[Music] Harper audio presents the art of memoir by Mary Carr read for you by the [Music] author and every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person a false self I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with Glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface but there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed I am Hollow and my structure of pleasures and Ambitions has no Foundation I am objectified in them but they are all destined by their contingency to be destroyed and when they are gone there will be nothing left but my own nakedness and emptiness and Hollow to tell me I am my own mistake Thomas meron seeds of contemplation so finally I would write one true sentence and then go on from there it was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say if I started to write elaborately or like someone introducing or presenting something I found that I could cut the scroll work or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written Ernest h way a Movable Feast life is a field of corn literature is the shot glass it distills down into Lori Moore caveat empor no one elected me the boss of memoir I speak for no one but myself every writer worth her salt is SW jys memoris meth with regard to handling actual events memory research dealing with family and other subjects legal whatnot voice Etc differ from mine as widely as their lives do where I've learned from others I add it but this is no compendium of popular approaches to the form also there's a place in hell for writers Who quote themselves and a few times I am forced to recap Adventures reported elsewhere if I didn't have to pay out the Wazoo to quote from better books than my own I'd have way more nbac off in here an appendix at the back cites great Memoirs a concerted study of those will no doubt pay off for you as it did for me maybe the methods I use to parse books will help you fall in love with those masterpieces special thanks to Masters of various non-fiction forums I interviewed for this book Philip gvic Katherine Harrison Michael ha John CAU Lissa mcfar Jerry stall Gary steinart Cheryl strade Jeffrey wolf over the decades conversations with others have schooled me Martin Amos Maya Angelo father Edward Beck Bill Buford Robert Caro Frank Conroy Rodney crra Mark Dodie Dave eggars Lucy grey Maxine Hong Kingston Phil Jackson Father James Martin SJ Peter mat James McBride Frank mccort Carolyn C Lisa C John Edgar Weidman Tobias wolf Corin zus Dimitri Nabokov informed my thinking about his father's Memoir finally much of what I say may well apply to writing novels or poems or love letters or Bank applications or parole board pleas in short any kind of scribbling but since it's Memoir they paid me for I'll stick to it preface welcome to my chew toy don't follow me I'm lost the master said to the follower who had a cocked pen and a yellow pad Steven Dunn visiting the master this preface is a squeaky rubber rodent I have paed and Nod at for years problem being Memoir as a genre has entered its heyday with a massive surge in readership the past 20 years or so but for centuries before now it was an Outsiders art the province of weirdos and Saints Prime Ministers and film stars as a grad student 30 years back I heard it likened to inscribing the Lord's Prayer on a grain of rice so I still feel some lingering obligation to defend it partly what murders me about Memoir what I adore is it's Democratic some say ghetto ass primitive anybody who's lived can write one aspect you can count on a memoirist being passionate about the subject plus its structure remains dopily episodic novels have intricate plots verse has musical forms history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth in Memoir one event follows another birth leads to puberty leads to sex the books are held together by happen stance theme and most powerfully the sheer convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past changes in the novel have helped to jack up Memoir audience as fiction grew more fabulous or dystopic or hyper intellectual under the sway of Joyce and wolf and Garcia marz and pinion acolytes readers thirsty for reality began em bibing Memoir between 2005 and 2010 Philip gavic closely observed the skyrocketing of non-fiction as literature at the editorial Helm of that towering literary mag the Paris review gic's Classic on the Rwandan Genocide we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families is also a masterpiece here's an excerpt of his speech as he stepped down likening rebukes against Memoir as a lesser form to the critics who once mocked photography for lacking the originality of painting the past 50 years has seen an explosion of exciting new work in Memoir reportage and the literature of fact in all forms and lengths and styles and yet yet I'm afraid there is a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world that wants to disqualify what is broadly called non-fiction from the category of literature to suggest that somehow it lacks an Artistry or imagination or invention by comparison to fiction but the non-fiction I published was every bit as good as fiction youngsters may not recall the link the assaults against Memoir from critics like William gas and Jonathan Yardley and James Walcott their ultimately impotent campaigns Put Me In Mind of how early novels were mocked for being mere fancies lacking the moral rigor of philosophy and sermons and the formal rigor of poetry so after 50 plus years of reading every Memoir I could track down and 30 teaching the best ones Plus getting paid to bang out three I spent last year trying to cobble up what a physicist would call a unified field Theory or Theory of Everything about the form I imagined a better me would have done this already a better me says the Ning voice in my head wouldn't eat Oreos by the sleeve this better me has an alphabetized bookshelf and a mind parceled out into PowerPoint slide she has a big fat overarching system in search of such a system I found myself last winter shoveling a wobbly wheeled cart at Staples hours later I lunged all snow spackled into the house like a labrador dragging home killing her teeth I got presentation easel three aluminum framed slabs of corkboard four flip chart one and Buu color-coordinated index cards and sticky notes but by summer the living room now dubbed the War Room resembled nothing so much as the headquarters of a serial killer task force with cards tacked up and schematics and arrows and notes by color on the window panes index cards said stuff like tell about Michael hair and the skinned man one quoted Old St Augustine probably a sex addict and arguably the father of memoir Circa the fifth century No it's not Oprah give me Chastity Lord but not yet I spent months watching the black cursor flicker or with my nose in various books I wish I'd written and I resisted the urge to slink off to hide under the bed like a dog with a bad haircut as with everything I've ever written I start out paralyzed by fear of failure the tarantula ego starving to be shored up by Praise tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small true thing is standing in line for me to say it's okay that's why the Lord in Infinite Wisdom gave us delete Keys recently a friend I teach with talked me down off the ledge about this project by reminding me that I've spent decades talking with joy to students about Memoir what I really bring to the classroom is having cherished the form as long and as hard as anybody in 1965 I wrote when I grow up I will write one half poetry and one half autobiography and as a strange child reading the sagas of Helen Keller and Maya Angelo I just felt less lonely and some Mystic way I believed they were talking as my toddler son once said of the infuriatingly sacaran Mr Rogers only to me a first person Coming of Age story putatively true never failed to give the child me hope that I could someday grow up and get out of the mess I was in which was reading hours per day in a state of socially sanctioned disassociation to try and fence myself off from the chaos of my less than ideal household if Angelo born black in preil rights Arkansas and poor blind deaf Keller each made it out of their own private heals to become that most exalted of creatures a writer maybe I could too every memoirist had lived to tell the tale and that survival usually geed me with hope as with a hypodermic a comparable sounding novel just couldn't Infuse me the same way however often fiction has served as a fig leaf for lived remembered experience the form doesn't promise veracity of event as I turn a novel's Pages a first-person narrator May seduce me but the fact that it's all made up and not actually outlived oddly keeps me from drawing Cur outside the book's dream the Deep mysterious sense of identification with a memoirist who's confessed her past just doesn't translate to a novelist I love however deliciously written the work I'm embarrassed to confess this because it sounds so naive identifying with someone I've never met a pedler of pages who profits from my buying her act I sound like the guy at a strip club who thinks the dancers really fancy him I once heard Don delilo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it a memoirist starts with events then deres meaning from them in this Memoir purports to grow more organically from lived experience when I asked a class of undergrads what they liked about memoir I heard them Echo the No Doubt naive sentiment that they drew Hope from the mere fact of a writer living past a bad juncture to report on it it's a miracle he even survived was written on many papers the telling has some magic power for them as it does for me tell it the soldiers in Vietnam begged Michael hair and in dispatches he told it this confidence of mine and most Memoirs veracity is viewed as gullible I know of course there's artifice to the relationship between any writer and her reader Memoir done WR is an art a made thing it's not just raw reportage flung Splat on the page most morally ominous from the second you choose one event over another you're shaping the past's meaning Plus Memoir uses novelistic devices like cobbling together dialogue you failed to record at the time to concoct a distinctive voice you often have to do a poet's lapidary work and the Goodwins rewards study you're making an experience for a reader a show that conjures your past inside and out with enough Lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titilation you owe a long journey and most of all you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself so while it is a shaped experience the best ones come from the soul of a human unit oddly compelled to root out the past Truth for his own deeply felt reasons in fact every memoirist I know seems doomed to explore the past in an often agonized Death March down the p if you met them all at a cocktail party they'd strike you as Frank and upfront more curious about the past than defensive about their own versions think of that family meal we've all had when each person's colliding version of an event ricochets off every other you weren't even born when that happened at such a meal I may defend my own account like a wolf her Turf but lying awake later I'll often feel the creeping suspicion I'm wrong unless you're a doubter and a worrier a nailbiter an apologizer a reinker the Memoir may not be your play pen that's the quality I found most consistently in those life story writers I've met truth is not their enemy it's the banister they grab for when fear feeling around on the dark Cellar stairs it's the solution wow there it is my long lost Theory stolen obviously from the delic Oracle with her pesky near impossible demand to know thyself a curious mind probing for Truth May well set your scribbling ass free a fierce urge to try reexperiencing your own mind mind and body and throbbing heart alive inside the most Vivid stories from your past is step one no doubt if you weren't haunted by those stories you wouldn't waste your time trying to write them then you just have to tell it right the second hardest part I've inserted the words the truth to replace the word God in the following quote from monk Thomas Merton's Memoir sstory Mountain the secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of the truth the truth utters me like a word containing a partial thought to himself a word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it with that idea in the air like rain Mist I usually enter one of my Memoir classes like some kid coming off the beach with a roaring shell to press to everybody's ear my big message is listen up I a passionate messy teacher I give a rat's ass and my sole job is to help students fall in love with what I already worship which means I show you stuff I've read that I can't live without black boy AKA American hunger I know why the Cage Bird Sings a childhood the biography of a place dispatches the woman warrior stopped time the kiss Down and Out in Paris and London Homage to Catalonia the color of water goodbye to all that the possessed adventures with Russian books and the people who read them memories of a Catholic girlhood wild the Duke of deception This Boy's Life and speak memory then I'll lay out any wisdom about the for I've either gleamed from them or figured out on my own watch for the prospective memoirist I pepper in short list and lessons that's what you'll get here me running back and forth between books I've taught and my own dispatches From the Muddy trenches where I wrote three books that basically beat my Texas ass there's a photo of writer Harry Cruz on my office door students often ask about because it looks so savagely unliterary on an English Department Hall lined with posters of Prim Dickinson in white eyelet lace or that trying to be Sinister fop balir in Black Velvet Cruz strikes a muscle man pose wearing a jean jacket with the sleeves ripped out he curls up his arm so the biceps big as a ham hackk his face is Pock marked grizzled with a more than once smashed nose Academia Embraces virtually nothing blue collar and Cruz's image is a small assertion of my humble roots amid the stubbornly white colar Mill of White Tower Academia obvious emphasis on the white which also predominates Cruz's meaty fist aims at his own chin as if he's about to knock himself out with an uppercut which I guess he was as he kept on drinking Rebel whiskey way past when it did him any good once after a binge he found inside his elbow the still bloody tattoo he had no recollection of getting a hinge where his arm bent as if he were machine not flesh in some ways writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist if it's done right sure there's the pleasure of doing work guaranteed to engage you emotionally who's indifferent to their own history the form always has profound psychological consequence on its author it can't not what project can match it for that plus you get to hang out with folks no longer on this side of the grass places and times you may have for decades achd after wind up erecting themselves around you as you work but nobody I know who's written a great one described it as anything less than a major league eating contest anytime you try to collapse a distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened there's suffering involved when I'm trying to edit or coach somebody through one I usually wind up feeling like the mean Sergeant played by Tom baringer in platoon he's leaning over a screaming Soldier whose guts are extruding and in a husky whisper bearinger says through gritted teeth take the pain till the guy shuts up and mechanically starts stuffing his guts back in no matter how self-aware you are Memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self your neat analyses and tidy excuses one not really a joke saying in my family is the trouble started when you hit me back your small pieties and impenetrable mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up in terms of cathartic effect Memoir is like therapy the difference being that in therapy you pay them the therapist is the mommy and you're the baby in Memoir you're the mommy and the reader the baby and hopefully they pay you no man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money Samuel Johnson said so forget about holes in your memory or lawsuits or how those crazy suckers you share DNA with are going to spaz out once you tell about what Uncle Bubba did during nap time I'll talk later about how you can deal with all those worries you can do research I.E postponing writing till Jesus Dawns a nighty but your Memoir Real Enemy is blinking back at you from the Shaving glass when you floss at night your ignorant ego and its Myriad masks Cruz's grossly overlooked a childhood the biography of a place magically pointed out to me my own L dah poses it's underrated virtually unknown except among the afficianados of the form I used to worry it wasn't as good as I thought particularly when Cruz's fiction never wowed me until I decided any aversion to it was a form of object classism which insists on marginalizing any workingclass Scribbler at the time I came across a childhood I was an academically uncredentialed former redneck Texan trying to pass myself off as a poet and Hyper literary Cambridge Cruz had lost time trying to hide his own cracker past and then he'd written about that millu in a book that would serve as my load star how good it is I can no longer gauge but it helped to guide me out from my biggest psychological hidey holes reading Cruz I Found the courage to tell the stories I've been amassing my whole life I includ so much of him here to underscore how mysterious a single influence can be if he shares a novice's foibles were I tattoo getting individual I'd owe him some fleshly real estate I know a lot of other people too I'd wind up like the state fears Illustrated woman emblazened with the inkin faces of the best memoirist probably without Cruz I'd have eventually gotten around in my first book but reading him which I started doing Circa 1980 gave me a shortcut that sharp awareness of all the false selves I concocted for the page that kept me from speaking the truth with the stoppering power of duct tape over my mouth at least one purpose of this book is to lay out some lucky gliding spaces for a wannabe memoirist to help her discover the story the one only she can tell then to help said person craft a voice exactly suited to telling that Tale in the truest most beautiful Way by true I mean without trying to Pawn off fabricated events by beautiful I mean for the reader what's the test of beauty rereading a memoir you return to usually feels so intimate believable real that you're lured back time and again you miss its geography and atmosphere its characters are like old Pals you Pine after however many intellectual Pleasures a book may offer up it's usually your emotional connection to the Memoirs narrator that hooks you in and how does she do that a good writer can conjure a landcape and its peoples to live inside you and the best writers make you feel they've disclosed their soft underbellies seeing someone naked Thrills us a little maybe I can help prospective writers feel better about disrobing my lessons and tips for anyone seeking to write a memoir are sprinkled in like pepper why not to write a memoir or carnality or how to choose a detail they're small and pithy enough that the general reader can p Vault over those technical blips for students in a late chapter on Michael hair there's an initial section for the general reader and section two is a line byline analysis that a non-writer might find tedious but the book's mostly shaped for the general reader and while I hope it can help such a human hone in affection for Memoirs of form I really hope to prompt some reflection about the reader's own divided selves and everm morphing past for everybody has a past and every past spawns Fierce and fiery emotions about what it means nobody can be autonomous in making choices today unless she grasps how she she's being internally yanked around by stuff that came before so this book's mainly for that person with an inner life big as Lake Superior and a passion for the watery element of memory maybe this book will give you scuba fins and a face mask and more oxygen for your travels chapter 1 the past vigor we look at the world once in childhood the rest is memory Louise Glick noos at unexpected points in life everyone gets way laid by the Colossal force of recollection one minute you're a grown ass woman then a whiff of cumin conjures your dad's Curry and a whole door to the Past blows open ushering in uncanny detail there are traumatic memories that rise up unbidden and dwarf you where you stand but there are also memories you dig for you start with a clear fix on a tiny instant and pick at every knot until a thin thread comes undone that you can follow back through the mind's Labyrinth to other places we've all interrogated ourselves it couldn't have been Christmas because we had shorts on in the snap shot such memories start by being figured out but the useful ones eventually gain enough traction to haul you through the past memory is a pinball in a machine it messily Ricochet around between image idea fragments of scenes stories you've heard then the machine goes tilt and snaps off but most of the time we keep memories packed away I sometimes lik in that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk how did so much fit into such a small space you show up at your high school reunion shocked to find a middle-aged populace rather than the teen she passed in the hallways decades back then somebody mentions she sat behind you in Miss pickets 7eventh grade English class and somehow her prepub face blooms awaken you then you remember where your locker was that year and that speech class came after English and since speech was last period you walked home across the football fields fresh moan grass watching the boy you had a crush on and practice gear so a single image can split open the hard seed of the past and soon memory pours forth from every direction sprouting its Vines and flowers up around you to the old Gardens taken shape in all its fragrant Glory almost unbelievable how much can Rush forward to fill an absolute blankness on the first day of a memoir class I often try to douse my students flaming certainty about the unassailability of their memories usually i f a fight with a colleague Prof or student while a video ographer wors in back then the class is asked to record right after the event what happened for the caliber of grad students I face down at Syracuse University the exercise should be a slam dunk a year or so back almost 800 applied for six slots in poetry and six in fiction they're all broke out in smarts but in some Oddball ways sure there are Ivy leers but in poetry we once turned down a Harvard grad for a gay X Marine in fiction a Yale sumacum lud lost a seat to a former barn and Bailey clown picture a seminar room with tables in a horseshoe and some 20 grad students mostly in Black each propping up a styrofoam cup of lukewarm liquid I explained the videographer him back by saying a class transcript may help with a book on Memoir I'm writing following a script I apologize for leaving my phone on but claim I have an administrative problem to work out halfway through our 3-hour class at planned intervals my co-conspirator Chris sometimes calls putatively to ask herang me about swapping classrooms the students hear me be jovial and accommodating though I hustle him off the phone saying let's talk at the break an hour before he's due Chris steams in a tall 50-ish poet with a shaved head he's tight lipped his mouth into a line and is claiming that this is his seminar room we need to clear out now we're playing against type he's known as lowkey and easygoing and I as how to say it noisy Southern he raises his voice I suggest we step outside he steps forward I step back he's tall I'm short I try to diffuse the situation he says for once I should do what everybody else does and cooperate he tells me to go myself or do I only remember it that way then he heaves a sheath of papers into the air and stalks out the students are a Gog on the tape they cut their eyes away from us to connect with each other paralyzed silence am I okay the codependent kid asked Bambi eyed I explained the Roose and the group's burst of laughter is a collective awkwardness one Joker claims he's suing for trauma since he flashed back to his parents fighting you'd guess that these bright mostly young fearly sensitive Witnesses would nail the event down to the color of Chris's socks and yet around the room with each student reading from spiral notebook or legal pad the mistakes pop up like dandelion greens there are memory aces of course maybe one rarely two of 20 to 25 per seminar come with wizardly photographic recall they get the facts spot on they nail quotes verbatim and don't mess up physical details or even intervals of time getting time wrong is a common memory screw up even for for the young how often did he call the Wizards are dead certain it was three times with 10 to 12 minute gaps in between and Chris's pants were khaki his shirt denim not vice versa he wore not loafers but black Nikes double knotted with two holes unthreaded Marvels these observers reviewing student blunders in these classes I correct details on the board fix dialogue and interpretive errors by the end we've chocked up an agreed on version during this time I sometimes implant new facts I give my adversary a leather bracelet he doesn't wear and even have him fiddle with it nervously a month from the event when asking kids to render the fight on a page I'll mostly get fed this official account what the group deems right almost always obliterates anybody's original Recollections except for those rare memory Aces who somehow cleav to their original intake it's the power of group think the basis of both family Dynamics and most propaganda but worse than the group think that warps recall are the students original radical misjudgments poets and train musicians seem mysteriously Keen at nailing dialogue verbatim but they can still flub tone or even misattribute who said what I was the one saying we can work this out but some credit Chris with the phrase as I jerked my elbow away some heard me exasperatedly sighing we can't work this out who knows why half the class recalled my advancing toward Chris when I either Stood Still or backed up even my inertia if they observed it at all got recorded in almost military ter terms sentences such as she held her ground or she was sturdy as a bulldog in her stance appeared and I was likened to Granite or steal one year the memory star was a saxophonist and Hip-Hop DJ so