You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it’s like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.
Geoffrey Wolff claimed he, over the years, inadvertently shaped his old man into a more dashing, gangsteresque figure than he’d been:
It had always been convenient to see my father in melodramatic terms, as extraordinarily seedy or criminal. But the things I’d dined out on weren’t emotionally accurate.
Before writing his Vietnam memoir, Tobias Wolff discovered that the letters he’d sent his mother—which he’d remembered as soft-focus, composed to shield her from fret—actually ramped up the danger he’d faced.
When Gary Shteyngart worked on his mesmerizing Little Failure, he came to realize what a dutiful son he’d in fact always been. Family lore held he was an ingrate and a bounder who cost his parents no end of misery.
Of course, revelations come to anybody who prods around in the past, memoirist or not. Ten years before my first book, I confronted my mother about why Daddy, who’d stoically tolerated her tantrums and wagging firearms at him, had stayed with her. She’d said, “He felt sorry for me.” The instant she said it, I knew it for truth, and yet it overturned a lifetime of believing she’d held all the power in their marriage. His silence hadn’t been helplessness—it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity.
Mostly we get in trouble when we start trying to unpack those sound bites I mentioned. Ideas that hold decades of interpretation can lie to us worst of all: I was tough, I was beleaguered, I was ugly. In Shteyngart’s Little Failure, his parents called him ugly so often, I was astonished to find plastered across the published work’s cover (having read an early manuscript) a snapshot of the slim, darkly handsome, long-lashed boy. He was solemn enough to rival the young hemophiliac czar-to-be! Hell, who wouldn’t look solemn when called ugly so often? Of course, for the purposes of memoir, it matters not whether he was perceptibly ugly, only that he felt so.
No matter how much you’re gunning for truth, the human ego is also a stealthy, low-crawling bastard, and for pretty much everybody, getting used to who you are is a lifelong spiritual struggle. Start trying to bring yourself to the page, and fear of how you’ll come off besets even the most forthright. The best you can hope for is to rip off each mask as you find it blotting out your vision.
We each nurture a private terror that some core aspect(s) of either our selves or our story must be hidden or disowned. With every manuscript I’ve ever edited—even grown-assed writers’—the traits a writer often fights hardest to hide may serve as undeniable facets both of self and story. You bumble onto scenes that blow up fond notions of the past, or whole shifts in attitude practically rewrite you where you stand.
In even great writers’ books, you’ll find whole chapters worth skipping because they feel like emotional detours. They’re included because the writer has some shiny aspect of the self that the chapter polishes to high sheen. Nabokov devotes the third chapter of Speak, Memory to all his family estates and heraldry and his fancy-pants ancestors, Baron von So-and-So and Count Suck-On-This. It’s stuff he’s secretly proud of, without ever admitting as much. But here’s how dull the writing gets inside that small, understandable vanity:
Two other, much more distant, estates in the region were related to Batovo: my uncle Prince Wittgenstein’s Druzhnoselie situated a few miles beyond the Siverski railway station, which was six miles northeast of our place.
He’s preening, in a way. Eventually he also casually drops how Uncle Ruka left him a couple million dollars in 1916. And he claims he has no long grouse against the Soviet dictatorship for having made off with this rightful inheritance. But he argues this disinterest in cash so hard, I have a hard time swallowing it.
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me. . . . The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
Point being: it would feel more honest to this reader if he confessed to begrudging the lost cash—who wouldn’t? At this chapter’s end he gets back to a beautiful reverie. It’s somewhat reassuring that even a masterpiece like Speak, Memory sags a little with the weight of one chapter, where we sense that Nabokov is showing off his exotic pedigree without admitting as much. Mary McCarthy perpetrates a similar gaffe in Catholic Girlhood, devoting a chapter to her role in a school play and her mastery of Latin in a way that points up her cleverness. Students always rankle against that chapter. Ditto Hemingway, who in A Moveable Feast (1964) seems to be slyly mocking Fitzgerald when he chooses to recount a talk they allegedly had about F. Scott’s penis size.
Somebody once asked me if I minded the review that claimed I was too circumspect in describing my son’s father in Lit, so he comes off two-dimensional as any WASP in an L.L.Bean catalog. My answer? If I’d written it better, it would’ve worked for every reader. Writing about him had tormented me, and those passages did feel weaker than the rest.
Another divorce failure, I think, occurs in Elizabeth Gilbert’s much-adored Eat, Pray, Love, which otherwise displays a nice mix of circumspection and candor. She overtly blames herself for the demise of her marriage, for instance, and for not wanting to have a baby. She claims the reasons for the divorce are too private—drawing a curtain I respect across those events without seeming coy.
But right after, she mulls over at considerable length the dickering details of her husband’s settlement. Is that not too private? She first offers to sell everything, and then to split it fifty-fifty. “What if he took all the assets and I took all the blame?”
