What's a Memoir About Anyway?

To a non-writer, it might seem that being truthful in writing is easy—just tell it.

Here’s a passage from a good writer that is on-point. 

The passage is on page thirty of the novel Lila by Marilynne Robinson. The protagonist of the novel is a silent young woman whom the reader does not yet know well.  She is sitting with an elderly minister in his kitchen, drinking coffee.  He has just told her an event about angels. 

She said, “I liked that story.”

He looked away from her and laughed.  “It is a story, isn’t it? I’ve never really thought of it that way. And I suppose the next time I tell it, it will be a better story.  Maybe a little less true.  I might not tell it again. I hope I won’t.  You’re right not to talk.  It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think.  Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say. 

Read that last sentence again—Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say. 

Most people don’t suffer at being writers.  Truth in writing is more complicated than most people understand.  Once we writers start talking—writing—there’s no telling what we’ll say. 

What we writers say is for the good of the story we are telling.  The good of the story we are telling becomes our motivation, which is paramount.  Truth notwithstanding.

If the need of the story is for its protagonist to step off the porch and to trip over the cat, then that is what the protagonist does—even though the truth of the incident was that it was the bottom step of the inside staircase, and it was the dog.  

Lila is a novel.  Fiction is one thing; memoir is another.  I write memoir.  It’s harder. 

For one thing, the people you write about in memoir are still alive, or they may be, and they have a right to privacy—which is true even if they’re dead.  For another, you yourself have a right to privacy, even when you seem deliberately to have opened yourself up.  But the main difficulty about your memoir is that your memoir is not about you.  Your memoir uses you to support its real subject.  Its real subject is your theme for writing. 

What are you writing about?  Not you.  Frankly, no one is much interested in you except a few friends and relations.  It’s your theme that is of general interest—you hope.

If your memoir’s theme is how pet ownership has opened up your life to greater awareness of God, let’s say, then it really doesn’t matter if the accident was prompted by the porch and the cat or by the stairs and the dog.  Either is relevant to the theme.

However, you know that it was the stairs and the dog. 

That’s the truth trouble, right there, because what you write is that it was the porch and the cat.  You write that it was the porch and the cat because, later, at the climax, when the awareness of God comes vividly upon you, that event actually happened on the porch, and you need to use the porch and the cat for the accident so that your memoir, as a whole, will make both thematic and literary sense.    

How do you balance? 

Theme?  Truth? 

Or do you serve each need at the same time—by using techniques of fiction, without stepping across the line into fiction? 

Readers of your book want to be excited by your memoir, not because it is about you, but—on the basis of your theme—because it is about them.  It’s about them even though you have gussied up their awareness of themselves in interesting new ways for them.  You have let them experience your locale, your adventure, your relationship, your trouble. 

They are drawn into your memoir by this.  They stay with you, inside your book, because of what you have revealed to them about them. 

 Each draft of your story perfects your story, while each draft is a little less true.  That’s because once you start to write your story, there’s no telling what you’ll say.   

             

            copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2016

           

Five Things I Learned About Writing From My Poet Dad

 

            Dad was prominent as a poet.  When I was young, I longed not to be a poet. 

I’d be anything—a quarterback, an FBI agent, a ship captain.  But in my soul, I knew I would be a chip off Dad’s block.  Alas, I was a word-smith, too. 

            So I watched Dad, to learn how. 

           

        One

                                                            Read, read, read. 

 

Read any style, content, genre, author, date—it doesn’t matter.

“We pour our souls into these words, Dikkon. You need to learn to identify writing that’s worth that effort and writing that’s not.”

Once, after Dad breezed through an erotic novel I showed him, drily he responded, “Chaucer did it better.”

 

Two

Start.

 

“I can’t write it,” I moaned, regarding my short story assignment in high school. “It’s too hard!”

Dad caught Mom’s urging eye, put down his pipe, and asked me, “What’s your story about?”

“When they’re choosing up teams, the boy wants to be picked first but maybe he won’t be.”

“And?”

“I don’t know!  Maybe he isn’t picked first, but maybe he hits the home run.  It’s due tomorrow!”

“Try making the story about his thoughts.”

“About his thoughts?”

“Yes.  Try starting with the word ‘maybe.’”  Dad grinned.  “Maybe the story is about maybe.”

