What is a Memoir?

 

In memoir classes at Gotham Writers' Workshop, there is often some confusion in the first class about what exactly a memoir is. Like many students, you may know that books such as Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt or The Liar's Club by Mary Karr are memoirs without being clear on why they are memoirs.

Historically, when someone said, "I'm going to write my memoirs," he was referring to an autobiography, which is simply an account of a person's life written by that person. The typical autobiographer is a famous person at the end of a career who is looking back at the big picture; a typical autobiography follows the celebrity from humble beginnings to first big break and finally on to the glory days - awards, adulation. Examples of this are Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography; Lauren Bacall: By Myself; and Long Walk to Freedom:   The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela.

Memoir is technically a subset of autobiographical writing. Recently, however, memoir has emerged as a strikingly distinct (and wildly popular) form.
 

Evolution of the Memoir

How did the contemporary memoir grow so popular, anyway?

People have always told stories, long before they could write them down. They told stories to explain the world and to recall significant events. For much of history each culture passed along one dominant story. Other stories, those told by the non-dominant tribe members, were muttered in the dark shadows of the cave or forest - and later, in the pantry with the door shut, or slave quarters, asylums, and jail cells.

Looking back, the 20^th century can be seen as a series of overlapping social changes, many of which originated in protest (i.e. the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, environmentalism, gay liberation, and the sexual revolution), that ultimately contributed to eliminating much of the shame associated with being different than the norm.

One result of this social upheaval was that people whose stories had been long stifled began to find a voice. And for those who wanted to write their stories, the memoir arose as the genre of choice - a genre that allowed them to tell their stories straight, not modified or disguised as fiction.

A Democratic Genre

The good news for those of us who aren't moon-walking astronauts or Academy Award winning actors is that today most memoirists aren't famous - we haven't seen their names on the evening news. They are teachers, mothers, reporters, scientists, cooks, poets, and doctors. The memoirist can be you.

People still read about the lives of celebrities, but this week's bestseller is just as likely to be about someone ordinary. It turns out that people want to read about people like themselves - people who may have had extraordinary (or ordinary) experiences, but could still be their neighbors or people with whom they went to school.

Because there are no longer subjects that are "off limits" the memoir is a wide-ranging genre, encompassing everything from having a murderer for a brother (Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart) to suffering a painful vaginal disorder (Susanna Kaysen's The Camera My Mother Gave Me) to the humorous travails of post-graduation don't-know-what-to-do-with-your life underemployment (David Sedaris in "Something for Everyone," Naked). There is no set topic or style or tone. There are even memoirs about happy childhoods!

Scope of the Memoir

Who writes them is just one of the big differences between memoirs and the autobiography, as described above. Whereas most autobiographies have breadth, looking at an entire life through a wide-angled lens, successful memoirs usually have a narrow scope. The memoirist looks closely at a single aspect of life, such as childhood, a significant relationship, or surviving a particular struggle. In The Tender Land, for example, Kathleen Finneran, along with her family, is coping with a tragedy.

Think about it - our lives are so big and baggy. We meet so many different sorts of people, experience such a range of emotions. Even the most mundane day is filled with a myriad of sensations from the sublime (a bite of chocolate cheesecake) to the ridiculous (banging your head on the edge of the kitchen counter). Each year is filled with triumphs and disappointments. How can we hope to write coherently about our lives unless we limit our subject?

And how can we hope to write anything of real meaning to someone else - the reader - if we're jumping from event to event in an effort to be all-inclusive? The memoirist is sometimes said to be someone who makes a lot out of a little. By dealing with one aspect of a life, a writer can create a vivid experience for the reader and deeply mine that aspect for its significance rather than skimming along the surface of "first I did this and then I did this and then…"

Focus of the Memoir

While an autobiography is concerned largely with events - world records broken, major scientific discoveries, elections won, prizes received - the memoir shines its spotlight elsewhere. Of equal or greater importance to what happened are the memoirist's perceptions - the thoughts, feelings, associations, and digressions that the memory of those events draw forth. That is, the memoirist is trying to convey not "What I Did," but something more like "What it felt like/feels like to be me."

While the loss of Sean lurks behind every sentence in The Tender Land, his suicide as an event is not the focus of Finneran's book. Instead, Finneran very closely observes the nuances of her own and others' reactions and she sees connections everywhere. This is clear from the beginning. While she waits four pages to tell us that Sean killed himself, she explains on the first page how she communicated with her father and she goes on to scrutinize her mother's beliefs:

I don't have the same kind of faith as my mother, and as I sat there that day eating lunch with my parents, I turned her belief about Sean into something more like a metaphor, though I knew that was not how she meant it. To her, Sean was not merely angelic; he was an actual angel. And I knew if I asked the obvious question - which one of us was he sent here to save--she would have many answers.

In this passage from "The Evidence of Angels," and throughout The Tender Land, Finneran demonstrates that making a lot out of a little - the small exchanges between family members, the significant glances, the things that are unsaid - is a worthy focus for a memoir.

Attention to Language

Attention to language is another distinguishing feature of the kind of memoir we're going to be looking at in this course - what is commonly referred to as literary memoir. This term doesn't imply that the memoir writer is trying to be literary or highfalutin. It simply means that the writer of the literary memoir pays close attention to language.

In our daily lives, language is most often utilitarian - grocery lists and memos. The memoirist, however, consciously arranges his words and sentences to create an intentional effect, such as to amaze, convince, frighten, or startle the reader. Though writing in a journal may be a useful and exhilarating part of the memoir writing process, these pages are not memoir because they are not crafted.

Finneran's attention to language is apparent on every page. In this passage from "The Evidence of Angels," Finneran is looking out the window upstairs as her father is downstairs making Sean's funeral arrangements:

Would there be enough flowers for him? he had asked earlier. No. Of course not. How could there be? "Sunflowers," I wanted to say when Kelly couldn't name her favorite flower at the florist's, but I couldn't think of the word then, only the image of her and Sean and Mary sucking on the seeds in the summer and spitting the shells on the sidewalk. "Sunflowers," I remembered now, looking at the yellow rectangle of light spilling out from the window, coloring a small section of snow below my window.

If you read this passage aloud, you will hear how Finneran paid attention to even the sound of the words - all those S's. And we certainly see how carefully she paints a picture of happier times - making snow angels, spitting seeds - over the picture of sadness.

Tell A Good Story

However wise and insightful its reflections, a memoir will fall flat if the memoirist fails to tell a good story. The memoirist must master the same elements of storytelling (character, plot, dialogue, description) as a fiction writer if she wants to grab and hold onto a reader's attention. It makes no difference whether the writer is relying on remembered or imagined material.

As you read The Tender Land and Somehow Form a Family, you'll be continually reminded that an interesting, gripping story doesn't require bodice-ripping or car chases. For example, do you know people like this? The woman who can put you to sleep in the first two minutes of her recollections of her African safari and the man who has you riveted by the rollicking tale of his trip to the corner deli. It's storytelling skill that distinguishes the two. In "Evidence of Angels" the storytelling captivates even though the events Finneran describes are commonplace - a family eating lunch, children playing, a bike ride on the river road.

Although there is a lot of skill involved in writing an effective memoir, these skills can be learned and practiced and mastered. The only real prerequisite you need in order to start writing a memoir is to be a thinking, feeling human being who has lived some life.
 

 

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