What has Pamela to do with Your Memoir?

In 1740 a book was published entitled Pamela or Virtue Rewarded. Some say, it was the first novel.  However, it was purported to be the true story of a woman named, of course, Pamela, and it was written in the first person in the form of letters from said Pamela to her father telling the sad tale of her life in the home of Mr. B (initials only are provided in the novel) where she worked as a servant and was pursued by Mr. B who, failing to seduce her, marries her.  In truth, Pamela was written by Samuel Richardson — neither a woman nor a servant to anyone.

Pamela was a sensation.  Apparently, this was not just because the book had raunchy details, especially for the time it was written. For example, Pamela’s room is invaded several times by Mr. B. One incident finds Mr. B hiding in a closet from which he pops out and is dutifully fought off.  It is hilarious even if we may be less than politically correct to laugh at such goings on! But more importantly, the novel’s success seems to have been due to the claim that it was a “true” story, Pamela’s story, hence a memoir — not the whole story of P’s life but a vibrant thematically integrated portion of her life.

Now memoirs flood the shelves of the few standing bookstores remaining and the many online bookstores.  We assume that these memoirs are “true” stories even though many are written by ghostwriters or even acknowledged as co-written by another person. And how we still love to read the “truth” even in this age when there is so much confusion over what is true and what false, even when ironically the most truthful, straight, factual of our media sources are accused of being “false news.”

I don’t know why this is.  I am no psychologist or sociologist or data collector but merely an observer.  Surely, anyone can notice the number of memoirs being published especially by celebrities and purchased in numbers. Perhaps it is our thirst for gossip.

Nevertheless, you should write your memoir. You are up to the task and deserve the fun you will have in the process.  Ironically, you will even enjoy the tears released. Remember, everyone has a story to tell, and your story is as gripping as the next guys when you dig deep. You should write a memoir or an autobiography not because it will be published or will sell widely but because, quite simply, it is a wonderful way of gathering your thoughts, your memories — the theme of your life. 

Like all stories we read or hear, we want this story to grab our attention and keep it. Therefore, telling a non-fiction story and writing a memoir uses many of the typical devices usually associated only with fiction.

Fiction, however, doesn’t concern itself with writing the truth, it just needs to be believed as truth. Moreover, and perhaps a bit confusing but true, Fiction that is supposed to be “made up” always contains an underpinning of what is true.

When William Faulkner, for example, is describing Yaknapatawpha County in most of his short stories and novels, he is mirroring the real-life Lafayette County of his home state of Mississippi. The people, the characters in those fiction pieces are also drawn from life but developed imaginatively as are the plots. And it is all believable if not completely factual.

Complicated isn’t it? As complicated as life! It is and it isn’t.

If you’ve read a great deal during your life, you probably have absorbed the devices of fiction that are also used in writing one’s memoir. You have a feeling of how to proceed. If not, I hope the following suggestions will help.

So, here goes!

In my memoir, I told a story and like all good stories, fiction or non-fiction, there are or should have been:

1. Clearly defined characters, some given more weight, more space than others depending upon their significance in the story.

These characters are often developed through narrative descriptions using comparisons, using “like” or “is” (Peter looks like a squirrel; Peter is a squirrel) in order to bring that character to life.  Which phrasing seems stronger? The simile: Peter looks like a squirrel?  Or the Metaphor: Peter is a squirrel? Which treatment makes the character emerge more vividly?

Often we also use quotations. We hear the way a character speaks: If in short abrupt sentences with sounds that hit and drop like: “Pick up that stick! Pick it up!”? Or if he or she most often use long, flowing lines, full of adjectives and even qualifications?  “If you feel moved to do so, please gather those pieces of wood, move them slowly into a pyramid shape. Believe me, please do believe me, they burn better that way.” What does each way of speaking tell us about the character?

 2. There should be a setting established or more than one.  Descriptions of place, either defined by contrast or similarity, help the characters and action to emerge. So I described taking the subway each morning at 6:00 a.m. for the last year of high school from Manhattan, where I had gone to live with my Aunt and Uncle, to Brooklyn and the last stop Flatbush Avenue and then back from there again in the late afternoon to Manhattan.

“In the morning,” I wrote, “the train was almost empty except for the occasional man exposing himself and the almost breathing heaps of garbage and smelly puddles. In the afternoon, the last stop, Flatbush Avenue, was the first stop of the return voyage. Then the train teemed with college students from Brooklyn College (2 blocks from my high school). They were chattering or flipping open books doing their homework. I knew no-one. I was a mere high school senior, but I loved the afternoon ride. Suddenly the train seemed bright and clean, glowing with their laughter and chatter, and I subtly listened to their conversations and gathered gossip and felt part of an important, lively group. My daily grind had become an adventure not an underground passage to hell.”

