gunning down the enemy I’d faced my whole life—family lies—with such panache I couldn’t feature not enlisting. It was a heroic performance. And I wanted nothing so much as to have the balls to do the same with my own story. The audience exploded clapping after.
And what an audience. There was the herd of poets I’d been busily padding around behind like a puppy. (Name-drop alert: Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, Robert Hass, Ellen Bryant Voigt—even Charles Simic´ visited.) They all wrote psychologically sharp stuff drawn in varying degrees of transparency from their own life events. On the prose side was Ray Carver, whose first paperback I’d lugged around Europe the year before, as well as Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson.
Geoffrey’s brother Toby was there. He hadn’t yet written This Boy’s Life, but alongside him sat Frank Conroy, whose Stop-Time was a cult classic excerpted in the New Yorker, where it showed up as fiction. With those teachers at hand, it’s small wonder that chums Mark Doty and Jerry Stahl would join me in writing memoir.
After grad school, I vanished into a job in the telecommunications business, writing at night and publishing as I could, but my poems strayed as far from my natural abilities as I could steer them.
On my thirtieth birthday, I flew back from a San Francisco business trip on the red-eye to Boston—a flight briefly aborted by a bomb scare. This afforded me some bar time. I spent every bit of change I could rifle from my cheap briefcase before I sloshed aboard, then pounded the champagne they doled out clear back to Boston. It was a dark time in my family—when wasn’t it? I couldn’t forget the specter of my shriveling daddy in a Texas nursing home. He’d be dead within the year, and part of me knew it.
The red-eye flew east toward the arcing sun. And all night, across the spiral notebook, my hand hardly stopped moving. A great, mournful cry poured out, page after page. I gripped the pen so hard my thumb hurt when I got off at dawn.
Once home, I emptied my briefcase, slapping the notebook on the kitchen counter. Then I set off for the mind-numbing task of faking a business career. Had I been scrawling all night on loose paper, I’d have tossed what I’d written in the trash. That’s how wretched I figured it was.
Later, my husband bent over the pages. A reserved guy, he had a keen look. “I was wondering when you’d get around to writing this,” he said.
The thought of him eying those raw, unfiltered pages embarrassed me. Few opinions mattered more than his—he was brilliant, ruthless, and didn’t truck in flattery. And he liked what I’d set down. He was one of the many fine writers—including all my teachers—telling me the pages came alive when I wrote in first person. It somehow felt small or weak or whiny to me.
Still, at his urging and reurging, I took the pages and started to cannibalize them for lines and language and tone. Out came a few elegies and other poems both lyric and narrative, along with some hunks of prose that would wind up in Liars’ Club.
Here’s one excerpt about my old man. It’s better than anything I’d done before. But it still sounded so emotionally bald that I only sent it out to a magazine at my husband’s urging.
I tell the only truth I know:
that I am helpless and sorry you’re dying,
that this planet
will weigh no less when you
are ash. . . .
and if, as Buddha says, life and death are illusory
I will be fooled and suffer your absence,
and somewhere you’ll always be
rising from your oxygen tent, a modern Lazarus,
or snapping open a Lone Star beer,
or simply, too tired to talk, scraping mud
from your black work boots onto the porch.
The great Latin rhetoricians advised orators that funeral speeches should be unadorned, free of flowery similes without a lot of embroidery, but at the time these words—which don’t seem so awful now—seemed shamefully simple, hardly the stuff of capital-L Literature.
Plus I had more posturing to do. The next line has Wittgenstein in it—dragged in, as Etheridge might have said, kicking and screaming.
And if, as Wittgenstein thinks, problems are grammatical,
I confess I find no syntax to pull
nails from a coffin . . .
Good Lord, I now think. The subject matter was bubbling up in me to be written, but I was yammering about Wittgenstein.
It strikes me now as twee to call “Father” the man who’d never been anything but Daddy. Too Sylvia Plath to call him Daddy, I figured.
In Cambridge in those years, fiction seemed the grand form women aspired to. Almost all the women I admired—Toni Morrison, Mona Simpson, Alice Walker, Sue Miller, Susan Minot, Alice Munro, Tillie Olsen, Joyce Carol Oates, Marilynne Robinson, Amy Tan—were working in fiction. And so I started a novel. What the hell did I know about fiction? Only that it permitted masquerade.
So what all did I change from reality?
First, I made myself an only child. That’d teach my country-club sister to throw me out of her mansion! Second, instead of my sloppy, paint-splattering drunk mother, the mom’s a ballerina—sylph-like, disciplined, bun-headed. Third, the narrator (aka me) is precocious as hell. She’s beautiful and noble and wise. She does calculus at twelve and volunteers at the local nursing home. She never bites anybody! Finally, I made sure that we as a family actually functioned like normal.