Remembering memoir

Of all the things that memoir can be: travelogue, coming-of-age story, humorous romp through time, etc., the genre's main focus as I now see it is to shape a life's story into events and perspectives that can help others learn. I suppose I've always known this, always being for as long as I've though actively about memoir, anyway.

After my stroke I spent lots of time hunting down books that told stories like mine. I wanted to know that despite the dung heap my life had become, things would get better. While none of the stories were like mine-- 'My Stroke of Luck" came out after I was over my misery-- I still found some comfort in what I read. At that time I never read for sensationalism, shock value or to make myself feel better because of someone's sorrows. The elements of memoirs that I read that spoke to me were just the ways in which the authors had assembled events to help me see their points of growth. Unfortunately, I think that many authors today use the adage that sex (or drugs, etc) sells, so these things are used in books to carry the whole story. It works, but frankly, I can't wait until we as a culture are bored with this tired old trick. In today's pop culture world, we can't help turning on the TV and seeing some sordid real-life TV show about how crappy someone's life is; there's Hoarders and Intervention and Wife Swap and all sorts of other shows like this; I can't wait till they are old news.

So what I've enjoyed the most about the class has to do with the ways in which I was asked to consider memoir as a literary form. It can certainly be that; however, I wonder if it's very nature imposes some limits on where it can go. If cultural trends are cyclical, as think we've all seen evidence of in some ways, then hopefully memoir can move into a place of substance, rather than just substance abuse/physical abuse, etc.

For example, I think back to our discussion on Langston Hughes, and the piece we read for that week. "Salvation" had some real depth to it, and although I'm not saying our other pieces didn't, it was so refreshing to read a piece that didn't involve the same story rehashed to another person's life/era. I know that all subject areas probably have memoir-writers in them, so maybe the onus is on me to find memoirs that fulfill me in a more "real" way.

So as I consider my own tale or stroke recovery, all of these considerations make me rethink the way I'd started that book; the inclusion of my own sordid stories and all the things I have come to dislike about the genre. How can I avoid them and write something that I'd like to see out there?

Again I turn to Hughes, who wrote, as the voice of an English teacher, in "Theme for English B,"

"go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page be out of you--
Then it will be true."

Wiesel's collective memory

I've been reading all of Patricia Hampl's "I Could Tell you Stories" for my final, and what I read today coincides with what Wiesel (and most of our authors, really) is trying to do with his stories in Night. She is talking about writers of the Eastern Europe persuasion, but I think it could be said that non-American writers fall into this category, as she later goes on to explain.Hampl is discussing the idea of memory and continuity in writers who have had to remember not only for themselves but for a whole era, a whole nation. That is definitely Wiesel.

"Remembrance in these writers is less strictly personal than it is in most American autobiography, through the uncanny and formative moments remain, as in any memoir, the basis of the work. But for these writers the past is the nation's finally, not the family's as it so typically is in American memoir. The brush strokes are of history, rather than autobiography" (83).

Hampl is calling attention here to the scope and intent of a memoir; she is saying that for American writers, whose lives and stories are shaped largely by and of their personal experiences and go on to reflect such things, scope and intent is not so all encompassing as it is for other non-American memoirists. Americans have always had a can-do, self-reliance sort of mentality, and even though other societies and individuals have this mentality too (Wiesel certainly does pull him self along), other people don't necessarily focus on the self quite to the point that American writers might. It is the difference between memoir and autobiography, she says.

For Wiesel, who must remember and write for whole countries, families and nation/states, the luxury of focusing on the self has disappeared with the past. Although Hampl is writing about the author Czeslaw Milosz and not Elie Wiesel, what she writes of the former could be said of the latter.


"[He] hinges the personal to the history of the nation. The fusion of these two narrations--one intimate, the other public--creates a powerful call and reply which achieves poetic form. It is a relationship--that bruised word of our own relentlessly psychological culture, reclaimed by the impersonal method [he] suggests" (86).


Wiesel's attempt at creating both personal and public narratives and histories in Night serves a purpose as a historical work, but it goes deeper than that in also capturing the stories of several "smaller" lives. The things he's chosen to include support his scope and intent to make this a literary work; each scene, each individual, each location works with this quality of memoir to highlight and foster discussion about "the greater truth" or the greater truths that must come of such a book.

