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