April 2016 – Michael N. McGregor

Memoir Monday #4 — Are You Just Making This Stuff Up?

Readers often wonder if a memoirist is just making things up. Sometimes they ask this question out loud at author appearances. More often they ask it silently while reading a section that seems too fantastic or perfect to be true. Some readers grow uncomfortable when anything strikes them as beyond what a writer could have remembered, while others, maybe most, simply assume that memoir is like an autobiographical novel. Those in this second category don’t worry about whether any of what they’re reading is actually true as long as it seems emotionally true or true to their own understanding of life.

Some memoirists view memoir in this second way too. And they have reason. If memoir is based mostly on what a person remembers, and study after study has shown that our memories are terribly inaccurate, why not simply give into reality and compose a finely crafted piece of art from the building blocks of your life? After all, as soon as you begin to shape anything, it no longer conforms to life as it was lived anyway. Every crafting of scene or sentence, even every word choice, involves leaving something out. Memoirist and even journalists choose to focus on this rather than that, to emphasize this theme or viewpoint rather than that one. What difference does it make if everything isn’t technically accurate?

My thinking has gone down this road this week because the book my classes are reading is Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth. The scenes in Beard’s book often contain details from early in her life that even a video of those moments wouldn’t have recorded in such detail. And she often pairs her memories with the details of what is happening in a related but different realm. For example, in one story she describes the movements of corn and a deer that she and her cousin will pass in a car at night, in the moments before the passing happens—movements she couldn’t possibly have witnessed. In another story she intersperses her own actions during a particular day with those of a coyote, which, again, will only cross her path.

This second example seems a more egregious transgression than the first—even if you believe that memoir is always based on faulty memory—because Beard follows the coyote through its solitary wanderings, goes inside its head, and says at one point that it is “in a good mood”! What, you might justifiably ask, is going on here?

In truth, it’s easier for me to defend what Beard is doing with the coyote than the seemingly accurate personal details she lays down in such number and fineness elsewhere. With the coyote, she is clearly imagining his world, no doubt from careful research, and using it to create a metaphoric comparison to her own wanderings and instincts. If a reader has no taste for any kind of fictionalization in nonfiction, even this might be unforgivable. But memoir writing is an art, a written art, and metaphor, analogy, comparison and contrast are long-standing elements in effective nonfiction writing. Beard’s imaginings of the coyote’s activities and world are obviously imaginings; they reflect not the coyote’s actual life but, through elaborate analogy, how she views her younger self while writing the memoir.

In her book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes: “Truth may have become a foggy fuzzy nether area. But untruth is simple: making up events with the intent to deceive.” She goes on to say, “Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences off the memoirist from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty….A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is.”

We get no feeling in Beard’s work that she is trying to forge “false tales” or pump herself up for her audience. The impression we get, in fact, is that she is trying to find whatever way she can to convey how she felt in an earlier moment in her life, and how she sees that moment now. She trusts that her reader is able to discern where she has gone beyond strict memory—using details from a more general memory of habitual action to flesh out a scene, for example, or creating a contrast between a scavenging animal in a natural world and her own natural hunger while separated from nature by cars and bars and other human trappings.

There is much more to say here, and other questions to ask—about the use of made-up dialogue, for example, or the re-creation of scenes one didn’t witness—but I can cover only so much in one posting.

Ann Curry, Susan Orlean and a Dry Martini: The Interview as Conversation — Writing About Others #3

I’m thinking today about interviewing. The first person I ever interviewed as a journalist was the principal of my high school, who moonlighted as a referee for what was then Pac-8 football and had been selected to officiate in the upcoming Rose Bowl game, a singular honor. I was just a scared little student but he treated me with respect, answering all of my questions with patience. I suppose I learned two things that day: that journalism opens doors, and that interviewing is mostly about two people talking.

I learned the principles of interviewing from my favorite professor in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, Ken Metzler, who wrote a book called Creative Interviewing. Metzler liked to tell a story about Ann Curry, the former host of NBC’s “Today” show, who was two years ahead of me in school. Curry, Metzler said, went to interview a prominent woman while still in school and was dissatisfied with how the conversation was going so she suggested they go to a nearby coffee shop to talk more. There, while gesturing, Curry spilled her coffee. “Mortified,” Metzler writes in his book, “she thought she had blown the interview. But, to her astonishment, the woman began talking more candidly.”

