Let’s say you plan to write a memoir about the year you just spent rebuilding homes in New Orleans, post-Katrina. What’s relational? Beyond musing about the stultifying bureaucracy and the force of a natural disaster, you decide to focus on the displaced people you saw every day who want their homes fixed and their city back. You detail their initiative and frustration, their loss and vulnerability. But what of you is important in all this? Is it your homelessness—actual, emotional, symbolic—that has been stirred by their trauma? Put another way, perhaps helping others has led you to reflect on the meaning of displacement, or alienation, in your life, too. It must have something to do with your core self or else you wouldn’t have volunteered, you wouldn’t have felt your passion connected to theirs. Self and world, self and core; all this is relational.
In memoir, how we have lived with ourselves teeter-totters with how we have lived with others—not only people, but cultures, ideas, politics, religions, history, and more. This balancing act of the self in relation to the outer and the inner worlds, against the memoir’s thematic and temporal restrictions, fascinates me. What is it that makes a person become who she is, perhaps has always been? What is it that changes us? How much of the self is innate, how much of it learned? What role does self-delusion play in our identities? What is it that makes us seek the mythic entitlements of American life differently from our neighbors? Most Americans think that the better among us are self-driven like Franklin or self-actualized like Thoreau. Such idolatry props up the greatman fiction, the “I did it my way” myth, a stepwise deterministic view of life that autobiography has engendered and memoir is challenging.
And yet the “I” of the memoir can also be the subject of the work. How do I understand the person I was then in light of the person I am now? This I-then and I-now (the pairing comes from Virginia Woolf) rings in memoir’s paradox. Though much time and many realizations may separate these two I’s, it is nigh impossible to keep the voices of today’s narrator and of yesterday’s narrator apart. They are always in flux, an example of which I will describe shortly. The thinking goes, my story is also his story; the person I am, I was—or I was, I am. Here I am in high school, in 1967, and yet that person is not me now. He is another. Still, don’t I share his traits, whether or not they are readily expressed? The truth is two-sided: I am not exactly him nor am I free of him. It feels natural to see the remembered self as a character who has an independent life, chooses for himself, indulges free will. But memoirists avoid such self-casting. The memoir writer does not situate himself in a recreated world as though he were a literary character. What the memoirist does is connect the past self to—and within—the present writer as the means of getting at the truth of his identity.
Before writing The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr thought she should fictionalize herself: “When I tried to write about my life in a novel, I discovered that I behaved better in fiction than I did in real life. The truth is that I found it easier to lie in a novel, and what I wanted most of all was to tell the truth” (Karr, cited in “The Family Sideshow”). Truth is uppermost in the minds of memoir writers because veracity won’t let them be. So as not to embarrass the living, they may rename people and places; they usually re-create dialogue since there’s no word-for-word record; and they may dramatize an event that differs from the recollections of others who were there. Sometimes memoirists must make life-and-death choices. Azar Nafisi, still fighting the Muslim theocracy in Iran, prefaces her Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by stating that “I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.”
But, even in a post–James Frey world, memoir writers are not fashioning fictionalized autobiographies or autobiographical novels, as one or two critics contend. Most memoirists do not falsify their pasts so as to build a better story.1 The best honestly explore how they recall the past and what of themselves is and isn’t true. Before I go a step further, I want to be clear about memoir and fiction, a confluence I’ll return to often. Memoir is related to fiction because memoir, like fiction, is a narrative art: we narrate past events; always, as we write, memory tells us stories. We must guard against our own narrative gullibility. We must ask ourselves, Did it happen as I remember? Have I misremembered and, if so, how will I know? We may have some means at our disposal to verify the past: letters, journals, family records, others’ recollections. But we must understand that often our memories have erased and altered things before we search out their latest version or a version from someone else. The nature of memory, as any brain doctor will confirm, is to mix imagination and fact. But that is not the same as saying that as memoirists we can riddle our tales with fictional composites and Hollywood endings. Still, in the memoir, the truth and figuring out the truth abide. The best way to deal with the tension between fact and memory, as one uncovers the tension in the course of one’s writing, is to admit to the tension—not to cover it up.
The Struggle to Write
One reason for this confusion between memoir and fiction, between how memoir and autobiography overlap, is that the memoir form, so newly emerged, is less understood than written. Function noses out form: writers write, and analyze what they’ve done only after they’ve written. It’s this avidity to leap in and get at one’s past and present selves that’s so contagious among authors, both first-timers and pros. The hoped-for reward is self-knowledge, not self-mystification. The writing will guide us there, if we write and reflect on what we write. But, though my pep talk may sound empowering for the author, the writing alone can lead to despair. Many give up: trying to make sense now of then incurs sudden, resistless anguish. The material may get too hot to handle.
Joan, the woman in my writing group with the transplanted heart, desperately wants to tell that story—how she was a candidate on the waiting list for two years, six months of which were spent in the hospital; how two transplants failed, the first “harvest” (she was given twelve minutes to get to the hospital) canceled once bruises were discovered on the donor’s heart and the second called off by an ice storm in Oregon that delayed the plane’s arrival; how the third try was successful and she joined a family’s loss of their son, whose sudden death must be a part of her tale. One scene she’d like to write: waking to the shock of having a man’s heart in her chest and hers gone, and then wondering how long his will keep beating. But she can’t write that scene. Not yet. Joan’s vitality is easily sapped (she says she has one-third the energy of the normal person), and then there’s her mother’s illness to deal with every morning before she gets to her desk.
The quotidian gives Joan plenty to work with, but now another fin cuts the surface. Before her surgery, Joan was locked in with no past or future—she could only wait, in dread and hope, for another’s death. A few years later, when she begins writing (a friend took notes during her surgery and recuperation), she is over-come by grief. A man has died and she has lived: two unrelated beings are now inextricable. What is she remembering? Is it the shock his heart suffered from the loss of his body? Is it the trauma of her twice-thwarted expectation that two harvests came to naught? Is it the responsibility that she must live for both? Now these and other emotions well up in eerie, invasive detail until she has to stop: The writing she attempts goes only so close to the experience, then won’t go any closer. Everything she is writing now she is discovering now, and every discovery now must be felt. The heart-fullness allows her to live. But there is much strain, ebbing from the conflicted hearts of her memory, and to tell it all may be impossible.