Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently?
And most of all, how am I afraid of appearing? Go beyond looking bad or good. Is there posturing or self-consciousness you could cut or correct or confess and make use of?
At the nadir of my confidence as a writer, I despaired of ever finishing Lit. I considered selling my apartment to give the advance money back. Then a Jesuit pal asked me, quite simply, What would you write if you weren’t afraid? I honestly didn’t know at first. But I knew finding the answer would unlock the writing for me.
Now you may not know what you’d write if you weren’t afraid. I seldom do. It’s a moment-to-moment struggle. But if you’re passionate to find out, then you’re ready. God help you.
4 | A Voice Conjures the Human Who Utters It
I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man’s] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
William Faulkner
Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice. It’s the delivery system for the author’s experience—the big bandwidth cable that carries in lustrous clarity every pixel of someone’s inner and outer experiences. Each voice is cleverly fashioned to highlight a writer’s individual talent or way of viewing the world. A memoirist starts off fumbling—jotting down facts, recounting anecdotes. It may take a writer hundreds of rough trial pages for a way of speaking to start to emerge unique to himself and his experience, but when he does, both carnal and interior experiences come back with clarity, and the work gains an electrical charge. For the reader, the voice has to exist from the first sentence.
Because memoir is such a simple form, its events can come across—in the worst books—as thinly rendered and haphazard. But if the voice has a high enough voltage, it will carry the reader through all manner of assholery and tangent because it almost magically conjures in her imagination a fully realized human. We kind of think the voice is the narrator. It certainly helps if the stories are riveting, but a great voice renders the dullest event remarkable.
The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self.
Pretty much all the great memoirists I’ve met sound on the page like they do in person. If the page is a mask, you rip it off only to find that the writer’s features exactly mold to the mask’s form, with nary a gap between public and private self. These writers’ voices make you feel close to—almost inside—their owners. Who doesn’t halfway consider even a fictional narrator like Huck Finn or Scout a pal?
The voice should permit a range of emotional tones—too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it’s shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader—from cool and diffident to high-strung and close. The writer doesn’t choose these styles so much as he’s born to them, based on who he is and how he experienced the past.
Voice isn’t just a manner of talking. It’s an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past. That’s why self-awareness is so key. The writer who’s lived a fairly unexamined life—someone who has a hard time reconsidering a conflict from another point of view—may not excel at fashioning a voice because her defensiveness stands between her and what she has to say. Also, we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before, and that can prevent us from recalling stuff that doesn’t shore up our current identities. Or it can warp understanding to fit more comfortable interpretations. All those places we misshape the past have to be ’fessed to, and such reflections and uncertainties have to find expression in voice.
You cut a contract early on to offer up the deepest perceptions you can muster without preening and posturing. Other writers may work otherwise, but every great memoirist I ever talked to sounded cursed to face up to real events. That’s just the nature of the enterprise. Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.
If the reader intuits some deception or kink in the writer’s psyche that he can’t admit to, it erodes the scribbler’s authority. This drives a reader from the page, putting the writer in competition with Chubby Hubby ice cream and the TV remote—tough contests to win.
However you charm people in the world, you should do so on the page. A lot of great writers rebuke charm, and I don’t mean the word to conjure a snake charmer pulling off a trick with a poor dumb animal whose fangs have been torn out. Too many writers relate to their readers that way, which results in some dull, hermetic books written just to satisfy the artist’s preening ego. Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By “charm,” I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You’ll need both sides of yourself—the beautiful and the beastly—to hold a reader’s attention.
Sadly, without a writer’s dark side on view—the pettiness and vanity and schemes—pages give off the whiff of bullshit. People may like you because you’re warm, but you can also be quick to anger or too intense. Your gift for charm and confidence hides a gift for scheming and deceit. You’re withdrawn and deep but also slightly scornful of others. A memoirist must cop to it all, which means routing out the natural ways you try to masquerade as somebody else—nicer, smarter, faster, funnier. All the good lines can’t be the memoirist’s.
Richard Wright’s Black Boy, published in pre–civil rights America, seems to shun charm and speak with a bitterness he paid dear for. That refusal to pander forms the core of his talent—a ruthless, unblinking gaze that reports to us with often barely tamped-down fury.
