The Memoir-Writing Process: A most rewarding journey

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The Memoir Writing Process

Often, while in the possession of the demon called the memoir, there is a sense of a brain burning too bright, like Van Gogh’s.  There have been moments—brief but flashy–when I thought it might drive me mad.  Re-living the hard stuff can bring you close to the brink.

And then there is the downer of coming up against real life: like when the insightful adolescent in your head comes up against the boring, stupid adolescent-you of the diaries you dig out; like when you make contacts with old friends  who seem too strange to touch, or too disappointing, or even frightening.  Interactions with a couple of old friends have changed the actual content of my memoir.  One contact fired it up.  The other, with a friend of whom I was once fond, was so bitter, I eliminated the person from the book.

And finally, there is the disappointment of finding out that when you are in the mood to re-contact people, or when you are in the wistful, nostalgic mood, your old friends are not.  They went through all that, and purged, long ago, or aren’t yet ready to touch the fire.  No one is back there where you are, when you are.  This brings you to think: How alone we all are.  And yet how vivid everyone is, and how clamorous and crowded the life while writing.

All in all, despite it all, memoir-writing: a most rewarding obsession.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Prone to fits of idiocy

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The Memoir Writing Process

Write a memoir at your hazard.  It is a precarious activity.  One that makes you prone to embarrassing yourself.  All the awkwardness, the idiocy of youth come flooding back, and, believe me, you suddenly really are fourteen.  You do stupid things, you act weird, because it’s like you’re half your forty-nine year-old self and half- your fourteen year-old self and you lurch around in your harlequin garb, unable to stand.  One moment you’re tongue-tied at the edge of the dance floor, the next you’re pitching to the torrents, pulses, surges, and swayings of first love.  In the course of the writing, when operating under the influence of my mixed selves, I have put three feet in my mouth (the urge to self-humiliation was so great, I needed a spare), acted mentally ill, become a lovesick puppy, and delivered lectures, mature as Athena, all at once.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Hazardous

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The Memoir Writing Process

Sometimes as I wrote, I was in a fugue, as when I was drugged at sixteen, an episode of the memoir.  And all along, the process led me toward the precipices of foolish acts, unaccountable acts.  For instance, immersion in old years left leaves me prone to fits of sweet love, when I wanted to fling my arms around all the people of the past, throw caution to the winds, and kiss them passionately.

…This brings me to the hazards associated with writing the memoir. Warnings for the novice, for any about to set their walking sticks on the memoirist’s trail.

Many have noted how the writing robs the writer of his memories.  Nabokov laments, as he refers to the writing implements of his childhood, “Alas, these pencils, too, have been distributed among the characters in my books to keep fictitious children busy; they are not quite my own now…Few things are left, many have been squandered…”

In Proust we find the thought that it is not the author who creates the story, but the story that creates the author. Beware who you create.  She’ll stay with you, take you over, define you forever after.  I think it prudent—and I have done this myself—to purposely leave out, preserve, some memories, episodes, and favorite people, so that not all your memories are stolen from you, trapped in the cage of sentences.

Another hazard of writing a memoir:  the people of your past seem, alternately like a pack of zombies ready to attack and submerge you, and a throng of dream people showering you with love.  Either shakes your little pram.

The Memoir-Writing Process: The neglect of friends

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The Memoir Writing Process

While in obsession’s thicket—it is true—I neglected my friends.  I couldn’t talk to them while I was in this haze, this morass of yearning, this bubble, while I tried to negotiate this watery ground, palpitate this tumor of the past.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Frenzy, fever, insomnia

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The Memoir Writing Process

Writing my memoir, I let myself go—both ways—into my head.  I surrendered to the force.  Without me, my mind brushed on the next dab of paint, as if by instinct knowing how to make it all fit by association.  Many days, I worked in a fever, a frenzy, as if the bombing started the next morning at dawn.  Memories and thoughts awakened me at night.  In the darkness, I shuffled around in the bed clothes, hitting my knuckles as I tried to wrest index card and pencil from the bedside table in the dark, waking up my tired husband—and then was blurry and short with the kids in the morning.  But there was the petite, incomparable thrill of note cards spilled around my bed at dawn: little jewels I gathered in the morning, a harvest from the blackness of night.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Possession