At home with Thoreau

I'd like to think of Thoreau's writing as memoir because he does cover a specific time frame and series of events, but I'm not exactly sure his story fits into what I think of as modern memoir. To me, modern memoir is more of an examination of a certain time frame that is rife with problems that one has to overcome; problems that the individual has no control over. I usually think that there is some type of personal revelation that comes out of this, and although this exists here, I don't feel like the challenges Thoreau is facing are all that critical to self-development. No, that's not quite it-- the problems he faces are critical to his self-development, but what I'm trying to get at is that they are not do-or-die challenges he's facing.

For instance, in Karr's memoir, she's facing rape, alcoholism, family problems and disinterested parents. Same with Angelou McCourt faced poverty and alcoholism, etc. The problems Thoreau is facing deal with his need to disengage from society and find a simpler life, but this is not as necessary to his livelihood as overcome those other problems is for the other authors.
Now, I realize that Thoreau would argue that simplicity IS necessary to one's livelihood and self-preservation, but really.. in the face of the other memoirs we've read, his problems are pretty tame.

Another reason I question Thoreau's work as "memoir" is that I'm not exactly sure what he's learning about himself in the wild. It seems to me like he's already had some pretty well-formed opinions and ideas; his time at the pond is just testing them out and further reinforcing what he already knows about himself. To me, a literary memoir must have some sort of life-changing conflict that results in a growth process for the reader too. In our time it's almost impossible for anyone to do what he did, so it's unlikely that anyone will "learn" in the way Thoreau did.

However, for all of my inability to see his work as memoir, on of the elements of story that Thoreau utilizes is that of recalling memories. What is memoir, literally, it not that? his diligence to recording his observations in his journal no doubt helped with this, and the of detail he includes helps the reader see/feel the author's landscapes.

A staggering work

I see why Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" has been referred to as "manic-depressive." Bouncing from highs to lows, spun off in a story-telling style that is as intelligent, manipulative and melancholy as it is humorous, Egger's memoir drained me. His "unusual approach" to recounting a specific time period of his life works well because his life was as quirky and unusual as the story (ies) he tells in the book. Eggers' life as a publishing entrepreneur is particularly well-suited to the techniques he uses because these same techniques are used in McSweeney's, his magazine; they are also the same sorts of techniques Gen X grew up on-- sarcasm, self-deprecating humor, indifference, melancholia and depression.

This is not to say any other generation has lacked these traits, it's just to say that many times Gen-X is associated with popularizing these things and making them "cool." What Eggers has done is combined these personality devices and characterizations and figured out a way to put them on paper that remains true to the essence of his young adulthood.

In much the same way Gen X and the dot.com/publishing bubble of the 90s revolutionized those sectors, Eggers injected a particularly clever degree of snark and entertainment into the publishing industry and the memoir genre. Although I am not a fan of Eggers and felt that the ending of the story could have come much sooner, I do believe his ability to craft something from the resources around him and capture a whole time period (and life, in Topher's case) and societal mood speaks volumes to his ability to create and do so as an original. In setting up "Heartbreaking Work" as he did, he's subtly infusing the story with several elements of his life that made him him, elements that contribute(d) to his story.

Personally, I don't like to sustain humor in my writing. I like a turn of phrase, a witty bit of dialogue, a bit of snark, but I'm not the kind of person who writes to entertain in the same way Eggers has in this piece. I feel like self-deprecating/dark humor, while entertaining, is indicative of a deeper problem within the humorists life and a reliance upon passive/aggressiveness to get attention. I'm talking real-life people, not just authors-- so this kind of humor/voice is something I am wary and distrustful of when I encounter it in any form.

For Eggers, however, I think his book reached people, precisely because so many people rely on these attitudes to get by in our society. For example, say a co-worker is having a bad day. Instead of saying he wants to talk about it, he might begin cracking jokes about how much of an idiot he is, or how much he wants to take the boss out and beat him up. On their face, these things may be funny in their presentation, but underneath the words, there's a desire to connect (in the first case) and a malicious need for attention (in the latter). Colleagues laugh and perhaps join in on the ribbing, not knowing what else to do, and everyone leaves the table bewildered about the social interaction that just went on. So, regarding Eggers... I read "Heartbreaking Work" in rapture about 1/3 of the way through, then gave up on because it began to alienate me, not help me see anything new and endearing about the human condition.