convinced by our acting that he almost left his seat to stop the brute assaulting me yet even in possession of the facts this kid wound up speculating as to quote what Mary had done to make him attacker like this close quote the observing students innate prejudices shape how they view things one year when I claimed the phone calls were from a doctor's office a girl with a serious illness worried about me while everybody else just resented my answering during class as a bratty move one guy figured Chris and I had been sleeping together and this kid half manufactured an Insidious Narrative of betrayal b based on her body language a girl who'd had a stalker figured Chris was one somebody else thought we were both High my unscientific decades long study proves even the best minds worp and blur what they see for all of memory's power to yank us back into an overwhelming past it can also fail Big Time both shortterm the Lost vehicle in the parking lot the name at the tip of your your tongue and longterm we made out in high school that's why I always send my manuscripts out to folks I write about because I don't trust my Wiggly mind Memoir as Carolyn C recalled her husband bailing on her while she metaphorically held on to his leg but her children and ex corrected her saying she'd sent him packing my friend David Carr of the New York Times tried to track down the facts about his most deranged Coke fiend years in the night of the gun where he used investigative skills in a video camera to interview old running Partners in Minneapolis the Highlight concerns a faceoff with a gun toting Maniac in an alley the big reversal it turned out Carr was the maniac wagging the gun when he recounted that Discovery to me years later the discrepancy still set him back in fairness to David's memory he was strung out at the time but still how can the Mind get it so right yet so wrong neurologist Dr Jonathan mink explained to me that was such intense memories as David's we often record the emotion alone all detail blurred into unreadable smear but lost memories are more Our concern and major lapses happen when episodic memory events or experiences feelings times places and autobiographical memory like episodic but you specific move into semantic memory thoughts or concepts facts meaning knowledge for me fitting an episode into words squashes it down a little instead of lively Sensations I often wind up with a story containing an idea or opinion I may not even have anymore these language memories I have to distrust a little in Mary McCarthy's memories of a Catholic girlhood she writes of her son insisting that melini was physically thrown off their bus in hyanis Massachusetts in 1943 because the driver pulled over to the curb and shouted the latest piece of news they've thrown musolini out this Yanks a laugh from you unless you're a memoirist it makes me bite my already chewed down Nails the thought of misrepresenting someone or burning down his house with shitty recall wakes me up at night I always tell my students that doubt runs through me every day I work like the Subway's third rail so when people ask in challenging tones how I can possibly recall everything I've published I often and fess up obviously I can't but I've been able to myself that I Do by this I mean I do my best which is limited by the failures of my so-called mind I come from a family of storytellers and it's true that having a close group of folks retail events over and over better logs The Narrative into long-term storage but memorized language can also calcify what's in your head events grow stale when told by rot like old dough squeezed out of a pastry bag the stories can feel too artificially shaped painful events told for humor can be drained of the real paos or Terror they first registered with and negotiated memories can be like a piece of writing clawed over by an editorial board anything at all dubious gets deleted and any particular point of view of abolished anybody in a family knows how tyrannical group think can be not long after my first Memoir came out my mother and sister started bringing up to recount scenes I'd written about using my language as a younger sibling whose views tend to get heavily discounted I might have registered this as a Triumph finally they get it instead I felt bereft I I had inadvertently become the official chronicler of our Collective memories and who knows what I was screwing up part of me Longs for the old days when I couldn't open my mouth without hearing how something only happened a few times or wasn't that bad in a warped way being wrong was way better it kept me folded more safely in the family delusion system chapter 2 two the truth contract Twix writer and reader the whole journey is toward the truth or toward authenticity agency and freedom how could it possibly help to plant a lie in the middle of it Edward St Obin when I think of all the stiff pronouncements I've made demanding truth and Memoir over the years I'm inclined to hang my head I sound like such a highest twit the village vicer wagging her finger at writer pushing the limits of the form forgive me I am not the art police the wonderful thing about what comedian Steven coar calls the truthiness of our era is that you can set any standard that blows up your coattail novelist Pam Houston claimed her novels are 82% true and ascribes that same percentage to her non-fiction fair enough I guess in today's literary landscape you can choose your own percentage you can always hide behind the fiction label as Truman capot did perhaps first in 1966 with his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood or as Philip Roth did in 1993 with his Ramana clay operation which he published his fiction while claiming it was God's Own truth ditto my favorite parts of David Foster Wallace's infinite Gest are more Memoir Than Fiction or you can make a general disclaimer as John barrant did in 1994 confessing that in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil he took quote certain storytelling Liberties particularly having to do with the timing of events close quote I took this to mean that he telescoped time to move the story along in fact the book's murder it's Central drama occurred years before Barren got there so many scenes including his own run in with the victim in a popular crossdressing characters role early in the investigation are pure fiction which he at least admitted to albeit somewhat slightly in Back Pages that's me speaking temperately as I can about other writers artistic Freedom which I would go to the mat for no writer can impose his own standards onto any other nor claim to speak for the whole genre I would defend anybody's right to move the line for veracity in Memoir though I'd argue the reader has a right to know but my own humble practices wholly oppose making stuff up as a reader I am way less temperate in my opinions it niggles the hell out of me never to know exactly what parts the Fabricators have fudged in her recent interview in The Believer Vivian gornick claims to falter at truth-telling even in putatively non-fiction forms I embellish stories all the time I do it even when I'm supposedly telling the unvarnished truth things happen and I realize that what actually happens is only partly a story and I have to make the story so I lie I mean essentially others would think I'm lying but you understand it's irresistible to tell the story and I don't owe anybody the actuality what is the actuality I mean whose business is it well if I forked over a cover price for non-fiction I consider it my business while it's great she owned up to her deceits it's hard to lend Credence to any after the fact confession especially one as vague or self-justifying as this one it's as if after lunch the deli guy quipped I put just a teaspoon of cat in your sandwich but you didn't notice it at at all to my mind a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it so here I stand with my little stick attempting to draw a line in the dirt for the sake of Memoirs authenticity truth may have become a foggy fuzzy nether area but untruth is simple making up events with the intention to deceive even in this day of the photoshopped Facebook pick that's not so morally hard to gauge you know the difference between a vague memory and a clear one and the vague ones either get left out or labeled dubious it's the clear ones that matter most anyway because they're the ones you've nursed and worried over and talked through and wondered about your whole life and you're seeking the truth of memory your memory and character not of unbiased history for get how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface and draft five or 10 or 20 yes you can misinterpret happens all the time the truth ambushes you Jeffrey wolf once said more on those hair raising reversals in a later chapter but unless you're looking at actual lived experience the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded you'll never unearth the more complex truths the ones that counter that convenient First Take on the past a memoirist forging false Tales to support his more comfortable Notions or to pump himself up for the audience never learns who he is he's missing the personal Liberation that comes from the examined life Liberation how you might say why isn't it just as good to make up a version of events you can live with and stick to that if your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb the unexamined life will do perfectly well thank you but whether you're a memoirist or not there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past it may continue to tug on you without you're being aware of it and lying about it can for all but the most hardened sociate path carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are the practice liar also projects her own manipulative double dealing facade onto everyone she meets which makes moving through the world a weary anxious Enterprise it's hard enough to see what's going on without forcing yourself to look through the wool you've pulled over your own eyes to watch someone scrutinize a painful history in depth which I've done as teacher and editor and while working with former drunks trying to clear up ancient crimes is to witness not in considerable pain you have to Lance a boil and suffer its stench as infection drains off yet all the scrupulous self-examinations over time I've been witnessed to whether on the page or off always ended with acceptance and relief for the more haunted Among Us only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past how does telling the truth help a reader's experience though let's say you had an awful childhood tortured and mocked and starved every day hit hard with belts and hoses Etc you could write a repetitive duller than a rubber knife misery Memoir but would that be true and true to how you keep it boxed up now or to liveed experience back then back then those same abusers probably fed you something or you'd have died and maybe you felt grateful for their crumbs or Furious or even unworthy no doubt you were either given false hope or you cooked up feudal schemes to win them over to improve your lot or you fought back and rebelled or you disassociated much of the time or some awful part of you admired their strength and you fantasized about being as strong yourself it's the disparities in your childhood your life between ass whippings that throws past pain into Stark relief for a reader without those places of Hope the beatings become too repetitive maybe they make a dramatic read for a while but single note Tales seldom bear rereading the most fastidious Writers Do overhaul their versions based on later information when John krackow was stumbling around oxygen deprived and brain damaged on Mount Everest he misidentified people he ran into in a blinding blizzard mistakes he corrected in later versions of Into Thin Air 1997 I also know crack AR drives his Publishers crazy revamping stories decades old as he recently did when he spent 10 Years Learning organic chemistry well enough to revise his idea of what seed poison the protagonist of into of the wild 1996 crack hour spends more time re-checking and revising than almost any non-fiction writer I know which says much about his Devotion to getting things right my friend Frank mccort's mother denied stuff like sleeping with her own cousin but who wouldn't certainly that outrage didn't make or break Angela's Ashes way worse in terms of maternal malfeasance was letting an underfed girl die in bed which mother mccort never denied what would motivate Frank who loved his mother to make up the incest if it weren't true oh and Katherine Harrison's father a fundamentalist Christian minister at the time denied having sex with her no surprise you have to suspect these obviously self-interested tractors other than them I haven't heard a single credible story from a memoirist pal about family fault finding lest you think I'm some crazed lone gunman for the truth I offer this fact the autobiographers whose practices I've admired up close over the decades have almost to a one shown their manuscripts around pre-publication and none faced Ma ma challenges to their versions based on family complaint my sample includes Jeffrey and Tobias wolf and Lucy grey and former students Corin zus and Cheryl Str also yours truly I was asked by a minor character to cut a tangential anecdote in my last book other than that minor blip no one I know has overhauled Pages based on family outrage but interviewers and audience are Gob smacked when I mention this No One Believes memoirists aren't constantly assaulted by detractors and naysayers in lawsuits how is that possible well as Frank Conroy said of his mother's response to stop time she felt it was my version of events the best memoirist stress the subjective nature of reportage doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story we also have to distinguish between memories wrangled over at the separate table and Memoirs combed over and revised dozens of times before being published everybody's personal history is jam packed with long weeding family arguments in which every reporter represents a personal view of history as irrefutable reality such arguments are private and informal and we tend to argue as if we're right for stone certain we've all wallowed in such never resolved mud holes common memory riffs involve either one a knowable interpretation someone's inner intent or motives or two chronology dates or how long something went on or how often Andor three disagreements about place where something went down we all screw such facts up it's true either unintentionally or in heated crusade to prove our private takes on family history many a loved one has engaged in hyperbole or stretched the bounds of evidence or dug in our heels to prove a point that's wrong but ask yourself how many of your clan would just flat out make up stuff that everybody knows is then publish it publishing lies requires a whole different level of sociopathy for veracity sake it doesn't cost a Memoirs the reader's confidence either to skip over the half-remembered scene or to replicate her own psychic uncertainty this part is blurry any decent comp teacher schools you to work in the Realms of maybe and perhaps the great memoirist NX recalls fuzzy form that that's why we trust her as we've lost faith in Old authorities our confidence in objective truth has likewise eroded science and scripture and church doctrine were once judged unassailable fonts of Truth history was told from the Viewpoint of the victors Cowboys good Native Americans bad we've learned to question the Pentagon report and the firm presidential denial histories and biographies often open with positioning essays explaining the writers inate prejudices and while formerly sacred sources of Truth like history and statistic have lost ground the subjective tale has garnered new territory that's partly why Memoir is in its ascendancy not because it's not corrupt but because the best ones openly confess the nature of their corruption the master memoirists creat such a personal interior space with memories pieced together that the reader never loses sight of the Enterprise's tentative nature Maxine Hong Kingston and Michael hair don't manufacture authoritative third person I am a camera views their books don't masquerade as fact they let you in on how their own prejudices mold memories sifter by transcribing the mind so its edges show a writer constantly reminds the reader that he's not watching crisp external events played from a digital archive it's the speaker's truth alone in this way the Forum constantly disavows the rigors of objective truth so how have memoirist families reacted to wolf claimed he was corrected on small points mostly of chronology but basically stuck by his memories which remained uncorrected by family so a dog his mother found adorable he persists in calling ugly Jeffrey wolf felt HonorBound by an idea of History readers are very sophisticated he wrote they understand that a promise has been made but he was also suspicious of those unshakable cons of evidence for the average historian documents like letters and tax returns and Diaries documents are tricky things too and I was dealing with my father a systematic liar you can't report annual income on the basis of his 1040 form and I'm looking at a copy of his resume right now it lists the head of the CIA as a reference cites degrees from Yale and the sore ball to give a more innocent example how many of us have our actual weights on our driver's licenses and yet a historian might draw on such records or letters or diaries as authoritative facts bending the truth wasn't always part of the autobiographers toolkit in the middle of the last century when Mary McCarthy published Catholic girlhood memoirists weren't even supposed to cobble up dialogue from memory her non-fiction standards were those for histories and biographies and journalism forms then still held to be fairly irrefutable whether we were more gullible or more secretive or the standards more rigorous then I can't say probably all three so while McCarthy claims her book lays a claim to being historical that is much of it can be checked close qu she apologizes in six long italicized streaks for her then edgy Liberties including innocent mistakes quote but perhaps we didn't know it was the flu even to put no in quotes back then acted as a hedge against the then almost inviolable standards of precision that a memoirist may feel free of today here are some of McCarthy's major apologies one I'm reconstructing dialogue many a time in the course of doing these Memoirs I wished I were writing fiction the temptation to event had been very strong particularly when I remember the substance of an event but not the particulars sometimes I've yielded as in the case of conversations they are mostly fictional only a few single sentences Stand Out quotation marks indicate that a conversation to this General effect took place but I do not vouch for the exact words two on proper names I have not given the right names to my teachers or fellow students but all these people are real they are not composite portraits in the case of my near relations I have given real names as with neighbors servants and Friends three on the nature of her memory there are several dubious points in this Memoir just when we got the flu seems to be arguable according to newspaper accounts we contracted it on the trip this conflicts with the story that Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula brought it with them my present memory supports the idea that someone was sick before we left but perhaps we didn't know it was that lethal flu four or on the nature of the false implanted memory we did not see our father draw a revolver I heard the story from my other grandmother when she told me I had the feeling that I almost remembered it that is my mind promptly supplied me with a picture of it the Memoir is truth has been devolving or evolving since girlhood in McCarthy's later book intellectual Memoirs 1992 Our culture's Truth transformation was nearing completion she talks almost scornfully about the fetishism of fact but in girlhood she's still healing to that notion whatever your deal with the reader I argue for stating it upfront like Harry Cruz in his 1978 a childhood his concept of Truth is way more Wiggly than the wolf's or mine but he admits it with his first sentence he Embraces gossip and hearsay and all manner of Apocrypha my first memory is of a Time 10 years before I was born and takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew lest you disparage this type of Gossip the gospels are probably all stories passed on by folks who heard them from other folks without other people's stories Cruz cannot hook himself to his long lost ghost father and we Embrace his method partly from empathy for his yearning for his old man and partly because it's all so fun to read did what I have set down here as memory actually happen did the two men say what I have recorded think what I have said they thought I do not know nor do I any longer care my knowledge of my daddy came entirely from the stories I have been told about him Cruz claims that whatever errors in detail he may make the stories he's been told remain true quote unquote in spirit whatever that means it does scoop out a fairly big escape hatch for somebody writing non-fiction plus Cruz trains Us in his methods of amplification early not just through his use of rumor but by drawing on his child's imaginative point of view as when he has this long talk with his dog Sam early on if you was any kind of man a tall you wouldn't snap at them gats and eat them flies the way you do I said it ain't a thing in the world to matter with eating Nats and flies he said it's how come people treat you like a dog I said you could probably come on in the house like other folks if it weren't for eating flies and gats like you do so Cruz lets us know that his path VAV external vacity or reporting history is undulating as a snakes later in the book he writes about an injury that just could not have gone down as described he's playing Pop the whip during hog scalding time when whole carcasses are dropped in boiling water so their bristles can be scraped off Cruz claims he landed in the boiling water quote beside a scalded floating hog I reached over and touched my right hand with my left and the whole thing came off like a wet glove I mean the skin on the top of the wrist and the back of my hand along with the fingernails all just turned loose and slid on down to the ground I could see my fingernails lying in the little puddle of flesh made on the ground in front of me so devoted am I to this undervalued Memoir that I phoned a doctor pal in a burn unit to be sure whether a kid could suffer such an injury without crazy scarring or loss of limb of course he couldn't but hyperboy to the point of unreality fits with Cruz's Georgia cracker milu which can trace its roots both to Southern Gothic at its most violent and grotesque and to Tall Tales from around the campfire such as Mark Twain's celebrated Jumping Frog story where in order to win a bet the Gambler Jim smiling did b a straddle bug to Mexico hyperbole often reflects a culture's excesses and savagery and appetite and at one point Cruz quips anything worth doing is worth overdoing the unspoken battlecry of many an alcoholic such as myself since anybody's handling of the truth derives from her nature and I know nobody's nature so well as my my own I feel obliged to detail my own practice though I do so with no more Authority than any other memoirist though like Cruz I quote wild tales and rumors from my cracker past I just have zero talent for making stuff up while I adore the short story form anytime I tried Penning one myself everybody was either dead by page two or morphed back into the person they'd actually evolved from in memory stuck in an airport with an uncharged reading device I'll pop for crap non-fiction before a crap novel early on I was lied to often and with conviction kicked off by two phrases I'm not drunk most always a lie and oh don't worry everything's fine which was true just often enough to mess with my head in high school both the fake not my sister forged to skip school and her excuses for breaking dates with boys held the seeds of Unwritten novels and one of the sayings that still Graces her holiday table would make a worthy family crest a good lie well told and stuck to is often better than the truth all this quite literally made me crazy I grew up not trusting my perception and buying Freud's theory that the truth would free me I set out on a lifelong quest to figure out what the hell happened in my childhood while my mother threatened suicide when I initially tried to probe her past by my mid 20s she gave in unearthing the truth led to radical healing in my otherwise fractured Clan and she died sober and much loved for me making stuff up as I first did in trying to tell my story in novel form 5 years before I embrace Memoir put me off the scent of what I was born to tell even trying to use pseudonyms messed with my head something awful some inner corrector kept saying but that's not John it's Bob so in rough drafts I had to work with real names which got changed in a global search replace only at the end one reason I send manuscripts out to friends and family in advance is I often barely believe myself for I grew up suspicious of my own perceptions plus my Kinfolk had changed their stories so many times I was hoping their signing off on pages would finally end my own lifetimes speculation long ago when I was younger and broker and looked easy iier to boss around a publishing executive tried to nudge me into inventing a scene in my first book when I say goodbye to my mother the reader has to know how that went down at that moment but I remembered zip about the scene and wound up guessing about it instead mother must have squawked about our leaving she would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking I recall no such scene the French doors on that scene never swung open mother herself was clipped from my memory she did promise vaguely to come for us soon but I can't exactly hear her saying that and here's the kicker I'd now guess that she felt liberated once we left such is the nature of time reversing an opinion when I was younger and mother alive we both found it easier to pretend she fought for us but I never actually saw Mother fighting for our company she always much preferred the wild freedom of solitude were I starting the book over I guess she didn't mind our absence over much though the Liars Club rang true to me when I wrote it from this juncture it seems to have sprung from a state of loving delusion about