What Curry discovered that day, I discovered later: that interviewing usually goes best when the pressure of doing an interview is gone. To put people at ease, I’ve interviewed them while jogging, walking through a museum, building a theater set, and inspecting a building site. This kind of casual interviewing is one of the keys to New Yorker profile writer Susan Orlean’s success. She starts her research of a profile subject by simply hanging around, asking the questions that arise naturally and letting what happens determine the direction of the conversation.

In his otherwise interesting and entertaining book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller states that “an interview is not a conversation” because it has a purpose: to elicit information. Yet his definition of conversation—a witty exchange that happens naturally, giving pleasure to all involved—is certainly possible in interviewing. The best interviews I’ve done have come from being prepared, of course, but also from being willing to indulge in an exchange of ideas, personal disclosure and even prolonged asides. My subject will surely say more than me and I’ll make sure I ask the important questions, but our interaction will be as close as possible to the conversation of friends or maybe strangers who meet in an intimate environment.

Good reporting—and, in the end, good writing—comes from recognizing that interviewing and every other aspect of writing about other people is a human activity. This point was driven home to me one night in Manhattan when I’d gone to interview an old friend of my book’s subject, Robert Lax. I’d mistaken the location of the man’s address, thinking it was close to one subway stop and discovering only after I’d gone there that it was somewhere else. To get to the right location, I had to walk through rain that became a downpour. When I arrived, late and drenched, the man took one look at me and asked if I needed a martini.

Martinis in hand, we sat in his comfortable living room and I took out my recorder. He was as kind and solicitous as he could be, but when I asked my first question, he said he didn’t remember. I tried another and got the same response. When he shook his head at the third one, perplexed and sorry, I realized that he had simply grown too old to remember things that happened so long ago.

He was a delightful man, however, so I put my pad and recorder away and just enjoyed the experience: the dryness of the apartment, the martini and his still-lively wit. One of the things we talked about was his love of dance, and when I got up to go, he said the next time I came to New York we’d have to go dancing together. I still think of that evening as one of my best interviews ever.

Memoir Monday #3 — What Myths Do You Live By?

I’m fascinated by the idea of the Living Myth. I don’t mean ancient tales about warring gods or talking animals, but the stories we live by that help us make sense of the world. In this context, myths can be true, untrue or half-true. It doesn’t matter, because they are true to us. Some we follow consciously and some unconsciously. Either way, they play a large role in determining who we are. And therefore it’s important for memoirists and writers about others to recognize them.

For example, in Kim Barnes’ excellent memoir In the Wilderness, which my memoir writing classes discussed last week, her family is guided by their belief that the Idaho wilderness is an Eden of plenty. This belief—this myth—determines many of their decisions and even how they view themselves after their move to a city.

In this week’s class, we’re discussing Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, which looks at myth more directly. Momaday divides the book into three sections: 1. mythological stories of the Kiowa people, 2. historical information about the Kiowas, and 3. his own observations about his family, his people and the land they lived on. Only the third section is clearly memoir, yet all three sections help the reader see who Momaday understands himself to be. Perhaps as a nod to the blurring of the lines between the three ways of seeing himself, as the book goes on Momaday moves the mythological section out of obvious myth and into the realm of more recent stories while using more mythological-style language in his personal observations.

A Living Myth can be societal, familial or personal. In this presidential election season, we’re seeing all kinds of societal myths being bandied about. Political parties and candidates swear by them, latching on to those that have proven successful in motivating people and trying to shape new ones. The media are great societal myth creators and perpetuators.

I’m less interested in societal myths, though, than familial and personal ones. My students’ assignment this week is to describe a story their family tells about itself. I’ve asked them to talk about what the story tells the family about itself and what it tells them about themselves individually. When we come into this world, we don’t enter a virgin stream but rather slip into a river that has been flowing for generations. It is alive already with myths and tropes and beliefs. As we grow we ingest them, react to them and, if we’re self-aware enough, examine them to determine whether we want to embrace them in adulthood.

