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Sara Mansfield Taber

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

24 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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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

What is the truth… in memoir? 12: The person on the page is not the person in the flesh

17 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

Another item about truth and memoir: the writer versus the in-the-flesh person: they are not at all the same.  In person, I am a quietish, unassuming sort, a listener.  On the page, I’m forthright, aflame.

What is the truth… in memoir? 11: Creating beauty out of the rough stuff

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

And here is another notion for the memoirist to keep in mind: I believe that the primary goal of writing is to fashion beauty out of hardship.  Eudora Welty wrote, “Trouble is the backbone of literature.”  I ardently want, in my writing, to capture, to create beauty out of the tough stuff. And is this not a kind of leap of faith: to see life, in the end, as beautiful?

What is the truth… in memoir? 10: A myth

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

Even more daunting: I was aware all the while, as I wrote the story of my life and sought the truth, that I was constructing a myth.  Which myth would be most productive, useful, honest, truest?  Were they the same?  Which did I want to leave for eternity?

What is the truth… in memoir? 9: A moody affair

27 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

And then, in addition to the vagaries of memory that plague the memoir-attempter, there are the ups and downs, the changing moods, of the memoirist at her desk.  One week, I was inclined, while writing, to emphasize the health of my family: how we laughed through the miseries of dysentery and worms, and traipsed the castle parks of Europe.  The next, I could only see the sickness, the quarreling in the car.  The next, I felt, “But that’s not right.  Ours is a story of adaptivity.  We all did extremely well with the hands we were dealt.”

Each day, conceivably, I could have knit, out of the strands of my life, a sweater that seemed to fit.  And the sweater I would knit the following day, in all likelihood, would be a different one.  But let’s stop this now—you see how easily one gets ones’ fingers all mixed up in a tangle of yarn, how easily one could toss the whole mess down.

What is the truth… in memoir? 8: How do you like your eggs?

20 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

Having established the portrayal of emotional truth as the purview of my memoir, we go back now to those layers of paintings, those versions of our lives brushed in one on top of the other, that keep shining out of the frame.  I’ve made my qualified vow to the truth, but which emotional truth ought I to tell?

My childhood, spent criss-crossing the globe, was a rich, exotic lark, deliciously happy.

My childhood was a field of grief, rent by constant moves, brittle secrets, losses, self-doubt, and friction. 

In order to tell you the truth of my childhood, which story do I tell?  What do I show you, or present to you on this platter, my book?  The triumphant, happy, hearty story—the American success story?  Or the bogged-down, sad, troubled one a Frenchwoman might write?

As I composed my memoir, I could not be happy with either the chirpy, hearty, wasn’t-I-happy story, nor did I want to serve you up the memoir of a victim—because neither was true.  I was both pitiful and confident.  Both ecstasy and sadness were commonplace in my life, positive and negative experiences waxed and waned, every which way, all over town.  I groped for balance.  Life, to me, has always been a mix of happy and sad. I cleave to a belief in rendering a proportionate mixture of trouble and triumph.  Now then, trying to be as objective as I can be:  If you looked at a movie of my childhood, you might say, “This is the story of a sensitive, shy kid who grew up to be, for the most part, strong and happy, with many struggles along the way.”  But that is just me, talking.  You might say, “Wow, what a cool, lucky childhood,” or “I wouldn’t have gone through that for the world.”

Beyond the happy-sad dichotomy, there are so many stories I could have told that would be a version of the truth:

The shy, lonely, grieving girl

The valiant girl with the spy glass, who could sail any sea

The girl who ended up on a U.S. Air Force psychiatric ward

My brave, inspirational mother

My terrified mother

My war with my mother

My perfect father

My father the tortured spy

A life within secrets

My childhood that zig-zagged across the globe

The people I have loved

My crazy schools

Itinerance and its consequences

Cultures I have known

One girl’s story of what it means to be American

Truth is multiple.  Each story is a layer (and each of these, to a degree, shows through the paint in my memoir).  I think of each of these slants, each of these books, and the many more I could conceivably write, as “The Lives of SMT.”  As the essayist Philip Lopate has written, in each essay he writes, he selects and exaggerates a certain part of himself in order to carve it in relief.  At the hypothetical end of his life, if you were to read the entire body of his work (assuming it was complete), as it built up, in layers on his canvas, you might only then have a near-full sense of the man.