my family in those days I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe were I writing that story today I'd be less generous to them while perhaps shining more empathy on my younger self whether age has granted me more whome care for the girl I was or whether life's ravages have grounded down my heart so I'm more self-centered I can't say am I healthily less codependent or a bigger You could argue either way although I'd fix a wrong date or point a fact for the book to correct it as written record I couldn't alter any major take on the past without redoing the whole to the self who penned that book formed the filter for those events I didn't fabricate stuff but today other scenes I'd add might tell a less forgiving story which brings me to The Well Springs where a writer's biggest lies Bubble Up interpretation I still try to a on the side of generosity toward any character like I mentioned mother throwing my birthday lasagna at my daddy and one of the zillion fights that felt like my fault but I also mention her cleaning it up after he was gone and lighting candles and a German chocolate cake a scene that if left out would have skewed her and is seeming worse than she in fact was an fatan writes about a 19th century sailor who comes home to a starving family at Christmas with a bushel of oranges he locks himself in a room and devours them solo while his kids scratch at the door he's an right until you learn he had scurvy metaphorically speaking I always make room for any evidence of scur in my characters any mitigating ailments in my last Memoir I couldn't report a malicious quip from my ex-husband without mentioning that he never spoke to me that way maybe that's why it stayed carved in my psyche it was out of character a writer whose point of view was closer inside the past might only concentrate on feeling wounded by the insult without tacking on that fact because it could jar the reader from the instant mostly I try to keep the focus on myself and my own padillos for the record here are the Liberties I've used which all seem fairly common now one recreating dialogue I've often said the conversation went something like this but most readers presume as much also by not using quotation marks in later books I seek to keep the reader more inside my experience the subjective nature isues the standards of History I think two changing names to protect the innocent most of my friends had a hoot choosing their pseudonyms three altering the name of the town most minor characters like the sheriff and School principal I don't bother to track down they might be dead but if they are alive I don't want the responsibility of perhaps misrepresenting them four blurring details of somebody's appearance for the sake of their privacy I've done this many times for minor characters a mayor say but for the neighborhood rapist in Liars Club I didn't want folks in my hometown to mistakenly blame one of the local delinquents I gave the culprit braces which nobody in our neighborhood had and changed a few other things with lit I hoped my ex-husband would vet the manuscript pages but when I spoke to him in advance he claimed to prefer being blurry five moving back and forth through time when appropriate and giving info you didn't have at the time which breaks point of view if your next door neighbor turned out to be say Ted Bundy you might mention that in parenthesis because you know the reader would care to know it's still apparent when I do this that I speak from another time six Telles scoping time 17 years later Daddy had a stroke or using one episode to stand for all of seventh grade the action points for a given period represent it wholesale I skip dull Parts seven shaping A Narrative of course the minute you write about one thing instead of another you begun to leave stuff out which you could argue as falsifying what was Major to you might have been a blip on somebody else's radar eight stopping to describe something in the midst of a heated scene when I probably didn't observe it consciously at that instant this is perhaps the biggest lie I ever tell I do so because I am constantly trying to recreate the carnal world as I lived it so I keep concocting an experience for a reader I have taken that Liberty but because I'm Catholic I feel guilty about it nine temporarily changing something to protect a friend at her request my friend Meredith had been a habitu of asylums but she still didn't want me to publish a school scene of her razoring at her wrist because it would torment me her aging mother she agreed to let a mutual friend stand in for her so the suicidal friend is Stacy in the first edition and Meredith in later ones 10 recounting old fantasies my inner life is much bigger than my outer life and some fantasies from the past seem Godly true of course I say they're only fancies not fact in Liars Club I also made up two of The Tall Tales which are meant to be anyway 11 putting in scenes I didn't witness but only heard about though I admit as much from lit so vivid is the story of Mother's final drunk with Harold so painterly in its grotesque detail that I take the liberty of recounting it as if I were there for a good story told often enough puts you in rooms never occupied 12 Visa interpretation be generous and fair when you can when you can't admit your disaffinity my general idea is to keep the focus on myself and my own struggles not to speculate on other people's motives and not concoct events and characters out of whole cloth chapter 3 why not to write a memoir plus a pop quiz to protect the bleeding and box out the rigid if you are silent about your pain they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it Zora Neil huren asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying I really want to have sex where do I start what one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another it depends on how you're constructed inside and out hormone levels psychology or it's like saying I want a makeover how should I look a goth girl's not inclined to lime green Fair ale sweaters and a preppy scorns black lipstick I've said it's hard here's how hard everybody I know who wads deep enough into memories Waters drowns a little between chapters of stop time Frank Conroy stayed drunk for weeks 2 hours after Carolyn C finished her first draft of dreaming she collapsed With viral menitis which gave her double vision it was my brain's way of saying you've been looking where you shouldn't be looking Martin Amos reported a suffocating ination while working on experience writing fiction how however taxing usually left him some buoyancy at Day end his Memoir about his father drained him Jerry stall relapsed while writing about his heroin Addiction in permanent midnight I used to crumble to the floor of my study afternoons like a longdistance trucker I'd have to claw my way out of sleep when I once asked my shrink if I was repressing some memory he said nah you're just really tired I also remember turning the last page of a manuscript with my editor and feeling fever crawl up my face a 103° I had pneumonia which I'd never had before here are some excellent reasons not to do this and following that a pop quiz to gauge your Readiness one if you're psychologically hectored by the Ning voice of some scold about how wrongness is is maybe wait till you find some balance you can care what people think so long as you're not brutally squeezed by it two if you have a bad memory give it up many people ask me how to recall the past and I say if they don't they're lucky get a real job three if the events you're writing about are less than seven or eight years pass you might find it harder than you think distance frees us of our former ego's vanities and lets us see deeper into events four also if you're young you might want to wait most of us are still soft as clay before 35 I know Dave Edgars was about 12 when he wrote his wildly successful heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius but he's an exception five if you're doing it for therapy go hire somebody to talk to your psychic Health should matter more than your literary production six if you want revenge hire a lawyer or find a way to have fun with it I have a friend who got a nasty review then received the reviewer's book in the mail for a possible review from him his reply I took it on the back porch and put a bullet through its head he shot the book and mailed it back to the publisher buy darts in a dart board liter ches for something else the reader seven don't write about people you hate though Hubert Selby claims you can do it with great love ditto don't write about a divorce you're going through eight if you're writing affects a group of people a class or race be sure you're ready for any Fallout Maxine Hong Kingston got slightly fried by the Chinese Community mccort took grief from the Irish nine if you're a right fighter somebody who never apologizes or changes your mind you don't have the fluid nature to Twig to the Deep River of Truth when the spirit draws your forked stick 10 related to the above if you can't rewrite give it up you need to be able to rethink and correct the easy interpretation if you still want to proceed you want to be sure you can handle all you might feel pass this quiz and I Knight your shoulders in blessing with my own fine line razor Point pen let's say something pseudo awful has befallen you a safe bet for any human unit thinking about a memoir and you imagine you'll write the very worst scene down the road after you've gotten your feet wet you'll work up to it let's face it you dread this scene as the rich dread tax time as demons dread Jesus it's a Haunter you're going to write it now don't get me wrong your goal is not to finish these Pages the opposite this draft will land in a folder you keep I want you to suffer through sitting in a room for some hours with your worst memories but you'll start with a centering exercise in an attempt to get underneath your normal ego and into some deeper Place more receptive to the truth meditation as a technique to loosen creative Powers fills boatloads of books there are millions of techniques counting your breaths 1 to 10 following your breath a mantra visualization studying a passage of sacred writing in getting tough guy undergrads to meditate I found the story of Zen basketball Master Bill Jackson's sacred Hoops useful students who'd otherwise refus to close their eyes and get woo woo in class went along behind Jackson's example Phil writes about playing as a Young Man From A Warrior's ego all rage for dominance but in the NBA as he reaches the far edge of his natural physical Talent he chooses to cultivate a mental Edge through Zen meditation Jackson starts to notice how much noise is in his head during a game including anger that was so and so Chamberlain next time he's dead meat and self-blame Phil a sixth grader could have made that shot the litany was endless however the simple Act of becoming mindful in the frenzied parade of thoughts paradoxically begin to quiet my mind down Yogi Bara once said about baseball how can you think and hit at the same time the same is true with basketball except everything's happening much faster the same is true of writing to tap into your deepest Talent you need to seek out a calm restful State of Mind where your head isn't defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little for me my mind is constantly checking where I am in line comparing myself to others or even to a former self racing Fring conniving to get ahead but underneath that is another self that quietly notices all that a friend called to say she was going crazy once and I said who's noticing that you want to get next to that quiet notier self as a starting place just apply your ass to the chair as someone wise once said a writer's only requirement and for 15 or 20 minutes practice getting your attention out of your head down to some wider expanse in your chest or solar plexus a place less self-conscious or skittery or scared the idea is to unclench your mind's claws so don't judge how your thoughts might jet around at first if you just watch it eventually you'll start identifying a little bit with that detached watch yourself and less with your prattling head you're seeking enough quiet to let the real you into your mind inspiration the drawing into the body of some truth giving spirit ready to walk observantly through the doors of the past then with eyes still closed approach the memory you're scared to sit down start by composing the scene in carnal terms by which I mean using sensory Impressions not sexual ones smell is the oldest sense even Oneal animals without spinal cords can smell and it cues emotional memory like nothing else if you can conjure the aroma of where you are fresh cut grass or lemon furniture oil say you're halfway there what can you see here touch paste what do you have on is the cloth rough or smooth if you're on the beach there's a salt spray and you need a sweater in the trench sweat snails down your spine what taste is in your mouth I always liken the state I'm in before I write to waking too early to rise and looking for a wormhole to Cork screw down into that more honest place you want a clear sense memory a treasured or despised object and most of all you want your old body your cold hand wrapped around a jelly glass of grape juice that toy monkey with the switch on its back that bangs symbols and when smacked on its head hissed at you you need a point of physical and psychic connection a memory you'd swear by to start with then allow the memory to play itself it won't be video footage of course only jump Cuts Snippets an idea here and there an image now open your eyes if you're doing this right the whole thing should have been arrestingly Vivid maybe even a little awful many students open their eyes with tears welling up sit a minute and let all this wash past you should feel like you've been somewhere if you're really lucky you found a way to occupy your former self looking out of that face at your much younger hands congrats that's impressive most of us get a few Snippets and glimpses now here's the Pop Quiz part can you be in that place without falling apart if you're sobbing with shoulder shaking and big tusks of snot coming out of your face the answer may be no call a Pal book a massage go for a walk you're not ready to occupy this space for years on and yet if you couldn't see much or you felt nothing you may not be ready either or if you can only feel one thing self-righteous rage unless it's a book about a larger atrocity I.E you're a sudin lost boy this may not be your Forte those of you who felt a living emotional connection to the past that struck you as real those who've been somewhere who brim with feeling and may even be crying but are not devastated come on in now try writing some pages to serve as later notes because you're not yet sure of Voice or anything else you're free from the need to squash in all manner of background information explaining what year it is ETC that stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts you're free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader head already it will be by the time you get to this part of the book you might ask though who are you writing for lots of people say I write for myself I am way less cool I tend to imagine a riter pal I look up to maybe a former teacher or my son or even my dead priest that helps me think clearly about what order information goes in again if you were telling a therapist or a friend at lunch youd know right away what data went where if you do have a reader in mind maybe set down the scene in letter form mustering as much carnal detail as you can feel at the same time you're going to try to describe your insides either now as you watch this or then as you were in it it doesn't matter which point of view and if you go back and forth to your adult self show how that feels to slip from present tense into a memory and here are some questions that might nudge you along what were you trying to get and how which ways worked which didn't if it's a particularly awful memory for your character you have to be sure to not make it more awful than it was many of us disassociate or check out during awful times so maybe you want to convey that to the reader the Memoir job is not to add explosive whammies on every page but to help the average person come in otherwise the reader will gawk at you like somebody on Springer or she'll pity you in both cases you lose some Authority the book becomes too much about your feeling and not enough about the readers finally put it aside put it out of your head at least a week you want it to set up like Jello-O and when you pick it back up ask yourself what haven't I said how might someone else involved have seen it differently and most of all how am I afraid of appearing go beyond looking bad or good is there posturing or self-consciousness you could cut or correct or confess and make accuse of at the NAT of my confidence as a writer I despaired of ever finishing lit I considered selling my apartment to give the advance money back then a Jesuit pal asked me quite simply what would you write if you weren't afraid I honestly didn't know at first but I knew finding the answer would unlock the writing for me now you may not know what you'd write if you weren't afraid I seldom do it's a momentto moment struggle but if you're passionate to find out then you're ready God help you chapter 4 a voice conjures the human who utters it I believe that when the last dingdong of Doom has clanged and Faded from the last worth less Rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening that even then there will still be one more sound that of man's puny inexhaustible Voice still talking williiam fogner each great Memoir lives or dies based 100% on voice it's the delivery system for the author's experience the big bandwidth cable that carries in lustrous Clarity every pixel of someone's inner and outer experiences each voice is cleverly fashioned to highlight a writer's individual Talent OR way of viewing the world a memoirist starts off fumbling jotting down facts recounting anecdotes may take a writer hundreds of rough trial Pages for a way of speaking to start to emerge unique to himself and his experience but when he does both carnal and interior experiences come back with Clarity and the work gains an electrical charge for the reader The Voice has to exist from the first sentence because Memoir is such a simple form its events can come across in the worst books as thinly rendered and halfhazard but if the voice has a high enough voltage it will carry the reader through all manner of assholery and tangent because it almost magically conjures in Her Imagination a fully realized human we kind of think the voice is the narrator it certainly helps if the stories are riveting but a great voice renders the dullest event remarkable the secret to any voice grows from a writer's finding attra Factor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way while an artist consciously constructs a voice she chooses its elements because they're natural expressions of character so above all a voice has to sound like the person wielding it the super most interesting version of that person ever and grow from her core self pretty much all the great memoirist I've met sound on the page like they do in person if the page is a mask you rip it off only to find that the writer's features exactly mold to The Masks form with near a gap between public and private self these writer voices make you feel close to almost inside their owners who doesn't halfway consider even a fictional narrator like Huck fin or Scout a pal the The Voice should permit a range of emotional tones too wise ass and it denies paos too pathetic and it shrill it sets and varies distance both from the material and the reader from cool and diffident to high strung and close the writer doesn't choose these Styles so much as he's born to them based on who he is and how he experienced the past voice isn't just a manner of talking it's an operative mindset and a way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past that's why self-awareness is so key the writer who's lived a fairly unexamined life someone who has a hard time reconsidering a conflict from another point of view may not excel at fashioning a voice because her defensiveness stands between her and what she has to say also we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before and that can prevent us from a calling stuff that doesn't Shore up our current identities or it can warp understanding to fit more comfortable interpretations all those places we misshaped the past have to be Fess to and such Reflections and uncertainties have to find expression in voice you cut a contract early on to offer up the deepest perceptions you can muster without preening and posturing other writers may work otherwise but every great memoirist I ever talked to sounded cursed to face up to real events that's just the nature of the Enterprise truth Works a tripwire that permits the book to explode into being if the reader ints some deception or kink and the writer psyche that he can't admit to it erodes the Scribbler Authority this drives a reader from the page putting the writer in competition with Chubby Hubby ice cream and the TV remote tough contest to win however you charm people in the world you should do so on the page a lot of great writers rebuke charm and I don't mean the word to conjure a snake charmer pulling off a trick with a poor dumb animal whose fangs have been torn out too many writers relate to their readers that way which results in some dull hermetic books written just to satisfy the artist preining ego charm is from the Latin Carmen to sing by charm I mean sing well enough to hold the reader inthrall whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page what drives them crazy will keep you humble you'll need both sides of yourself the beautiful and the beastly to hold a reader attention sadly without a writer's dark side on view the pettiness and vanity and schemes Pages give off the whiff of people may like you because you're warm but you can also be quick to anger or too intense your gift for charm and confidence hides a gift for scheming and deceit you're withdrawn and deep but also slightly scornful of others a memoirist must cop to it all which means routing out the natural ways you try to masquerade as somebody else nicer smarter FAS or funnier all the good lines can't be the memoirist Richard WS black boy published in pre- civil rights America seems to shun charm and speak with a bitterness he paid dear for that refusal to Pander forms the core of his talent a ruthless unblinking gaze that reports to us with often barely tamped down Fury it was Wright who started the American Memoir craze of the last century with the publication of black boy in 1945 the book gushed out of him in 1943 he was followed CL closely by other Smash Hits Thomas Merton's sstory Mountain 1948 Vladimir nabokov's speak memory 1951 and Mary McCarthy's memories of a Catholic girlhood 1957 Nabokov was publishing excerpts in France starting in 1936 and McCarthy in the New Yorker in 1946 but for my money it was Wright who first won an audience in book length without being wildly famous first Wright started shaping the form as we think of it today the Next Generation featured Maya Angelo and Frank Conroy who no doubt learned from the aforementioned first timers Booker T Washington's Up From Slavery had previously been a national bestseller but Washington had been a major figure before Wright was the first African-American to ride from Oblivion onto the New York Times bestseller list not the last though for Malcolm X 1965 and Angelo 1969 bobbed in his wake as a little white girl in segregated Texas I found such books showed me racism as we were all still gagging on it today I even wonder if those Memoirs didn't partly fuel the Civil Rights Movement without them black experience would have been rendered solely in sociopolitical speak writes refusal to shuffle Uncle Tom like down the page trying to call favor was a revolutionary act at his time in history and it reads as true in that context of course his voice can also transport with its poetry each event spoke with a cryptic tongue and the moments of living slowly released their cated meanings there was the Wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountain-like spotted black and white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay there was the Delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the Sun to the Bright Horizon but such tender moments stand in Stark relief to the brutal facts of the Jim Crow South and segregated Chicago he starts off black boy with a distracted aimless rage deciding to set the family house on fire my idea was growing blooming now I was wondering just how the long fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of broom straws on fire and held it under them would I try it sure after this he's beaten almost to death by his mother and takes a hallucinatory stretch in bed soon after that he finds a way to defy and infuriate his bullying father awakened into a fury by a mewing kitten the old man tells Richard to shut it up kill that damn thing and the boy does right depicts killing the kitten with chilling detachment after arguing his father into the ground about the rightness of having killed the animal he notes I had had my first triumph over my father I had made him believe I'd taken his words literally he could not punish me now without risking his authority I'd made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me writes lawyerly case isues all moral piety Lang bear the ruthless scrap for truth and turf even in his family that he was born to at a time when his American Publishers could cudel him into changing the book's title from American hunger to Black Boy thus reducing a visionary's label into a racial slur his voice above all speaks with a sense of unblinking veracity refus using any soft focus he's one of the few memoirists who can pull it off German novelist Thomas barh hars Gathering evidence and graves's goodbye to all that also come across as bitter that tone which might great coming from other writers feels like the inevitable cost of their truths in my experience teaching in a hyp selective grad program pretty much any truth written deeply and with enough Clarity and cander to allow emotional range winds up fascinating me I'm not sure just any Scribbler could win my praise writing lived experiences but our students seem fairly adroit at cobbling up unique voices that hold me in thr and the more memorable The Voice the truer a book sounds because you never lose sight of the