Why Write a Memoir? Reason 11: To record history and one individual’s history

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Why Write a Memoir?

I also scribbled at my desk prompted by a wish to record history and one individual’s history: what it was like to grow up, the daughter of an American spy, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.  Poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “It is incredible how much of the aura of a country can penetrate a child.”  In a sense, I typed away simply as an act of recording: recording how American activities in the late 20^th century shaped a girl.  And as an act of exploring:  What does it mean to be an American in this world?

So, this memoir is my offering to the paper heap of twentieth century history. My effort to counter the prevailing forces in what the writer John Berger calls a “century of disappearances.”

What of Spying? Two Books, Two Faces of Espionage

I have been thinking a lot about espionage lately—its noble aspect and also the messiness of an enterprise based on secrecy, manipulation, and deception.

Spying, by nature, has these two faces.  To look at the first, its noblest mien: espionage is an attempt to gather information about the actions of other countries, and particularly bad actors in the world; to stop aggressions, if possible; to undermine or change inhumane regimes; and to support democracy, and protect the lives of ordinary people, around the world.  All of these objectives may be criticized, but the CIA was created in the wake of Hitler’s devastation, and under that light in particular, espionage might be seen as not only necessary but among the higher callings.

To look at its other face, there is an inherent murkiness, ambiguity, and morally-troubling side to spying.  The disasters and long-term ripple effects from its mis- or faulty-use are legion: Iran, Chile, Vietnam, to name three.  Back to the other face again, the CIA contributed to the ending of Osama Bin Laden.  If one tries to reckon with espionage, the two faces of the spy service swing in and out of relief…

A pair of books into which I have dipped have, for me, shed clear light on these two faces of intelligence work.

I will begin with the volume that shines a startling and penetrating—not to say dismaying—beam on the series of mistakes, havoc-wreaking, and deaths-of-thousands that can result from espionage mis-handled, mis-used, and gone rogue.  I cannot recommend enough Curveball by the Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Bob Drogin.  Drogin was assigned to the intelligence beat for his paper before 9/11, and was central to the investigation of, and reporting on, the WMD search preceding and following the start of the war in Iraq.  The book follows, beat by beat, the series of mis-steps by American spies, the State Department, and the executive branch, that followed the claim by an Iraqi con man-asylum seeker in Hamburg that Iraq had, hidden in its outlands, a series of mobile bio weapons labs—the faulty intelligence upon which the war in Iraq was based, and which Secretary of State Colin Powell called up as key evidence, in his fateful speech to the United Nations on February the 5th, 2003.  It is a crystalline example of an instance in which, as Drogin puts it, “The defector didn’t con the spies so much as they conned themselves.”  He sums up this story of disastrous espionage:  “[Curveball’s] marginal story took on an importance it did not deserve.  Senior intelligence officials irresponsibly hyped his claims and accepted unconfirmed reports.  They cast aside contradictory evidence, brushed aside clear warnings, and ignored a rising clamor of skeptics.  Time and again, bureaucratic rivalries, tawdry ambitions, and spineless leadership proved more important than professional integrity.”

New York Times reporter Benjamin Weiser, has written a book that presents the other face of espionage.  His fascinating book illuminates spy-craft at its finest.  Here again is a story of an informant and CIA operatives, but this round, all the actors concerned are models of nobility, rigor, and integrity.  A Secret Life is an account of the life of a Polish colonel who, out of a deep love for Poland and a drive to help his country free itself from Soviet domination, volunteered to secretly supply the Americans with information pertaining to Soviet weapons and military planning.  The reams of documents he handed over in the course of nine years, at great personal risk, contributed to the freeing of the nations of Eastern Europe.  The commitment, consideration, loyalty—and perhaps even love—that undergirded the relationship between the agent and his CIA handlers are deeply moving, and remind the reader of what under-cover, inter-cultural alliances can accomplish at their best.

Espionage has two faces, dark and light—and most spying is probably a mix of the two.  A look at these two starkly contrasting books sheds brilliant light on its grey world.

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 10: To release secrets

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Why Write a Memoir?

Quite important, of course—I have to force myself to say it out loud—I wrote a memoir to release secrets: because my father was an undercover CIA officer, because of his secrets and his silence.  Because I had been silent—and my family had been silent—long enough. With a force equal to that my mother and father employed to keep secrets, I was driven to tell the unsaid.

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 9: To extend a hand—to offer a mirror to oneself and others

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Why Write a Memoir?

As well as for the other reasons, I wrote of my life to extend a hand—to myself and to others.  I wrote, in a sense, in a search for reflection, for sameness:  to have the friend-from-infancy, the exact-reflector, I never had—and out of recognition of all the friends I did have.  Relatedly, I wrote in order to read what I wanted to read: about all the ups and downs, the whirling-around carnival twists of life.  Because I wanted to say something about the festival nature of life—life as many sorts of rides.  And this, too, is important and true:  I wrote as an offering to strangers—so that others didn’t have to feel so alone, as I did as a child seemingly-always in new places, standing awkward and anxious among the odors of strange fish, incomprehensible jabberings, and indecipherable smiles.

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 8: For one’s own pleasure—and in celebration

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Why Write a Memoir?

I gulp as I say this, Puritan girl that I am: I wrote this memoir, in part, for my own pleasure—and in celebration.  Writing the life, after living it, as memoirist Patricia Hampl says, is to live it twice.  It is: to swim in the pleasure of a past world, to don again an old happy, and sometimes miserable, self.  It offers a tingling comfort similar to that of discovering the shabby, long-forgotten, favorite sweater you used to wear on walks with your father in the Black Forest, or coming across an old pair of story-and-mud-encrusted shoes you wore back in Japan days.  All this, while writing my memoir, felt guilty, almost too sweet, like a stolen pleasure, an illicit gift to myself.  But for me, it was a vital way to have something to hold onto, like a still life of arranged fruit, from out of my crazy, zig-zagging childhood.  My hope, of course, was that my pleasure–and I don’t mean only happiness—if conveyed with enough lusciousness, would become the reader’s.

