When a stroke fells the novel’s daddy, the mother and daughter stay at the hospital overnight, sleeping on chairs. On the actual night, we’d left him for Mother’s surprise birthday party, where we got drunk on margaritas and I later ran over his cat (not fatally). In fiction, we talk out insurance worries, instead of Mother threatening to shoot herself if I couldn’t straighten out her reimbursements. The novel’s mom actually consoles the grieving daughter; my mother was more akin to a lackadaisical reptile owner, flicking the terrarium to see if I was still alive.
And here’s the tone and voice.
On my sixteenth birthday, my mother presented me a pair of nineteenth-century opera glasses from France—gold-plated binoculars small enough to fit in a pearl-beaded evening bag. This gift might lead you to think that we occupied a different sort of world than we did, that we regularly attended some opera house, that we climbed in and out of a lot of taxicabs as doormen held umbrellas over us.
Even while the novel’s first paragraph refutes the opera glasses, claiming they aren’t who we are, they start the dang book. And as Freud says, there are no negatives in the unconscious. Even the diction—presented instead of gave—is a stilted stand-in for the vernacular I’d wind up with.
But the glasses had a source in lived events. Daddy had once given me his old army binoculars. Instead of those, this novel’s mother somehow delivers an effete, gold-plated doodah that opposes not just Daddy’s field glasses but the whole backwater Texas milieu I was actually born to. And not insignificantly, the glasses come from my way-disinterested mother, not my thought-I-hung-the-moon daddy. Holy wish fulfillment, Sigmund.
Meanwhile, I painted my character just as prettily, as in this paragraph, where I do my clichéd double-vision thing of looking through the glasses at the following idyllic scene.
A cardinal in a chinaberry tree picked at a green berry that looked as big as an apple. A dragonfly lit on a white cape jasmine flower, its wings whirring and shimmering. Chameleons dozed like miniature dinosaurs on tree twigs.
I managed to find something pretty to blot out the rough, industrial landscape I grew up in, which was famously ugly, run through by snakes and alligators and mosquito hordes. How did I restrain myself from putting in the little Irish guy with a green derby from the Lucky Charms commercial? In truth, the only time I was involved in nature at all was toting a shotgun to murder an animal.
What’s wrong with this as writing? I interact with no one. There’s no action, no story. I don’t seem to want anything other than to pose adorably with a lorgnette from the Lincoln administration.
But isn’t this using my strength? Poets are good at describing stuff, right? Shouldn’t I do that as much as possible? Yes, but unless the description helps the story along or reveals something psychological, it’s froufrou, embroidery, decor.
In 1991, after five years, I delivered the novel to my hard-drinking, hell-for-leather writer’s group, which was famous for making people cry. I still have longhand notes from Sven Birkerts and Robert Polito (was Lewis Hyde there?). They patiently say: “Try this as memoir.” “Your essays are good, maybe do this as nonfiction.” “TRIM!!”
Looking back, every arrow aimed at a throbbing neon sign that read *memoir*. As Elizabeth Hardwick told Robert Lowell before he invented confessional poetry, “Why not just say what happened.”
The voice I’d eventually figure for that first memoir drew from a lifetime of reading, which my mother had fostered. An artist and history maven, she kept a wobbly tower of books by her bed. She was smart and witty—master of the one-liner—but not much of a storyteller.
The talk of my barroom aficionado daddy ran rich with figurative language. If a woman had an ample backside, he might say, “She had a butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag,” which—believe it or not—was a positive attribute.
Instead of milking this current running naturally through my head, I’d tried in my novel to sound like some fluffy, ruffly Little Bo Peep.
Daddy’s manner of speaking would unlock the book for me. Daddy, the in-house exile in our household of book-reading females, would solve my biggest literary problem. He was a legendary storyteller in the bars and gambling joints across our county. For an anthro class in college, I’d even recorded some of his tales. But his manner of talk was so singular, I didn’t need to listen to the tapes. The stories hummed through my fibers.
It’s ironic that the very redneckese I’d spent some time trying to rise above wound up branding my work like hot iron on a steer’s ass. Without borrowing from Daddy’s voice—without the grit and grime of where I’d grown up—I’d been playing with one hand tied back.
When there was a thunderstorm, Daddy might say, “It’s raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock,” which, for all purposes, is a line of poetry. The crisp image jolts a little. It yanks you out of the quotidian. It operates just beyond the bounds of propriety, as poems should. Plus, the minute you laugh at it, you become loosely complicit in the speaker’s offensive speech. This binds you to the narrator. You’ve bought in. (The same kind of buy-in happens in any superfantastic premise—think George Saunders’s story “Fox 8,” where the minute you accept the premise that a fox is writing, you’ve sort of been psychically hijacked by the narrator. He owns your belief system.) That single line also evokes an entirely new world in which cows piss on flat rocks and folks stand around to marvel at it.
Metaphors helped to flesh out experiences and texture the language as my father talked. The wind came through boxcar cracks during the Depression “like a straight razor.”