narrator cobbling together his truth not everybody's agreed on B or is it the trer a book the better the voice great Memoirs sound like distinct persons and also cover a broad range of feelings the glib jokester becomes as tedious and as unbelievable as the whiner this talent for truth includes a Voice's bold ability to render events we find unbelievable Elsewhere on the first page of Hillary mantel's giving up the ghost for my money a book as worship worthy as any of her prizewinning fiction we hear about her encounters with the spirit world on a staircase she passes through a shimmer in the air that contains a ghost I know it is my stepfather's ghost coming down or to put it in a way acceptable to most people I know it is my stepfather's ghost first off she states the mystical experience is simple fact but because she knows many readers in our skeptical culture will ad judge her Bonkers she spends a subsequent sentence traveling to where those readers more rationalist belief systems hold sway she rephrases putting no in quotes so she starts inside her mystical experience then briefly jogs to where the dubious reader stands prepared to Discounter and from that instant we trust this most sensible of voices to incorporate both the irrational and our doubt about it in doing so she's invited us into the supernatural experiences so common to her she speculates a few paragraphs later about the auras of eye migraines that torment her allowing neurolog logical possibilities for her ghost related experiences above all we're convinced of her firm curiosity about her encounters with the supernatural her willingness to explore any explanation for them so later when as a child in a garden she has a runin with the ultimate Evil one could only call it demonic though she doesn't go that far she doesn't have to disavow the reality of the event to accommodate our doubt The Voice has made room for us before mantel needs only stick to physical facts and her child's reaction the faintest movement a ripple a disturbance of the air I can sense a spiral a lazy buzzing swirl like flies but it is not flies there is nothing to see there is nothing to smell there's nothing to hear but it is motion its insolent shift makes my stomach heave I can sense at the periphery the limit of all my senses the dimensions of the creature it is as high as a child of two its depth is a foot 15 in the air stirs around it invisibly I am cold and rinsed by nausea I I cannot move I am shaking this is the beginning of Shame whether you doubt man tells reality In this passage you can have no doubt that she's reporting something ineffably real to her a similar type of entity inhabits her novel Beyond black among the most overpoweringly disturbing books I know on a par with turn of the screw or the best of Stephen King so too must voice confess to readers any moral bankruptcy as in Tobias Wolf's This Boy's Life I was a liar even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was I couldn't help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interest changed and as other versions of myself failed to persuade I was also a thief but so winning about this conf is the author's self-aware reason for it he's trying to forge a and when popular opinion interferes with the process wolf fabricates to fool his audience and further what he sees as self reshaping it's the gift of self-awareness who hasn't wanted to be somebody different and tried to scud the public into buying the ACT rather than ruining the reader's confidence and the author's Pages the confession actually bolsters her belief we can accept anything from a memoirist but deceit which is almost always a shallow person's lack of self- knowledge even somebody I might not otherwise care for can compel my attention when speaking out of heart-felt experience and self- knowledge on airplanes we've all been stranded next to some chatty perfectly nice but duller than a rubber knife human being and we've all faked sleep to escape that chatter yet when traveler's anonymity permits said boore to speak out of some profoundly felt experience I often find myself riveted by the confessions of somebody I'd otherwise dread spending even a 5minute elevator ride with that person's living breathing inner expression which when told with heart and cander includes some parcels of radical suffering and joy well it always captures me for speaking from passionately felt events is risky emotional Stakes make drama which is a conflict with feeling and danger mysteriously contained in a human body's small space don't get me wrong all right writer's voice doesn't have to be effusive or operadic to work nobody's more reticent than Conroy or Nabokov say but no one doubts the depths of their feeling however cool their overall tones as often as I've been bored by a shallow seat partner fronting some fake self I've been transfixed by watching lived passion radiate off a stranger's face even the most buttoned up or recalcitrant person trying to restrain feeling can't help but convey it in close proximity if she's telling those core stories that have seemingly shaped who she is the least articulate of confessors can in fleeing moments of connection move me as a great Symphony does and it's from the need to capture the shared connections between us that Symphonies were invented ditto memoirs all drama depends on our need to connect with one another and we're all doomed to drama even the most privileged Among Us suffer the torments of the Damned just going about The Business of Being Human people we adore drop dead or die over tortured years we born ugly and poor or Rich and handsome but uncared for and even the best families loved ones however inadvertently managed to destroy each other's hope they fail to show up at the key instant or they show up serving grief and shame when tenderness is starved for one great side effect of my own work is how often strangers skip the small talk to confide the more turbulent patches of their lives it's an odd phenomenon that I have never not been moved by such a tale and I'm not that compassionate or generous either still a living breathing human being even a boneheaded or barely articulate one conveys so much in person the physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering what Shakespeare called the poor bare forked animal compels us all we're all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another hearing each other's stories actually raises our levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin which is what nursing mothers secrete when they breastfeed what partly helps them bond with their young it helps to join us together in some tribal way it's harder to translate lived experience onto a page a story told poorly is life made small by words the key details are missing and the sentences might have been spoken by anybody we need a special verbal device to unpack all that's hidden in the writer's heart so we can freshly relive it a voice unfortunately nobody tells a writer how hard cobbling together a voice is look under a voice in a writing textbook and they talk about things that seem mechanical tone diction syntax D the writer says with a forehead smack diction is mer word choice what variety of vocabulary you favor syntax is whether the sentences are long or short how they're shaped with or without dependent clauses Etc some sentences Meander others fire off like machine gun runs tone is the emotional tenor of the sentences it's how the narrator feels about the subject Robert Frost said any time he heard wordless voices through a wall tone told him who was angry who beused who about to cry for me psyche equals voice so your own psyche how you think can see and wonder and scud and suffer also determin such factors as pacing and what you write about when since all such literary decisions for memoirist are offshoots of character I often find that any bafflement I face on the page about these factors is instantly answered once I find the right voice in Frank com's stop time 1967 he doesn't try to jack up a mediocre experience into dramatic spectacle rather he takes a small moment and renders it so poetically you can't forget it here he's a way smart pseudo delinquent high school student before school eyes closed head back I drank directly from the carton of milk taking long gulps while cold air from the refrigerator Spilled Out onto my bare feet leaving an inch for my stepfather's coffee I replaced the carton and pushed the fat door shut end of breakfast the scene captures the feral hunger of any adolescent male standing in the fridge door yet it feels so specific the long gulps the cold spilling on his feet even the inch of milk he has to leave behind for his stepfather is he doing it thoughtfully or sullenly or automatically you'll have to read the book to find out for Conor manages to make even the most quotidian event mean nobody's rendered a teens's cynical morning haste any better and the rhythm of the paragraph the long sentence three lines followed by a short sentence two leads up to three perfunctory words end of breakfast this is an outlaw boy scrabbling for small sustenance and the authority of the fat fridge door and his seminal voice in the context of the rest of the book lines up with croy's cool I can take being neglected Persona so powerful is croy's voice that at the Zenith of his powers he is able to sexualize the throwing of a yo-yo that it was B L masturbatory seems inescapable I doubt that half the pubescent Boys in America could have been captured by any other means a single loop the loop might represent in some mysterious way the act of masturbation but to break down the entire repertoire into the three stages of throw trick and return representing erection Climax and dessence seems immoderate Conroy puts him himself into a trance practicing the yo-yo thus disassociating from his family's profound lack of care finding that cool spot and the old hepcat Jazz sense of finding a Groove means finding order silence a place where time can stop in such instance of cool the boy and Pang Croy can vanish he'll later find sex and music and liquor and driving too fast as other modes of Escape into selfless silence having taught Croy stop time for some 30 years I can testify that students seem to trust this voice they believe it that it won't LI or mislead fabricate a vents or Pander confess the Lesser sin to hide the greater bore or beg for pity Ergo in literary terms it sounds true again voice grows from the nature of a writer's Talent which stems from innate character just as a memoirist nature bestows her magic powers on the page we also wind up seeing how selfish or mean-spirited or divisive she is or was we don't see events subjectively we perceive them through ourselves and we remember through a filter of both who we are now and who we once were so the best voices include a writer's insides watching her mind feel around to concoct or figure out events you never lose sight of the ego's shape its blind spots dislikes wants the books I reread don't seek to record as film does a visual medium Tethered to surface action these days in popular film The flashier the better nor as history does by weighing and measuring various sources and crafting a balanced perspective to tell the truth such a memorist can't help but show at each bump in the road how her perceptual filter is distorting what's being taken in in other words she questions her own perceptions as part of the writing process the deeper and Argo more plausible sounding writer in chirs just as memory distorts so too does the EG's synthesizer shape even the simplest of our Sensations and voice should reflect that Distortion Conroy in his non-nonsense milk guzzling doesn't sound frail or sentimental nor does right in his righteous rage the noise each makes speaks his character into being both sound tough and cynical even as kids since a personal theory about the world and one's place in it can make it appear so we can assume that there is weary in the world is on the page they translate events coming at them to conform to ideas about how they presume stuff works in their cases perhaps through a scrim of smart canny suspicion but how dare I speak of Truth in Memoir when it's common knowledge that the subjective egoistic perception is AR priori warped by falsehood perhaps mildly so in self-serving desires or wildly so in hardwired paranoia a Buddhist monk might call how the ego takes in the world Maya or delusion a psychologist might point out how you project past traumas onto today's innocent events so how's veracity possible it's not that memories aren't shady but the self-aware Memoirs constantly pokes and prods at his doubts like a tongue on a black tooth the trick to fashioning a deeper truer voice involves understanding how you might misperceive as you go along thus looking at things more than one way the goal of a voice is to speak not with objective Authority but with subjective curiosity for me say a penchant for gloom has to be confessed to throughout any book I write Bleak humor right at the edge of being wrong has kept me alive so it's wound up in my work asked by my sister why I was sexually assaulted as a child but she wasn't I quipped maybe you're not cute enough which takes one of the darkest events in my life and tries to turn it into a put down for somebody else talk about Grim to chirp my story like some bouncy cheerleader would be to lie that grimness has to make it in a believable voice notes how the self may or may not be inventing reality morphing one's separate truths most of us don't read the landscape so much as we beam it from our eyeballs the inability to Dawn angel wings to Sherk culpability or Justify past sins seems innate to the voice of every memoirist I rever the life chroniclers who endure as real artist come across is folks particularly schooled in their own Rich inner geographies a quest for self- knowledge drives such a writer to push past the normal vanity she brings to party dressing she somehow manages to show up at the ball boldly naked a memorist nature the self who shapes memories filter will prove the source of her Talent by talent I mean not just surface literary gifts though those are part of the package but life experience personal values approach thought processes perceptions and innate character here's alif bachuman in the possessed adventures with Russian books and the people who read them dramatizing her talent for surreal metaphor along with her passion for Russian lit the passage comes from her magnificently slapstick chapter detailing an academic conference on Bauman's hero Soviet martyr Isaac Babel when the Russian Academy of Sciences puts together an author's collected works they aren't aiming for something you can put in a suitcase and run away with the Millennium edition of Tolstoy fills a 100 volumes and weighs as much as a newborn beluga whale I brought my bathroom scale to the library and weighed 10 volumes at a time time the detail of her hauling a scale to the library marks her an adorably obsessive C and we hope her passion for Russian lit will infect us Hint it does like Ban's work babbles is also earmarked by Shocking ju to positions in Unforgettable similes one of his red Cavalry stories Begins the orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head you can watch bachuman hone her talent for metaphor if you read the first version of this essay as I did and the literary cult mag n+1 where tolstoy's collected volumes first weighed as much as quote a large Timberwolf close quote most of us would have let the wolf metaphor stand it's jolting and funny and Echoes a Russian landscape but she rewrote and the beluga whale is the far better animal springing as it does from salty caviar which Echoes The Lost Empire of the Zars plus the whale like Tolstoy is a behemoth reigning in a rarer element than the wolf it's hard even to believe he's a mammal like the rest of us as you start out in rough drafts setting down stories as clearly as you can there begins to burble up onto the page what's exclusively yours both as a writer and a human being if you trust the truth enough to keep unbailing yourself on the page no matter how shameful those Revelations May at first seem the book will naturally structure itself to maximize what you're best at you're best at it because it sits at the core of your passions Cheryl stray who's wild still rides the bestseller list was blessed with a passion for poetry that informed her language that and the discipline to keep a Daily Journal during her solo hike of the Pacific Trail gave her the skeleton of that book stray speaks of Truth as a quest I tell students they want to find the true truer truest story her first draft scraped the surface but she found deeper psychological truths and revisions how you approach the truth depends on your passions Russian books and surreal metaphor for Journal keeping and poetry and Hiking you can witness two different talents approaching some of the same material by reading Brothers Jeffrey and Tobias wolf Jeffrey seminol Duke of deception 1979 partly Grew From his extraordinary skills as a biographer he used a historian's investigative research to Route out his con man father's lies research and interviewing were gifts Jeffrey had mastered in his fascinating and immaculately documented biography of Lost Generation suicide Harry Crosby black son jeffy's Memoir uses photos and documents to announce it as an investigated work but non-fictions Notions of the truth kept evolving by the time his brother Tobias brought out This Boy's Life In 1989 he used no photos no interviews his work is an active memory two men two talents two approaches developing a voice is actually learning how to Lodge your own memories inside someone else's head in some ways the narrator comes to exist as a standin for the reader the only way I know to develop a voice is to write your way into one as a memoirist moves words around on a page telling stories she starts to uncover that thing she does best which should stay in view during most of the book and you need not be fancy in diction in syntax to win an audience only true Frank mccort's Angelus ashes uses the proletariat's blunt monosyllabic diction to work magic my father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born instead they returned to Ireland when I was four my brother Malaki three the twins Oliver and Eugene barely one and my sister Margaret dead and gone when I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all it was of course a miserable childhood the happy childhood is hardly worth your while worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood people everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years but nothing can compare with the Irish version the poverty the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire pompous priests bullying School Masters the English and the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years above all we were wet other than a peppering of latinate words like loquacious mccort uses words we learned by fifth grade it's what he writes and when and the directness of his utterance that we connect with a polymath like Nabokov more on him in the next chapter Wows us with his linguistic surface mccort Works to make us identify with him more the first paragraph POS its family trouble my father and mother should have stayed in New York then draws the simplest list of siblings ending with the awful presence of a dead infant and since mccort knows in some ways that we as readers fear the cliche of an awful Irish childhood he addresses that fear right off so he comes straight to where the readers cynicism about his Enterprise hides mccort then routes it out with mockery a Pious defeated mother moaning by the fire pompous priests bullying School Masters he ends with a simple understated carnal joke on himself in the physical cold of his Island Home above all we were wet mccort raises psychological Stakes while wowing us with both tragedy and humor promises for what the book will hold he would have failed trying to use nabokov's diction syntax or psychological approach chapter 5 don't try this at home the seductive narcissistic count I mean what would you do if you had to create Beauty I'm afraid I'd start screaming the most irksome forms of insects coming from my mouth I'm afraid I'd come up with death Dean young one story so enchanting is the atmosphere Nabokov conjures in my brain that reading him almost rewires it I lift my face from a folded down page to find colors brighter edges sharper trash I Glimpse on my otherwise shoddy Street a ticket stub or lip sticky cigarette butt come across as souvenirs from some Intrigue that dissolved right before I looked up the world becomes a magic collage or mysterious art box allbound object assembler Joseph Cornell and it works every time you reread a miraculous widget for perceptual transformation as Philip Lin once said of poetry's slot machine you put the penny of your attention into it pull a handle and a feeling comes out like my students I've tried to copy nabokov's mysterious dance methods and I look like a fool some Stout and haar suit crossdresser trying to pass his pretty and pink ballerina tights having taught this book at least a dozen times I still find it a mystery trying to catalog nabokov's talents would take a library and yet not to call out speak memory and a book about Memoir would be like 4th of July Sans fireworks looked at through the lens of a more ordinary writer's gifts speak memory leaves out much that a normal reader tends to to identify with yet we wander its pages with Wonder and feel bereft as any Exile at its end recently from sheer frustration I started calming it for what isn't there which it surprised me to find is the kind of deep link with an author that hooks me into most other great Memoirs speak memory lacks longrun personally dramatic stories of the type associate with normal plots there's no dialogue the occasional instant or anecdote but very few scenes you're intimate with the writer's thought processes without feeling he has anything in common with the likes of you the writing is intoxicating and irresistible but you can't find your experience anywhere in it his extreme refinement frees him from the humdrum where most of us live novelist Jenny aill refers to him as an art monster quote Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella his wife licked his stamps for him the creature you find in speak memory is rare enough to beo worthy he's not just smarter but somehow more of feat than most of us without seeming put on resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace he doesn't sound Prissy painting himself as a cultivated cthe who can hear colors and see music nor Bane talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages he's just your standard virtuoso Aristocrat from a Gilded Age which is the miracle of his talent he has shaped the book to highlight his own magnificent way of viewing the world a Viewpoint that so eats your head that you never really leave his very oddly Beed skull and you value things in the book's context as he does never missing what you otherwise adore in another kind of writer in fact if you could list some of the information to bof reports about his relationships apart from his magical atmosphere you'd find he fails to meet many measures we use for being a halfway decent person if we weren't so in love with him we might cringe from him his aristocratic social mores and emotional quirks absent the beguiling atmosphere he Woos us into could come off as fish at best or malignantly misanthropic at worst the book is a mesmerizing meditation on the nature of beauty time and loss played out against backdrops of very dusted interiors and it's a cry of longing for his lost parents and of joy for his wife and son Nabokov unabashedly identifies with Imperial Russia's Lush Allure as the rich lived it in the early 1900s Enchanted rooms he stares us through Page after page he gives us philosophy in moments of transcendence he leaps and drags Us in his wake across the century and we follow him without Envy at his privilege we're just glad to get past the Velvet Rope not nothing in his existence is B now he never bored or irritated his parents are never less than glorious dolls incapable of doing anything Petty or commonplace both shown like the sun his mother wears white and shades of rose bestowing on him sugary advice I.E love with all your soul and lead the rest to fate his father resplendant in horeg guard uniform quote with that smooth golden swell of qu grass burning upon his chest and back close quote is the Luminous King in a myth Nabokov gets away with this by making us fall in love with his aristocratic mindscape of all his talents it's nabokov's flare for carnality by which again I mean physicality not sexuality that first lures me in he can light on a physical object and by filtering it through his perceptual machine transform it into a relic that shoots off poetic associations like Sparks his whole childhood seems devoted to ingesting as much Beauty for memory as he can wolf down thus forging The Lost Empire into art before it turns to Ash in his memory he makes these objects signify in metaphorical ways that merg them with the book's themes he must as an expression of love for the law become sophisticated enough in taste to travel back and forth through time at will to find the underlying patterns that order what's otherwise been obliterated the whole effort is a salvage operation with life or death stakes and the plot so far as one exists organizes itself around his making a sensibility fine enough to save the quote unquote perceptual Eden he claims he was born into in another writer's hands to focus on a single object at length reads as off point or decorative but for nebach off every object pretends a whole slew of other meanings ideological moral spiritual that weave into the book's light motifs so the objects he dwells on aren't just pretty gigos from antique parlors he infuses them with emotional consequence and symbolic weight and philosophical rth resonance early on he starts training you to read into things like a necromancer deciphering the Stars he's a kid in a cot making a tent of his bed clothes quote shadowy snows slides of linen and that crib exists for me as though I'd wallowed in it and it's his mother's Jewels he played with in the crib rings and Tiaras and so forth a certain beautiful Delight yully solid Garnet Dark Crystal egg left over from some forgotten Easter I used to chew a corner of the bed sheet until it was thoroughly soaked and then wrapped the egg in it so tightly so as to admire and relick the warm Ruddy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping through with a miraculous