Does this brief description of a setting tell you anything about me, about the writer of this memoir?

3. Many experts say that in fiction there must be a plot . . . a cause and effect sequence of events, either of action or revelation, that rise to a peak of intensity.  From there the movement has no place to go, so there must be a design of descending action, and a turning point moving towards an ending, a gathering, a recognition or even a prevailing question that coaxes the reader to think back on what he or she has just read — and be satisfied. Perhaps one might call this the aha! moment.

Within that major arc of events there are moments or episodes of action, physical or mental, often referred to as “beats” containing lesser conflicts with another person, nature, setting, situation, each beat also having an arc, the movement of those beats building towards a climax, the point where the rising action of the beats is heading. This is the advice of many writers and teachers.

I believe that in writing a memoir one must have a structure, for example “a series of boxes,” but not necessarily a cause and effect sequence of events because the writer is working on the discovery of the “cause and effect”, and the reader is invited to move with the writer through the stages of that discovery. I might very well be wrong about this but that is how it worked out for me. 

4. In both fiction and all forms of non-fiction like memoir, the ending need not be a “solution” but should be a coming together of all of the elements of the story in a way that, as we look back on them,

seems “right,” even inevitable, given the ideas, characters, setting, and actions we have witnessed.

  The content of each episode in my memoir — though it didn’t overtly say so — demonstrated an attempt to make something new, to give birth to something. Why should the ending swerve from that determination? Why shouldn’t it gather those attempts into a dance, a recurring, movement to once again plan to make something new?

YET HOW TO BEGIN? After swimming in a sea of already written episodes, the writer selects as the first episode a “hook” that grabs the reader’s attention.

 I didn’t begin the final version of my memoir at the very beginning of the episodes or beats that I had written. For example, I didn’t talk about my birth in a small hospital in the Bronx on 167th St. Rather, I began the story at a point that I felt was central to my life and theme and the one that would seem to grab the reader’s attention — the death of my parents.

  This was my exposition, your introduction to me, the writer. But that beginning was not presented as a tragic tale. Rather, the structure of that first chapter was divided into BOXES.

The prompt for my students and for me was simply: “Write about a box.”

            I began with Aunt Mae’s box (the one she jumped out of to begin her vaudeville dance act) — an entertaining opening, a rather unusual and promising opening, a “hook”. Then the reader learns of Mother’s Box, the coffin; Father’s Box, another coffin but a different experience. And then, unexpectedly we turn and move to Gift Boxes, 60 Boxes from my children on my birthday. You see how even the arc of that episode or beat moves from fun to pain and then reaches a high point, a turning point to recovery. Does this pattern, even in the first chapter, predict a total life design? 

To my surprise, from that chapter on in the final draft, I arranged the events chronologically, rising to a high point — what we might call the major arc. Not surprisingly, divorce was the turning point.

There are many alternatives for you as you gather your pieces together. (Interesting the Word “pieces”.  Of course I meant episodes, incidents, beats. But aren’t you, in a memoir especially, gathering your “pieces”?)

Enough of that! So how will you begin your story and the major structure or arc of your design? You might want to begin with your birth, especially if it in some way foreshadows the future.

Or you might start your story in the middle of the thematic series of episodes you have already written, at an incident that again, in retrospect, seems to foreshadow the future but this time, after creating the middle of your life, you “flash-back” to earlier episodes and only then move forward again in time and theme.

Or you might in fact begin your memoir at what you envision as the end of your life, then flashback, move backwards to incidents that seem to pre-determine that ending. Or move back and forth from past to present to past.

The important thing is that even in the first draft, you should write a lively page, a page that might include letters, photographs, graphs, drawings — but not depend on those items only for depth, color and content. Your building blocks are, after all, well chosen words.

To repeat: in my memoir, I told a story. This story was based on facts (I didn’t make anything up or at least I think I didn’t) but like all good stories, I used all the devices of good fiction (fiction that is supposed to be “made up” but always contains a subtext of fact and truth.)

I found my theme, my central idea, as I was writing, the first draft or even the second draft or third draft (not revising the entirety in each draft or version, of course).  I found that in each moment of my life, I was intent on making something new. And so I also found my title: “From Birth to Birth.”

After that discovery, I revised, reshaped, a bit more,  added events, moving towards a climactic moment, a high point and often a turning point. Then we move to the ending that is not necessarily a “solution,” but a coming to a probable closing — thematically.