Beyond these familial myths, however, are personal ones that have an even greater hold on us. We turn the origin stories of these myths into nuggets we polish and repeat over time to ourselves. These often become our so-called “chestnuts,” the often-embellished stories we tell at parties, but there are many more that we never speak of except to ourselves. They tell us we’re shy because we feared speaking up in grade school or we’re always spurned by others because we weren’t picked for a team sport in high school or we’re clever rather than book-smart because we have succeeded despite poor school grades.

Identifying these myths—which can come from religion, politics, place of origin (think of how many myths there are about being from the South), tragedy, success and any number of other sources—is crucial to understanding oneself or others when writing about them. They are lights we navigate by and it’s hard as hell to change them, even when we recognize them. That’s why political discourse keeps falling into the same old ruts, and we keep falling back on old patterns.

Some of what I’m calling myths are, of course, sources of wisdom. Some allow us to navigate our world successfully. Some are vital to staying alive. And they can provide a great deal of comfort as we seek to make our way in life.

For it’s the completely new, for which we have no myths to guide us, that can truly frighten us—or, if we’re receptive and self-aware, excite us and open new vistas before us.

We Want the Omelette: Writing About Others #2

This morning I was looking at a book by Ira Bruce Nadel called Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form, published in the mid-1980s, when a number of books about writing biography appeared, perhaps because Leon Edel, the influential biographer of William James, had published a book called The Poetics of Biography in 1977. I’ve only dipped into Nadel’s book but I like what I’ve read so far. Early on, he writes: “The need to understand the literary techniques and strategies of biography parallels its emergence today as perhaps the most popular, widely-read body of non-fiction writing.” His three epigraphs foreshadow his belief that biography is an art and should be more seriously studied as such:

“Facts related to the past, when they are collected without art, are compilations; and compilations no doubt may be useful; but they are no more History than butter, eggs, salt and herbs are an omelette.” —Lytton Strachey

“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings…But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possible be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

“The biographer, after all, is as much of a storyteller as the novelist or historian.” —Leon Edel

The art of biography lies in the interpretation of the facts discovered, Nadel says, and also in the choice of form and language. “No biographer merely records a life,” he writes. “Every biographer, no matter how objective he declares himself, interprets a life.” And as soon as a writer “becomes conscious of language, conscious of how it alters what he describes from a factual representation to an independent verbal object, he transforms his craft into an art.”

When I teach profile writing, I always tell my students that the profile they write is not the one true story to be told about their subject but rather a description of an encounter. Preparation and interpretation are part of what results, but so are the writer’s interests and knowledge, facility with words and mastery of tone and metaphor. There’s even a huge dose of randomness: we learn one fact but not another, we interview our subject on a day she’s feeling well or ill, a friend will talk to us but not a family member. In the end, we make the best sense we can of what we have.

As Nadel says, narrative is central to how we write about others, and narrative has “properties other than that of recording events.” There is voice in narrative and point of view, a sense, however muted, of the narrator’s perspective, personality and understanding. The corrective to this (if one is needed) should be a more explicit laying out of bias and approach rather than the faux-objective voice and stance so many profile writers and biographers adopt.

“Those who accept language as a transparent medium of representation and believe that if they only use the right word for describing an event the meaning will be clear, illustrate an inadequate sense of the creative nature of language and its role in biography,” Nadel writes. “Such empiricists, who place their faith in language for conveying fact, write biographies of maximum detail and minimal interpretation, believing the latter to be the function of some other form of composition. But the principal interest in biography, the reason for its popularity with authors as well as readers, remains its ability to provide meaning for an individual’s life, transmitting personality and character through prose.”

In other words, we want the omelette. And to get it, we need writers who know how to cook.

Memoir Monday #2 — Who Am I?

In my memoir writing classes last week, we discussed Vivian Gornick’s fine little book on personal writing, The Situation and the Story. In her introductory section, Gornick explains her idea that all of the raw material used in personal writing and even what we might normally call the story itself—the plot or action—is just “situation.” No matter how extraordinary what we want to write about might be, it won’t have an impact on a reader until we discover what we have to say about it. What its meaning is to us. What our emotional journey through it is. This is what Gornick calls the “story” and I sometimes call the journey: the writer’s personal movement through the material.

In her great new book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr uses different language for what seems to be the same distinction. She talks about outer experience that needs to be shaped and an inner conflict, even an “inner enemy” ( a writer’s “psychic struggle against her self that works like a thread or plot engine”).