completeness of glow and color a lesser writer might sound FL flid detailing an object's Jewel likee Hue with phrases like miraculous completeness but in nabokov's case his traumatic devouring of the egg enacts his actual physical passion for splendor while granting the object psychological power he calls sucking on it quote not yet the closest I got to feeding on beauty close quote so that egg is St St cold food only nurturing to the poetic mind which is the altar at which Nabokov worships the fake egg is maternal and primordial and it holds in its Ruby light bir's promise and he the artist to be is nursing on it this is baby Nabokov The nent Connoisseur coming to Consciousness before his mysterious radiant God Timeless beauty that stone Garnet egg is cold and indestructible but somehow mother's milk for him the description comes early enough to help establish in a reader's mind the poetic Resonance of objects as part of the book's inner struggle siphoning up beauty isn't only a light Motif it's a form of survival so he can devote a chapter to Butterfly hunting while his father being shot in Exile occupies less than a moment moment and the two events in no way seem off-balance in the writer's account books of course it's his father who taught him to stalk through the fields with a net so in some way the folded papery insects are paternal heirlooms short-lived flying flowers sacred icons from the Divine patriarch known for his cutless and boxed dueling pistols the whole Russian Revolution that ruined and his family in every sense is mere background music to nabokov's refinement it will take a Keen Eye and Keener taste and the keenest of philosophical Minds to rescue his lost beloveds from the ravages of time and it's his inability to control time externally to resurrect them that serves as his inner enemy in a great memoir some aspect of the writer's struggle per s often serves as the book's organizing principle and the narrator's battle to become whole rages over the book's trajectory so being an afficianado of beauty and philosophy makes nabokov's parents alive for him in the book in this way developing his aesthetic sensibility becomes a life or death matter not a peacock's vain preing part of his singular scale manifested in his voice is translating philosophical ideas into physical or carnal metaphors and this way he is not unlike Babel and bachuman he'll somehow smoos ideas into Unforgettable images instead of saying as I might dully enough the whole universe is small compared to a single memory iakov injects feeling into the idea and makes it syntactically memorable as Hell by Conjuring his own Wonder with an image we'll find wonderful ourselves how small the cosmos a kangaroo's pouch would hold it how poultry and puny in comparison to human consciousness to a single individual recollection and its expression in words like any Master writer he's found the trick of doing what he most excels at structuring the voice so that his talent sits in the foreground students love trying to imitate Nabokov which teaches them a lot mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself naov wannabes don't just sound like turds but like pretentious turds The Writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own ESS which I call talent and which is best expressed in voice which brings me back to that simplest of voice building blocks addiction Nabokov uses addiction more ornate than would fit most of us for the vast majority of writers were better off with simpler vocabulary the shorter often monosyllabic words you use all the dang time unless you're like my friend poet Brooks Haxton who translates greek latin French Hebrew and German throwing in $3 words will just make you look like a dick so you're better off writing than copulate the first has Germanic Origins the second derives from latinate language there are no rules but Germanic words tend to be thought of as low it's the vocabulary of the street of childhood or the underprivileged the other vocabulary is often seen as high the parament of Science and diplomacy in France there was an actual Academy that screened out words deemed to sh ity Germanic or scrofulous latinate to join their fancy dictionary Nabokov sentences go on for lines and sometimes pages and his high futin diction Sprouts naturally from his polyglot education and rarified background his psychological need stated early in the book is to be free of time which will eradicate the past he's trying to hold on to he almost can't believe we sometimes think that his mind can't change the facts so being untethered by chronology becomes like his constant trolling for beauty part of the book's driving engine almost working like a plot he opens with the subject the Cradle rocks above an abyss and Common Sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of Light Between Two eternities Of Darkness I rebel against this state of affairs I feel the urge to take my Rebellion outside and pick at nature throughout the book he talks about how quote the walls of time separate me and my bruised fists from the Free World of timelessness later he writes quote initially I was unaware that time so boundless at first blush was a prison close quote what caps off time for us of course is death nabaka loves twinning finding matching patterns in disperate places and laying them together like butterfly wings the cradle that opens the book becomes by the first chapter's end a coffin presumably his father's he ends the chapter with that coffin in a long unspooling for yard sentence that starts with a memory from young nabokov's childhood place at the table he watches his exalted father perform what he calls quote an act of levitation close qu when peasants toss him in the air three times in the mighty heave ho close quote their way of cheering the land owner Lord for some gift he flies up and hangs suspended in the window as if by Magic the subsequent metaphor takes us on a long journey and then there he would be on his last and loftiest flight reclining as if for good against the cobalt blue of the summer noon like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar with such a wealth of folds on their garments on the bolted ceilings of a church while below one by one the wax tapers in Mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense and the priest chants of Eternal Repose and funeral lies conceal the face of whoever lies there among the swimming lights in the open coffin Ezra pound said rhythm in poetry is cutting a form in time nabokov's form in this chapter the Cradle at its opening the coffin at its end makes a satisfying little click in the reader head the shape of it works to satisfy you like repetition and variation in music now I'm not naive enough to think every reader makes the conscious association between the two containers for a human for and AF as Nabokov calls it baby corpse but such is my own faith in poetry which Taps into both the unconscious and memory that I believe finding the coffin at chapter's end gives even the most Reckless reader the sweet sense of some underlying order I'm enough of a poetry fan to believe it can work like Voodoo under a reader's awareness Nabokov makes you drool like one of pavo's dogs for these moments when he takes one scene in time and stitches it to another and finding lost Connections in these clicking or twinning moments becomes what you shop for as you read thus providing momentum from early on each flight from time implies longing and a desperate scramble to re-enter the past so when he sails from one era to start what would in another writer's book be digressive we gladly fly into another age with noov it becomes a forward movement not a sideways detour I confess I do not believe in time I like to fold my magic carpet it after use in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another let visitors trip and the highest enjoyment of timelessness is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants this is ecstasy and behind the Ecstasy is something else which is hard to explain it is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love a sense of Oneness with sun and stone Oneness with sun and stone sounds not unlike being God and from his state of timelessness he is a god at resurrecting the lost another twinning example at one point he describes a Boyhood encounter with General kurakin head of the Russian army in the East who lines up on a de 10 matches for young Vladimir to make a smooth ocean surface when the general tips the matches up in pairs to look like sharp waves the pattern represents a stormy sea 15 years later as Papa iakov flees the Bolsheviks across Southern Russia he meets what he presumes is a peasant in a sheep skin coat who asks for a light of course it's the old General seeking a match the twin moments are jammed together to reveal a great truth how the powerful fall the matches are burned out and lost but as for the general himself he's a pawn in the pattern not a character we've been made to care about quote I hope that old kurakin and his rustic disguise managed to evade Soviet imprisonment but that is not the point in other words whether this man lived or died interest the writer not near nearly as much as his own poetic associations what pleases me is the evolution of the match theme those magic ones kurakin had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid and his armies had also vanished and everything had fallen through like my toy trains the following of such thematic designs through one's life should be I think the true purpose of autobiography nabokov's not giving a crap about the general as a human Critter would read as hideously hateful in any other writer's book particularly one where the writer's warmth or heart sits at the core of her Talent Angelo say or mccort and iov's beloveds are wholly vague except in so far as they're recipients of his exaltations the characters he sketches in keenest detail tend to be people he scorns which differs from what we expect from most writers mostly we like them to sound fair it's one thing for Tobias wolf to snark at his tyrannical first stepfather with his nah note in this boy's lifee he used to say what I didn't know would fill a book well here it is close quote but we may have thought less of wolf as a narrator if he undertook the kind of grotesque portraits Nabokov can pain of family underlings like his neurasthenic governess mm moiselle her hands were unpleasant because of the froggy gloss and their tight skin be sprinkled with brown echomatic spots I think of her hands her trick of peeling rather than sharpening a pencil the point held toward her stupendous and sterile bosom SED in green wool the way she had of inserting her little finger into one ear and vibrating it very rapidly always panting a little her mouth slightly open and emitting in quick succession a series of asthmatic Puffs any character in a teen movie exhibiting even one of these qualities would be doomed for 2 hours to no end of high school cruelty in case we haven't judged her harshly enough from this portrait at one point he dubs her a creature without a soul brutal and yet we don't recoil from him because he's created a context where he's entitled to do this for him to Fain sympathy for her or to pose as a man of the people would come off as smarmy the following of poetic themes can be the purpose for him since that's the nature of his particular psyche and character and emotional ptoa and Camber few of us have such philosophical Natures so attached to deep emotional places nor the aat sensibility for such pattern making or thematic Explorations maybe Hong Kingston in the woman warrior nabokov's not cold PE books are more passionate he can make you tear up as he Mourns his family beings that I had loved most in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart his Outburst for his loved ones pepper the book but love is often manifest in a more oddly abstract form than most writers would be able to pull off whenever I start thinking of my love for a person I'm in the habit of immediately drawing radi from my love from my heart from the tender nucleus of a personal matter to monstrously remote points in the universe something impels me to measure the conscious ious of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebuli when most of us think of our love for a person we think of the actual person so a normal writer drifting into this kind of metaphor in the midst of her Memoir would sound like a literary showoff avoiding the point because nabokov's mind naturally moves in a metaphorical Direction he's trained us to read these excursions as emotional events Tethered to the writer's survival he devotes way more time to falling in love with poetry than he does to either brother yet we barely notice his completely ignoring one brother and barely mentioning the other Serge who was probably gay based on what Vladimir read in a teen diary which he showed rather cruy to a tutor yet the brothers are 10 months apart and as kids Vladimir admits to being both the coddled one and something of a bully we accept that situation as part of the universe we've begun to inhabit seray is the mere shadow in the background of my richest Recollections the two brothers cross paths in Cambridge where sirgas is missed as a crap tennis player and in Paris where he sometimes dropped by for a chat Nabokov loses sight of him during the war how is it possible this is an bigger deal to the writer I wonder he later learns that Serge died in a concentration camp nabokov's Ki explanation for this brother's absence fills one vague sentence for some reason I find it inordinately hard to speak about my brother then the reader hops over this guy's corpse as glibly as neov seems to on we go to the next ravishing scene still using devices more common to other memoirists Nabokov can draw tears from me at certain passages as predictably as if turned on by a spigot students who fear sentimentality as death have to study neov who proves that sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader aemotion without Vivid evidence for Nabokov memory itself is a country and his tender reflections with longing move us even more perhaps in coming from a speaker who can be so cool I see again my school room in Vera the blue roses on the wallpaper the open window Its Reflection fills the mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits gloating over a tattered book a sense of security of well-being of Summer warmth pervades my memory that robust reality makes a ghost of the present the mirror brims with brightness a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling everything is as it should be nothing will ever change nobody will ever die that passage shows how an odd instant in time can endure in memory and reassemble itself decades later the right producing in the reader that Berry sense of security on the brink which begins to tip and shiver toward desolation with that last phrase nobody will ever die of course there are thousands such more common moments uncommonly written in speak memory but mostly dakov structured the whole thing to play to his particular strengths twinning metaphor poetic moments of transcending time carnal luxury he found that talent for his talent he sets us up early on to assign emotional value to his abilities once we understand his process we can watch him Frisk around like a rabbit leaping forward and back in lengthy descriptions he's imbued with emotional heft and meaning that very leaping which would seem capricious or vain in another's work the process of his thought has become the point point of the book form marrying into meaning as it does in poetry a literary Miracle chapter six sacred carnality my holy of holies is the human body Anton COV May 1888 carnality sits at the root of the show don't tell edict that every writing teacher harps on all the time because it works by carnal I mean can you apprehend it through the five senses in writing a scene you must help the reader employ smell and taste and touch as well as image and noise the more carnal a writer's nature the better she'll be at this and there are subcategories according to the senses a great Glutton can evoke the salty bite of pastrami on black eye the sex addict will excel its smooth flesh the one with a painterly eye visual Beauty Etc every Memoir should brim over with the physical experiences that once streamed in the smell of garlicky Gumbo your hand in an animal's fur the ocean's phosphor lighting up bodies underwater all acid green of all Memoirs five elements carnality is the most primary and necessary and luckily for me as a teacher the most easy to master my Texas oil worker daddy introduced me as a kid to the rackon tour's need for physical evidence when he told me a story about selling fake moonshine to some City Boys his brother was driving off with Daddy hanging on the running board of a model te when a pursuer driving alongside snatched Daddy's pant off from behind bulkie I said you saw that in Bugs Bunny you don't believe me I didn't I had this shirt on when it happened my mouth slung itself open it's sad how long I believe stories based on arbitrary physical objects that my daddy fished out from his past and plunked down into my present like that shirt it became totemic evidence that elevated the tall into reality getting sophisticated about carnal writing means selecting sensual data items oders sounds to recount details based on their psychological effects on a reader a great detail feels particular in a way that argues for its truth a reader can take it in the best have extra poetic meaning in some magic way the detail from its singular position in a room can help to evoke the rest of the whole scene the way Conroy doing pages on the yo-yo evokes his body kinesthetically in the instant the great writer trolls the world for totemic objects to place on a page in every genre it's key playright and short story genius Anton COV could hypodermically inject an item so iconographic so reverberant with meaning that its presence almost recounts a whole character in his seminal lady with a dog a rake at a summer holiday Resort seduces a Pious young wife over a period of weeks and afterward as she sobs in bed he cuts a slice of watermelon the butchered fruit isn't a symbolic standin for the ruined woman but the coolness of his appetite for it as she sobs speaks volumes when one of the first confessional poets Robert L wants to describe the psychological state of his mother's tense aristocratic home he claims her claw foot Furniture has an on tiptoe air in the process making the cool wasby atmosphere into a kind of character the first Memoir is to lure me into her physical Universe with that kind of exactitude may have been Maya Angelo and I know why the Cage Bird Sings standing before her church congregation on Easter the child Angelo forgets her lines and peels caged inside a lavender taed dress she'd once thought was going to transform her into one of the quote sweet little white girls who are everybody's dream of what was right with the world close quote that beloved white girlness so at odds with the physical fact of her herself undercut any confidence she might have had which partly comprises that inner enemy I'll talk about more soon as she squirms and puffs scrambling inside to remember the hand me- down dresses silk rustles around her sounding like quote crpe paper on the back of her's close quote this wonderful Sonic metaphor evokes a time and place when horsedrawn Hees were draped in that Rivery fabric almost every one of Angelo's phrases in that initial scene possesses a kinesthetic element so we inhabit the girl's body which she wears with shame beginning with the sunshine Angelo puts us in a place in time only she can report on but Easter's Early Morning Sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut down from from a white woman's once was purple throwaway it was old lady long too but it didn't hide my skinny legs which had been greased with blue seal Vaseline and powdered with Arkansas Red Clay the age faded color made my skin look dirty her hyphenated adjectives once was purple agef faded old lady long captured the peculiar language of Southern complaint you know tits havin was an actual invective hurled around my East Texas neighborhood the detail of her bony legs covered with Vaseline and Clay a southern black alternative to stockings I first learned of from her is singular to her time no detail is brandex or generic it all Springs as Keats once said of metaphor like leaves from a tree and Angelo's descriptions never flag as her soft Fus fantasy ends so she's transformed into a too big girl with hair a kinky mask also squinny eyes my daddy must have been a she's a girl forced to eat pigtails and snouts further she has broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number two pencil the tooth space even Conjuring a kid's move a fitting a pencil there think of all the Dreadful carnal cliches Angelo might have chosen other than nappy which she does use once and you twig to her talent for placing our bodies alive in a scene strangely readers believe what's rendered with physical Clarity I once had a reader say I knew when you put in that old can of babo cleanser you were telling the God's honest truth a guy I played a kissing game with in junior high was stunned that 30 years later I evoked his red shirt with a tiny seahorse embroidered on front you're some kind of witch if you remember that he said again an instance of hyperarousal focus Narrows sense memories from these states May sometimes stay brighter in recollection than others anybody Juiced on adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol not unlike Angelo being scared in front of the church register sens Impressions more intensely than in more typical time going back to the aforementioned kissing game I can still distinctly feel myself inside the curved arms of the boy I'd so long had a crush on almost 40 years later I can still smell his Juicy Fruit gum I put my hands up almost to protect myself from standing too close and my fingertips had the seahorse outline imprinted on them of course physical details however convincing actually prove zip in terms of Truth surely I misremember all kinds of stuff maybe the boy I kissed was chewing Bazooka Joe or double bubble say but I think in this case the specific memory even if wrong is permissible because readers understand the flaws of memory and allow for them non- carnal people may have to stretch to become memorable describers we all start off sketching a character lightly hair and eyes and weight like a driver's license and a less thoughtful writer may fail to Sully the page with that person's physical presence again as if such a generic memory blurt makes an eternal impression as a kid I was so revved up and anxious and hypervigilant that I studied people as if with a magnifying glance stimuli others barely register can still come across very loud to me a haunting sense of place should Ripple off any good Memoir once the cover's closed and you may reopen the front again as you would a gate to another land anybody with crisp recall can get half decent at describing stuff with practice Hillary mantel explains her own confidence in her memories as growing from their vivid physicality though my early memories are patchy I think they are not or not entirely confabulation and I believe this because of their overwhelming sensory power they come complete not like the groping generalized formulations of the subjects fooled by the photograph as I say I tasted I taste and as I say I heard I hear I'm not talking about a prian moment but a prian copil as they do for Manel the sharpest memories often give me the spooky sense of looking out from former eye holes at a landscape decades since gone the old self comes back the former face when that transformation happens inside me it's almost like I only have to set down what I see compare two Master writers one in a non-c carnal instant the other in a carnal one a passage from Robert graves's 1929 goodbye to all that while good as Pros tells more than shows us his psychic state after World War I I was still mentally and nervously organized for war shells used to come bursting on my bed at night even though Nancy shared it with me strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been Ked killed I could not use a telephone I felt sick every time I traveled by train and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping don't mistake my view of graves he's an extremely carnal writer and his scenes of trench warfare clench at a reader's bowels but here the sentences have the quality more of a semantic memory than an episodic one memory told more than memory lived there is not a single scene but several condensed into phrases he tells you he's sick but doesn't occupy the sick body the only sense memory large but not dwelt on above is that of shells bursting in bed because they are plural the faces are less Vivid to us again he saw plenty of ghosts in singular form I'm only making a point compare this to the physical tale of Michael hair's own bad Flash and dispatches 1977 which he Likens to an old Acid Trip certain rock and roll would come in mixed with Rapid Fire And Men screaming sitting over a steak in Saigon once I made nasty meat connections rot and burning from the winter before in way worst of all you'd see people walking around whom you'd watch die in Aid stations and helicopters the boy with the huge Adam's apple and the wire rimmed glasses sitting by himself at a table on the continental Terrace had seemed much more nonchalant as a dead Marine two weeks before hair at first nearly faints then does a double take and notes that the dead boy is not a ghost the flashback seems triggered by smell with nasty meat connections and rot and burning unlike graves's plural flashbacks of lost friends here sees a particular ghost Marine with the huge Adam's apple and the wire rimmed glasses here goes on to describe his stress reaction in a way we as readers can enter my breath was gummed up in my throat and my face was cold and white shake shake shake that R shake shake shake is some of the rock and roll speak that fuels the voes engine and dispatches and steers the reader away from pity which he adroitly deflects with lyrics and dark humor carnal memories don't have to be traumatic of course simple ones stick because of repetition a neurologist friend took his college age daughter to a new chain restaurant spun off from the one they'd visited every Saturday for a pumpkin muffin when she was a to at the new place my friend foed a piece of his pumpkin muffin on his daughter without mentioning the old connection from first bite her eyes filled she was remembering she described every