So I wrote the story and submitted it on time.  Its first sentence was “Maybe I’ll be picked first but maybe not.”  

 

 

        Three

                    Bring the reader in.

 

“Do you like it?” Dad asked. 

“It’s assigned.” 

“Not what I asked.”

“Then, no.  It’s boring.” 

“Do you think maybe he’s just writing for himself and maybe for his closest friends?”

I hadn’t thought of that as a possibility.  The author was a major name in modernist English fiction—the focus of my college class. 

Dad pressed on, “Do you think it’s important that you be drawn in?”

“Who?  Me?”

“You’re his reader, aren’t you?”

I laughed.  “I wouldn’t be his reader, not if I could help it.”

“So…that’s my point.  Yes, the reader must come to the writer, but the reader only will come to the writer if he’s drawn in, not forced in.”

“That’s not happening here.”

“So when you’re a writer….”

I nodded.  “Bring ‘em in.”

“Atta boy.”

 

           Four

Don’t go to sleep until you know what happens next. 

 

“No,” Dad said.  “I don’t believe in writer’s block.”

“It’s my first novel, Dad.  I can’t get past the point where I am.  You’re a poet, not a novelist.  How could you know?”

“What’s the last scene you wrote?”

I told him.

“Go back and write it again.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Doesn’t matter.  Probably nothing.  But write it again—create it again.  Your juices will begin to flow again, and you’ll speed on.”

Turns out he was right—I sped on.

 

Five

Don’t let it fester. 

 

I called Dad.  Two days before, I had finished my second novel, doing its last sixty pages in an eighteen-hour burst of ecstatic—almost holy—writing.  “It’s done, Dad.”

“Congratulations!”

 “I’m exhausted.”

 “Of course. Get a rest.”

 “Tell Mom.”

 “Of course. So…what’s next?”

 “I read it over.  I think it’s good.  Gotta do some tweaks.”

 “Do that.  But then—get it off your desk.”

 “What do you mean?”

 “Don’t let it fester.  Get it out into the world.  If you tweak it too much, you could kill it.  Now let an editor tell you what to do. ”

 

HERE’S A BONUS FOR LISTENING!

 

A Sixth Thing I Learned

Keep trying.

 

Sitting in our garden, Robert Frost turned to me and remarked, “Dikkon, the work of the poet is to write at least one single poem that they can’t get rid of.  They’ll try.  But don’t let ‘em.”

--Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2016

Unlike Byron

“He looks as unlike Byron as one can get.” 

This is how one reporter described my cheerful, can-do father during Dad’s first press conference.  Dad was newly appointed as the United States Poet Laureate, in 1959.  The reporter was referring to George Gordon, Lord Byron, the English Romantic poet par excellence, and the very type of flamboyant and excessive literary heroism.  

President Eisenhower had approved Dad’s appointment to our nation’s highest poetical post, and my father—a naval officer during World War Two—was delighted to receive this nod from the man who successfully planned, organized, and executed the Normandy Invasion. 

Mom said to Dad, “But I don’t think he knows much about poetry, do you?”   

“Of course, he does!  Look who’s standing at his podium!”

Dad was not shy about blowing his own horn.  Dad was not shy, really, about anything, except about sharing his feelings. 

What? 

That doesn’t make sense.  He was a lyric poet who published more than twenty books and who seemed, to me anyway, to knock down professional prizes as though they were bowling pins. 

Dad shared his feelings in his verse, of course.  He was a Romantic.  He believed that high emotion, the love of nature, and romancing the literary muse were the great avenues along which mankind could travel to arrive at the Palace of Truth. 

Dad was a man of the grand gesture when he was on stage, reading, or when he was among friends and admirers.  He was a man of the grand gesture—especially when he had time to prepare the lines that would produce the effect he desired.  Had he not been a poet, he might have been a fine actor or salesman. 

However, he was not a man to share his closest feelings with his son. 

He did love me with complete faithfulness.  Some of what I did, he admired.  Some of what I did, he did not admire.  It was difficult for him to chastise and to exhort, even when I needed it.  Instead, he dodged such a moment, and instead he poetized, patted my back, and poetized some more. 

I loved the guy.  Then here’s what happened. 

