A Behind the Scenes on the pivotal choice to chronicle a family's story. An Exclusive Writing Lab on the distinctions between autobiography and memoir
Hi and welcome into Flight School:
In our last post, I brought you through the early days of what would become a memoir writing career and into my first two processes: reporting and journaling. I hope you’re out there asking questions, writing answers, and practicing this back-and-forth process that evolves between both.
For those well into the memoir writing journey, I hope the post backfilled a process already underway and provided new ideas and tools.
After a year of research, Steve and I were nearly done with the house and I was in the midst of a crisis. I wanted to let go of my public relations business and write this story about my family. But because I couldn’t fathom how, I pivoted into a master’s degree at Portland State in something called Conflict Resolution. (Another perfect metaphor for my situation, I realize now).
While taking classes and trying to envision a future as a mediator, I kept turning over a bigger question. Was I supposed to do something with that story about my family?
My one hundred fifteen page news report about their lives and deaths—the who, what, why, where, when, and how—sat cooling in a file cabinet at my home office. My Mead journals filled with shocking and intense emotions were piled on top of a bookcase gathering dust.
I suppose I needed a break to see my next move, and to think, which I was doing at a deep level. While taking the Max Light Rail to and from my classes downtown, the scenery of the city screaming past the windows, I thought that if I wrote the story of my family, I would want to do it in a way that would honor their lives.
Note how I wasn’t in the equation at all? I told myself that their lives, and untimely deaths, needed to be commemorated, and given value. Looking back, there was a serious disconnect from myself, from my sense of personal value, from being able to recognize what I had survived. Being homeless after my parents had died. Enduring the long, exhausting process of being passed from home to home like so much unwanted garbage. And all while being fleeced of what little money I had inherited. As I considered writing about my family members, I seemed determined to think of myself solely as a humble scribe and servant to their memories. Even my emotions about that past, cooling in my journals, felt irrelevant. It was my DUTY to write about them, I remember telling myself, but not as a news reporter. No. Maybe fiction? No, that wouldn’t work either. I wanted to tell the truth. Truth with a capital T.
Tom Spanbauer, a writing teacher who hosted a class called Dangerous Writers, once told me (and the others gathered…huddled…around his table) that the moment you open your mouth and start talking, you’re lying. There is no truth, he said. We are all liars, and more so when writing a story.
Okay, so this is not a direct quote. And this pearl might not have come out that harshly, but that’s how I remember Tom speaking about Truth.
As a former reporter, I was appalled when I heard him say that because deluded as I was about throwing myself at the story of my family, I believed I had found the truth about their lives and deaths. I had the hard facts. What more was there to say?
Boy, was I wrong.
I didn’t know diddly-kabuki about those people. Sure, I knew how they died, and I knew details leading up to their deaths, but I was already breaking my own reporting rules about balance and fairness by slipping into a fog of devotion to people who had, in the end, betrayed me in ways that can hardly be articulated…
We don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.
~ (Who does this quote belong to anyway? Some say Steven Covey. Others, Anaïs Nin)
I love this quote because I believe it gets closer to what Tom might have been trying to teach me.
Back then, I saw the world in terms of being of service to others. There was no me without being of service. Period. How could I know my family then? How could I see them honestly and clearly? How could I truly tell their stories? Well, in a way, I couldn’t. There would be a veil of sentimentality tossed over my family if I continued in this way, and I have to admit that Blackbird certainly tipped in that direction.
Let’s pause my story for a moment to talk about you, and your writing.
YOU are not me. If you are a person convinced that you are writing about another person—and I meet people who believe this all the time—you MUST write that story. I am not saying you are in a fog, or that you don’t understand that you do have a voice in your story. How can I know what is going on with you? I can’t. And don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
Which is why I stopped here. I want to speak to you directly and offer some help:
If you are a writer convinced your writing is to commemorate the lives of other people—people who suffered in ways that need to be documented—watch out for tipping into sentimentality and if you do tilt in that direction, cue the reader that you cannot help yourself because of your deep love for whoever you are writing about. It’s fine to love people. It’s fine to honor them in story form but remember your loves are also your blind spots. Don’t let your narrative, or your relationship with your reader, suffer as a result.
To shape such a book, I suggest you go find examples to help with voice and structure. The novel A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is about one person telling the story of another. John tells Owen’s story. This happens in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby too. And, I believe Ruth Ozeki did a version of this in A Tale for the Time Being.
As you read these examples, open yourself up to the possibility of writing something that hasn’t been created yet. Maybe you are writing a kind of autobiographical, biography, memoir-ish-hybrid.
Cool!
Do it!
Break the rules, I say. Create new forms. And God-speed.
Back to my journey now…
While I wanted to tell the story of my parents’ lives, and then my brother’s life, I remained lost.
I wanted…what?
I didn’t even know.
I just knew I was bursting to tell their story…somehow.
One day, I found myself in Powell’s books, where a girl can get lost in the stacks upon stacks. And on a high shelf, I found Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kayson.