Getting a feel for Conroy's life

Frank Conroy's memoir is a departure from the other memoirs we've read in several ways. First, Conroy shows us his poverty but doesn't overtly mention it. Parental dysfunction is observed in young Frank but is less "recognized" by the character, who doesn't seem to know any better or realize that anyone else's parent behave as parent should. Even Tobey's parents, who are more caring, aren't exactly "put together," and Jean's brother's families seem to be a mess too. While these differences make the book more enjoyable for me-- I realized while checking it out how badly I wanted not to read another memoir, but having read it fully enjoyed it--they are not the main feature of the story that makes it stand out to me.

Writing as a musician, Conroy has happened upon, or created, a style of writing that is rhythmic and lyrical, what I'd call the cadence of his inner thoughts and emotions coming out harmoniously on the page. This is no small accomplishment, because what he has done is essentially take a musical, poetic form and stretch it out over 283 pages. In the other memoirs we've examined, the writers have done a good job of evoking a region or time period with their attention to language and sound of each character. While Conroy continues to do this, he also pulls the reader into an internal landscape that hum with a certain sort of sound and energy. What this suggests overall is a form of characterization that we don't necessarily get with the other authors. Conroy's salvation lies in music; he becomes a drifting note in several passages; we learn about this man not so much from the words and scenes and ideas he spells out for us, but in the way he uses dissonance, harmony staccato moments and weaves everything together to make us feel, in the way that music makes us feel. His life has become his art; he has taken an aspect of his art and applied it to his life's story in this writing.

When I think about how these musical techniques work in music, I think about how even when I think I understand a song I'm sometimes left with a vague question of whether or not I really got into its rhythms the way the musicians intended. Conroy manages this effect well in Stop/Time, even overtly relying on the associations readers have with music at certain times.

"I stood as if listening to music, and in something like the way we are told suns are born, that specks of matter nearly empty space begin to fall, rushing across vast distances...I sank down until my knees touched the ground, and sat on my heels, almost reverently, within to disturb nothing in the suddenly harmonious world," he writes on p 139, detailing the moment he watched a girl through shelves at the library. "It was at once frustrating, and for some reason extremely exciting to see only this small part of her... my brain raced... at moments like this, as all men know, one becomes oblivious to to everything else in the outside world..."( 140).

Conroy does an great job of building the scene slowly, moving books, hunkering down, peeking; he lets the pressure build in the reader as it has built in himself, and then, with just a hint, he ends the scene and escapes into the private release of his own action, mentioning, tongue-in-cheekily, "the business--and I choose my words carefully-- at hand" (140).

The sensuality of the moment is made even more intriguing and delightful by Conroy's stop! of time before the scene reaches its climax.

She's crafty: Hampl's imagination and importance in memoir

As an only child growing up in the middle of nowhere, I needed imagination to get through the stifling boredom of the farm life. I would make up playmates, landscapes and situations to keep myself company and leave the world I knew. Hampl says that our imagination is a vast, powerful thing; memory is not just a "warehouse of finished stories, not a gallery of framed pictures (24). Memory and imagination come together then, and because these elements of persona come together and allow for all sorts of possibilities, we can get lost in the expanse of our own creations.

"By writing about that first piano lesson I've come to know things I could not know otherwise," writes Hampl in her discussion of memory and imagination. When she says that we must all guard our own truths about what has happened to us (class notes), I believe that she's saying if we cannot figure out a way to tell our stories and comprehend the past so that it makes sense for us, no one will be able to. We tell ourselves stories to live (to borrow a line from Joan Didion), and if we have to tell ourselves some little white lies to get through things, that's what we do. Perhaps we begin to believe the truths we've been telling ourselves for so long that eventually we know no other way to tell the story. Then what? Has it become the truth, or is it still a fabrication? Is our cognizance of the untruth a factor in whether or not it's a lie?
"I realized I had told a number of lies," says Hampl on page 25 or our excerpt; when we realize that we're telling a fabricated story that must mean that we know the real story exists out there somewhere, so shouldn't we go after that? If she realized after her initial drafts that she'd been making things up, doesn't she have the responsibility to tell the reader the truth?

I argue that yes, she does, and so does any writer. But like Karr, who pointed out that her memory had fault lines and fissures, Hampl admits to having problems with her memory and the recreation of her childhood stories. In doing so she's being honest with us about the truth of her book, which is a collected organization of memories.