 

                                                            II

 

After our mother died, my sister and I began to be the parents of our father. 

Dad was ninety at the time, still going along pretty strongly but not being noticed as a poet as regularly as he had been before.  It hurt my feelings for him when he was not included in some important new anthology of poetry. 

“People ask me if you still write poetry.”

“I don’t go chasing after a poem anymore.  But I’ll write one down if it comes along on its own.” 

He handed me an envelope on the back of which was scrawled a poem.  His handwriting had never been legible.  I made my way through the first stanza or two and stopped.   “Here,” I said and leaned to show him.  “What’s this say?” 

            “I don’t know.  Read it to me.”

            I read what I could and then stopped.  Dad asked me, “What do you think I say next?”

            “I can’t tell.”

            “Yes, but what do you think?”

            “I think you talk about the leaves, their color.”

            “I think you’re right.”  He paused.  “Good poem, isn’t it?”

            One thing Dad taught me is that we lose things—things from our pasts—and that there is charm in un-remembering. 

 

                                                                                    III

 

            But what about the truth? 

Dad would twinkle and say, “What’s truth, really, after all?”

            And if he were in a certain mood, he would tell me again about the time when he was an ecstatic young poet striding the white lanes of Ireland beside its vivid green, all alive-o.  Then, he would dine with William Butler Yeats, the Nobel laureate, and with Oliver St. John Gogarty, and with that whole crowd of aesthetes and of literary adventurers.

 

Especially Dad would remember one of those literary dinners, a particularly long one, which was conducted entirely in Latin.  Funny thing is, Dad would then point out, biographers of Yeats have mentioned that man’s ignorance of Latin. 

 

So what happened?  Had Dad been in a dream that night, in some sort of Yeatsian trance, manipulated from—The Other Side?  After all, he was enchanted, as a young acolyte must be, sitting at table and breaking bread with the poetical Pope. 

 

Later, in the small hours of that morning, walking the Dublin streets with Yeats, Dad told me he was silent.  The two men trod their way toward their turning, where one would go right and the other would go left.  That night, after the Latin dinner, Dad couldn’t think of anything high enough to say to the master.  As the two approached their separation point, he longed for that one perfect line. 

 

He was, after all, a Romantic. 

 

Was it to be reverence?  Gratitude?  Jollity?  The longing to be acknowledged as yet another who dreamt of the lost woods of Arcady? 

 

The lamp.  The corner.  The streets, akimbo.  

 

“Well, goodnight.” 

 

“Yes, goodnight.”

 

It was done.

 

As described, this moment feels real to me.  The Latin dinner?  Well….

           

Numerous publishers asked my father to write an autobiography.  He never did.  He always told me it would be too difficult to tell the truth.  Not that the truth was unknown, he’d say; nor was there a scandal to hide.  To my mind, he never wrote his life down because he didn’t care to make the exercise. 

 

Truth-finding can bring tough self-criticism.  And, God knows, Dad was never his own most clear-eyed critic.

 

                                                                        IV

 

            So I wrote a book instead. 

 

My book is a memoir, not a biography.  There’s a difference. 

 

My book is an effort to testify to the way my relationship with my father affected my relationship with my Father. 

 

Dad and I are both different and the same.  For me to understand both our difference and our sameness, first I needed to look into Dad’s past, before me.  To accomplish that, I opened doors wide, which, when I was younger, I only peeked through.  These are doors into rooms in the mansion of the early 20^th century. 

 

I walked around in those rooms, I sniffed the air, and I heard the floor creak beneath me.  Nowadays, those old rooms are set up with velvet ropes as exhibits of period furniture, but I pushed past the ropes—since I had a guide—and I sat on the chairs and I conversed with the ghosts of the passers-by. 

 

I had three guides, really.  One guide is Dad’s poetry.  Here, in these words, is what he actually said at those actual times.  A second guide is memory.  I re-encountered dozens of conversations that had been stored away in closed memory cabinets.  The third and final guide is viscera.  A boy knows his father in ways that transcend intellectual knowing. 

 

The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told is the testimony of my gut—written that I should better understand why I got this way. 

 

As any child does, I emerged into consciousness in the middle of my parents’ tale and needed to catch up.  So, as I ran, I grabbed scraps of what I could understand, and I molded them around big pieces of what I couldn’t, and that made me a pair of patchwork sneakers to kept my feet off the stones.   