detail of the old place and how they go to the Botanical Garden after but it can't be right she said because this place just opened you know in Robocop when Peter Weller gets mold into some kind of metal suit with computer eyes and clenchy strongman hands an excellent carnal writer Fashions not a robot but what feels like a breathing tasting Avatar the reader can climb inside thus wearing the writer's hands and standing inside her shoes the reader gets zipped into your skin chapter 7 how to choose a detail literature differs from life and that life is amorphously full of detail and rarely directs us toward it whereas literature teaches us to notice literature makes us better noticers of life we get to practice on life itself which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature which in turn makes us better readers of life James Wood how fiction works as a kid one way I handled my own family crisis was to pick on a little kid next door Mickey Hines yes I was picked on but I also did picking on back part of the economy of misery handed down from older to younger on the Block while writing Liars Club I interrogated my memory coming up with poor possible details to give a reader one a bunch of us dared him to take his pant off in his closet with a neighbor girl right before we knew his mama was coming home from a dash to the store two I made him eat something nasty and a sandwich mud or dog I can't recall which three I used to ask him to play hide-and seek and then just go home while he looked all afternoon four I got him to smoke Nestle's quick rolled up in toilet paper which blistered his tongue number one with the neighbor girl would almost require a whole scene it would take too long to tell plus the memory is mostly semantic an idea rather than concrete images I didn't trust it the story could have been neighborhood Legend I had no physical visuals from the story number two about eating something nasty also sounds like something I may have just heard making somebody eat something awful in my neighborhood was a common trick maybe it wasn't this kid at all number three asking him to play hide and seek isn't as dramatic as any of the other scenes but number four with the fake cigarette is like nothing I've heard elsewhere it led to a string of physical details IE one dad across the street rolled his own Smokes on a red plastic and Tin roller we snitched it from a kitchen drawer along with the quick from a cabinet those concrete images made me trust my memory of the whole scene as mine not just something I heard about and the carnality of the burned tongue is something anybody 's ever sipped scalding coffee can practically feel there's an intimate truth that helps the reader enter the scene small and particular I also remembered he showed his mother the blistered tongue and that we as a neighborhood listened to his spanking in the bathroom after which was also very specific a hairbrush on his blubbery little ass that image shows our perverse Collective Glee at somebody else's pain plus overhearing other families dramas forms a big part of that Memoir what worried children often worry about is not seen But overheard chapter 8 huers the diluted and big fat Liars I saw prophets tearing their false beards I saw frauds joining sects of flatulant executioners and sheep's clothing who fled the people's wrath playing Shepherd's pipes zv Herbert what I saw maybe deceit and Memoir irks me so badly because some years back I endorsed one of the biggest literary frauds in recent memory fake Holocaust Survivor Benjamin will Ker's childhood recollection of aitz fragments carries praise and my name on the British Edition Circa 1996 but Bruno doer will Ker's birth certificate name not only spent the war comfortably in Switzerland he wasn't even Jewish he began faxing his therapist memories sometimes 10 or 12 Pages at a time as they came to him but the therapist knew his client couldn't really discern between reality and fantasy if he called the piece fragments from a therapy would have been fine the shrink said in Philip gic's New Yorker expose the memory Thief now the book's falsehoods seem so glaring wil mki would have had to be Superman or made of rubber to endure what he alleges one of the most unrelentingly brutal Journeys ever set in ink he claimed that at age three he hung by his teeth from a guard's bicep no such jaw strength exist outside the circus plus the guard would have to be holding his arm upside down bicep to the ground while supporting the Iron Jawed toddler riding on a conveyor belt headed for the ovens under naked corpses he feels two disembodied hands appear rescuing him from the in generator in the last second all of this he bounces up from charging at the next Nazi he sees like a rabid Chama some part of me I stifled knew it was false but I still got behind the book why was I just cowed by its resounding International endorsement more driving I think now was a guilt I'd suffer if it were true and I denied a camp Survivor his witnessing I just didn't let myself trust my instincts I was in good company will kerski would go on to win the pred deoir deaa in Paris and a national Jewish book award in New York where he beat out Ellie Vel and Alfred cisin also blurbing the book alongside me was biographer and investigative journalist G sereni who attended the nurg trials and wrote perhaps the definitive bio of Albert Spear today will kerski Cleaves unswerving to his story unbudgeted by physical evidence if the guy was attempting to defraud as kavich claimed he did the worst job in history for Clues abounded will kerski sounds more deranged than like a conscious fake and one of my most depressing exercises in public naive I've handed out to classes two unidentified chapters from two Holocaust Memoirs one Primo levies agonizingly true survival at aitz one wi kersis The Proven fabricator gets the vast majority of votes for veracity every time here's some reasons my very smart someb educated grad students give for taking all this in as true one he's not trying to make himself seem like a hero I disagree he's making himself seem like a victim which translates into Survivor which translates into hero two why would he lie about all this he seems to believe his lies according to his shrink and gich who interviewed him three the writing has an immediacy its first person present tense makes it seem as if he's reliving it more than Levy's more more formally written piece with its emotional circumspection four lack of exposition or rhetoric shows lack of thoughtfulness and therefore a lack of artificiality or deceit five the writing is more conversational than levies informality equals truth to many students six it's fragmentary like traumatic memory or a movie flashback seven he puts in dialogue whereas Levy the real Survivor is more sparing with dialogue will kerski has long conversations eight Levy uses too many proper names how could he recall them all I assume he's smart or maybe he looks some up nine Levy sounds too Upper Crust or smart which makes students see him as posed they find the informality of will kerk's writing winning they also have this complaint with Lefty Orwell he sounds too highbrow 10 what if it's true and we don't believe him in 2008 of 18 students only three found Levy the more plausible in 2012 of 21 students three again found Levy more plausible which means to me that reasonable judgment is still losing ground and cheating the public huers cheat themselves out of their real stories James fry must have fought to get sober before a million little pieces just not in the ways he alleged no doubt he suffered like hell but he somehow deluded himself that his real misery wasn't bad enough or maybe his real character wasn't Macho enough or nice enough to Warrant scrutiny but any addicts overhaul is a nightmare surely his true story would have been worth a read truth is less set in stone now more mutable we know better than ever that people lie like crazy they probably lied a lot before too but now cameras in a watchdog media seem way more Adroid at catching out their lies with the web we've got more people trying to track down the adulterer or photograph the drunk celebrity who's fallen off the wagon we also often believe all manner of horse dookie based on prevailing winds family denial systems stay impregnable based on that tendency or we're swept up in a tail we want to believe millions of perfectly bright readers get drawn in and duped by stories I fell for lilan helman's self-aggrandizing Tales in Pento until Mary McCarthy known as a rigorous truth Seeker told dick Kitt's television audience every word out of her mouth is a lie including and and the nothing protects us against practiced liars and husters nothing ever will what wrinkles me lately though is a sweeping tendency to deny even the possibility of Truth during a campus sexual harassment investigation my department chair said there's her version in his version there is no truth which infuriated me someone either assaulted the woman in question or not it was binary sure there are major mistakes of interpretation two cops beating a black man claim he was reaching for a weapon in his pants a video shows the victim groping but it's for an asthma inhaler in an off-kilter Paradox our Strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of on the page or maybe our appetite for the Fantastic fed by Iron Man and gravity and a failen of vampire and zombie based Blockbusters has eroded all public standards of plausibility even among perfectly smart people okay there are some Dumb Bunnies walking out of The Last Temptation Of Christ a friend overheard someone say I didn't know Jesus was so short our desire for spectacle has led many story concocting Memoir isting quotes into jacking up their Tales believing that the story with the most gunshots will win the biggest audience but it's the busted Liars who talk most volubly about the fuzzy line between non-fiction and fiction their anything goes message has come to dominate the airwaves around Memoir reading that scammer James fry got on a plane with a bullet hole through his cheek I deduced that even pre 911 airport security frowned on boarding The Gunshot wounded and when he alleged that his rehab made him suffer a root canal without a non-c Consciousness altering numbing agent sober people the world over knew the torture session was fake The Bullet Hole and unn numbed tooth were absolute tip offs surely other readers had they paused even for a second to consider the unlikelihood of those reports would have dubbed the guy a bullshitter but I'm guessing many just Shrugged past it because we've all chosen to accept that the line between fiction and non-fiction is too subtle for us to discern that's what fry argued on TV vigorously he had no reluctance to speak for all memoirist claiming self-righteously to both Oprah and Larry King that his form of Shameless embellishment was customary for all Memoir since the genr so knew are you listening St Augustine his self-righteous defense and total lack of apology might have tipped us off that we were dealing with a practiced dissembler of course there was no way for any of us to deduce what he flat out lied about he transformed his Frat Boys DUI with its $733 bail and a few hours sipping coffee in an Ohio police station into a month-long jail sentence the result of this roostery desperado's fist fight with cops and all manner of trumped up charges his college educated girlfriend became a crack horse since puberty and he claimed I stand by my book partly because the lies occupied only 18 Pages or 5% of it quote within the realm of what's appropriate in Memoir close quote to follow his reasoning an event manufactured from Whole cloth is the moral equivalent of another Memoir blurring identity to disguise someone or misremembering a date this isn't quite true the line between memory and fact is blurry between interpretation and fact there are inadvertent mistakes of those kinds out the Wazoo but fry didn't misremember and actually believe he had a bullet wound he didn't really believe he was incarcerated when he never served a day he set out to fool people so did Greg mortensson the skunk posing his Saint builder of Afghan schools in three cups of tea he didn't hallucinate that he'd been kidnapped by Taliban when in fact he'd been hosted in some kind people's homes he cooked up events to mold his Public Image into that of the noble forgiving Survivor of brutal treatment John CRA hour's three cups of Deceit details how mortensson went on to drain massive sums from his charity for personal use renting private jets for book selling junkets and buying his own books at retail to stay on bestseller lists he was forced by the Montana attorney general to repay million dollar to settle the allegations yet as recently as January 2014 I saw Morton used the same smarmy indeterminate non-con fession that once came out of James Fry's mouth quote I made some mistakes I'm not trying to make Li sniffing blood hounds out of memoir fans nor to silence wouldbe memoirist who give up the art fearing their minds aren't as steadfast as computer files and video footage I don't yearn for some golden age of objective truth when the fact police patrolled dialogue and Memoir demanding it be excised unless the writer had recorded backup but the popular scoffing presumption that memories solely concocted by self-serving fantasy and everyone's trying to scud has perhaps helped to bog down our Collective moral Machinery our reigning suspicion has extended the practiced Liar's motives to everyone including the well-intentioned truth seeker and so doing we've let a small cadr of schemers take over disgraced conmen have helped to author the dominant notion that a thinking person can't possibly discern between a probable truth and a hyper embellished Swindle based on their Antics we've begun to abandon all judement thinking instead oh who knows anything's possible everybody lies anyway my heroes in the fields of memoir and journalism don't find the line so indeterminate Hillary mantel still shoots for undiluted reality I have an investment in accuracy I would never say it doesn't matter it's history now and David Carr outlined this once simple standard in journalists dancing on the edge of Truth where he indicts shamed New Yorker writer Jonah larer for making up quotes from Bob Dylan every reporter who came up in Legacy Media can tell you about a come to Jesus moment when an editor put them up against the wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull show respect for the fundamentals of The Craft or you would not soon be part of it I once lost a job I dearly wanted because I had misspelled the name of the publisher of the publication I was about to go to work for not very smart but I learned a brutal lesson that stayed with me however often the airwaves wind up clotted with false memories and misidentified criminal culprits and folks dithering about what they recall I still think a screw has come loose in our culture around Notions of Truth a word you almost can't sit down without quotes around it anymore so sometimes it strikes me that even when we know something's true it's almost rude to say so as if claiming a truth at all what threatens someone else's experience most of all no one wants to sound like some self-satisfied prozer everybody can pounce on and debunk the American religion so far as there is one anymore seems to be doubt whoever believes the least wins because he'll never be found wrong it is odd that I've never seen a televised minute about the simple rules of veracity the non-fiction writers I know seem to cleave to murdering themselves in revision after revision trying to meet it this overlooks the reality am I the only person left alive to believe this that most memoirists know the past can be a swamp nonetheless most are trying to find footing on more solid ground some memories often the best and worst burn inside us for lifetimes fluid Unforgettable demanding to be set down chapter N9 interiority and inner enemy private agonies read deeper than external whammies it is a misfortune in some senses I feed too much on the inward sources I live too much with the dead my mind is something like the ghost of an ancient wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be in spite of Ruin and confusing changes but I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight George Elliot Middle March carnality May determine whether a memoir is any good but interiority that Kingdom the camera never captures makes a book reread by reread translate great your connection to most authors usually rest tobac off and a few others aside and how you may identify with them mainly the better memoirist organizes a life story around that aforementioned inner enemy a Psy struggle against herself that works like a thread or plot engine interiority moves us through the magic Realms of time and Truth hope and fantasy memory feelings ideas worries emotions you can't show carnally or told whenever a writer gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots or judges she moves inside herself to where things matter and mean early on in a childhood tale an author may render Consciousness Awakening that enduring often trivial first memory through which a narrator blinks into being Nabokov made such a moment so singular its Machinery almost speaks to or Sparks my own such arrival as if he described something I too had felt but never been able to articulate I see the Awakening of Consciousness as a ser series of spaced flashes with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed affording memory a slippery hold as you watch the narrator feel around the edges of Consciousness for its slippery hold probing for what really went down you enter a singular set of psychic perceptions but craving that hold or permanence in what's ped is nabokov's inner enemy even a writer with gargantuan external enemies must face off with himself over a book's course otherwise why write in first person at all the split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book's thrust or through line some journey toward the self's overhaul by books end however random or EP otic a book seems a blazing psychic struggle holds it together either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling forward often the inner enemy dob tals with the writer's own emotional investment in the work at hand why is she driven to tell the tale usually it's to go back and recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity Frank Conroy's inner enemy is his inability to maintain balance and control in the chaotic world of his feckless family without either disassociation or rebelling in self-destructive ways stop time shows the power of spacing out to protect a kid in pain that inner blankness or emptiness provides the place where Conroy a professional jazz pianist when I knew him could shape music or form out of his environment's painful disorder he enacts how a deprived kid survives not just suffers and it's through disassociation a Consciousness leaving time and place for an hour or more I lay Motionless in a self-induced trance my eyes open but seldom moving in this state my ears seemed rather far away I was burrowed somewhere deep in my skull and the undercurrent of the book is the aimless boredom of childhood since kids lack power and agency over much they must Embrace empty time Conroy does it with bitterness My Philosophy at age 11 was skepticism like most children I was anti- sentimental and quick to hear false notes I wait Ed more than anything else waited for something momentous to happen keeping a firm grip on reality was of immense importance my vision had to be clear so that when it happened I would know a spectacularly unsuccessful philosophy since nothing ever happened as his Reckless parents and lackluster teachers failed to protect him he gradually slipped into the state of being in trouble the book opens with him as an adult driving drunk at 100 mph from London to his home in the suburbs his outlaw street which we grow to love him for also endangers him for Harry Cruz his fatherless State somehow Cuts him off from forging a solid self he started the book quote because I've never been certain of who I am he's a man stripped of identity which he can only reclaim by reabsorbing his lost Home Place partly through memories of the father who grew there and then died before Cruz could be born the book's stated emotional Quest is to gather and utter old stories to fill in blanks in the writer with this old man's past and peoples otherwise Cruz might have to move through life as an undefined Shape Shifter a kind of poppet for for other people's influences he describes himself as a guy who goes from mask to mask slipping into and out of identities as easily as people slip in and out of their clothes even the voice we find so distinctive he claims is actually malleable as putty as a reporter listening to the recorded interviews with film stars or truckers after the fact his quote own voice will imar become indistinguishable from the voice of the person with whom I'm talking by the third or fourth tape some natural mimic in me picks up whatever verbal ticks or mannerisms it gets close to close quote in his Macho named book Blood and grits he confesses the shame of trying to be a literary man when he comes from illiterate sharecroppers everything I had written had been out of a fear and clothing for what I was and who I was it was all out of an effort to pretend otherwise this seems the place to mention that we later find out that Cruz's mother remarried while Cruz was still a baby and so till age six the man he called daddy was a violent drunk uncle who terrorized the family before Cruz was even conceived the father he Mourns lost one testicle to the clap while working on on a dredging crew in the Florida swamps he caught it from quote a flat-faced seol girl whose name he never knew and who grunted like a s and smelled like something shot in the woods close quote this unflattering portrait of the unflattering ACT helps describe the hard place we're in a universe full of loud pigs and shot things you have to take whiffs of while walking around it's a world told in must ular language and jam-packed with action of the grittiest sort but that lost world is also one where people hang tough together and Cru sounds above all else so lonely and disconnected that sense of unassailable community would seem to him like food to a starving man Cruz never seems to have had a pal like his daddy's on the dredging crew guy who took the AL man to have one testicle lopped off before that the friend engages the old man in a grim banter that binds them the rhythmic stroke of the dred's engine came Counterpoint to my daddy's shaky voice as he told Cecil what was wrong when Cecil finally did speak he said I hope it was good boy I show do what was good that Indian you got the clap but Daddy had already known he had thought of little else since it had become almost impossible for him to give water because of the fire that started in his stomach and felt like it burned through raw flesh every time he had to water off he had thought of the chicky where he had lay under the Palm roof being eaten alive by mosquitoes because such stories are Cruz's patrimony the sole bonds that tether him to the planet the carnal reality of the place and his daddy's suffering body had an immediacy we have to buy into for the sake of his own manhood we sense Papa Cruz embodies the butch hypertrophied male and all of Cruz's tough a from joining the Marines and brawling and working as a Carney to getting massive skull tattoos seem to grow from the author's longing to live up to the Mythic Uber mench patriarch only met in photos and stories his is the gun that is always drawn his is the head that is turned back under the whiskey bottle that always is a kind of plaintive cry forgive me for getting all Freudian here but for the father with one testicle to have a gun that is always drawn does sound like a son's own desperate wish for a macho old man one mark of capital M modernism is writers commenting self-reflexively on the fact that they're writing as when a theater character breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the audience in a conflict such as cruises the process of telling a story in a way solves the psyche's core problem in this there's a poetic marriage of form and content the medium is the message again we hear Manel in giving up the ghost wrestling with her ability to incorporate her experience of the supernatural in a time when she'd be a judged mad for the belief so now I come to write a memoir I tell myself just say how you came to sell a house with a ghost in it but this story can only be told once and I need to get it right why does the act of writing generate so much anxiety Margaret Atwood says the written word is so much like evidence like something that could be used against you I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness and perhaps I still do but I also think that if you're weak it's childish to pretend to be strong unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project why should a reader have any a writer sets personal reasons for the text at hand and her struggling psyche fuels the tale here's me in my first book trying to explain how what I didn't know about my past haunted me when the truth would be unbearable the Mind often just blanks it out but the ghost of the event may stay in your head then like a smudge of a bad word wiped off a School Blackboard this ghost can call undue attention to Itself by its very vagueness the night's major consequences for me were internal the fact that my house was not right metastized into the notion that I myself was not right or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of not rightness in night concentration camp Survivor Ellie weizel perhaps suffers as much from his own guilt about how he treated his dying father as he does from the depredations the Nazis inflict while the sick old man in his death throws calls the author's name the young man stays away begrudging his father those agonized cries which eventually draw the blows of the SS I shall never forgive myself his last word had been my name a summons I had not responded Yes the camp and its tortures overwhelm we sell but this internal conflict deepens the story so it's odd to me that in later editions of the book weel cut the passage claiming it was quote too personal too private perhaps the need to Route out my own inner demons is why I always start off fumbling through my own Recollections only later after several drafts do I engage in research by visiting old haunts and passing my manuscript around the memories I've gwed on and rehearsed are the 's most key