It was Wright who started the American memoir craze of the last century with the publication of Black Boy in 1945. (The book gushed out of him in 1943.) He was followed closely by other smash hits: Thomas Merton’s Seven-Storey Mountain (1948), Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951), and Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). Nabokov was publishing excerpts in France starting in 1936, and McCarthy in the New Yorker in 1946, but for my money, it was Wright who first won an audience in book length without being wildly famous first. Wright started shaping the form as we think of it today. (The next generation featured Maya Angelou and Frank Conroy, who no doubt learned from the aforementioned first-timers.)
Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery had previously been a national best seller, but Washington had been a major figure before. Wright was the first African American to ride from oblivion onto the New York Times best-seller list. Not the last, though, for Malcolm X (1965) and Angelou (1969) bobbed in his wake. As a little white girl in segregated Texas, I found such books showed me racism as we were all still gagging on it. Today I even wonder if those memoirs didn’t partly fuel the civil rights movement. Without them, black experience would’ve been rendered solely in sociopolitical speak. Wright’s refusal to shuffle Uncle Tom–like down the page trying to cull favor was a revolutionary act at his time in history, and it reads as true in that context. Of course, his voice can also transport with its poetry:
Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly released their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay.
There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon.
>
But such tender moments stand in stark relief to the brutal facts of the Jim Crow South and segregated Chicago. He starts off Black Boy with a distracted, aimless rage; deciding to set the family house on fire:
My idea was growing, blooming. Now I was wondering just how the long fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of [broom] straws on fire and held it under them. Would I try it? Sure.
After this, he’s beaten almost to death by his mother and takes a hallucinatory stretch in bed. Soon after that, he finds a way to defy and infuriate his bullying father. Awakened into a fury by a mewing kitten, the old man tells Richard to shut it up: “Kill that damn thing!” And the boy does.
Wright depicts killing the kitten with chilling detachment. After arguing his father into the ground about the “rightness” of having killed the animal, he notes:
I had had my first triumph over my father. I had made him believe I had taken his words literally. He could not punish me now without risking his authority. . . . I had made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me.
Wright’s lawyerly case eschews all moral piety, laying bare the ruthless scrap for truth and turf—even in his family—that he was born to. At a time when his American publishers could cudgel him into changing the book’s title from American Hunger to Black Boy—thus reducing a visionary’s label into a racial slur—his voice above all speaks with a sense of unblinking veracity, refusing any soft focus. He’s one of few memoirists who can pull it off. (German novelist Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence and Graves’s Good-Bye to All That also come across as bitter: that tone, which might grate coming from other writers, feels like the inevitable cost of their truths.)
In my experience teaching in a hyperselective grad program, pretty much any truth written deeply and with enough clarity and candor to allow emotional range winds up fascinating me. I’m not sure just any scribbler could win my praise writing lived experiences, but our students seem fairly adroit at cobbling up unique voices that hold me in thrall.
And the more memorable the voice, the truer a book sounds, because you never lose sight of the narrator cobbling together his truth—not everybody’s agreed-on version. Or is it the truer a book, the better the voice?
Great memoirs sound like distinct persons and also cover a broad range of feelings. The glib jokester becomes as tedious and as unbelievable as the whiner.
This talent for truth includes a voice’s bold ability to render events we find unbelievable elsewhere. On the first page of Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost—for my money a book as worship-worthy as any of her prizewinning fiction—we hear about her encounters with the spirit world. On a staircase, she passes through a shimmer in the air that contains a ghost: “I know it is my stepfather’s ghost coming down. Or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I ‘know’ it is my stepfather’s ghost.” First off, she states the mystical experience as simple fact, but because she knows many readers in our skeptical culture will adjudge her bonkers, she spends a subsequent sentence traveling to where those readers’ more rationalist belief systems hold sway. She rephrases, putting know in quotes. So she starts inside her mystical experience, then briefly jogs to where the dubious reader stands prepared to discount her. And from that instant, we trust this most sensible of voices to incorporate both the irrational and our doubt about it. In doing so, she’s invited us into the supernatural experiences so common to her. She speculates a few paragraphs later about the auras of eye migraines that torment her—allowing neurological possibilities for her ghost-related experiences. Above all, we’re convinced of her firm curiosity about her encounters with the supernatural, her willingness to explore any explanation for them.
So later when, as a child in a garden, she has a run-in with the ultimate evil—one could only call it demonic though she doesn’t go that far—she doesn’t have to disavow the reality of the event to accommodate our doubt. The voice has made room for us before. Mantel needs only stick to physical facts and her child’s reaction:
The faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But it is motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking. . . . This is the beginning of shame.
