One reason I send manuscripts out to friends and family in advance is: I often barely believe myself, for I grew up suspicious of my own perceptions. Plus my kinfolk had changed their stories so many times, I was hoping their signing off on pages would finally end my own lifetime’s speculation.
Long ago, when I was younger and broker and looked easier to boss around, a publishing executive tried to nudge me into inventing a scene in my first book when I say good-bye to my mother. “The reader has to know how that went down at that moment. . . .” But I remembered zip about the scene and wound up guessing about it instead:
Mother must have squawked about our leaving. She would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking. I recall no such scene. . . . The French doors on that scene never swung open. . . . Mother herself was clipped from my memory. She did promise vaguely to come for us soon, but I can’t exactly hear her saying that.
And here’s the kicker: I’d now guess that she felt liberated once we left—such is the nature of time reversing an opinion. When I was younger and Mother alive, we both found it easier to pretend she’d fought for us. But I never actually saw Mother fighting for our company—she always much preferred the wild freedom of solitude. Were I starting the book over, I’d guess she didn’t mind our absence overmuch.
Though The Liars’ Club rang true to me when I wrote it, from this juncture it seems to have sprung from a state of loving delusion about my family. In those days, I still enjoyed a child’s desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe. Were I writing that story today, I’d be less generous to them while perhaps shining more empathy on my younger self. Whether age has granted me more wholesome care for the girl I was, or whether life’s ravages have ground down my heart so I’m more self-centered, I can’t say. Am I healthily less codependent or a bigger bitch? You could argue either way. Although I’d fix a wrong date or point of fact for the book to correct it as written record, I couldn’t alter any major take on the past without redoing the whole tome. The self who penned that book formed the filter for those events. I didn’t fabricate stuff, but today, other scenes I’d add might tell a less forgiving story.
Which brings me to the wellsprings where a writer’s biggest “lies” bubble up—interpretation. I still try to err on the side of generosity toward any character. Like I mention Mother throwing my birthday lasagna at my daddy in one of the zillion fights that felt like my fault, but I also mention her cleaning it up after he was gone and lighting candles on a German chocolate cake—a scene that, if left out, would’ve skewed her into seeming worse than she in fact was. Anne Fadiman writes about a nineteenth-century sailor who comes home to a starving family at Christmas with a bushel of oranges. He locks himself in a room and devours them solo while his kids scratch at the door. He’s an asshole, right? Until you learn he had scurvy.
Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. In my last memoir, I couldn’t report a malicious quip from my ex-husband without mentioning that he never spoke to me that way. Maybe that’s why it stayed carved in my psyche: it was out of character. A writer whose point of view was closer inside the past might only concentrate on feeling wounded by the insult without tacking on that fact, because it could jar the reader from the instant. Mostly, I try to keep the focus on myself and my own peccadilloes.
For the record, here are the liberties I’ve used, which all seem fairly common now:
1.Re-creating dialogue. I’ve often said, “The conversation went something like this,” but most readers presume as much. Also, by not using quotation marks in later books, I seek to keep the reader more “inside” my experience—the subjective nature eschews the standards of history, I think.
2.Changing names to protect the innocent. Most of my friends had a hoot choosing their pseudonyms.
3.Altering the name of the town. Most minor characters like the sheriff and school principal I don’t bother to track down. They might be dead, but if they are alive, I don’t want the responsibility of perhaps misremembering them.
4.Blurring details of somebody’s appearance for the sake of their privacy. I’ve done this many times for minor characters—a mayor, say. But for the neighborhood rapist in Liar’s Club, I didn’t want folks in my hometown to mistakenly blame one of the local delinquents. I gave the culprit braces, which nobody in our neighborhood had, and changed a few other things. With Lit, I hoped my ex-husband would vet the manuscript pages, but when I spoke to him in advance, he claimed to prefer being blurry.
5.Moving back and forth through time when appropriate and giving info you didn’t have at the time, which breaks point of view. (If your next-door neighbor turned out to be, say, Ted Bundy, you might mention that in parentheses because you know the reader would care to know.) It’s still apparent when I do this that I speak from another time.
6.Telescoping time: “Seventeen years later, Daddy had a stroke. . . .” Or using one episode to stand for all of seventh grade. The action points for a given period represent it wholesale. I skip dull parts.
7.Shaping a narrative. Of course, the minute you write about one thing instead of another, you’ve begun to leave stuff out, which you could argue is falsifying. What was major to you might have been a blip on somebody else’s radar.
8.Stopping to describe something in the midst of a heated scene, when I probably didn’t observe it consciously at that instant. This is perhaps the biggest lie I ever tell. I do so because I am constantly trying to re-create the carnal world as I lived it, so I keep concocting an experience for a reader. I have taken that liberty, but because I’m Catholic, I feel guilty about it.
9.Temporarily changing something to protect a friend at her request. My friend Meredith had been a habitué of asylums, but she still didn’t want me to publish a school scene of her razoring at her wrist, because it would torment her aging mother. She agreed to let a mutual friend stand in for her, so the suicidal friend is Stacy in the first edition and Meredith in later ones.