Gornick talks about finding the right “persona,” the version of ourselves that can best tell the story to be told. “Its tone of voice,” she writes, “its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentences, what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen to serve the subject; yet at the same time the way the narrator—or the persona—sees things is, to the largest degree, the thing being seen.”

It is this intimacy between subject and the narrator’s particular vision—or voice—that makes good personal writing compelling. In praising George Orwell’s personal writing, Gornick cites his “wholly successful fusion of experience, perspective, and personality.” Karr says bluntly: “Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice.” She calls voice the “delivery system for the author’s experience.”

“Voice isn’t just a manner of talking,” Karr writes. “It’s an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past.”

Both writers emphasize, each in her own way, making—and expressing—such an intimate connection to one’s material that both the experience being written about and the writer’s way of viewing it—and life itself—come alive.

In order to get to this kind of intimacy, Gornick says in her section on memoir, the writer must ask clearly and truthfully: Who am I? “On that question the writer of memoir must deliver,” she writes. “Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry.”

Here’s where things get interesting, I think. When beginning a memoir, Who am I? is not the simplest question, even to ask. Yes, it’s the writing itself that tackles the question, the “depth of inquiry” taken on. But what “I” is the writer seeking to know? Is it the “I” that is writing in the present moment or the “I” that is central to the tale being told? Is Who am I? an enduringly existential question that can be answered once, or is it a provisional question, leading to a provisional answer? And if I achieve clarity on who I was back then, in the time I’m writing about, does that mean I’m any closer to knowing who I am today? Or is it the relationship between the two—the then-I and the now-I—a memoirist is really seeking?

These questions are especially important to me right now because I’m writing about a period in my life other than childhood, which is the subject of most memoirs (or at least first memoirs). I was an adult already then, even old by some determinations, yet I would not say that who I was then is the same as who I am today. I’m interested in exploring who I was then and how I came to be that person but also in how that period shaped the person I became after that.

One other thing I’ve been thinking about this week: You can’t approach writing a memoir as a writer only, thinking about how to construct it so it has the most impact. You have to approach it first as a human being, seeking to understand yourself in a way you haven’t before. Maybe this thought is self-evident to many, but it’s easy for a writer (and writing teacher) to get caught up in form and audience and expression too soon. I suppose it feels safer to enter the dark with pen in hand.

Do You Have the Right to Write About Her?

I’ve committed myself to posting one entry a week on memoir and one on writing about others for the next two months. Although I’ll be reading books about both subjects during that time, my plan is to concentrate on my own thoughts. I want to see what I can puzzle out. What questions come. I’m hoping to find intersections and exclusions: thoughts about one that are applicable to the other, and thoughts that aren’t.

My first entry each week, appearing on Monday (I hope), will be about memoir, and I’ve already made that entry this week. So here I’ll concentrate on writing about others. I want to start with something memoir-related, however: writing about family. This is the place where memoir and writing about others most often intersect. Virtually every memoir about childhood paints a picture of one or more parents in some way, and many paint profiles of siblings too.

In my classes on personal writing, I always tell my students, “Be careful about bringing parents into your writing. They have a tendency to take over.” This warning comes from experience–from seeing a brief mention of a father in a personal essay, for example, prompt a class full of readers and would-be critics to beg or even demand to learn more. Maybe we’re all just Freudian after all, believing that childhood experiences and relationships determine who we become. It seems more likely, though, that writing about parents is simply more highly charged than writing about anyone else. And once a reader feels that emotional charge, she hungers for more.

Most books that deal with writing about others focus primarily on biographies of people already dead. They talk about going to archives and interviewing survivors. They discuss the need to interpret a writer’s thoughts based on her works or a politician’s values based on his actions. They recommend researching and recreating the times in which your subject lived. And some, if they’re good ones, talk about how to bring your subject to life on the page. What they don’t discuss is how to think and write about someone with whom you’ve had an actual encounter.

The thing is, it’s easy to form opinions and settle on themes when you’re writing about someone you’ve had no relation to. You can treat that person as history, a collection of facts and writings and relationships with other dead people. But what if you’ve seen a person alive? What if you’ve witnessed his or her actions and words over time? What if that person had a great influence on your own life, for better or ill? How do you separate your own strong feelings from what someone else might call “the facts”? In the case of a parent, how do you distinguish your own development from the independent changes that person might have been going through at the same time?