Whether you doubt Mantel’s “reality” in this passage, you can have no doubt that she’s reporting something ineffably real to her. (A similar type of entity inhabits her novel Beyond Black, among the most overpoweringly disturbing books I know—on a par with Turn of the Screw or the best of Stephen King.)
So, too, must voice confess to readers any moral bankruptcy, as in Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life:
I was a liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn’t help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions of myself failed to persuade. I was also a thief.
What’s so winning about this confession is the author’s self-aware reason for it: he’s trying to forge a self, and when popular opinion interferes with the process, Wolff fabricates to fool his audience and further what he sees as self-reshaping. It’s the gift of self-awareness: who hasn’t wanted to be somebody different and tried to scudge the public into buying the act? Rather than ruining the reader’s confidence in the author’s pages, the confession actually bolsters her belief. We can accept anything from a memoirist but deceit, which is—almost always—a shallow person’s lack of self-knowledge.
Even somebody I might not otherwise care for can compel my attention when speaking out of hard-felt experience and self-knowledge. On airplanes, we’ve all been stranded next to some chatty, perfectly nice but duller-than-a-rubber-knife human being, and we’ve all faked sleep to escape that chatter. Yet when travelers’ anonymity permits said bore to speak out of some profoundly felt experience, I often find myself riveted by the confessions of somebody I’d otherwise dread spending even a five-minute elevator ride with. That person’s living, breathing inner expression, which (when told with heart and candor) includes some parcels of radical suffering and joy . . . well, it always captures me.
For speaking from passionately felt events is risky. Emotional stakes make drama, which is a conflict with feeling and danger mysteriously contained in a human body’s small space. Don’t get me wrong—a writer’s voice doesn’t have to be effusive or operatic to work. Nobody’s more reticent than Conroy or Nabokov, say. But no one doubts the depths of their feeling, however cool their overall tones.
As often as I’ve been bored by a shallow seat partner fronting some fake self, I’ve been transfixed by watching lived passion radiate off a stranger’s face. Even the most buttoned-up or recalcitrant person, trying to restrain feeling, can’t help but convey it in close proximity if she’s telling those core stories that’ve seemingly shaped who she is. The least articulate of confessors can—in fleeting moments of connection—move me as a great symphony does. And it’s from the need to capture the shared connections between us that symphonies were invented. Ditto memoirs.
All drama depends on our need to connect with one another. And we’re all doomed to drama; even the most privileged among us suffer the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human. People we adore drop dead or die over tortured years. We’re born ugly and poor, or rich and handsome but uncared-for. In even the best families, loved ones—however inadvertently—manage to destroy each other’s hope. They fail to show up at the key instant, or they show up serving grief and shame when tenderness is starved for.
One great side effect of my own work is how often strangers skip the small talk to confide the more turbulent patches of their lives. It’s an odd phenomenon that I
have never not been moved by such a tale. And I’m not that compassionate or generous, either.
Still, a living, breathing human being—even a boneheaded or barely articulate one—conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering—what Shakespeare called the “poor, bare, forked animal”—compels us all; we’re all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another. Hearing each other’s stories actually raises our levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin, which is what nursing mothers secrete when they breastfeed—what partly helps them bond with their young. It helps to join us together in some tribal way.
It’s harder to translate lived experience onto a page. A story told poorly is life made small by words. The key details are missing, and the sentences might have been spoken by anybody. We need a special verbal device to unpack all that’s hidden in the writer’s heart so we can freshly relive it: a voice.
Unfortunately, nobody tells a writer how hard cobbling together a voice is. Look under “voice” in a writing textbook, and they talk about things that seem mechanical—tone, diction, syntax. Doh, the writer says with a forehead smack. Diction is merely word choice, what variety of vocabulary you favor. Syntax is whether sentences are long or short, how they’re shaped, with or without dependent clauses, etc. Some sentences meander, others fire off like machine-gun runs. Tone is the emotional tenor of the sentences; it’s how the narrator feels about the subject. Robert Frost said anytime he heard wordless voices through a wall, tone told him who was angry, who bemused, who about to cry. For me psyche equals voice, so your own psyche—how you think and see and wonder and scudge and suffer—also determines such factors as pacing and what you write about when. Since all such literary decisions for a memoirist are offshoots of character, I often find that any bafflement I face on the page about these factors is instantly answered once I find the right voice.