This was way before the movie, or the hype, or Winona Ryder. The book I held had a simple, lovely blue and white cover that invited a reader to step closer.
Turning it over, I saw it was categorized as autobiography. Right there, back cover. Autobiography.
Autobiography Defined:
An autobiography is a self-written life story. It is different from a biography, which is the life story of a person written by someone else. Examples: Helen Keller.
~ Literary Terms.net
The word autobiography comes from the Ancient Greek auto (“self”) + bios (“life”) + graphein (“to write”) = “a self-written life.” It is also known as autography.
~ Supersummary.com
Hmmm, I thought at the time. What am I missing? Why does Girl Interrupted read like a novel?
And here came another synchronicity (the first being that I found Girl Interrupted).
I was at school, that book in hand, when a woman from the English department saw it poking out from the pocket of my messenger bag and said, “Oh! Girl Interrupted. I love that memoir.”
Whatever else she said, I don’t know. I just remember hearing her say that word: memoir.
“Wait, it says it’s an autobiography,” I said.
She laughed. “No. It’s a memoir.” And she was gone. Tall? Short? Young? Old? I couldn’t tell you. But it was like being hit between the eyes.
What the heck is a memoir?
Memoir Defined:
Memoir comes from the French word for memory; no writer of any stripe is prescient enough to put everything he or she wants to record into notes, therefore drawing on memory is an essential part of what we all do…To be a memoir, the writing must derive its energy, its narrative drive, from exploration of the past. Its lens may be a lifetime, or it may be a few hours.
~ From Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola
Robin Hemley, a professor of English at the University of Iowa and director of the Nonfiction Writing Program, goes a step further and calls it Immersion Memoir.
The Immersion memoirist takes on some outward task or journey to put his/her life into perspective…(and)…is interested in self-revelation or evaluation while using the outside world as his/her vehicle.
~ From A Field Guide for Immersion Writing by Robin Hemley
And William Zinsser, editor of Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, a memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance.
Riding home on the train that day, feeling strangely winded from running to catch the express, I sat next to the window in a daze. I had decided, without a Scooby-Doo of a clue, that I was going to write a memoir.
Now, I had to explain my decision to Steve. Oh, dear…
(Go directly to the next post in the Blackbird journey now).
So, now you have some terms/definitions/ideas to think about, and more questions to ask yourself.
What are you writing?
What do you think it should be?
What form is out there now that you can learn, and work with?
What form might you create?
Is what you are creating for you, and you alone?
If yes, the reporting/journaling format could be the way to go.
Are you writing your life for your family?
If yes, then you could be doing a combo of reporting and autobiography that covers the time you want to cover.
Are you telling a story about someone else?
Borrow my autobiographical, biography, memoir-ish-hybrid for a bit, or make up your form.
Are you writing about yourself, and a personal experience that covers a particular time?
Maybe it’s an autobiography.
Are you writing about yourself, and a personal experience that covers a particular time, with the core goal of gleaning something about that experience for yourself first and then, for the reader? Are you exploring the impact of an experience on yourself?
Maybe it’s a memoir or a collection of essays.
Essay Defined:
In the West, scholars often date the essay tradition back to the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne. Essays, composed in Montaigne’s retirement, laid much of the groundwork for what we now think of as the essay style: informal, frank (often bawdy), and associative….the essay writer tries out…essay in French meaning “to try”…various approaches to the subject, offering tentative forays into an arena where truth can be up for debate.
~ Tell it Slant
The essayist attempts to surround a certain something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral taking us closer to the heart of the matter.
~ Philip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay.
I look forward to your comments and thoughts, and of course, and always, send my gratitude to you. ~ Jennifer ❤️
There was a moment when I willed up the courage to reflect upon and write the story of a night I've always tried to keep buried (even from myself) - a particular night of violence from my childhood that I haven't even told my wife a whole lot about, and I've never even broached with my grown daughter. When I wrote about that night, that's when I was sure I was writing (attempting, anyway) a memoir, despite all the historical research I'd done and my assumption that I was telling this multi-generational, "Rich Man, Poor Man"-type family saga about those who came before me.
I came to find that my real question wasn't so much about the rich stories and debilitating tragedies of past generations. They fascinate me and always have, but those I could research and absorb and even write about as a third party narrator. No, my real question was about how those events and people - good and bad - led to my my own experiences in childhood, and how I've worked to overcome so much of that in my adult life.
In short, I'm striving for introspection spurred by retrospection, not just one or the other.
I've been going back and forth about whether to include some rather disturbing events with one of my family members, and I kind of decided not to because my story is about my dad, not about this other person. But, while I'm honoring my dad while still being honest about him (in a way that he would hate if he were alive), I feel like my not being honest about the disturbing events with the other character are doing a disservice to my dad. Reading this entry of yours kind of moves me further into that direction. I told myself that I wasn't including it because the story isn't about this other person, but the person is in the book, and I'm making them very sentimentalized. Food for thought and something I am going to ask my editor about. I'm mostly afraid of the blowback with my family.