So there you sit before the thicket of memories, a ramble of wooded habitats stretched to the horizon.  Some of the forests are barbed, some lush and deciduous, some sparse and piny, set in thin air.  In which do you set your story?

To use another metaphor, attempting memoir is like breaking yourself open and having to put yourself together again.  How do you like your eggs? Hard-boiled?  Scrambled?  Over easy?  Poached?  With Hollandaise sauce at the Ritz?

What is the truth… in memoir? 7: A version of the truth

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

All I could offer in my memoir was my truth—as best as I could tell it.  And the only truth I could offer, as many have said, was a version of the truth.  I could only offer my version of the truth, and I could offer only one of my versions of the truth.  (Remember the layers of paintings?)  Everyone has their truth and my memoir could present mine, and no one else’s.  In the memoir, I didn’t intend to violate anyone else’s truth.  That is theirs, and sacred.  I just ask the world to grant me mine as well.

 

What is the truth… in memoir? 6: Allegiance to one’s own truth rather than that of others

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

Another problem in all this truth-seeking while crafting a memoir:  Was this book to be my truth or that of the people I knew?  To whom did I owe allegiance?  Unlike in my work as a literary journalist or scholar, where my primary aim was to convey others’ truth, (I have written books about French bakers and Argentine shepherds, and academic papers about Mexican immigrants and Indian women,) here the truth conveyed could only be my own.  I didn’t have access, nor did I seek access, to the experiences of my past companions.  That was not the mission of my memoir.  In fact, at a certain point in the writing, I needed to avoid others’ memories and perspectives altogether, so as to preserve my own recollections, and not muddy the one truth I was after: my own, my own story.  But is that the truth, then?  You see how fast you can slip into a whirlpool, with piranhas drawing near.

What is the truth… in memoir? 5: A stab

30 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

Another caveat to this matter of truth and memoir:  All the secrets and the necessary face-keeping of my family (the requirement to protect and to hide), all this murk in which I lived as a CIA kid, no doubt, doubly predisposed me to a quest for truth.  You can only live with secrets and disguises for so long.  The truth will out.  “Out damned spot,” Lady Macbeth said, to no avail.  And as her creator directed, the true duty of poets “is to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”  “Writing is an act of transgression,” writer Jamaica Kinkaid has noted.  This memoir I wrote was my stab at truth.  It was like stabbing for a body hidden behind a curtain.

What is the truth… in memoir? 4: The stammering girl seen through the gauze of adult perception

23 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Born Under an Assumed Name, Memoir Writing, On Writing

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What is the truth...in memoir?

In this consideration of memoir writing and truth, I return now to the seven year-old child and the forty nine year-old trying to attach her to the page.  Another verity surfaces in the pond. Not only are the seven year-old and the forty nine year-old not the same, but it is impossible for the forty nine year-old not to overshadow the little girl in the embroidered, white-cotton Chinese pajamas, with her head on the pillow, listening to her father’s voice.  As I have already noted: I have been unable, as a writer, to give you the actual seven year-old, or the twelve year-old skating after a Dutch boy on a pond in The Hague, and exactly what she said back then.  I have only been able to give you the ripples of emotion that stayed in her body as it grew: how she listened, holding her breath in the dark, for cues in her father’s voice, how she drew the covers over her head to go back to sleep—and to make something out of those flashes of feeling.  The girl on the page could only possibly be the girl as seen through the gauze of adult perception.  This carried the risk of the girl seeming smarter and more insightful than she was at the time.  These book kids are always wise beyond their years…

At the same time, as the writer, I tried, with all my urgent heart, to put words to the dumb, foundering, young feelings I had back then.  And I say, to seem a little wiser than I was (or even a lot wiser: I have seen some of the mortifying letters I wrote back then!), is a compromise worth making.  Wouldn’t you rather hear the adult rendition over the bashful, inert stammers of the tongue-tied seven year-old or the slangy clichés of the bluff-sassy twelve year-old?  Back then, I was simply in the hands of it all, just living it, not thinking about it and how it made a story.

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