He had a talent for physical detail and a bemused attention to the human comedy. Until drink ate him up, he was a keen observer, with a knack for zeroing in on a luminous image. At a random stoplight, he’d laugh like hell just seeing a big fat guy on a moped with its tires squashed down. He liked marbled meat and unfiltered Camels; he ate onions raw. He argued from external evidence—a fully imagined place—and the slapstick and violence of his tales drew you in mostly through the vivid portrayals a carnal person has a knack for.
But most of all, Daddy loved his characters. There were buffoons, sure, but affection shone through every tale. Unlike a lot of other barroom show-offs I’ve listened to, he had to be coaxed into talking, and his stories never seemed designed to punk anybody. He frequently made fun of his own lunkheaded antics, as when his brothers convinced him at a fair to get in the boxing ring with a kangaroo, who quite literally kicked his ass. I hoped his attitude of fond humility would underpin my own vision.
However much I borrowed from Daddy’s language and attitude, I knew any voice authentic to my youth would have to accommodate the hours I spent pinched and wondering in my head. My inner life sometimes felt bigger than my exterior—it’s just how I’m wired, I guess. So my voice couldn’t just mimic his. I had all manner of stuff to talk about that he’d roll his eyes at. Literary references and therapy were just two. But to package those in idiom was to keep the voice consistent, and to admit my posturing as I went:
I was in my twenties . . . and liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course—I was a lazy student). . . . [I’d] spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for somebody to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I’d married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature.
The aforementioned bullshit opera glasses I’d started with in fiction finally became what they’d been to start with in fact: army-issue field binoculars, written in below, in a voice much more alive in time and place and with shame and malice and an anecdote and a sense of place:
I stepped through the back screen and held [the field glasses] up to my eyes. Through our fence slats, I could make out Mickey Heinz sitting on his fat knees next door, running his dump truck through the dirt. I could nev
er see Mickey without a wince. I’d once gotten him to smoke Nestle’s Quik we’d rolled up in toilet paper. . . . He’d blistered [his tongue] so bad he’d run to show his mother, not considering how she and all his people belonged to one of those no-smoking, no-dancing churches. Mrs. Heinz whapped his butt bad with a hairbrush. We listened to the whole thing squatting right underneath the Heinz bathroom window—the whap-whap of that plastic brush on Mickey’s blubbery little ass, him howling like a banshee. . . . I was longing for Daddy’s truck to lunge into the garage.
This scene—rendered truly as I could make it—comes in the language of the kid I was at the time. It has some character data inside it: that I handled my own bad feelings by picking on Mickey Heinz, but felt somewhat bad about it, at least. Plus I am situated among other kids, who pose dramatic possibilities for me later. The scene includes some inner life, an anecdote, and finally Daddy shows up at its end.
I spent nine hard, exasperating, concentrated months on the first chapter of Liars’ Club alone, which was essentially time developing that voice—a watchmaker’s minuscule efforts, noodling with syntax and diction. Were I to add on the time I spent trying to recount that book’s events in poetry and a novel, I could argue that concocting that mode of speech actually occupied some thirteen years (seventeen, if you count the requisite years in therapy getting the nerve up). What was I doing during those nine months? Mostly I just shoved words around the page. I’d get up at four or five when my son was asleep, then work. I’d try telling something one way, then another. If a paragraph seemed half decent, I’d cut it out and tape it to the wall.
The voice had to be consistent to sound true. Tone could vary, but diction and syntax had to match up. A reader had to believe the same person was speaking throughout—this is an apparatus, of course. Listen to anybody all the time, and the mode of speech shifts around. Mostly assembling the voice was intuitive, but I did find some minor rules for my narrator to stick with, even if “naturally” I’d speak a whole lot of other ways.
Like, I consciously ended sentences on prepositions. “There was a lifeguard whose bathing suit we spent half the summer looking up the leg hole of.” This is idiomatic and oral. It scorns formal grammar. You can’t have one sentence that way, then warp the syntax around in the next paragraph to sound “correct.” To wit:
It was the same yellow door we’d gone through is a different critter speaking than one who says It was the yellow door through which we had gone.
The diction had to be consistent too. So I kept calling my Mother Mother—not Mama, sometimes, then Mommy, then Mom, whether “that’s how it really happened” or not. Changing what I called her would signal some psychological shift, which I’d have to stop and explain. I just picked Mother and stuck with it.
It’s a cliché to talk about finding a voice, but it does feel arrived at, fixed and immutable as the angel hidden in Michelangelo’s stone. About nine months into working on the first chapter for a proposal (I’d been told I needed a hundred pages and an outline), I started knowing where the words went. Plus an obvious order rose up—mostly chronological, with one flash forward at the outset.
It didn’t happen in one instant. But over a period of a few days I went through a profound psychological shift. The images in my head suddenly had words representing them on the page. And accompanying the words was a state of consciousness. It almost felt like I’d walked into some inner room where my lived experiences could pass through and come out as language.