The word memoir comes from memoria, or memory in Latin. Memory means the "mental faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., according to dictionary.com. So if memory is the act of "reviving" facts, then no, memoir doesn't have to imply a complete factual story. Definitions aside, I guess I feel like memoir needs to be "real life," since it's someone's life we're dealing with in the story. When I think about my contract with readers I guess I assume they're going to believe what I say is real to have been/be real, so I should just tell the truth. Again it goes back to my question of "why not just call it fiction if it's fiction?"

Both Karr and Hampl lead by example-- when they write a scene to say that time compressed and shifted or that they remembered something in a certain way, they're pointing out their memory problem, and for me, that example is better than any kind of "this is how you should do it" advice.

To safeguard my relationship with readers my intro will discuss the fact that I am writing about a time in my life when I was drugged up and recovering from brain surgery, and therefore my memory was compromised, to say the least. I note that the name changes of hospital staff were made to protect them in their careers; I will note that the time sequence I detail was the time sequence as I lived it, but perhaps it didn't occur that way to those not under the influence of morphine and other drugs. I think that's enough to let people know that yes, this is an accurate portrayal of what happened to me, but I'm not even sure if this is how it happened.

Ignorance as bliss in Hughes' "Salvation"

"My aunt came and knelt at my knees and cried, while prayers and song swirled all around me in the little church. The whole congregation prayed for me alone, in a mighty wail of moans and voices."

Langston Hughes' depiction of this scene toward the end of "Salvation" imparts the biblical idea of hell that many of us have heard since we were younger than the author is in his story.
"Mighty" wails of "moans and voices" are sounds we can hear when we think of "hell" and the atmosphere as it's been written; Hughes' patience and waiting conjures up the idea of purgatory, which is where he's kind of stuck throughout this story. The idea of purgatory, a place where sinners wait until they are prayed out of their limbo, threads through this whole piece, beginning with the happiness of those who have been saved (the adults) praying for others (the children) and ending with his salvation as the church "into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air."

How can one not see the illuminated images of Jesus rising from some glossy portrait into the flaxen beams of heaven?

In our class notes we see that "detail, sensory information and action" are the hallmarks of scene and movement. Hughes uses some dialogue throughout the piece, but what really moves the story, for me, is the imagined lull of prayers and voices that I hear in my head when I think of a congregation in prayer. That noise and reverence, although "holy," hums and buzzes in my skull, pushing me forward and adding to the urgency and tingling sensations the young Hughes must have felt. Added to the power of this feeling is the one recollection of times I've felt conflicted by self or society, much as Hughes is here.

Overall, although this piece moves through the shadows of peaks and valleys created by both Hughes' reactions and the desires of his church, what I find most compelling is that Hughes' salvation comes not so much in way of protecting his soul, but enlightening his mind.

For those who know of Hughes as a writer beyond this piece, it's not stretch to say that he wrote about the freedom and salvation that comes when the mind is loosed of ignorance. In depicting the actions of the little girls who cried and then ran to be saved--fearful for their souls-- and the rest of the "poor sinners," with their "work-gnarled hands"-- it's easy to see that Hughes' final savior is his mind itself, and his own understanding of truth. It's a painful truth for him to learn, that he can no longer believe in Jesus, or the adults who seem so wise, but in the end, his conflicts with the questions he had about Jesus prior to the revival (his aunt tells him all about the "feeling" but his scepticism persists) are answered and he comes to his own beliefs.

As we've looked at memoir from the perspective of the child thus far, we've seen that adults are often wise, confusing and so removed from the realities of childhood that their knowledge seems vastly superior and almost unattainable to the child(ren). But here we have an author who has bucked the conventions of his society and his aunt regardless of what he once thought or wanted to believe. Hughes doesn't tell us how all of this comes together for us; in introducing the characters he does, however briefly, and building the suspense of the moment with the quick snapshots of scenery and action, we come to feel the same flatness and acceptance that he feels.

What this acceptance becomes is not one of Jesus, but an acceptance of "oh, well, I wanted this because everyone told me I wanted it, but now I realize it's not really for me." This is a difficult kind of acceptance for anyone to bear because realizing we don't fit in, at any age, marks us as different, and therefore, potentially unsaved by common knowledge and ideals.