[He] was also asking for things I never even considered (a stake in the royalties of books I’d written during the marriage, a cut of possible future movie rights to my work, a share of my retirement accounts). . . . It would cost me dearly, but a fight in the courts would be infinitely more expensive and time-consuming, not to mention soul-corroding.
Now divorce writing may be the toughest thing a memoirist can do other than covering a war, nor could I render my own any better. But while she takes the time to detail all her ex’s unfair requests, she never lets us in on the source of what seems like buckets of money for a New York freelance writer. She sports an apartment, a house in the ’burbs, a retirement account. She flies a friend along on her book tour for company. Even a simple “I’d come into some money” or “Movie rights made me flush” would help. This is a minor bump in the book’s long journey, but it proves that even the most successful of us misstep from time to time, showing what we should hide and hiding what the reader needs.
We more often fail by omitting key scenes. Cheryl Strayed was almost done with Wild when she discovered two incidents that—once you’ve read her story—seem so psychologically crucial you can’t believe they’d ever been passed over.
The first involves how she and her teenage brother have to shoot their dead mother’s horse. Before Strayed’s hiking trip, her beloved mother dies a swift and agonizing death of cancer, leaving behind an ancient, broken-down nag named Lady. Strayed’s stepfather—once an amazing dad—has, after her mother has passed, gotten over it pretty fast, even moving a new girlfriend into Strayed’s childhood house. He promises to have the animal put down by a vet.
He’s away on Christmas Eve when Cheryl and her brother—she twenty, he eighteen—come back to the homestead for the last time to find the bony animal shivering in a snowfield. She spoke to me about it recently on the phone:
My heart was shredded. The closest we could come to killing my mother was killing that horse, which was like her god.
It’s a wrenching scene: “The bullet hit Lady right between the eyes, in the middle of her white sta
r.” After, the kids leave her for coyotes to drag away.
What’s captivating to me as a writer is how the memory came to her in a flash. She was driving her kids home from school, not thinking much about the memoir, when she experienced a brief moment of desolation. You know the feeling: a sagging sadness out of nowhere just waylaid her. And that feeling conjured the image of those two kids in the cold, shooting that animal.
It’s not like she’d forgotten the event—just overlooked it. Who wants to show up in a book shooting an animal, after all—even if it’s a mercy killing? But of course she knew it belonged right off. “I’d been trying to figure out what scenes would show how totally my stepfather had bailed on us,” she said. Of course, she only needed that one.
The other memory also involves her stepfather. Toward the end of her thousands-mile-long hike, she’s staring into the fire, recalling how her stepfather had taught her to build a fire and pitch a tent.
From him, I’d learned how to open a can with a jackknife and paddle a canoe and skip a rock on the surface of a lake. . . . But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on [the trail]. . . . He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he had loved me well when it mattered.
So despite her heartbreak at his leaving, and “though it was true everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat,” her load was lightened by all he’d taught her that she could use. She wound up feeling he and her mother had given her all the tools she needed to make it.
Maybe it takes a lifetime to get used to occupying your own body, writer or no. Self-deceit is the bacterium affecting every psyche to varying degrees, especially in youth. We like to view ourselves a certain way. After warning my high school sweetheart—a rock guitarist and music producer whose nickname back then was Little Hendrix—that he might make a cameo in a book about our teen years, he asked, Could I please not mention all the pot we’d smoked as kids? I looked at him, with his mass of hair and slim-fit jeans and boots, and asked him who he thought he was fooling.
In my experience, young writers may stumble early on by misunderstanding the basic nature of their talents. We want to be who we’re not. The badass wants to be a saint, the saint a slut, the slut an intellectual in pince-nez glasses.
My Syracuse colleague George Saunders murdered himself in grad school trying to sound like gritty, working-class minimalist Ray Carver. Ray was a lumbering trailer-park aficionado who favored stark realism using the fewest words, so George showed up driving a beater pickup and sporting a cowboy hat. Forget that he was actually a handsome surfer-looking guy, son of a successful businessman, prom king in his high school. Plus the nature of his talent—which produced for us fantastic talking foxes and cavemen in museum tableaux and masks that permit babies to speak—stands worlds away from Carver’s. George’s surreal situations grow more from the mode of, say, Isaac Babel or Nikolai Gogol. George trying to be Ray Carver would be like Gabriel García Márquez trying to be Hemingway. One of George’s teachers kept trying to steer him back to his humor pieces, which George found “too goofy”: “They were just stupid jokes I put in, messing around.” But eventually, as he got older, the satirical stuff started to make its way onto the page.
Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it. In fact, usually it growls like a beast and stinks of something rotten. Age and practice help you to rout out vanities after you’ve ruined perfectly good paper setting them down, but you can’t keep them from clotting up early drafts.
And every memoirist I know has a comparable story. I have dozens.
Even this book tricked me. You’d think—after three memoirs and thirty years of teaching—I’d have inoculated myself against posing as somebody other than this damn self I’m stuck with.
