I wound up trying to capture early-teen desire in the poetic, metaphorical way it had come to me then. There’s nothing porno about it, and yet it carries massive intensity. Also, I’d chosen Cherry as an ironic title: I felt—due to household upheaval and two childhood rapes—I’d lost my innocence long before I should have. But the more I wrote, the more I discovered that innocence had never left me, if you measure innocence as a capacity for belief—particularly a belief in love. What was mine in terms of hope and sweet longing had been with me all along—still, in some ways, is.
In Lit, I was also bedeviled by letting present knowledge block out clear memories of the past. I just couldn’t stop seeing my marriage except colored by our divorce, and I wrote the same pages over and over, not making stuff up, but canting the material one way, then another. At first I wrote events that cast him as perfect and me as a drunken slag. Then I wrote him as an icy WASP and myself as a tender heart. None of it rang emotionally true to me. I despaired. I even considered giving back the advance, which I’d have had to sell my apartment to do.
Then after meditation one day, when I’d prayed for the seventh month running for some glimpse of the truth, I had a vivid flash of us young and in love, floating in inner tubes down a Vermont river the week we met. How tender we’d been. The memory brought a stab of pain almost physical—I’d avoided writing about how in love we were, brimming with hope. It had been far easier to make glib, jokey remarks about how shitty a wife I’d been.
Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. If you find yourself blocked for a period, maybe goad yourself in the direction of how you hoped at the time. Ask yourself if you aren’t strapping your current self across the past to hide the real story.
21 | Why Memoirs Fail
My last memory is the Headmaster’s parting shot: “Well, good-bye, Graves, and remember that your best friend is the waste-paper basket.” This has proved good advice. . . . few writers seem to send their work through as many drafts as I do.
Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That
Most memoirs fail because of voice. It’s not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling. Or there are staunch limits to emotional tone, so it emits a single register. Being too cool or too shrill can ruin the read. The sentences are boring and predictable, or it’s so inconsistent you don’t know who’s speaking or what place they come from. You don’t believe or trust the voice. You’re not curious about the inner or outer lives of the writer. The author’s dead in the water.
We live in the age of the image, and it’s too easy to learn carnal writing for a memoirist to sketch a foggy physical world sans evocative sensory detail. A lot of instruction manuals beam in on the physical, simply because you can master it. But few textbooks take up how the inner life manifests itself in a memoir’s pages. In the more spectacular visual media like action films, say, the inner life fails to get much airplay—at most a scene in a shrink’s office or a snippet of voiceover here and there. But memoir can compete against the pyrotechnics of visual imagery in film and TV only by excelling where those media fail: writing a deeper moment from inside it.
You’re looking for that inner enemy that’ll help you to structure the book. I always have inklings of it, but tend to find it by writing interior frets and confessions and yearnings as I recall them. Maybe it’s only manifest after a first draft. Once I’ve found it, I’ll revise with it as the spine—how the self evolves to reconcile its inner conflicts over time. Your attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end.
Another way a crap memoir fails is if the narrator fails to change over time. Characters who don’t transform or who lack depth become predictable. If the bad characters were consistently bad in real life, it would make all our heartbreaks almost palatable. We could just steer clear of the always-hateful human. But the hateful are kind sometimes, or sorry—or they sound so sincerely sorry it’s hard not to get lured in again and again. Those of us who grew up with seductive narcissists in the family know that they capture you not with their bullying but by somehow making you pity them in private. So you imagine you’re the sole confidante of this individual’s inner misery. She needs your fealty, and you give it repeatedly despite brutal evidence that doing so puts you in danger.
Shallow reportage usually stems from a lack of psychological self-knowledge. The narrator is always tough or stoical or self-sacrificing, or always ready with the quick quip or smartass posture. Worst of all, such characters are hackneyed as hell, predictable when life often fails to be and art must never be.
Most stale of all is the butt-whipping memoir, which abounds these days: “I took a butt-whipping, I got up and took another. Poor me, here came yet another.” The great Holocaust memoirs portray not just great suffering but great hope and wisdom and forms of psychological endurance and curiosity. They seem written to help us understand something complex, not to prove a single point in dreary repetition. A book that concerns itself only with one thing—I Was a Teenage Sex Slave, say—might have some prurient interest, but unless that thing is super dramatic (a war or a concentration camp) or varied in its portrayal, you won’t find yourself rereading it.