This pleasure-taking was, too, a kind of celebration.  I wrote to celebrate the very boon of having been given life.

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 7: To unload—so as to live more fully in the present

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Why Write a Memoir?

I also wrote my book, like all writers, to unload—with a hope, ultimately, to live more fully in the present:  I wrote to rid myself of encumbrance. To get those bulging, over-stuffed cartons of experience out of my head. To muck out the stables.  Memoir-writing is the great unloading, the great garbage dump.  Or perhaps a better image is the used clothing shop.  The memoir, like the therapist’s office, is the repository of the out-worn self.  The hope is to write oneself clean.

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 6: To find out who one is—to assemble a self

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Why Write a Memoir?

Too, I wrote a memoir  to find out who I was—to assemble a self:  In writing the memoir I had a chance to be my full self, to unite my past and present selves, to express a fuller self than I could with my friends and family.  Since, with each person we know, we are partial.

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 5: Out of longing and love

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Why Write a Memoir?

All writing is all about loss and longing, and love.  Love:  Certainly I wrote my memoir out of love.  In one sense, my book comes down to an illicit tryst under the old Japanese torii gate.  A love song to those old boys, those long-ago girls, of my life.  To Vicki who could conjure a full-antlered deer with her pencil, to Bob who smelled of fresh-baked cookies and air… A toast to the boys and girls we all had, who helped us grow up, those early loves who witnessed and forgave us our youth and our foolishness, who saw us commit our idiocies and still loved us. I want to kiss all those boys again (and the ones I didn’t kiss)—who made me feel I was part of the human race, like I belonged, like I was attractive and lovable despite all my insecurities and passions. (Perhaps lust is the salve for all wounds.)  To say thank you.

The memoir sprang from a wild tenderness for the green shoots, the honeysuckle kids we all were.  I wrote to thank the world for all those old beauties.  Those old, scrappy, frayed, dog-eared beauties.

I wrote to swirl my heart in past love, but also because a surfeit of lost love can be an encumbrance…

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 4: To make sense of the past—in a quest for resolution

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Why Write a Memoir?

Beyond its recapture, I wrote a memoir to make sense of the past, to sort things out, in a quest for solace and resolution:  The queen in her counting house, I sat at the drop-leafed table I use for a desk, in the sway of a compulsion to take stock, and to revise.  Writing a memoir is “Take 2: a new version of my life.”

I wrote:  Because of the fear-tinged, whispered Chinese that reached through the darkness into my Taipei bedroom when I was seven. (The sounds—I later learned—of a Chinese man my father was hiding).  Because of the way, when we lived in Holland, my later-discouraged father looked, with calm, happy eyes, out over the North Sea. (Along with his disappointments, through recollecting, I could cart away his love of European history).  Because of the way I mourned, when I was a teenager in Washington, a boy my age who immolated himself like a Buddhist monk in protest against the Vietnam war.  (What is a kid to do with the cruelty of the world?).  Because of the orchid-bordered house in Borneo I had to leave behind without a good-bye.  (A sadness, but the bitter fragrance of batik and the sweet scent of temple incense will stay with me forever).…The miracle of the flat, thin, white sheet.  A sheaf of paper can hold the whole, all the myriad experiences, all the messy complexity, as no other medium can.

And I have found that if I go to the place of purest pain and truth, there’s comfort waiting, and solace.  That is the only place to find it.  By writing my story, I dug a pool to catch all the joy and pain that constantly leaked from the years past.  At my desk, I had a chance to turn the sloppy, messy past into a pond of bright, fluttering fish.

Why Write a Memoir? Reason 3: As a hymn to the past—and in order to go home again

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Why Write a Memoir?

I wrote my memoir as a hymn to the past—and in order to go home again (an aim, of course, impossible to achieve).  A memoir, let’s face it, is homesickness flopping on the page.  Autobiographical writing is an effort, like fishing by hand, to grasp the wispy tail of the past and bring it up to eye-level.  To capture, flicking out of the sea, the pulsing, skittery kid one once was. To trap the memories before they slip away.  In writing the memoir, one seeks to claim those places, and that person, no longer here with us.  Writing a memoir is like swimming back across the ocean to those lost shores, or gathering all the flora of those various long-ago islands of experience into a bright bouquet.

As I wrote my autobiographical tale, it was as if I was writing about some other girl I once knew well.  I sensed that she might be of some use to me even now, many years later.  In Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,  Wordsworth writes of the “life and food” he gained from recollections of his younger self and past experiences.

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first

I came among these hills: when like a roe

I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led; more like a man,

Flying from something he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved… 

 

For thou art with me, here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes…

I wrote to reconnect to the passionate girl I was (that lovely, passionate child we all were)—the one who sometimes gets lost, in my memory, amongst all the other girls I was: the shy, the worried, the drifting ones.

A resurrection of my old places and my child self, my memoir, my recording, was also my way of keeping the past pure.  Odd to say, perhaps, with all my lost worlds, I have avoided reunions, fearful of confrontation with change, of having my memories altered—in the grips of a keen, grim sense that you can’t actually go home again.  From my childhood spent leaving countries and—aching, but determined—not looking back, I have wrought a sense of the past as sacred. While it might be fun to have an in-the-flesh meeting, with the lost people of the past—my dear friend of third grade, an old sweetheart or two—I don’t know if I’ll ever have the nerve or wish to surrender my special world, the one Nabokov describes, “seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time.”