But the same deluded fear interferes at some point with pretty much every book I write.
Before starting this, my editor suggested right off keeping it simple, modeling the book on my Syracuse syllabus. But I argued that I was going to elevate the memoir form by following T. S. Eliot’s model in his essays or James Wood’s in Broken Estate or young Elif Batuman’s brilliant tome on Russian lit.
Yet those three role models couldn’t be further from who I am. They’re Ivy Leaguers, lauded intellectuals, fluent in languages and philosophy, leaking IQ points from every pore. I am a backwoods storyteller who’s made a living with street vernacular. As if.
Can you guess what my fear is? What kept me generating diddly squat on this very text for months?
That I lack the credentials to write anything with authority. Reared in the Ringworm Belt, I am a dropout. The grad program I went to folded the day after I got my MFA. And yet I planned this book as a work of aesthetics and literary history and phenomenology and neurobiology and yahditah yahditah blah blah.
And this is the self-consciousness that haunts every book! You’d think I could spy the wrong road without first traveling halfway down it. You’d think I could—after decades of tricking myself over the same fear—head off the pretentious bustling that precedes my writing anything and always winds up in the trash.
And yet writing has never been linear for me. I always circle my own stories, avoiding the truth like a pooch staked to a clothesline pole, spiraling closer and closer with each revision till—with each book—my false self finally lines up eye to eye with the true one.
I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I’d make a brooch out of it.
18 | Truth Hunger: The Public and Private Burning of Kathryn Harrison
Lying is done with words, but also with silence.
Adrienne Rich,
“Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”
It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don’t match up. I don’t know if memoirists are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ourselves. Like everybody, I suppose, people we loved broke our hearts because only they had access to them, and we broke our own hearts later by following their footsteps and reenacting their mistakes.
This earmark of a memoirist no doubt applies to every human being on the planet. But many of us undertake exploring the past precisely because it is so foggy and tenuous in its truths.
Or maybe memoirists’ families and platoons and empires actually did blow apart more spectacularly than their less-scarred or less-likely-to-write-about-it counterparts. But being an orphan oddly frees you to speculate and wallow around in memoryville without any correction from outside. The minute our non-memoir-writing counterparts start wondering aloud about this or that event in the past, the memory police—either a tidy matriarch with a chronological photo album or somebody at the VFW—rushes in to say, “That’s not how it happened.” (Robert Graves was in the same regiment as poet Siegfried Sassoon, and in the latter’s copy of Good-Bye to All That in the New York Public Library sit marginal notes arguing the veracity of many points Graves made.)
In my house, say, the recording angels stopped regularly filling photo albums when I was about four. Certificates of divorce and marriage and death never got saved. It’s all rumor and guesswork.
Mary McCarthy in Catholic Girlhood claims losing her parents had broken the chain of “collective memory” that binds the more solvent family. Without a solid history, she and her brother spent a lifetime discussing the past, bent like a pair of bloodhounds to sniff out the old trails. That ongoing dialogue helped to fuel her work for a lifetime before she set pen to paper.
The very difficulties [of researching our story] have provided an incentive. As orphans, my brother Kevin and I have a burning interest in our past, which we try to reconstruct t
ogether, like two amateur archaeologists, falling on any new scrap of evidence, trying to fit it in, questioning our relations, belaboring our own memories. It has been a kind of quest.
Having gone through the profound discomfort of writing from personal history, I don’t think most writers amble into this arena to cash in on some grisly past, nor to settle scores, nor to jack up every hangnail into a battlefield amputation. Truth summons them, as it summons the best novelists and poets. And it’s not only memoirists who get it wrong. “What is the novelist’s sentimentality,” Tobias Wolff once said, “—whether expressed in unearned cheer or unearned cynicism—but a lie of the heart.” Most memoirists are driven to their projects for their own deeply felt psychological reasons. As Yeats said, “Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry,” so most of us have been hurt into memoir.
The memoirists I know don’t cleave to veracity so as to keep kinfolks from suing nor to avoid landing on Oprah blinking and sweating once they’re unmasked. For most, knowing the truth matters more than how they come off telling it. They’ve spent lifetimes plumbing the past—weighing, questioning, digging around in the old days long after their former companions have sallied forth into tidy forgetfulness or private versions of personal history in which they star as heroes.
Kathryn Harrison was inwardly scalded into writing one of the bravest memoirs in recent memory, only to be blistered by the press for it. (No man I can think of ever took such a public butt-whipping.*) What sin did she commit? In The Kiss, she breaks a universal cultural taboo—at age twenty, she’s seduced by her long-lost preacher father, entering into what she calls an affair with him.
In choosing to digest fully her fractured past, Harrison was possessed of a gnawing hunger for clarity. Because she paid such a high price for exposing said past—the ad hominem attacks on her remain the nastiest I’ve ever seen—her complex motivations warrant a look.