to what's eating me up and only those can help me to find a book's shape reading George Orwell's masterful essay shooting an elephant for my purposes a mini Memoir you see two halves of a man colliding he doesn't try to justify his own actions and putting down a pricey animal in Burma as a British police officer during the Raj he's not yet the political Lefty who fight in the Spanish Civil War and Penn 1984 but serving overseas he started to sour on imperialism and to empathize for the people he's paid to repress on the other hand the populous baits and torments him they're an obvious external enemy in Main in lower Burma I was hated by large numbers of people the only time in my life I've been important enough enough for this to happen to me but the inner struggle that shapes the piece is how that hatred begins to warp his insides Orwell's own malice eats him up so that he writes of the young monks who languish on the streets and tea bars to tease him I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts if you haven't read the piece it follows a simple thread an elephant in rut goes mad and kills it coolly but by the time the crowd is jeered and cajoled Orwell into rushing to the scene the calm sleepy looking Critter is pulling up grass to eat as he beats the dusty roots on his knees to get the dirt off Orwell observes he has a preoccupied grandmotherly air still the crowd bullies Orwell into shooting the elephant with a rifle so small he has to fire over and over while the thing gasps and coughs gouts of blood it's one of the most personally inditing scenes in Memoir I've ever come across when I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick one never does when the shot goes home but I heard the devilish Roar of Glee that went up from the crowd a mysterious terrible change had come over the elephant he neither stirred nor fell but every line of his body had altered he looked suddenly stricken shrunken immensely old he sagged flabbily to his knees his mouth slobbered what was happening to Orwell at that time the Schism inside between disgust at his role in the Raj and his Fury at the burmes who hated him for his role forges the story as he says near the end you wear a mask and your face grows to fit it he offers himself no mercy with the ironic end statement that he was glad the animal had killed auli fore it put me legally in the right close quote adding I had done it solely to avoid looking the fool try to think of Orwell writing the story solely as someone sympathetic to the burmes people and there' be no emotional power to what he was telling he'd come off as someone selfishly defending his own actions once the reader identifies a bane or self-serving streak the writer can't admit to with cander a level of distrust interferes with that reader's experience in almost every literary Memoir I know it's the internal struggle providing the engine for the tail Orwell's powers of description ring a emotion from a reader for all players the animal the people and the callow young police officer Lost In Fear And Pride yes the elephant embodies that old school battle with nature that powered so many great novels but it also mirrors Orwell's inner War chapter 10 on finding the nature of your talent above all don't lie to yourself the man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him and so loses respect for himself and having no respect he ceases to love Theodore dovi I often find students in early Pages showing themselves exactly opposite from how they actually are the talented young poet who didn't want to bring her passionately felt love poems because they felt too girly was an engagingly vulnerable and girly individual the super Brainiac tried posing as a workingclass hero one of the sweetest kids I ever knew wrote like a sociopathic hard ass trying to help students diagnose their own blind spots I often ask the following questions one one what do people usually like and dislike about you you should reflect both aspects in your pages two how do you want to be perceived and in what ways have you ever been false or posed as other than who you are lovers or family members yelling at you when they're mad have answered this one for you by the way three is there any verbal signpost you can look for that suggest your posturing one kid I know started bringing in references to metal bands to show how cool he was I might start yakking about philosophy any reader could answer these questions on my behalf I think one my friends usually like me because I'm tenderhearted blunt salty and curious I'm super loyal and I laugh loud two people don't like me because I'm emotionally intense and often cross boundaries sometimes inadvertently other times just being puckish my disposition tends toward dark small talk at parties bores me senseless and at weddings I prefer to dance rather than chitchat I'm a little bit of a misanthrope I cancel lunch dates because I'm working three I'd love the cool voice of an emotionally reticent intellectual my role in my family was to feel so I was initially scared to feel on the page doing so felt too bald and lunkheaded but when I get away from felt moments or stories I'm giving up what I'm better at four when I start digressing into high flute and dition about intellectual subjects I know nothing about I'm screwing up in short how are you trying to appear the author of a lasting Memoir manages to power past the initial defenses digging past the false self to where the truer one waits to tell the more complicated story chapter 11 the Visionary Maxine Hong Kingston we know the truth not only by reason but also by heart blae Pascal Pon Maxine Hong Kingston's oddly ethereal Vision helped Forge the genre of memoir as we know it and her woman warrior published in 1975 stands today on the shelves of most college bookstores and libraries after three decades of teaching her I still Marvel at how she enthralls my students the two prongs of her massive Talent mirror the two sides of the story's conflict her truth hungry feminist Americanized self does battle with her mother's repressive Notions of Chinese lady likeness and humility from the book's first breath the writer betrays a confidence from her mother a secret born of ancient cultural values that Define what being a woman should embody mostly eating a big sandwich with a cile smile on your face better to raise geese than girls is one piece of wisdom an infanticide for girl babies is accepted practice so the writer sets her own blabby American educated mouth against her mother's traditional ideas of feminine modesty Clan loyalty and demure comportment her struggle throughout the book the book opens with both the mother's admonishing voice and in the very Act of reporting that voice the daughter's broken Covenant in this Exquisite ventriloquism the two opponents start off speaking through the same mouth you must not tell anyone my mother said what I am about to tell you in China your father had a sister who killed herself she jumped into the family well we say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born before this nameless Aunt drowns herself in the well she turns up in the fields pregnant though her husband has been gone too long to have fathered the baby in a Savage hallucinatory attack the villagers rans sacked the family home stealing their rice and slaughtering their livestock to punish the family for the ant's shame that night the aunt Bears her bastard in a pig sty and in the morning the family finds her and the baby plugging up the family well Hong Kingston's mother relays the aunt's story to warn the Young author who's just gotten her period And Thus reached the age to bring shame away from sex away from appetite away from opening her mouth at all to be forgotten is to be condemned to an eternal hell without family forgotten ancestors are Hungry Ghost unfed because they're unremembered part of Hong Kingston's originality Springs from her poetic marriage of form and content the conflict raging between the two cultures within the young speaker shapes the book books flip-flops between realism and fantasy transgressing against the Chinese tradition of female silence she spills family secrets and displays a hunger for truth that makes her almost as dangerous as her shamed aunt she appropriates as a Birthright her mother's method of fable or talk story to fantasize about who that lost Aunt might have been Hong Kingston makes it clear she's not doing out facts just speculating on the dramatic possibilities At first she imagines the drowned ant as a rape victim assaulted in the field too ashamed to complain or maybe she was raped by a family member Hong Kingston also fashion her as an outlaw a Vain and Lovick tart a wild woman who kept rolicking company saving the ant from Oblivion Hong Kingston saves herself from being constricted by the old ways like a foot Bound in silk I alone devote pages of paper to her though not origami into houses and clothes I do not think she always means me well I am telling on her and she was a spite suicide drowning herself in the drinking water the Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one whose weeping ghost wet hair hanging down in skin bloated Waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute later in adolescence Hong Kingston begins to try to turn herself American feminine proud Standing Tall with toes out not the humble and Silent hunched over and pigeon toed Chinese feminine what is Chinese and what is movies the danger in China was the ancestors the danger in America are the children they inherit the ghost sins and are bloated and hungry she grows into a recklessly defiant daughter and a school bully trying to pinch and torment a shy student into speech Hong Kingston's lurid fantasy sequences Echo her mother's Supernatural Tales while reviews at the time likened passages of the woman warrior to the then new Latin American magical realism of say Gabrielle Garcia Marquez Hong Kingston's work is far more Supernatural than realistic facing danger her mother could metamorphose into a dragon she banned out her her Dragon Claws and riffled her red sequin scales she flew over cloudscapes contrast such Transformations with Garcia marquez's grounded in physical reality scenarios from 100 Years of Solitude which opens with the explainable magic of scientific invention ice in the tropics say or a magnet so powerful it draws nails from houses as it's dragged down the street in Garcia Marquez a dead man's dentur Sprout yellow flowers in his tooth glass and butterflies appear in the presence of a great Beauty surreal Garcia Marquez once quipped that's how life is in South America he makes the magical credible then step by step leads the reader into the ghostly Hong Kingston's book feels dreamier Bolder in how it challenges a reader credulity she starts off with physically possible events then eventually you must leap into an Enchanted Village structure where Spirits shimmered among the live creatures but given how the writer wrestles throughout her California childhood with the mysterious constraints of the ancient world the ghostly comes off as the truest way to render her internal drama she doesn't know what to believe and and what's myth the family actually refers to their American neighbors as ghosts it's family wisdom that as an immigrant child she is being devoured by this ghost culture so her parents hide things from her sometimes I hated the ghost for not letting us talk sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese don't tell said my parents though we couldn't tell if we wanted to because we didn't know they would not tell us children because we have been born among ghosts we taught by Ghost and were ourselves ghostlike mysterious rituals are enacted and never talked about at dinner mother would pour seum 7 into the cups and after a while pour it back into the bottle never explaining ironically the adoption of her mother's fantasy technique also serves this memoirist as an unlikely form of dis ression because of it the family secrets are kept in a way the book is a demim for reality and myth blur that uncertain Whimsy and another writer's book would wrankle or bore coming off as digressive or decorative attempting to use Hong Kingston's method myself I could too easily hear a reader saying get back to the real story as I tried to bamboozle her with pages of witchy spirits and conjecture but H Kingston dissects its cultural source and context as she explains how the Fantastic became real in her household we accept the mystical instant as wholly natural as in this Stranger Than Fiction trip to the drive-in there was the woman next door who was chatty one moment inviting us children to our first Sky movie and shut up the rest then we would see silver heat rise from her body it solidified before our eyes her husband threw the loudspeaker out the window and drove home fast the girl matter of factly watches this angry Spirit rise from a woman's body few other writers could get away with this it would feel like technique in Hong Kingston's hands it comes off as true because the world she's constructed operates that way she takes neighborhood rumor about a Corps strewn landscape and locates it in an actual physical Place once you accept this fantastic premise believing in the local witch isn't far off people have been known to have followed hobo paths into a slew and parted the stalks to find dead bodies hobos Chinese suicides children kids said this mad woman was a witch capable of witch Deeds unspeakable boilings and tearing apart and Transformations if she caught us she'll touch you on the shoulder and you'll not be you anymore you be a piece of glass winking and blinking to people on the sidewalk she came riding to the slooh with a broom between her legs and she had powdered One Cheek red and one white her hair stood up and out to the side in dry masses black even though she was old she wore a pointed hat and layers of capes Shaws sweaters buttoned at the throat like capes the sleeves flying behind like sausage skins she starts the awful scene of realistically dead bodies Among The Cattails then she moves to Apocrypha kids saying she could transform you then she launches into the fabulist yet such fables tell truths that would otherwise go unspoken in a culture that may strike an American reader as shadowed by concealment the Mythic serves as a form of sidewinding cander once Hong Kingston shows you how to read her you don't care whether you're in myville or on reality.com because some part of you has yielded to her methods over the course of the book you master swimming fluidly between both Realms some scenes are so thematically perfect and physically bizarre the reader doubts them though they're possible before hon Kingston started speaking in her American school she claims she took an IQ test and secured a zero IQ as part of a cure for her daughter's silence which meant failure in her American School Hong Kingston's mother went into the young writer's mouth with scissors cutting the small membrane under her tongue called the frenum thus freeing her tongue for speech the particularity of the event argues for actuality but its perfect match with the book's themes of feminine silence argues for myth while I couldn't directly copy Hong Kingston's method in my own first book studying her gave me the courage to use the Texas Tall Tales I'd overheard from my daddy and his gambling buddies after a cold ride in a Box Car a man finds a frozen slightly fuzzy object rolling from his pant leg thaw it in a frying pan it makes a fart noise but such a joke for me comes off as just that a joke no one would call it a witnessed event hon King Kingston's mystical swords women somehow become living creatures the truth of a writer's self Hong Kingston's pensent for fabulism say has a way of bobbing up on the pages like a badly weighted corpse you may as well bring the reader to the swampy grave from the get-go back in the 1970s Hong Kingston transgressed against a culture of Silence to Overlay Chinese myths and ancient texts unto a modern landscape it was a feminist act revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them while the book hit bestseller list and got Raves its writer was often trounced in reviews by male Asian scribers whose own lesser Works sank into deserved obscurity Frank chin scolded her and my friend Amy Tan among others for restating white stereotypes in their work tan recently noted Vis A Chin's attacks thate being marginalized by the reading public was a judged authentic by him whereas being read by the mainstream invariably meant you'd sold out close quote while I can't speak with authority to the issues of inequality chin seems rightly fired up about I must defend Hong Kingston's right to represent her own Chinese girlhood any way she damn pleases without checking with the male thought police first Amy Tam put it this way sure you can establish tidy moral or political standards for how race is represented on the page it's called propaganda propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture Hong Kingston's woman warrior has out live the past's more sexist environment to win the ardor of generations it's a Timeless Monument to Memoirs possibilities chapter 12 dealing with beloveds on and off the page families exist to witness each other's disappointments Laura Silman methods for dealing with family and friends differ as radically as writers do on one end sit memoirist mostly women who interview and almost collaborate Carolyn C rewrote her dreaming in response to family comment on the other sit those with enough Moxy not to give a rat's ass all men in my experience Frank Conroy claimed he did stop time without much interest in his own Clan's response at all if they'd have disapproved I wouldn't have changed a word my friend Jerry stall whose permanent midnight challenged family history by renaming his father's death as suicide once said if you had to live it you get to write it the gender divide makes sense men can become Men by rebelling against their folks The Angry Young Rock and roller stealing the car or standing up to the patriarch is an archetype edus slaying father to marry his mother but for a woman to kick her mother's ass is unseemly when I have chastised Lucy grey for in her autobiography of a face not explaining why her family seemingly abandoned her in the UK during the agonizing cancer treatments she underwent as a teen she said women are repositories of Clan lore and our femininity is gauged by the security of family relationships to drag out the dirty laundry almost masculinizes a woman of course we gossip and worry stories with each other in ways that would horrify many of our male kin folk but publishing such gossip Lucy suggested was something much worse Jeffrey Wolf bemon the effects of Duke and his Prim mother who'd been called a nasty Name by a scumbag reviewer after that he'd told me it was clear she wished the book had never existed he particularly warn me off TV talk shows where complex family issues get Warped into sound bites you take the people you love most in the world and make them characters in a narrative then you lose control of that narrative dick cavitt found my life droll then Toby's book came out to Wild Acclaim I'd twice met their mother immaculately quaffed and Tiny I sat behind them all in the movie version of This Boy's Life she's played by a chirpy Ellen Barkin Toby by Leo DiCaprio DeNiro does the awful stepdad Toby had to urge the director to edit out a suexual part how could I have witnessed such a thing the New York Times magazine quoted Jeffrey as saying here's this woman she's been written about once the trains rolled over her going north she picks herself up and dust herself off and here comes the train about to back over her mother Wolf's quip if I'd known both my boys were going to be writers I might have lived a little differently now comes the juncture where I either detail my own travails with others or end the chapter the the trustee literary advisers I call my kitchen cabinet have worned me off spending time here on my own processes maybe any writer who yaps about her work outside brief interviews comes off as a car salesman or worse as if she's touting herself as the do Yen believe me I'm not no one can be it's all too personal yet I don't know anyone else's adventures with family as intimately as my own and not to include them seems koi at best deceitful at worst so here goes in general terms there are three parts to my handling of others I notify them way in advance to give them a chance to shoot it down nobody has yet I keep Pages private till the book's done and at the end I send work out to folks I wrote about long before type set as a side note it's not my nature to write at any length about people I don't like save portraits of a grandmother who pissed me off and two pedophiles it's mostly love that drives me to the page my son was in junior high when my second Memoir came out and he took a stance he held for more than a decade I'm not ready to read your books this strikes me as wise it's one thing to know your mother was sexually assaulted quite another to read the graphic scene he preferred ref me as a dispenser of waffles not a literary figure but there's nothing in my stories he doesn't know in rough outline we're close and I'd never want him to hear family traumas from Pals with my last book lit I had him V the first chapter because he appeared there in his then current College age permutation he changed ner a word I'd have preferred that his father scrutinized that manuscript for accuracy but he preferred the blurring of a pseudonym I did send those chapters to our former marriage counselor just to see if she felt it fair glib as I once was in suggesting Lucy gy piss off her own family I was much like her before I set out to write about my less than perfect clan as a single mom far from home I dreaded pissing anybody off before I ever started Liars Club I kept phoning my mother and sister my daddy had passed to take their pulses about the project and warn them about any possible public scrutiny should I be so lucky as to draw any part of me hoped they'd chew me off much as I worshiped the form of memoir the Project's Prospect shot me through with Dread I felt compelled to write it yet broke a sweat when I realized how easy it would be to do it wrong truth was I had a financial flamethrower on my ass no car in Syracuse were the Snows measurable in yards and child care cost that precluded my making much on summer holidays maybe my mother and sister were so glib about the book because they were used to my small press poetry efforts with readership measurable in the dozens I knew my New York publisher hoped for world domination my family's unfl flap ability worried me more than if they'd thrown fits who cares my sister said get it off your chest my mother said they were both great readers and I'd been giving Memoirs as gifts for decades so they knew I was shooting for a 3D portrait not a burn your house down tell all still our household had been the sight of some flaming jackpots asked once how a bullet hole landed in a kitchen tile mother said succinctly he moved and that wasn't the only firearm incident my sister once quipped to mother as the tile guy fingered a bullet hole isn't that where you shot at Daddy and mother came back no it's where I shot at Larry over theirs where I shot at your daddy which also tells you why Memoir suited me with characters this good why make up but alcohol and Firearms weren't the whole story they sell seldom are there was Deliverance too thanks in no small measure to how mother sobered up in her 60s which showed me the way years later sobriety hadn't undone our tattered past but it had worked as triage to stop the bleeding and unearthing mother's long nurtured lies had led to our greatest closeness as a clan it pleased me no end that my family anticipated a loving portrait and we'd spent decades clearing the ground by talking over the books events anyway my therapist plural had urged me into those conversations still my family didn't seem to be twigging to the possibilities maybe their spectacular denial systems had kicked in again so at Christmas I flew down and spent several days detailing stuff I feared would embarrass them remember when you brandished a butcher knife F us and set our toys on fire and got taken capital A away oh hell mother said the whole town knew about that lucky is the memoirist like me blessed with a wild ass mother if I gave a what people thought I'd have been baking cookies and going to the PTA she'd raised hell and knocked over Supermarket displays plus she was a portraitist trained in New York so she understood how point of View and feeling shape reality she knew my voice would ground the reader in subjective reality not Fain absolute Authority it was my in some ways conformist sister who came off his way to Devil May care but with an edge a local insurance agent she cussed like a sailor and acted the badass but she'd always colored in the lines way more than the rest of us so somebody had to I guess she'd been naive enough to quip repeatedly and with cheer I didn't have to go to therapy because you went for me she belonged to Rotary and the women's Masonic organization even in the 1970s her jeans had military creases during her first marriage to a guy we called the rice Baron she once forbade me to visit their country club in my thrift store clothes I wouldn't sod my yard dress like that I was left she was hard right I was a boho loner she a southern business owner with a Christmas card list and the high hundreds but despite schisms between us well into adulthood in childhood she'd been my hero and so would she be in the book after a few days in Texas I brought up the only news the book would carry which didn't involve them really two childhood sexual assaults I kept to myself the morning I unburdened myself the news went by in the blip I'd expected mother said somewhat fiercely those sons of then after a brief L Lisa grabbed her purse I could really go for some Mexican food over lunch she talked about a guy who tried to force himself on her and how she'd physically overthrown him otherwise that ended the discussion until the night before I left when some business acquaintance of Lisa I barely knew came by and wanted to talk to me about the assaults Lisa had told him the whole story his soul question were you penetrated felt coldly prant but I figured if I were going to write a memoir I better get used to it you can't sign up to play football then whne you've been h it in the two plus years I was writing I kept the pages to myself but occasionally I rang mother to check out a fact usually a date or to take her temperature on how she felt about certain details going public God bless