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The Memoir Writing Process

Rarely, while writing my memoir—this is another iteration of obsession—I was as calm as God, solemnly inscribing words as if on tablets.  But usually, writing my memoir was like being possessed.  At certain points when I was working on it, I was in an alternative universe.  During such periods, my husband poked me and said, “You’re not with us.  You’re in a parallel world.”  It was truer than he knew.  I was off with my lover in the thatched hut.  These times, I was just barely able to listen to my children.  It was like they were calling from somewhere far off in a fog.  (It was really me that was in a fog.)  And I couldn’t hear them until I got the day’s burden of memories unloaded from the ship whose cargo hold was bottomless, infinitely re-filling.  A ship that seemed to re-fill to the brim the minute I scooped out the day’s box of k-rations, or slab of death-by-chocolate cake.

Nabokov describes writing as “a private mist.”

When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die, there came the most trancelike state of all.  With hardly a twinge of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather’s study.  On that couch, I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm dangling, so that my knuckles loosely touched the floral figures of the carpet.  When I next came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still there, my arm still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the edge of a rickety wharf, and the water lilies I touched were real…So little did ordinary measures of existence mean in that state that I would not have been surprised to come out of its tunnel right into the park of Versailles, or Tiergarten, or Sequoia National Forest.

The Memoir-Writing Process 3 : Obsession

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The Memoir Writing Process

I say, memoir-writing, at its most basic, is obsession.  Involuntary obsession is a requirement for the endeavor. (I have my mother’s genes to thank for an obsessive brain that won’t stop writing the book even when I—the more sensible one of me—wants to.)  Writing a memoir is like having a lover waiting, hiding in a hut out in the nearby forest.  Even if you can’t stay, you want to steal in and touch his cheek, even if it can only be for a second.

 

The Memoir-Writing Process 2: Perseveration

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The Memoir Writing Process

Like all writing, memoir-writing, is perseveration: the same story over and over.  Who was it who said we live the first thirty years and then write about it for the next fifty?

The Memoir-Writing Process 1: Poking around in scars

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The Memoir Writing Process

A Private Mist

The Memoir-Writing Process:

Why is memoir writing so trying…and rewarding?

Now a few words as to the memoir-writing process.  Writing the memoir is not a matter of riding in a boat, sucking candies and fruits.  As you pole along, sometimes the waters are placid and calm.  More often they are a torrent.

There is regular writing, and then there is the memoir. Both are treacherous. Orwell wrote, “Writing is a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a bout of some painful illness.” Memoir-writing is that, or perhaps a more specific diagnosis would be: a severe attack of homesickness.

Red Smith commented, “Writing is easy.  All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” Similarly, memoir-writing just involves the simple act of digging into an old scar and then poking around in the red, tender flesh.

In the next nine weekly posts, I will consider the perils, joys, and other features of the memoir-writing process.

What is the truth… in memoir? 13: A never-to-be-reached vanishing point

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What is the truth...in memoir?

Finally, a last question of the many in this conundrum of truth and memoir:  How smooth a story should I, the memoirist, tell?  American story-telling convention demands a clear narrative arc, a steady progression toward positive change in the protagonist.  Real life is a big mess, and life-changing events roar in out of the blue.  My stay in an Air Force Psychiatric ward, for instance.  Deus ex machina play a part in every life.  This obvious truth about life is somehow impermissible, un-American.  When you think about it, it is really the American idea of life story that is preposterous.  Whose life is of a piece, an unwavering narrative arrowing straight toward triumph and redemption (especially as it is lived along)?  But ought I conform to American convention, so as to make things easy on my readers? I could present a collage, or a crazy quilt, or a box-full of index cards to be sorted by the beholder.  I finally decided on a compromise: an unfolding story to invite my readers in, but with bits of the real mess and slop thrown in as well.

In summary, I can say of my memoir:  This is not all of me.  This is one story of my life.  I could have written it as though the black, instead of the white, cat was on the strand.  But that is for another day.

Writing the memoir, trying to recapture the past, trying to discover truth, is like walking closer and closer to a crashing sea that slips ever further away.  The truth, the never-reachable vanishing point