Unless there’s a political motive (as for Robert Graves or Richard Wright), a bitter book grows tired, a vengeful one unreadable. You know the writer’s morphing every event to make a point.
Or a memoir fails from a pacing problem—it goes fast over dramatic events and slows to a snail’s pace to dispense banal information or go on a tangent.
You can be too smotheringly close to an event, so it’s overpowering to the reader. Or you keep your distance, so just when something key is about to be revealed, it becomes glib or jokey.
I remember a piece in which a closeted gay writer was about to get laid for the first time after pages of shame and fear. He goes to the disco, gets picked up, makes out at the bar, then—finally—brings the guy home. At the denouement, the author pole-vaults entirely out of the scene to launch into a long disquisition on his PhD dissertation, which ended the whole piece. Certainly you can pull the shade on a physical scene for discretion’s sake. You don’t have to detail a sex act as porn does. But the psychic swerve—not describing how the act affected the speaker—denied the reader what the writer had been promising for pages.
On the most basic level, bad sentences make bad books. Poet Robert Hass taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better. I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me. Or how I see them now.
In Lit, my rough draft of one chapter started thus:
Mother drove me to college in our yellow station wagon, and every night we stayed at a Holiday Inn, where we got drunk on screwdrivers.
This is information. Getting drunk with your mother suggests an emotional problem, but there’s no inherent drama or conflict. Other than the yellow car, there’s no carnality. The screwdrivers suggest trouble but don’t really capture the emotional tenor of the drive. Mostly, there is no scene—just reportage of data. That’s all I started with.
So how did I get from Draft 1’s dried-up little sound bite to something lusher? Memory—a physical memory of that time, a carnal fact. The car hadn’t come with air conditioning, so Mother installed a cheap one, which hung from the dash. It collected distillation, so when she made a sharp right turn, icy water—faintly redolent of chemical coolant—would slosh out onto my bare feet. Getting doused by that splash of freezing condensation was like a physical baptism miraculously dousing me in that single, living instant. It’s as if memory’s eye suddenly flipped open.
Like many such scenes, it comes to me in florid present tense. I look down and see the giant bamboo-bottom flip-flops I’d bought in California, with their black velvet straps, getting drenched with cold water. A
nd I am in that car again. I can see the derby hat Mother wore—a pimp hat, she called it. She’d bought me one, too, in Houston. And she wears a copper bracelet that turns her wrist green because somebody told her it helps with arthritis in her hand. And another sense memory comes: I smell peaches, which we bought by the bushel in Arkansas. Also vodka from the screwdrivers Mother drank all the way down.
I rest inside those sense memories, and a phrase comes to me—peaches galore. Mother says we have peaches galore, and I say, Wasn’t that some burlesque dancer’s name? And Mother says, That was Pussy Galore. Her saying the word pussy is almost as wince-inducing as watching the savagery with which she devours a peach. And I remember feeling cooped up with her—a luxury in some ways, since her attention was hard to come by. But I also recall longing to run away. Those conflicting desires held the emotional fuel in that chapter.
And the memories start flying at me like bats swooping out of the past—my reading aloud to her an early English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That novel makes it in, and the phrase about Pussy Galore; the derby hats do a cameo. But the copper bracelet and the air conditioner vanish. And that beautiful Iowa corn, the sheer order and wealth of it—those rich farms with large white houses—that’s the kind of American scene I longed to enter. It opposes my squalid hometown and Mother’s own Dust Bowl childhood.
The cornfield is an apt symbol for what I aspired to, at the time. Folks from normal childhoods might fear the tidy repetition of the rows. To me, they looked like an order that lent comfort. So I used the image to begin the chapter.
Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croaker sacks.
But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage.
It has a carnal description—the car like a Monopoly icon—from a point of view I could only have in imagination. Other carnal facts: the girl me has both a hangover and bitten cuticles. In addition to data from the earlier draft that this mother-daughter team get drunk together at night, it gives background info that the first paragraph lacks:
–Mother’s Dust Bowl youth
–The author’s age
–Where she’s from
–That she’s a worrier
–That the college she’s heading to is one above her station
–The blight of her shitty high school record
So there exists a boatload of interior information that helps to create emotional conflicts:
–The mother’s low-rent background adds to the daughter’s angst about going to a fancier college than normal in that family.