10.Recounting old fantasies. My inner life is much bigger than my outer life. And some fantasies from the past seem gaudily true. ’Course, I say they’re only fancies, not fact. In Liars’ Club I also made up two of the tall tales, which are meant to be bullshit anyway.
11.Putting in scenes I didn’t witness but only heard about—though I admit as much. From Lit: “So vivid is the story of mother’s final drunk with Harold—so painterly in its grotesque detail—that I take the liberty of recounting it as if I were there, for a good story told often enough puts you in rooms never occupied.”
12.Vis-à-vis interpretation: be generous and fair when you can; when you can’t, admit your disaffinity. My general idea is to keep the focus on myself and my own struggles, not speculate on other people’s motives, and not concoct events and characters out of whole cloth.
3 | Why Not to Write a Memoir: Plus a Pop Quiz to Protect the Bleeding & Box Out the Rigid
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
Zora Neale Hurston
Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, “I really want to have sex, where do I start?” What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another. It depends on how you’re constructed inside and out, hormone levels, psychology. Or it’s like saying, “I want a makeover, how should I look?” A Goth girl’s not inclined to lime-green Fair Isle sweaters, and a preppy scorns black lipstick.
I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little. Between chapters of Stop-Time, Frank Conroy stayed drunk for weeks. Two hours after Carolyn See finished her first draft of Dreaming, she collapsed with viral meningitis, which gave her double vision: “It was my brain’s way of saying, ‘You’ve been looking where you shouldn’t be looking.’” Martin Amis reported a suffocating enervation while working on Experience. Writing fiction, however taxing, usually left him some buoyancy at day
’s end; his memoir about his father drained him. Jerry Stahl relapsed while writing about his heroin addiction in Permanent Midnight.
I used to crumble to the floor of my study afternoons, like a long-distance trucker. I’d have to claw my way out of sleep. When I once asked my shrink if I was repressing some memory, he said, “Nah, you’re just really tired.” I also remember turning the last page of a manuscript with my editor and feeling fever crawl up my face—103 degrees. I had pneumonia, which I’d never had before.
Here are some excellent reasons not to do this, and following that a pop quiz to gauge your readiness:
1.If you’re psychologically hectored by the nattering voice of some scold about how wrong this is, maybe wait till you find some balance. You can care what people think, so long as you’re not brutally squeezed by it.
2.If you have a bad memory, give it up. Many people ask me how to recall the past, and I say if they don’t, they’re lucky—get a real job.
3.If the events you’re writing about are less than seven or eight years past, you might find it harder than you think. Distance frees us of our former ego’s vanities and lets us see deeper into events.
4.Also if you’re young, you might wanna wait. Most of us are still soft as clay before thirty-five. (I know, Dave Eggers was about twelve when he wrote his wildly successful Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but he’s an exception.)
5.If you’re doing it for therapy, go hire somebody to talk to. Your psychic health should matter more than your literary production.
6.If you want revenge, hire a lawyer. Or find a way to have fun with it. I have a friend who got a nasty review, then received the reviewer’s book in the mail for a possible review from him. His reply? “I took it on the back porch and put a bullet through its head.” He shot the book and mailed it back to the publisher. Buy darts and a dartboard. Literature’s for something else: the reader.
7.Don’t write about people you hate (though Hubert Selby claims you can do it with great love). Ditto: don’t write about a divorce you’re going through.
8.If your writing affects a group of people—a class or race—be sure you’re ready for any fallout. Maxine Hong Kingston got slightly fried by the Chinese community; McCourt took grief from the Irish.
9.If you’re a right-fighter, somebody who never apologizes or changes her mind, you don’t have the fluid nature to twig to the deep river of truth when the spirit draws your forked stick.
10.Related to the above: if you can’t rewrite, give it up. You need to be able to rethink and correct the easy interpretation.
If you still want to proceed, you want to be sure you can handle all you might feel. Pass this quiz, and I knight your shoulders in blessing with my own fine-line, razor-point pen.
Let’s say something pseudo-awful has befallen you—a safe bet for any human unit thinking about a memoir. And you imagine you’ll write the very worst scene “down the road,” after you’ve gotten your feet wet. You’ll work up to it. Let’s face it: you dread this scene as the rich dread tax time, as demons dread Jesus. It’s a haunter.
You’re going to write it now.
Don’t get me wrong: your goal is not to finish these pages. The opposite. This draft will land in a folder you keep. I want you to suffer through sitting in a room for some hours with your worst memories. But you’ll start with a centering exercise in an attempt to get underneath your normal ego and into some deeper place, more receptive to the truth. Meditation as a technique to loosen creative powers fills boatloads of books. There are millions of techniques: counting your breaths one to ten, following your breath, a mantra, visualization, studying a passage of sacred writing.
