MODULE 2 -- WHAT IS A MEMOIR?

Reading 1
Assignment 1
Reading 2
Assignment 2

READING 1
It's easier to answer the question "What is a memoir?" by first considering what memoir is not. My Life and Loves by Madonna or Michael Jackson, or any other celebrity admirable or despicable, is not a memoir. When famous people write their "memoirs," they are usually not writing memoir. They are recounting stories, dropping names or painting pictures that satisfy the desire of the public for intimate glimpses of the rich and famous.

Memoir is also not autobiography. The autobiographer tells his or her life story, from beginning to end. A memoir deals with a theme that may be handled in a brief period of time or stretch out over a lifetime. The story of a life, however, is not the main concern.

Finally, memoir is not entertainment, although the writing may be entertaining. Memoir is not written to please the reader -- it is not fanciful, imaginary or invented. If the contents are not true, the writing is not memoir.

Many works called memoir are not. In contrast, some works that are not considered memoir because they're too successful and popular (memoir sounds like something ponderous) are, in fact, memoir. Consider the bestseller ANGELA'S ASHES by Frank McCourt, the classic I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou or the memoir-turned-movie, GIRL, INTERRUPTED by Susan Kaysen.

What, then, is memoir? The word comes from "memoria" which means memory in Latin. But a memoir is more than a memory. It is a memory that is given meaning by the author. Judith Barrington put it beautifully in WRITING THE MEMOIR. (Note: Barrington uses the generic "she" for the author instead of "he" or the awkward "he or she".)

"Rather than simply telling a story from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge. . . . The contemporary memoir includes retrospection as an essential part of the story. Your reader has to be willing to be both entertained by the story itself and interested in how you now, looking back on it, understand." (p. 20)

I want to share with you some writing from the famous diarist, Anais Nin, from the second volume of her diary. She is on a trip to Morocco in 1936.

"Fez is a drug. It enmeshes you. The life of the senses, of poetry (even the poor Arabs who visit a prostitute will find a woman dressed in a wedding dress like a virgin), of illusion and dream. It made me passionate, just to sit there on pillows, with music, the birds, fountains, the infinite beauty of the mosaic designs, the teakettle singing, the many copper trays shining, the twelve bottles of rose perfume and the sandalwood smoking in the brazier, and the cuckoo clocks chiming in disunion, as they pleased.
The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide."

What makes this passage memoir and not merely a travelogue? The passage is suffused with sensual detail, eroticism. Yet, it is definitely Nin who is experiencing Fez, not you or me. How do we know that? She tells us -- "It made me passionate..." In the last sentence, she relates her experience of the city to the search for her personal truth.

At another point, the description recedes and the musing takes over.

"Fez. One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self. This may explain my fascination for it. Wearing a veil, full and inexhaustible, labyrinthian, so rich and variable I myself get lost. Passion for mystery, the unknown, and for the infinite, the uncharted."

This passage provides deep, personal revelation, yet you are still in Fez. Nin has seamlessly interwoven the external experience of a city with the internal experience of self-discovery. Her ability to do this makes great memoir.

ASSIGNMENT 1
Think of a city which is an "image of your inner city." In no more than a paragraph, describe that external and internal city. Start out, perhaps, with "I am Chicago, New York, Istanbul, Moscow (you choose)" and tell us why. Post your paragraph in the Getting Ready by Reading Memoirs Course Discussion.

When reading memoir, it is important to consider both the story and the musing. Sometimes there is a clear separation between the two. Sometimes they are woven together as Nin has done. As Barrington explains (p. 20):

READING 2
"The 'musing' element of memoir appears in two different forms. Sometimes it takes place right there on the page, visibly separated from the experience it is reflecting on; at other times the author lets us see she has done her musing out of our sight but displays the resulting wisdom. What is always recognizable, though, is the presence of the retrospective voice."

What about this voice? Retrospection sounds like serious business. And it is, but that doesn't mean it has to be written in a heavy, analytical fashion. That's why I like the term "musing." It suggests a gentle voice, personal, direct, the author talking to you, not at you. Beware of memoirs where the author is so self-conscious about retrospection that the voice is overly solemn and consequently a bit pompous.

I'd like to share one last example of musing from "Winter Work: Diary of a Day Laborer" by Don J. Snyder in SURVIVAL STORIES. This is an excerpted version of the first two pages -- the entire piece is well worth reading.

"Though winter was nearly a month away, the mornings were cold, and I would go to the beach and fill a canvas bag with wood to build a big fire in the living room so that when my four kids got up there would be one warm place where they could get dressed for school. This was better than turning on the furnace. I had lost my college teaching job eighteen months earlier. We were down to our last $200 the morning I saw what I thought at first was just a mirage that you sometimes see when the tide is out and the sunlight shimmers off the mud flats like ribbons of heat off a highway. It looked like hundreds and hundreds of wooden ladders standing on the ledges half a mile away. I kept walking until I got close enough to see clearly the enormous wooden frame of a structure that looked much too large to be a house. . . .
I kept thinking I would find another teaching job, but eventually we reached the point where my wife, Colleen, stood in line for food stamps and I stood in line for work at the Maine employment office in Portland . . . . I waited for my interview and started writing another budget in Bellow's novel . . . . For rent, food, heat, electricity, telephone and gas, $1535 a month--a sum that should not be terrifying to a forty-four-year-old man.
I got home just after noon and was wiping the kitchen table, when Colleen came in carrying our three-year-old daughter, Cara, who was crying at the top of her lungs. 'I slammed the door on her finger,' Colleen said sorrowfully as she set Cara down on the counter and took off her blue mitten. Then I heard her scream. 'Her finger came off! The top of her finger came off, Don!' It was more than the bills for the emergency room and the hand surgeon that carried me back to that house to ask for a job. It was the memory of me just standing there in the kitchen inside my fears, taking all that time to feel sorry for myself while Colleen zipped Cara inside her down coat and ran outside in a snowstorm, heading for the hospital seven miles away."

What makes this memoir so gripping? The writing is rich with detail, direct, honest, suspenseful. But the last paragraph is the key -- the musing. Unemployment, living on the edge, family responsibilities make one fearful. That fear can be paralyzing, can drive one to drink, or can, in a survival story, drive one to action. The unemployed college professor got hired as a manual laborer on an outdoor job during a Maine winter. Not an easy way to go, but better than standing inside your fear, feeling sorry for yourself.

ASSIGNMENT 2
Think of a time in your life when you came close to being paralyzed by fear. What got you out of it? Would the experience make a good memoir? Write the first few lines and post them in the Getting Ready by Reading Memoirs Course Discussion.