When I say “climactic,” I don’t mean balloons will burst or an alarm will sound in your brain (which is what that term seems to imply). It is a high point when you come to understand or vividly see what your life, the theme of your life, that has been explored, has revealed.

         That climax, in my case, was the revelation that no matter how old I was — 80, 90 —I was going to at least try to create something new — to give birth to something new — the dance, the life that was in me.

WHAT HAS BEEN THE PATTERN OF YOUR LIFE: CIRCULAR? FLAT? UP and DOWN? DISCOVER IT! USE IT. 

Remember, that you do not have to use my way or another’s. Make your own map, your own design. If it works, you have become a trail blazer, another James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.

         It often helps to receive prompts as you write: A prompt is a phrase or question that might stir your memories and thoughts, like “Write about a box.”

         If you wish, I’ll send you a few prompts from time to time.

JUST ASK ME, TALK TO ME.

EPILOGUE: 

My argument with “Write about what you know.”

I've always disliked the literal meaning of "write about what you know,” the implication being that what you know is the facts, the truth. That seems so glib, so limiting.

Many times, we know so much more than we think we know. We look back and read several notes, journal entries, poems that we wrote years before a crisis like divorce, death, any change. . .   And we find that we knew that change was coming but before we acknowledged it. 

The knowing was in the subtext, the slight hints that lurked behind and within the words; it snuck in in innuendo and reference and in an accumulation of references.  We were thinking about it subliminally.

Knowledge was there but we didn’t acknowledge it.  We didn’t “know” it up front. We could not use it, even write about that kind of subterranean knowledge overtly. It wasn’t part of what would ordinarily be included in “write about what you know.”

In addition, over time and writing other episodes, and juggling drafts, in the process of writing just “what is known,” we might even discover that even “the known” is questionable, needs further exploration. So that even when writing about what seems to be “known,” writing about “factual” details, dates, we must do research, research about what we just jotted down and need to confirm or reject or expand upon. And that research sometimes changes those facts, details, history.  They become what we now know. 

We can’t remember the exact date of an event!  We look it up. We ask questions. That date leads us to other discoveries, other memories.  If we don’t pass them up, they become part of our flesh and bones and blood. To paraphrase Rilke — Not until they turn to blood within us can we write one line . . . one true word.

For example, one remembers a seemingly casual incident: I am 12 years old, holding my aunt’s hand, walking in Grand Central Station. She meets a tall, dark man. She is startled. She knew him some time ago, she said. There is an acknowledgment of my presence, a strange exchange of nods and glances. Then they say goodbye.  My aunt walks faster.

Why do I remember these tiny seemingly insignificant moments?  Why do I question them now when I am no longer a child but 89 years old. Why was my aunt so upset?  Why did the man look at me so inquiringly? And so, the brain whirls.

In that spiral the mind and body pick up bits and pieces of other unanswered questions. For example, at my aunt’s funeral, after I had given a eulogy where I ended with: “She was not my mother, she was my aunt, she was my best friend . . . she was my . . . mother.”  Why did my aunt’s best friend whisper to me, “Yes, she was your mother.”

Questions remain. Several answers become the facts we add to our narrative, become “what we know”, what we know and can write about because what the facts and memories and imagination have seemed to add up to are often  confirmed by a bodily response, a chill in our bones or a sense that “our hair is actually standing on end,” as many have said.

“Without imagination, nothing in the world could be meaningful.  Without imagination, we could never make sense of our experience.  Without imagination, we could never reason toward knowledge, toward reality.” So said Mark Johnson in “The Body in the Mind,” 1987.

Like everything in life and writing, there are no simple answers, no absolutes. But don’t let that discourage you. We can write about anything if we apply research, knowledge, memory, touch, taste, details, and imagination in our quest for knowledge and expression.

  So getting back to you and the rewards of writing your memoir:  You should write your story, your memoir, because writing is fun or it can be fun if you approach it as yet another form of play and follow the rules of the game which involve, as one of its primary rules, writing with your whole body and mind (more of that later).

You should write your memoir because in the process you “discover” what you want to say and need to say.  If you are lucky and persistent — you discover your theme, your underlying, unifying idea — you discover your truth.   

            There are always truths and there are always doubts.  Yet we pursue the comfort and security of at least learning what seems to be true, always there, always pulling you to discovery.

         The memoirist’s firm intention to be truthful prompts him or her to secure information, to check details, to acknowledge when off base, to let our active mind, as well as sometimes our very physical responses affirm that we have come just as close as possible to the truth.

Your reward is not so much the end-product, your memoir, but the experience in trying to get to the truth, the labor of love that always involves digging and unearthing and corroborating and letting the facts, and the sensations of your body open to discovery.