–The daughter telling the mother she’s sick of hearing about said mother’s shitty youth shows the somewhat normal conflict between mother and daughter, though for a daughter to call her mother’s youth “shitty” was way outside the mores of that time. The idiom suggests a lack of boundary between the two that gestures to the book’s central conflict.
In addition, I explain several things about my notion of truth:
–The Monopoly icon image says I am using imagined scenes from my adult point of view.
–Saying “I told Mother something like” proves I’m reconcocting talk, not working from a diary or objective script.
Most of all, the scene holds core emotional truths that will eventually shape the whole book. The teen me wanted to be like Mother—artistic, boho. We wind up reading a great novel together. But wanting to become Mother doomed me to become a drunk, an emotional car wreck, and not much of a nurturer. I mean, she got potted nightly with seventeen-year-old me as if we were sorority sisters. Teen me also longed to escape my suckhole hometown, which Mother likewise resented and blamed me for keeping her stranded in—so to add to my angst, I felt guilty leaving her behind. The revision tries to infuse the scene with some undercurrent of the psychic torrents trapped in that car’s small space—two squirrels in a coffee can, Daddy might have said.
22 | An Incomplete Checklist to Stave Off Dread
Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!
But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don’t use foreign expressions. It’s elitist.)
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
For those of you with a naturally generative talent, able to bang out pages by the ream, this chapter may only help you later in the process, when it’s time to revise and organize and tighten. But mostly I’m writing for that human creature who sits down brimming with a story, then thinks, Oh, shit. What first?
This chapter answers that, so far as I can. It should also lend some comfort: ts’ok to be lost. Being lost—as I’ve said elsewhere—is a prelude to finding new paths. And any curious writer will have to do a lot of wandering before any book’s done. You won’t have most of your elements on day one. You should have:
1.Crisp memories—that carnal world in your head
2.Stories and a passion to tell them
3.Some introductory information or data to get across
4.The self-discipline to work in scary blankness for some period of time (for me it takes three to five weeks to find a way in, though I’ve been in the weeds for a year at a pop)
Everything else, you can figure out as you go. In fact, if you start telling your stories, the pieces tend to fall into place. As you work, you’re looking for those other elements mentioned before—a voice that exploits your talent and an interior point of view, complete with an inner enemy to organize the book around.
Writers hate formulas and checklists. It’s way more fun to masquerade as a natural shaman who channels beautiful pages as the oracle once channeled Zeus. But looking at my own books, I’ve found they all include most of the stuff below—as do most of the books I teach.
Here’s my list:
1.Paint a physical reality that uses all the senses and exists in the time you’re writing about—a singular, fascinating place peopled with objects and characters we believe in. Should include the speaker’s body or some kinesthetic elements.
2.Tell a story that gives the reader some idea of your milieu and exploits your talent. We remember in stories, and for a writer, story is where you start.
3.Package information about your present self or backstory so it has emotional conflict or scene.
All the rest of these are interior:
4.Set emotional stakes—why is the writer passionate about or desperate to deal with the past—the hint of an inner enemy?
5.Think, figure, wonder, guess. Show yourself weighing what’s true, your fantasies, values, schemes, and failures.
6.Change times back and forth—early on, establish the “looking back” voice, and the “being in it” voice.
7.Collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory.
8.Show not so much how you suffer in long passages, but how you survive. Use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over th
e dark places.
9.Don’t exaggerate. Trust that what you felt deeply is valid.
10.Watch your blind spots—in revision, if not before, search for reversals. Beware of what you avoid and what you cling to.
11.(Related to all of the above) Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart.
And one big fat caveat: lead with your own talent, which may cause you to ignore all I’ve recommended.
23 | Michael Herr: Start in Kansas, End in Oz
Oh, return to zero, the master said.
Use what’s lying around the house.
Make it simple and sad.
Stephen Dunn, “Visiting the Master”
I. What He Does
Every reader who didn’t fall for Michael Herr’s voice in his seminal war memoir Dispatches (1977) fell for it as a moviegoer in the haunting narration of Apocalypse Now or his later script for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, both of which echo the book:
How many people had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time it was an American and an officer. That wasn’t supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit . . . charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn’t know what I’d do when I found him.
Charley didn’t get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death, or victory.
Apocalypse Now
Michael Herr invented what Americans think of as the hypnotic, surreal sounds of that awful war (maybe any awful war), and it made him famous in a movie genre I’ve heard him darkly refer to as Vietnam porn.