Salzman juxtaposes remembered and remembering selves with flawless ease. Many of us miss seeing the mix as craft because the author keeps the story moving. Only at set moments does Salzman intercede in this manner; instead, he keeps the narrative drama strong and the self-changing chronology (the rise and fall of kung fu and other adolescent interests, which eventually disappoint him) central. But the psychological impact of the narrator’s self-knowledge in memoir (knowing what when) is also central. It’s the memoir’s primary compositional conflict: voices from then to now are constantly revising what we remember. Those voices, collected over time and spoken now, may best reflect how we perceive ourselves, having lived with ourselves as long as we have.
The Present Overtakes
Mark Salzman’s mixing of narrative voices in Lost in Place is the result of much revision, of his listening to and adding in those voices as he drafted. It is also the result of time passing, first as he discovered the “disappointment” story and second as he filtered it through his memory and his sensibility. Enough time lets our many-voiced narrators speak, listen, and interact. This is one reason why writers come to the memoir: they feel that a sufficient amount of passing time will clarify their present perspective. But what of a memoir writer who has not yet lived past the time of her story, who is shaken as it unfolds in her current life and yet is drawn to write of it anyway?
One woman who has been trying to uncover her story is Sheila, a member of my memoir-writing group. Her struggle to find the person she is writing about is always apparent. She begins by focusing on her first marriage. As a senior in high school, she dates a man, Jerry, who’s two years older. They go steady, break up, get back together, and eventually marry. She recalls getting married as what she was supposed to do, being “naive on my part.” With no children, Sheila spends much time making a structured home for Jerry, with dinner on the table at 5:30 sharp. But Sheila suspects something is wrong. Jerry has become quieter, complaining that he’s not sleeping well. He has terrible dreams and is frustrated with his small business, supplying materials to contractors. One of his problems is with work. He refuses to work for anyone else, fearful of having his reading disability discovered. (Sheila says this was not identified at the time but was probably dyslexia.) She doesn’t know to what extent Jerry’s business is failing because he will go weeks without speaking to her. Sheila has a dreadful feeling that he’s in psychological danger. She can feel his foundering in depression. She begins to wonder, in her writing, when and how she knew this. One night Jerry doesn’t come home; she calls his business but there’s no answer. She calls the police and reports that he’s gone missing. The next day, she calls the police around noon. They tell her they cannot file a missing person’s report for several days. This is a Tuesday. By Wednesday, with no word from Jerry or the police, Sheila drives to the business with a friend. They climb a fence, smell exhaust fumes coming from a closed-up ware-house, and find his parked car. Jerry’s rigged a hose from the tailpipe into the car window. He’s killed himself.
It’s a stunning and disturbing story, and the group and I are curious where this opening volley will take her. And then we hear the second installment. Eight months after Jerry’s suicide, a man named Martin calls her, someone she once dated in high school. He has heard she is widowed and asks to see her. He is interested in psychology and in her plight; Sheila, who is open and vulnerable, responds favorably to him the next two years. Amateur shrink Martin begins taking Sheila apart. While they date, she is under a psychiatrist’s care. She tells me, in an e-mail, that those sessions consisted of “his asking me a question and my answering with uncontrolled sobbing. We did not get very far.” Feeling that she must choose between her psychiatrist and her psychologist, Martin, she chooses the latter and marries him. Once they move to San Diego, Martin becomes “more verbally abusive than ever. He had always been analyzing me, my motives, my life, and continually making me feel bad about myself.” It’s not long before Sheila seeks treatment from another psychiatrist, who ends up helping her divorce Martin. At the time, she writes, “I realized I had married two different men [Jerry and Martin] with major psychological problems, and I vowed not to remarry until I felt I would not attract a person like that.” Martin, though, remains a part of her life via frequent phone calls. Seventeen years later, after Sheila has married a third time, she learns one day that Martin, like Jerry, has committed suicide.
For Sheila, the thematic muck is obvious: “I wanted my memoir to be about my long struggle to free myself from attracting suicidal types.” Though she knows today that these men died because of their own problems with depression, that fact doesn’t settle what’s roiled her for decades. She wants to know what it was “about me, without my knowing it, that contributed to their deaths.”
Though Sheila’s story may sound desperate, she is not herself desperate. At sixty, she is well adjusted; her marriage is good, and she values writing and therapy. The therapy of memoir, however, reopens old wounds, as becomes very clear to her and to us when, a few weeks later, she brings in a third installment. She has written what has just occurred, part of it torn from the week’s headlines. One of her friends, a man named Bill who had battled with a woman for years about custody of their fourteen-year-old son, Evan, and had been given a court order to stay away from both the boy and the woman, has killed the boy and himself. After Bill murders Evan and before he kills himself, he calls several friends. Sheila is one of them. She doesn’t get the call, but he leaves a message on her machine. He speaks not only of the horror he has just committed but also in a voice that sounds to Sheila like the despairing voices of her first and second husbands were they to have left her messages before suiciding.
In shock, Sheila is grieving the loss of a friend and his son. In writing about her grief, she is unsure what she’s feeling. Suddenly, this one event has fused her life and her writing. In the wake of the murder-suicide, Sheila loses the safety in which she was examining how suicide and intimacy cohabit, somewhat safely, in memory. Her life, in its uncanny ability to stay on theme, has got in memoir’s way, and it stops her from writing for a while. And yet she tells us that she can’t escape the feeling that the deaths of all these men she’s known have something in common. What is it? That the world is more out of control and more directed than she thought? If true, what is that saying about her? She doesn’t know. Maybe she’s not supposed to.
Sheila’s story is unusual in that the very theme of her work—men’s suicides—has merged the past with the present. For me, her story dramatically exemplifies the interaction of life and memoir writing. For Sheila, her memoir is now overrun by the changeable present, which, I remind her, is always exercising its dominion over the past. Time has assuaged her theme and time has again blown it apart. Her tale depicts how psychologically alive the body of memory is: it is both an elder, offering the wisdom of experience, and a child, wanting our attention now.
After Bill’s and Evan’s deaths, and, in part, because of the writing, Sheila is thrown into a “debilitating funk.” With a therapist, she finds that she has been able to work through the “post-traumatic stress.” She wants to begin writing again, and I wonder how Sheila might tell her story.
One way is to tell the tale only from the perspective of the young woman who endured and survived her first husband’s suicide. Okay, but how does she limit the emotional participation of the later suicides, which are surely part of how she might portray that younger self? Telling about each suicide chronologically might show a culmination. But each suicide and her feelings may get mixed up. The force of their accumulation is inescapable. These male death-events have already coded themselves as part of her