           

But were the sneakers…true? 

 

And did they honor my father and glorify my Father?

 

I pray that the answer may prove to be yes. 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

 

Men in Christmas Overcoats

My father, my uncles, my grandfather, adult male cousins—I have an image that has remained with me since a young boy. 

 

It is Christmas, and the morning joy has been replaced with anticipation of the afternoon family gathering.  We are at Grandfather’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

 

My pacifist grandmother has been kind enough to give me two shiny cap pistols and a double holster because—I was always a salesman, even from the first, ready to address the objections of my customer—because I assured her I would only shoot people who are already dead.  It seemed to me a perfect compromise, and, by charming my grandmother, it worked. 

 

Things are going very well today. 

 

            So, it is early afternoon, and the uncles begin to arrive, complete with my aunts and my cousins.  My mother’s brother Charlie is one of the uncles, along with my Aunt Aggie, and their two daughters, Kate and Susan, who are my pals.  (Cousin Susan went on to distinguish herself athletically—she won the Iditerod sled dog race four times.)

 

I stand in the vestibule, wearing my guns. One after another, these tall men come through the outer door, smelling of cold snow and winter wind, their faces red.  They all wear overcoats, which they doff as they trade greetings with my father and with Grandfather. The overcoats smell of the outdoors and swirl a cold air as they are swung off shoulders and hung among others already there.  The uncles are well dressed, good-looking, competent.  They chat with one another as though they are all members of that enviable club—the club of adult maleness.

 

 They notice me; they greet me. 

 

More than anything on earth, I long for membership in their club.  I would give up my guns to be a man in an overcoat arriving out of the snow from a world in which I know how to make things happen. 

 

            If you are a woman, you will have had much to consider about men.  We men, I can tell you, mull a lot over women.  But first, when we are six or eight—and at later times, too—we mull a lot over men. 

As we boys come up, we encounter the lives of our fathers.  Most of us, we encounter the well-lived lives of our fathers.  Our fathers are decent men, who tried, and who succeeded.  Along the way, our fathers made their mistakes of course.  Eventually, all fathers display their weaknesses to their sons.  However we sons already know what those weaknesses are. 

When I was six or eight, I imagined I knew Dad’s weaknesses because of visceral sympathy between the generations.  I felt soulful accord with Dad.  Here’s what I thought.  I know Dad (comforting and cozy); he knows me (sometimes, not so comforting and cozy). 

Anyway, we know one another’s weaknesses because we are father and son

There’s a sager explanation of this communion—sin. 

 

At six or eight—even at ten or twelve—I probably knew that word, but it had no context for me.  In our family, we were Episcopalians, after all, as high as could be.  More to the point, my father was a poet, worshipping, really, the muse.  Sin had nothing to do with anything that had to do with us—or with me, for that matter. 

 

Yes, a shaft of jabbing badness cut at my guts and made me keep secrets.  But—I crouched inside myself in confusion—perhaps keeping secrets is just the way things are.  

 

Jabbing badness could not be in my uncles in their Christmas overcoats, nor in Grandfather and Dad.  How could there be jabbing badness in Grandfather, who was so kind to me, or in Dad, who was Dad, or in Charlie, who knew how to play, or in any of the others who swooped through the door? 

 

I was the only one who kept secrets, and I would stop doing that soon. 

 

After all, now I had my guns. 

 

After all, I was strong enough to stop keeping secrets.

 

 

 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

 

What Would the World Miss Without Your Story?

 

One man could sail around the world and not hold a single reader with his memoir.  E.B. White could describe a row across Central Park Lake and hold a reader breathless. 

It’s not the events of your story.  It’s the story of your events—in you.

 

Scene One

Location: a party at a house by the harbor.

The conversation: it might go something like this.

 

One of the men turns to me—about my age, getting grey—we’ve been chatting boats.  “You’re the one who’s just published that memoir.”

“Yes.”

“You retired?”

“Yes.  I enjoyed doing the book.  Lot of work.  I suppose not everyone could do it.”

“You know, I’ve tried to write a memoir.  People say my life is amazing.  Can’t seem to make it into a book though.  I could use your advice.”

“You’ve sailed across the Atlantic, right?”