If the voice worked as a living contract with the reader, it also strangely bound me to candor. To make stuff up would somehow have broken the spell the voice cast over me. Even fake names slid some glass down between me and the past. I had to do the whole book with real names and descriptions and do global find/replace afterward. Odd, that.
Whatever the source of the voice—self-hypnosis, psychological peace, the ghost of Papa Hem saying Write one true sentence, or the Lord God on high—its arrival changed the whole game. I honestly don’t know if a shift in mind predated the voice or vice versa. But suddenly I felt the wagon I’d been pulling like a trudging ox was a vehicle with an engine, moving down the road. Pages started piling up. And two and a half years later I had a full draft of what went into print—so close they set type by it.
15 | On Book Structure and the Order of Information
Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to create a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.
St. Augustine, City of God
In terms of basic book shape, I’ve used the same approach in all three of mine: I start with a flash forward that shows what’s at stake emotionally for me over the course of a book, then tell the story in straightforward, linear time.
I wouldn’t suggest that shape for everybody, but I would say you have to start out setting emotional stakes—why the enterprise is a passionate one for you, what’s at risk—early on. That’s why the flashback structure, which I borrowed from Conroy and Crews (among thousands of other storytellers), is a time-honored one. It’s sitting on the coffin, telling the tale of a death—or rebirth, in my case.
Young writers often ask me to help them order information in a story. But there’s a proven method you can try. Imagine sitting down to tell it to a pal at lunch. You’d have no problem figuring out what goes where.
Usually the big story seems simple: They were assholes, I was a saint. If you look at it ruthlessly, you may find the story was more like: I richly provoked them, and they became assholes; or, They were mostly assholes, but could be a lot of fun to be with; or, They were so sick and sad, they couldn’t help being assholes, the poor bastards; or, We took turns being assholes. . . . (I always joke to students that everything I’ve ever written started out: I am sad. The end. By Mary Karr.)
There’s the big, almost-capital-S Story of a whole book (how I survived becoming an orphan by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, say), and there are smaller stories or anecdotes—the time Stooge and I stole the watermelons. If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.
16 | The Road to Hell Is Paved with Exaggeration
don’t brandish your stump
over other people’s heads
don’t knock your white cane
on the panes of the well-fed
Zbigniew Herbert,
“Mr. Cogito Reflects on Suffering”
To hammer home for practitioners what I’ve said before, the worst events or the most spectacular wins don’t make the best books. Maybe the most truly felt event does—or some cunning mix of voice and story shaped by passion. Plenty of folks have triumphed over way more than I ever faced. I was born in the richest country in the world to literate, employed parents who owned their home. Some start out brain-damaged in rape camps in far-flung gulags. My suffering is not one iota of what such folks endure.
To manufacture stuff in hopes of selling more books means you never do honor to your own trials and conquests, what Faulkner might call your postage stamp of reality. If you trust that what you felt deeply warrants your emotional response, try to honor your past by writing it that way. Sometimes true agony is not even discernible to the human eye. As a kid, when I saw my mother’s mouth become a straight line and heard her speak in a Yankee accent as her posture went super straight, I knew she was tanked. The rat scrabble this set off in my head, as I tried to figure out how to stop the chaos approaching us like a runaway train, was torment. Rendering a small external stimulus inside a child’s impotent body can provide a moving experience for a reader.
Also, making you and yours seem hyperbizarre can keep a reader from identifying with you or being inside an experience.
Some writers’ talents work in the realm of the hyperbizarre, but they’re rare. My abilities seem more tethered to the real rather than the surreal, so I try to normalize the strange so the r
eader can access it.
17 | Blind Spots and False Selves
We apply certain kinds of pressure to you, under which you are forced to flee to your highest ground. . . . But hopefully, under that pressure, you leave behind all of the false You’s—the imitative You, the too-clever You, the Avoiding You—and settle into that (sometimes, at first, disappointing) beast, Real You. . . . Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.
George Saunders,
MFA graduation speech, Syracuse University, 2013
In memoir the heart is the brain. It’s the Geiger counter you run over memory’s landscape looking for precious metals to light up. A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives you courage to reveal whatever you unearth, whether you come out looking vain or conniving or hateful or not.
Any memoirist’s false selves (plural) will take turns plastering themselves across his real mouth to silence the scarier fact of who he is. Writing as directly as possible out of that single “true” core and nascent ability will naturally unify pages. Otherwise, there will be inconsistencies that read as fake.
False choices based on who you wish you were will result in places where the voice goes awry or the details chosen ring false. If Helen Keller wrote from the viewpoint of a nearsighted girl rather than a blind one or if Maya Angelou made herself an orphaned paraplegic or a light-skinned black girl who could pass in the Jim Crow South . . . well, you can see how their stories would’ve been bled of raw power.
Many of the truths a memoirist starts out believing morph into something wholly other. Again: anybody maladroit at apology or changing her mind just isn’t bent for the fluid psychological state that makes truth discoverable.