In getting tough-guy undergrads to meditate, I found the story of Zen basketball master Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops useful. Students who’d otherwise refuse to close their eyes and get woo-woo in class went along behind Jackson’s example.
Phil writes about playing as a young man from a warrior’s ego—all rage for dominance. But in the NBA, as he reaches the far edge of his natural physical talent, he chooses to cultivate a mental edge. Through Zen meditation, Jackson starts to notice how much noise is in his head during a game, including anger (“That #$%^& Chamberlain. Next time he’s dead meat.”) and self-blame (“Phil, a sixth-grader could’ve made that shot!”).
The litany was endless. However the simple act of becoming mindful in the frenzied parade of thoughts, paradoxically, began to quiet my mind down. . . . Yogi Berra once said about baseball: “How can you think and hit at the same time?” The same is true with basketball, except everything’s happening much faster.
The same is true of writing. To tap in to your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful state of mind where your head isn’t defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little. For me, my mind is constantly checking where I am in line—comparing myself to others, or even to a former self, racing, fretting, conniving to get ahead. But underneath that is another self that quietly notices all that. A friend called to say she was going crazy once, and I said, “Who’s noticing that?” You want to get next to that quiet, noticer self as a starting place.
Just apply your ass to the chair (as someone wise once said, a writer’s only requirement) and for fifteen or twenty minutes, practice getting your attention out of your head, down to some wider expanse in your chest or solar plexus—a place less self-conscious or skittery or scared. The idea is to unclench your mind’s claws. So don’t judge how your thoughts might jet around at first. Eventually you’ll start identifying a little bit with that detached, watcher self and less with your prattling head.
You’re seeking enough quiet to let the Real You into your mind. Inspiration—the drawing into the body of some truth-giving spirit ready to walk observantly through the doors of the past. Then, with eyes still closed, approach the memory you’re scared to set down. Start by composing the scene in carnal terms—by which I mean using sensory impressions, not sexual ones. Smell is the oldest sense—even one-celled animals without spinal cords can smell—and it cues emotional memory like nothing else. If you can conjure the aroma of where you are—fresh-cut grass or lemon furniture oil, say—you’re halfway there.
What can you see, hear, touch, taste? What do you have on? Is the cloth rough or smooth? If you’re on the beach, there’s a salt spray, and you need a sweater. In the trench, sweat snails down your spine. What taste is in your mouth?
I always liken the state I’m in before I write to waking too early to rise and looking for a wormhole to corkscrew down into that more honest place. You want a clear sense memory, a treasured (or despised) object. And most of all, you want your old body. Your cold hand wrapped around a jelly glass of grape juice. That toy monkey with the switch on its back that banged cymbals and—when smacked on its head—hissed at you. You need a point of physical and psychic connection, a memory you’d swear by to start with. Then allow the memory to play itself. It won’t be video footage, of course, only jump cuts, snippets, an idea here and there, an image.
Now open your eyes. If you’re doing this right, the whole thing should’ve been arrestingly vivid, maybe even a little awful. Many students open their eyes with tears welling up.
Sit a minute and let all this wash past. You should feel like you’ve been somewhere. If you’re really lucky, you found a way to occupy your former self, looking out of that face at your much younger hands. Congrats. That’s impressive. Most of us get a few snippets and glimpses.
Now, here’s the pop quiz part: can you be in that place without falling apart? If you’re sobbing with shoulders shaking and big tusks of snot coming out of your face, the answer may be no. Call a pal, book a massage, go for a walk. You’re not ready to occupy this space for years on end. Yet.
If you couldn’t see much or you felt nothing, you may not be ready, either. Or if you can only feel one thing, self-righteous rage—unless it’s a book about a larger atrocity (i.e., you’re a Sudanese “lost boy”)—this may not b
e your forte.
Those of you who felt a living emotional connection to the past that struck you as real, those who’ve been somewhere, who brim with feeling and may even be crying, but are not devastated—come on in.
Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you’re not yet sure of voice or anything else, you’re free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You’re free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader’s head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book.
You might ask, though, who are you writing for? Lots of people say, “I write for myself.” I am way less cool. I tend to imagine a writer pal I look up to, maybe a former teacher; or my son; or even my dead priest. That helps me think clearly about what order information goes in. Again, if you were telling a therapist or a friend at lunch, you’d know right away what data went where.
If you do have a reader in mind, maybe set down the scene in letter form, mustering as much carnal detail as you can feel. At the same time you’re going to try to describe your insides—either now as you watch this or then as you were in it, it doesn’t matter which point of view. And if you go back and forth to your adult self, show how that feels, to slip from present tense into a memory.
And here are some questions that might nudge you along. What were you trying to get, and how? Which ways worked? Which didn’t? If it’s a particularly awful memory for your character, you have to be sure not to make it more awful than it was. Many of us disassociate or check out during awful times, so maybe you want to convey that to the reader. The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in. Otherwise, the reader will gawk at you like somebody on Springer, or she’ll pity you—in both cases, you lose some authority. The book becomes too much about your feeling and not enough about the reader’s.