“Three crossings.  Once solo in a 28-foot sloop. France—Azores—Cape Verdes—then downwind to the Caribbean.” 

“So what’s the point of your memoir?”

He looks puzzled.  “I just said.”

“I don’t mean to be argumentative, but no, you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve told me what happened, not what the point is.”

“People say I tell what happened very well.”

“I expect you do.  There’s a lot to tell about, in all that sailing.  I’m sure you’ve done a good job at what is not the job.”

He looks, perhaps, offended.  “What do you mean it’s not the job?”

“What I mean is you’ve begun the job—to tell the story—but that’s not the real job.  You’ve got your story so one event flows into the next event.  That’s good.”

“Thanks.” And then, “I think.”

“But the real job is harder.”

“Why?”

“Because the real job is answering my question—what’s the point?”

“Why can’t I just tell the story and be done?”

“Because no one wants to read a sequence of your events.  ”

 

Scene Two

 

“I don’t understand.  Why do I do this then?”

“What someone wants to read is what that person needs to read.”

“How am I supposed to know what that person needs to read?”

“One thing everyone needs to read is the truth.”

“The truth about what?”

“About you, and about the point.”

“But the truth about me is what I wrote down already.” 

“No, it isn’t.  What you wrote down is a sequence of events, which you have ordered so they flow.  That’s not the truth.  That’s a sequence.  And nobody wants to read a sequence of your events.” 

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Tell the point.”

“What is the point?”

“Ah, that’s the big question, is it not?”

“Oh, come on.  We’re going around in circles.”  He steps aside and pours himself another drink.  I think he may have left the conversation, but he circles back.  “Anyway, the truth right now is that I hate my boat as much as I love her.  Maybe I’m too old.”

I pause then ask, “What’s the point of your life—let’s say of your nautical life—of this sequence you have written down?” 

“The point?  I’m just trying to tell my story here.  People say my life is amazing.  That’s what I’m trying to tell about.”

“You really want my advice?”

“Sure.”

“Write the sequence down, each chapter, just as it flows.  But then go back and write it again.  By the second or the third time you do that, a new conception of the story will emerge.  Your concept of your story will have matured.  That new concept is the point.” 

“Ah, that point thing….

“Yes.  That point thing leads to the truth about you.  The truth will be the reason why people need to read your book.  So they can have truth in their lives.  They need to have truth in their lives, and your book gives it to them.” 

He muses.  “It’ll take a lot of pages to write it again and again.”

“It takes a lot of days to cross the Atlantic.  What’s the point of doing that?  Just to get to the other side?”

“Yes—but really, no.”  He pauses.  “It’s being out there on the ocean and in tune with the ocean—for me, that’s in tune with God—and even more so when I'm alone.”   

“So that’s the truth you need to talk about.  Your focus needs to be on the truth, not on successive positions at noon.  People will read your book, if it contains the truth about you and about your soul, so they can have the truth in their lives.”

“But what do I do with this mass of paper?  By now, I’ve got maybe a thousand pages on my desk!”

 

                                                                    Scene Three

 

“Yes, you do have lots of pages.  Now cut every sentence from the thousand pages that is not about the point.”

“But what if I love those sentences now?”

“You will love them.  But your love is self-indulgent.  You’re in love with your love of your sentences.  Cut anyway.” 

“Not easy.”

“In the Caribbean, did you ever take on board a huge bunch of green bananas and hang them in the rigging and, when they ripened, need to eat them as fast as you possibly could before they rotted?”

“Yes.”

“What happened when they rotted?”

“Threw them overboard.”

“See?  Even though you loved them?”

“Even though.”  He smiles.  “Okay, I cut.”

“That’s what you’ll do if you want someone else to read your story.”

“I thought I wanted that.”

“Don’t back away now.  Now people will read your story—and will value it—because now you are telling the truth.”

“Anything else?”

“Just go through and make every paragraph a pleasure to read—vivid, humorous, whatever it takes to make each paragraph a pleasure to read.”

He rolls his eyes.  “Then am I done?”

“Oh, sure,” I smile. “Then you’re done.” 

We shake hands. 

As he turns away, I say, “But when an editor gets a hold of it, and you’ll have three or four more rewrites yet to do.”

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015