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…