A description of this memoir, a categorization that goes beyond the marketing copy, and an analysis of the whole looking at structure, plot, and the “value” of the antagonist with handouts
This week, we’re going to look at Without a Map by Meredith Hall, a book thirty-six writers and I studied at the Studio for three weeks this fall.
The goal of this post is to share our process and conclusions.
To be clear, I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t read this book. I’m not endorsing it, nor am I shooing you away from it.
Instead, this is a journey of exploration…a way to think about a book you are reading that moves beyond judgments of good or bad, worthy or unworthy, right or wrong.
Let’s do it!
About the Book:
Meredith Hall grew up bonded to her insular New Hampshire community, comforted by the hallmarks of belonging: perfect attendance in Sunday school, classmates who seemed more like cousins, teachers who held her up as a model student, a mother who loved her unconditionally. Then, at sixteen, she became pregnant, and all at once those who had held her close and kept her safe turned their backs.
The same day in 1965 that Meredith was expelled from school, her mother told her “You can’t stay here.” Her father and stepmother reluctantly offered Meredith a cold sanctuary until she gave birth to the child she gave up for adoption. Then she was banned from her father’s home forever. For the next decade she wandered, lost to society and to herself. Slowly, Meredith began stitching together a life that encircled her silenced and invisible grief.
When he was twenty-one years old, Meredith’s lost son found her. She learned that he had grown up in gritty poverty with an abusive father—in her own father’s hometown. Their reunion was tender and turbulent, a renaissance. Meredith’s parents never asked for her forgiveness, yet as they aged, she offered them her love.
Without a Map charts an extraordinary journey in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion and ultimately wisdom. ~ From Hall’s site page.
Memoir? Collection of Essays?
On the cover, we are told that this is a memoir, which by traditional definition, is “a nonfiction category strongly linked with the personal essay,” according to Brenda Miller and Susanna Paola, in the third edition of Tell it Slant. “Memoir comes from the French word for memory; 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.”
For those of us working on memoirs at this time, we have certain expectations, which include that if a book is called a memoir it will be a full-length story that presents a problem that is either resolved or not, by the final page, and that the memoirist will work the material in a manner similar to what we might read in a novel.
This expectation was the first dilemma surrounding our approach to this book because while there was a cohesive story for a while, there was also a sense that the various chapters did not quite mesh together. Again…no judgement. The writing was terrific, to be sure. Hall is a skilled wordsmith but at times readers (myself included) felt…lost. “Where is she taking me,” many asked themselves. This sense of being lost created the following responses: To stop reading. To force through, keeping an open mind. To enjoy the disjointed construction as an example of what’s possible in the genre.
The construction Hall used was called out in a question-and-answer interview at the back of the book:
Interviewer: You wrote a fairly non-linear manuscript—you often jump back and forth in time…This seems to have confused some readers, and it’s something that other readers have found very appealing.
Meredith: Yes, I was not aware of moving in time. I wrote about my mother. About my baby. About my town. About my pregnancy. About my father. I did virtually no revision, simply wrote. One day, I felt I was done. I printed it all out and spread the pieces on my bed in my apartment. I made a list of what I had in front of me and realized that I should organize the pieces chronologically for clarity.
Okay. So…now we have a clue about what Hall intended. “I did virtually no revision.” And, “One day, I felt…done.” And, “I organized the pieces chronologically…”
This makes sense.
A bit of further exploration took our inquiry to the front cover page, which lists the category of this book for shelving and sales purposes to include: childhood and youth, 21st-century biography, homes and haunts—Maine, and Maine—social life and customs—21st century.
Conclusion: Memoir seems to have been used more as a subtitle, but not as an official category.
A little further down, we found a listing of the following credits, meaning that several chapters of the book had already been published, as stand-alone essays, in numerous publications:
This info is most helpful for the befuddled reader because we can see that we have here is more of a collection of essays.
So the question now is…can it be both a memoir and a collection?
Yes.
And no.
And yes.
That’s the crazy thing about publishing. They can do whatever they want. It is all “art” and today’s memoir can be tomorrow’s collection.
One additional consideration is about the time that this book was released: 2007. My deduction about this time is that this was the “early days” of memoir in its current incarnation and “anything goes” was the rule. Memoirs coming out aren’t quite as disjointed or experimental, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be. In fact, the moment you feel you get a fix on what the rules are…they change. Publishing and those working in that business makes up the rules as they go.
Structure? Plot? Value?
No matter what you call a book…memoir, collection, novel…it is still possible to suss out the structure, plot and value. And doing so gives you more power when understanding your own work.
(To read more on this teaching, which I called The Secret Sauce, go check out Flying Lesson #7)
To talk about structure, we first determine the protagonist who, in this book, is Meredith.
Based on our discussion, we believe the hook is that she is pregnant in a community that is supposed to support her, has supported her until….
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