I struggled with most of these questions while writing my biography Pure Act, in which I was writing about a man I loved who taught me much. They loom even larger as I embark on a memoir in which my mother’s life and death play a significant role. To some degree, they are questions of fairness, and they aren’t asked often enough about memoir or about writing about others, whether that writing be profiles or even biographies of the dead.

As I write these entries over the next two months, I expect this question of giving others a voice in the telling of their own stories to regularly pop up, along with an even larger question: In this age when every form of supposed appropriation is suspect, do we have the right to tell another person’s story at all?

Writing About One’s Self and Others: Embarking on an Experiment

A few years ago, one of the external evaluators who supported my promotion to full professor wrote that I was among those rare writers who look inside as well as out. Most writers, he said, focus exclusively on personal writing or on writing about the world beyond them. I didn’t think much about his statement until I decided to add parts of my personal story to Pure Act, my biography of poet Robert Lax. I did so for three good reasons: My personal connection to Lax gave readers who had never heard of him a reason to care about him; I could use scenes from our times together to bring him more vividly to life; and it seemed false to write from a distance about a man who had greatly influenced my life.

I knew some traditionalists would call this decision a mistake, but artificial boundaries between personal observation and supposedly objective research strike me as silly and generally false. Even a piece of writing based primarily on research is saturated with the writer’s personal viewpoint. It is the writer alone who decides what subject to write about, what material to include or exclude, and what tone and approach to use. The personal is always there, whether we recognize it or not. Fortunately, as our thinking about narrative nonfiction has evolved, more and more writers are loosening up—showing their work, so to speak, by making their methods of fact collection and even their preferences and biases clear.

With the biography birthed and the initial publicity done, I’ve begun two new projects that have me thinking again about looking inward and outward at the same time. One is a memoir about a year my wife and I spent on an island off the coast of Washington State. The other is a book about writing about others. Am I Janus-faced enough, I wonder, to work on these two books at the same time? And if I can, what might my efforts reveal about the similarities and differences between these two types of writing?

In some writing circles, primarily in Britain, biographical and autobiographical writing are grouped together under the title Life Writing. Having written short pieces of memoir as well as biography, this grouping strikes me as overly baggy. Yet there can be no doubt that writing about yourself is akin in some ways to writing about another. In writing a memoir, for instance, you must be able to see yourself as a character, and in writing about someone else you must establish an empathetic connection. In both cases, you need to create a world around your subject and bring that subject to life.

In order to explore these connections further, I’m embarking on an experiment: For the next two months, I plan to post two entries a week on this site, one on memoir and one on writing about others. Since I’m teaching memoir writing this term, some of the memoir material will come from class preparations and discussions, and some of the material on writing about others will come from classes I’ve taught on that subject. But my intention is to be more speculative and contemplative than academic or, God forbid, didactic. I want to think on the page about what I’m discovering and share it with anyone interested.

Generally, the first entry each week will be devoted to memoir and I’ll write it on Monday, so let’s call this the first Memoir Monday. That having been said, this introductory entry is quite long already, so instead of deep contemplation, I’ll leave you with just a few memoir thoughts. These are drawn mostly from comments made at the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference I attended over the weekend.

In an AWP panel on memoir, Cheryl Strayed, author of the best-selling memoir Wild, said that a memoirist needs to “let the bottom fall out,” writing “into the deepest truth,” the one you didn’t know until you started writing. “We go into the darkness,” she said, “we go through the darkness, and we come out of the darkness changed.”

Another panel member said that a memoirist is the protagonist in her story but not the hero. This comment deserves more musing, of course, but in the interest of brevity I’ll say only that the panel member was calling for a true examination of one’s self—one that goes beyond and below self-glorification, self-centeredness, and even self-doubt. In her new book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes: “Once the reader identifies a vain or self-serving streak the writer can’t admit to with candor, a level of distrust interferes with that reader’s experience.”

Memory studies have shown that the least-durable type of long-term memory is factual memory and the most-durable type is episodic memory, which is primarily scene-based memory with a personal component, the kind of memory most conducive to memoir writing.

And finally, a quote from poet Marie Louise Kaschnitz especially applicable to memoir writing:

You cannot write

To save your soul.

Given up, it drifts and does the singing.

And so the experiment begins…