self-involvement attests to its exploratory zeal. Even its so-called failings are part of its mission. In our time, memoir dwells in a fleeting paradise, and some of us are trying to preserve the woods before the academic bulldozers enter with reference works and subject heads. To examine this expanse, I have found it best to mix criticism, psychology, reflection, essay, historical and cultural contexts—memoir is an American form—as well as my experience and that of others who are writing the form in the 2000s. To ground my ideas, I offer close readings of the important elements of sixteen memoirs.
Among the questions: Why is the form so popular? What is it people are seeking by writing memoir? Why is it that when we write of what we remember, the effect on us now is so important? Has the form shown a directional purpose in the two decades of its emergence? Based on my reading of more than one hundred contemporary memoirs and the drafts of student writers, I see memoirists focusing on the emotional immediacy of a singular relationship—unresolved feelings for a parent, a child, a sibling, a partner, an illness, a regret, a loss, a death, a phase like childhood or adolescence, a period like college. As they tell their stories, some authors expand the personal to such larger issues as heritage, gender, ethnicity, culture, the spiritual and natural realms, even time itself. In memoir, it doesn’t matter whether the primary relationship is long past or recent or even current, as long as the telling is relational and honest.
Self and that which the self contends with in the world make up one nexus. Another is the meeting between a past self and a present self, one or both impelling the writer’s insights now. Memoirists engage these selves by using the dramatic techniques of narrative, characterization, and description as well as the analytic styles of explication, essay, and reflection. With such stylistic possibility, much tension is created when self and other, now and then, drama and analysis are joined. The tension hurls us into a kind of vortex, whirling judgment, dizzying memory. The only way out of the vortex is to face the truth or, rather, face the paradox of telling the truth. In memoir, we don’t just tell the truth. We use the possibilities of the form to guide us into a process by which we try to discover what the truth of our lives may be.
Watching memoirists explore the possibilities of the form, I’ve been aided by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, in which he calls literature “an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries” (6). Memoir is offering to readers and writers its own inexhaustible discoveries, proving itself adept as a literary form and as a means of self-disclosure. I would say that a memoir imaginatively renders our evolving selves and critically evaluates how memory, time, history, culture, and myth are expressed within our individual lives. To understand how the memoir has become a new literary form in our time is the reason I’ve written this book.
Acknowledgments
Gratitude goes to the many who helped steer me toward writing The Memoir and the Memoirist. Those from my groups (some of whose words and stories appear in these pages): Kay Sanger, Joan Mangan, Ollie McNamara, Paul Havermale, Sheila Fisher, Tami Dumai, Sue Norberg, Steve Montgomery, Linda Hutchinson, Patrick McMahon, Felicia Castro, Stephen Gallup, Chi Varnado, Allan Rudick, Dolores Forsythe, Julie Meola, Deborah Johnson, Wendy Gelernter, Marcia Aguiniga, Susan Stocker, Anita Trevino, and Kim Harlow (I have changed a few names in the text where necessary). Those who commented on the manuscript or listened to my ideas: John Christianson, Marc Lampe, Nancy Cary, Roger Aplon, and Judy Reeves. My sons, Jeremy Vincent Larson and Blake Ellington Larson, and my brother, Jeff, none of whom asked to have a memoirist in the family and all of whom have been gracious about my proclivity to write about our relationships. I owe thanks to Judith Moore, who died of cancer while I was finishing this book. Judith, the author of a stunning memoir, Fat Girl: A True Story, was my editor at the San Diego Reader, for which I’ve written narrative nonfiction the last eight years. Not only did she keep me working constantly on new stories these past eight years, but she also enthusiastically supported what I wrote, both memoir and journalism. She was my William Maxwell, on the phone and via e-mail, and she never knew how much her intelligence and love of good writing influenced me. I wish I had told her. Finally, I appreciate the enthusiasm and skill of the staff at Swallow Press/Ohio University Press: marketing manager Jean Cunningham, project editor John Morris, and director David Sanders.
To my second-half life-partner, Suzanna Neal, I want to say that the greatest gift you’ve given me is criticism with love. Simply by asking, What are you trying to say? Suzanna showed me where to make the crucial cuts and where to put the emphasis. How much her intelligence and love of good writing have influenced me. Suzanna has been thrilled by my successes and understood my failures as a writer. In those moments I treasure her expression: when she puts her arms around me, raises herself onto her toes, and pulls me close to her out of desire and possession. “At the end of my life,” writes Rumi, “with just one breath / left, if you come then, I’ll sit up and sing.”
This Writing Life Now Is What I’ve Lived For
An Introduction
It’s summer in Southern California, and I’m teaching a nine-week course, Writing the Memoir. Fifteen beginners have assembled, among them Chi, Patrick, Ana, Paul, and Kay; one’s a nurse, another’s a retired designer of women’s clothing, another’s with the city. They hail from towns like Ashtabula, Ohio, and Lubbock, Texas, from cities like Brooklyn and Los Angeles. They tend to be older than younger, more curious than careful. The first thing I say, which I’ve learned from my own memoir writing, is that you must forget about writing an autobiography. After four or five decades, you’ll spend another ten years trying to get a whole birth-to-date life on paper. Even if you succeed, it’s a good bet that no one, other than your family, will read the eight hundred–page opus. Besides, once Mom or Dad or little brother reads it, they’ll want changes, which you probably won’t like. What’s more, if you attempt to write the whole story, you must paddle back up every tributary of your developmental stream, exploring less the clouded depth of your experiences and more the surface shimmer of years, roles, griefs, and dreams.
You must, I tell them, see the past as dividable. List and reflect on your life’s thematic centers. Search for a temporal phase or an emotional thread. Love affair, profession or abiding interest, a single geographic or psychological journey, a lost political belief. Which one has greater weight than the others? To write memoir is to be selective; to write one’s autobiography is to be indiscriminate. Another point: the theme or story may be centered in the recent or the long-ago past. (People, like great novels, have themes, though a person’s theme can change.) Time and memory may or may not have made the story less raw. Still, you need to emphasize that which captivates you in the present. Don’t worry about remembering events: they have already shaped themselves in your mind and emotion, though you should be on guard for how you reshape them as you write today.
The class turns to discussion. One man grew up gay in Pocatello, Idaho, and asks, Can that be my story? One woman is the recent recipient of a heart transplant at sixty-two. Is it too soon to write about it? Some question while others listen intently. I sense ease, their comfort growing; they’ve come to the right place. Already cohesion is building, a like-mindedness. One commonality is that memoir’s currency has brought them in. They’ve read The Kiss and Angela’s Ashes, The Liars’ Club and The Color of Water. They’ve treasured the honesty in these authors, felt their compulsion to get down the child-parent drama. They’re aware of nobodies whose memoirs have rocketed them to stardom, been celebrated and exploited in the media. New Age mariners, group members aren’t afraid to confess; they welcome collective process. Many recognize that their writing will happen only as it’s spurred by the group. They sense also that I will lead them. They seem to trust the memoir form to guide them because it is open to all—not exactly a literature of the people, but, certainly, of any individual.
The second week, I repeat ideas about theme. You must comb through a dozen or more themes in your life, each unique, each book-length. Choice requires a stick-to-itiveness, one that resists the memoirist’s natural urge to love being lost in the forest of the self. If you can’t see the focus yet, take a single event, a relationship, even an image, and explore it for a week or two. In this way, we continue with exercises, readings,