her she never blinked as to how I handled interpretive differences it may not work for everybody if somebody's view wholly opposed mine I mentioned it in passing yet never felt Duty bound to represent it for instance my blonde sister adored Our Fair grandmother Who Loved Lisa's blond ass back I baldly showed my own scorn for the old lady who thought my dark hair made me look Mexican o blight yet aloud as how my sister tatted lace with her and more or less sucked up I also mentioned that my grandmother was dying of cancer in her 50s which can't do much for your disposition and a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her brain no doubt warped her disposition in any event I doubt the reader accepts my hatred of her as just or Fair only that it was my view here's another such mitigating passage Lisa contends I started screaming and that my screaming CA mother to wheel around were Lisa writing this Memoir I would only appear in one of three gues sobbing hysterically wetting my pants in a deliberately inconvenient way or biting somebody usually her with no provocation in short I tried to lay out my prejudices and gesture there might be another opinion once the manuscript was done I flew mother up to Syracuse use where she sat reading pages on the back porch of and on she cried I was such an which shattered me in one way but I have to confess it also satisfied me in another ultimately she said something that rattled me to my core I didn't know you felt this way I also met Lisa in Colorado to do what we called the child abuse tour she flipped Pages while I drove around old haunts double-checking physical details it shocked me how she woled the book down how did you remember all this she'd phoned my editor of her own valtion to Rave about the pages and endorsed their truth as my mother had a few months before the book came out Lisa decided she was pissed off and stopped speaking to me though this was a fairly common phenomenon it's still set me back but I also figured she'd be such a hero to anybody who read the story she'd come around once it was published then a writer friend figured out a way to label the book fiction and write her out making me an only child no doubt my mother passed this Prospect along to my sister and not long after the Publishers lawyers reported that my sister had phoned to Champion the book's accuracy again she ultimately sold copies from her car trunk and bragged her ass off about it I can also honestly say that publishing the story freed us from our old shame somehow my beautiful outlaw 70-year-old mother received marriage proposals from strangers my sister was heralded as Brave in every review people wrote how my hard drinking Daddy was now their favorite patriarch in my hometown the facts had been common knowledge anyway but something about having all the bad news out and open air freed us even more call it aversion therapy we seemed collectively to get over mother's half century plus lies about who she was when she arranged a book signing at our local library over 500 people showed including old bows far-flung cousins and my first grade teacher in some ways that day with my mother and sister holding Court meant more than any good review I ever got truly a life highlight it burned away some old Aura of shame I think which phenomenon Echoes my favorite reconciliation story from Maxine Hong Kingston her mother couldn't believe how well Maxine had captured a village life she'd never lived and when her later China M was translated into to Chinese so her father could read it he started writing poems again in its margins which in Chinese books are super wide to permit commentary part of an old Confucian tradition if Maxim was complaining about how her people devalue daughters her father penned a poem celebrating women's equality these were the first poems he'd written since he'd left China to work in a laundry in this country and Max en's mother embroidered the characters in cloth to save them when I donated the books with his commentary to the library at University of California I didn't tell my father they gave a big party during which his marginalia were displayed in glass cases he stood before it and said loudly my writing all night so onlookers could hear among all the dozens of Pals and shrinks and acquaintances I've sent manuscripts to I've never had a detractor which probably says more about their generosity than my accuracy so I count myself more lucky than expert for the record here are my rules for dealing with others one notify subjects way in advance detailing parts that might make them wse so far no one has ever winced two on pain of death don't show pages to anybody mid-process you want them to see your best work polished three as Hubert Selby told Jerry stall if you're writing about somebody you hate do it with great love four related to the above I never speak with authority about how people feel or what their motives were I may guess at it but I always let the reader know that's speculative I keep the focus on my own innards five if somebody's opinion of what happened wholly opposes mine I mention it in passing without feeling obliged to represent it six don't use jargon to describe people it's both disrespectful and bad writing I never called my parents alcoholics I showed myself pouring vodka down the sink give information in the form you received it seven let your friends choose their pseudonyms eight try to consider the whole time you're working how your views especially the harsh ones may be wrong correct is needed nine with your closest Compadres and touchy material you might sit with them same house or town maybe not same room while they read pages that may be painful for them 10 I'd cut anything that someone just flat out denies then again in my family all the worst stuff was long confessed to before I started writing the first tone 11 let the reader know how subjective your point of view is this is in some way a form of respect to your subjects who might disagree chapter 13 on information facts and data the most interesting information comes from children for they tell all they know and then stop Mark Twain the first chapters of most Memoirs are fact packed facts are the meat and potatoes of writing necessary for a meal but devoid of much innate Savor nobody buys a memoir except maybe those by ubiquitous celebrities to master the cold data of someone's life most memoirists stand daunted by the first information dense chapter wondering how to cram in all that background data without the pages sounding like a shampoo bottles list of ingredients informational writing tells it doesn't show some writers make such great sentences that they Fascinate even while dispensing facts but mostly information is the good writer's Nemesis it Yanks the reader out of scenes away from drama and lived experience where the reader can watch external events and interpret them on his own getting fed Bland information is like being preached to by a school mm that said here's the kind of data you might need to squeeze in I was 14 and 7t Tall the War's losses increased tfold and yet High command denied we were losing the drought lasted 7 years and bankrupted the family his father was a banker his mother a homemaker some facts hold so much drama or psychological interest they prompt Natural Curiosity and a desire to know more in 1968 he shot himself with a Smith and Wesson pistol the most skillful writer either package facts so they hold this kind of psychological interest or the data gets palmed off in carnal scenes the reader can imagine and engage with on a physical level in these books you often don't notice you're being fed a string of facts they're sprinkled into other writing like pepper there when you need them but otherwise invisible my own first drafts start with information then I try to her that information out of my head into a remembered or living scene I often interview myself about how I came to an opinion then rather than present an abstract judgment she was a thief I tried to recreate how I came to that opinion she was a thief becomes I stared into the computer's big green eye inside which sat the website where my diamond bracelet was being sold Lydia's email contact in the corner some data you may think you need to blurt out the year for instance but saying on the news that summer I watched the president resign before helicopters on the White House lawn says Nixon Administration to the reader in a slightly more fetching way one cheap way writers try to strap on character is with te t-shirt slogans and brand name clothing I encourage my students to work a little harder than this try to find something singular and dramatic a person does instead of just gluing on a label that limits meaning to present-day fashion and won't make sense 50 years hence take data about a speaker's age and size standing under the orange hoop I was the only freshman who could lift one AP long long arm and brush net this says age and size and basketball prowess while being a vocative I tried to hunch inside the new letter jacket but my bony wrists stuck out this adds an element of psychology self-consciousness rather than simply describing his father's physique and Angela's Ashes Frank mccort dispenses data about the price on his father's head and then occupies a child's mind mind pondering his father's actual Noggin being paid for my father fought with the old IRA and for some desperate act he wound up a fugitive with a price on his head when I was a child I would look at my father the thinning hair the collapsing teeth and wonder why anybody would give money for a head like that when I was 13 my father's mother told me a secret as a wee lad your poor father was dropped on his head it was an accident he was never the same after and you must remember that people dropped on their heads can be a bit peculiar mccort's talent for verbal wit packed into a child's mindset means the pnal being serves as an occasion for dispensing other more dramatic data he lets us here in his grandmother's voice how he learned about his father's dropped on head this foreshadows the family's coming disasters and Promises drama peing a reader's curiosity in the course of all that he gives us a carnal portrait of the old man too George Orwell's moving Memoir of the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia also Palms off key data in a subtle way rather than start with the political sex and conflicts within the Revolutionary ranks he focuses on his encounter with a single Italian Freedom Fighter the description of the young guy locates the book as a song of praise to the peasant people or well feudly fought alongside against fascism it's one of dozen such portraits and it shows us why he's there he was a tough-looking youth of 25 or six with reddish yellow hair and Powerful shoulders his peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye he was standing in profile to me his chin on his breast gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table something in the face deeply moved me it was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend the kind of face she would expect in an anarchist though likely as not he was a communist as we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard queer the affection you can feel for a stranger it was as though his spirit and mind had momentarily succeeded in Bridging the Gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy I hope he liked me as well as I liked him by speculating whether he's an anarch or a communist Orwell lets us in on The Descent within the leftist ranks while saving us the boredom of a lengthy political disquisition he knows he has to make us care about the people first so he shares a sliver of how he came to care what makes Orwell a genius is trusting that this small strange moment that touched him so deeply could also touch a reader if he told it frankly enough in any good Memoir the writer tries to meet the reader where she is by offering information in the way it's felt to reflect the writer's inner values and cares either in clever linguistic form like mccort or dramatic scene like Orwell chapter 14 personal run-ins with fake voices the difference between mad people and sane people Brave Orchid explained to the children is that sane people have variety when they talk story mad people have only one story that they talk over and over Maxine Hong Kingston the woman warrior as I've detailed elsewhere it took me 15 years of scribbling first in poetry then in fiction to dredge up nerve to tell my childhood story in a voice that fit my face before then I hid from readers on pages that sugarcoated any emotional truths about us all part of an overall effort to sanitize our past and remold myself into somebody smarter faster funnier than harsh reality had afforded me to become literature when I was growing up had been the stuff of cool diffident hyper educated white guys and I was solidly Blue Collar Crown Princess of the crap job crawfish trucker waitress T-Shirt Factory seamstress a Dropout with an itinerant past in my zip cat of origin I'd Hazard that I was the library's most devoted New Yorker customer John ch's Tales of East Coast swells who drank their Scotch neat one me they had swimming pools they used summer as a ver verb and I wanted to sound like them despite the fact that the only books I identified much with were by writers of color like Maya Angelo reading Angelo's first in 1971 it wasn't just you can write about this but you can write about us even though her family was black and mine white I hued more to her worldview than to the four inhand tie kns riding the club car or going to the Yale game in cheap and salingers and Fitzgerald's books during my short College stent every time I picked up a pen this grinding unnamed fear overcame me later identified as fear that my real self would spill out one can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit what I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that in fact I kept Jenning out reasons that writing reality was impossible I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish by 22 I was soaking myself in the French poets who'd enthralled TS Elliot at my age he'd been writing proof Rock and studying philosophy at the sorbon which unlike Elliot I pronounced the sore bone also unlike him I read read these guys in translation from biographies of Arthur Rambo and Charles bodair I tried to Fashion an outlaw poet mask I wore black clothes and Scarlet lipstick and borrowed mother's old Beret I scribbled languid vague poems about Paris a place I'd barely been and a man I'd left there but barely remembered and those young poems of mine were sequent and embroidered with classical references to writers I'd hard read the cynic diynes whose motto live like a dog fitted I thought my faux Punk Patty Smith facade what did I write about wanting to get laid not getting laid getting laid badly wanting a guy to leave wanting a guy not to leave then he leaves in a Persona poem an old Gambler makes stiff statements about the nature of chance allas Stefan maler throw of the dice Daddy had often gone out to shoot craps when we' needed money for school clothes try to find a poet whose Talent differed from mine more than Elliot tight as a rolled umbrella somebody once called him or Insurance executive Wallace stevens or Prim Miss Dickinson it' be hard they're poets known for experimental bents and hermetic symbolic systems that can forge intense psychological spaces in a reader's head their voices also tend toward the reticent in a similar vein was New York school wizard John ashbery a glib easeful prolific God whose cool stream of Consciousness I worshiped my critical thesis on him topped 100 Pages this on a poet who admits he's indecipherable and cares not one Whit if the reader gets him this whole herd of poets all but Dickinson classically educated operates on elision and emotional Reserve by contrast I was a feral American half aborigin drinking and pogoing around Rock clubs while hotly suffering my disintegrating hard drinking well-armed family during this time my idea of fessing up was to obscure any actual memory and siphon all feeling off till there was not but sawdust on the page tell the truth but tell it slant Dickinson had said not drape gauze all over it so it can't be seen there's a difference between mystery and obscurity poet Donald Justice once said about real mystery Hillary mantels runin with ghosts say a writer can say every dang thing she knows without lessening the Enigma power obscurity is just hiding out of cowardice what fundamentally needs unveiling here's an excal excerpt from my 1978 poem civilization and its discontents a pretentious reference to Freud's Masterpiece it was my way of writing about Mother's breakdown during which she'd set fire to our toys and menaced us with butcher knife raised in 1959 some do sedated a Texas housewife fastened electrodes to her temples and flipped on the current her hair singed curled Loosely around her eyes which were pale green and dumb in the photo of her release this is where the story ends for the housewife who had once danced flamco in a bowling alley it's hard to say how much of her daughter burned away she evaporated into puberty and Jin and became a victim of rumor I won't bother to say what all is wrong with this the snotty devil mayare tone which would better fit a jokester fool like Letterman or the crap line breaks violent enjam Ms and uneven cabic pattern chosen for no reason there's no data about who the woman is or why you should care plus it's in no way true mother never dance flamco in a bowling alley nobody ever did or would a fine example of my limited fictional imagination puberty and Jen mean nothing they're a gesture about what who knows how post pubescent and hard drinking and World weary I was mother did way more interesting stuff when she had judged the small town supermarkets parmesan unworthy she upended the whole cheese display she wagged a shotgun at the ice cream truck when its Bells woke her from from a nap she owned a Couture soup from Paris and gave me sra's nausea to read when I was in sixth grade but I was somehow stifled from speaking directly about the far more interesting facts much less the events that ran through my nightmares and kept me dragging to a shrink's office if I wrote vaguely enough I risked nothing no one could understand what was going on I once heard a quote by Marin Bell on his early work I knew I was an experimental poet my poems didn't make sense in a private workshop with Ethridge Knight an excon from Mississippi and elsewhere ashy of knee and with hands Rusty enough to strike a match on he scolded me about the pretentious pages I turned in way before Poetry Slams he used to take us into bars or onto crowded buses to read out loud facing a listing drunk or a foot sore commuter you figure out pretty quick how irrelevant much of your driil is during this time my much-loved old man was killing himself with drink and the one poem Ethridge kind of liked of mine was about a suicidal dog the first line was don't do it dog that jokey riff was as close as I could come to the Deep mourning that corroded my insides like battery acid as I drove ethd crazy with my evasions spiraling around the homebased subjects haunting me in a poem called invisible man I actually faked both being black and knowing about scientific Notions of entropy and another called the double helix I quacked on about genetics a subject that I only knew existed through the similarly titled Memoir by Francis Crick and James D Watson then I had a lightning Stroke of Luck I blindly bumbled into one of the planet's best conversations about Memoir age 23 loose is a hard slammed pingpong ball I found myself rolling into a graduate program in poetry the only one that would take me son's college diploma and then only on probation till I proved I wasn't as dumb as I looked which I probably couldn't have been I remember the room and the gray metal chair from which I first heard Jeffrey wolf read about his con man father it was August in Vermont and hot somebody turned off the gale force floor fan as he stepped to the Lightwood Podium so we could hear him better with his Hemingway beard and Polo shirt Jeffrey looked like he'd be equally at home propping up a martini glass in some Smoky Jazz dive or on a Cuban swordfish boat his wife was an elegant woman whose opinions people cared about a Princeton grad who wrote for Esquire in the Washington Post Jeffrey had all the credentials you'd need but he wore them lightly he was handsome and Hearty but he brooked no and seemed worried about nothing more than getting words down in the right order at parties he dispensed pricey knac told Riv in stories and talked about jazz the summer of 1978 the stuffy room he was reading in held fewer than a hundred exhausted mostly Young Writers and they're not yet 40-year-old professors but the minute he started to read a fine current sizzled through the air people who'd been slumped in their chairs mentors and tour mentors mostly exhausted from a day spent pouring over our medium shitty Pages straightened up we leaned forward the occasional fly Buzz became audible Jeffrey had a strong voice but he read from the book haltingly it hurt him to read you could tell he plowed on though stopping sometimes to drink water and nobody shifted hell I hardly blinked he was showing me a form of courage I knew I didn't have he was like some action movie hero gunning down the enemy I'd faced my whole life family lies with such panach I couldn't feature not enlisting it was a heroic performance and I wanted nothing so much as to have the balls to do the same with my own story the audience exploded clapping after and what an audience there was the herd of poets I'd been busily pading around behind like a puppy name drop alert Louise Glick Heather McHugh Robert hos Ellen Bryant boy even Charles simik visited they all wrote psychologically sharp stuff drawn in varying degrees of transparency from their own life events on the pro side was Ray Carver whose first paperback i' lugged around Europe the year before as well as Richard Ford and Marilyn Robinson jeffy's brother Toby was there he hadn't yet written This Boy's Life but alongside him Sat Frank Conroy whose stop time was a cult classic excerpted in the New Yorker where it showed up as Fiction with those teachers at hand it's small wonder that Chums Mark Dodie and Jerry stall would join me in writing Memoir after grad school I vanished into a job in the Telecommunications business writing at night and publishing as I could but my poem strayed as far from my natural abilities as I could stear them on my 30th birthday I flew back from a San Francisco business trip on the Redeye to Boston a flight briefly aborted by a bomb scare this afforded me some bar time I spent every bit of change I could rifle for my cheap briefcase before I sosed a board then pounded the champagne they DED out clear back to Boston it was a dark time in my family when wasn't it I couldn't forget the Spectre of my shriveling daddy in a Texas nursing home he'd be dead within the year and part of me knew it the red eyee flew East toward the arcing sun and all night across the spiral notebook my hand hardly stopped moving a great mournful cry poured out page after page I gripped the pen so hard my thumb hurt when I got off at dawn once home I emptied my briefcase slapping The Notebook on the kitchen counter then I set off for the mind-numbing task of Faking a business career had I been scrawling all night on loose paper I'd have tossed what I'd written in the trash that's how wretched I figured it was later my husband bent over the pages a reserved guy he had a keen look I was wondering when youd get around to writing this he said the thought of him eyeing those raw unfiltered Pages embarrassed me few opinions mattered more than his he was brilliant ruthless and didn't truck in flattery and he liked what I'd set down he was one of the many fine writers including all my teachers telling me the pages came alive when I wrote in first person it somehow felt small or weak or whiny to me still at his urging and re urging I took the pages and started to cannibalize them for lines and Lang anguage and tone out came a few elies and other poems both lyric and narrative along with some hunks of Pros that would wind up in Liar's Club here's one excerpt about my old man it's better than anything I'd done before but it's still sounded so emotionally bald that I only sent it out to a magazine at my husband's urging I tell the only truth I know that I am helpless and sorry you're dying that this planet will weigh no less when you are ash and if as Buddha says life and death are auser I will be fooled and suffer your absence and somewhere you'll always be rising from your oxygen tent a modern Lazarus or snapping open a Lone Star beer or simply too tired to talk scraping mud from your black work boots onto the porch the great Latin rhetoricians advised orators that feral speeches should be unadorned free of Flowery similes without a lot of embroidery but at the time these words which don't seem so awful now seem shamefully simple hardly the stuff of capital L literature plus I had more posturing to do the next line has Vicken Stein in it dragged in as Ethridge might have said kicking and screaming and if as Vicken Stein thinks problems are grammatic I confess I find no syntax to pull nails from a coffin good Lord I now think the subject matter was bubbling up in me to be written but I was yammering about Vicken Stein it's strikes me now as Twee to call Father the man who'd never been anything but Daddy too Sylvia pla to call him daddy I figured in Cambridge in those years fiction seemed the grand form women aspired to almost all the women I admired Tony Morris and Mona Simpson Alice Walker Sue Miller Susan Min Alice Monroe Tilly Olsen Joyce Carol oats Marilyn Robinson Amy Tan were working in fiction and so I started a novel what the hell did I know about fiction only that it permitted masquerade so what all did I change from reality first I made myself an only child that had teach my country club sister to throw me out of her Mansion second instead of my sloppy paint splattering drunk mother the mom's a ballerina s-like disciplined bun headed third the narrator aka me is precocious as hell she's beautiful and Noble and wise she does calculus at 12 and volunteers at the local nursing home home she never bites anybody finally I made sure that we as a family actually functioned like normal when a stroke Fells the novel's daddy the mother and daughter stay at the hospital overnight sleeping on chairs on the actual night we left him for mother's surprise birthday party where we got drunk on Margarita's and I later ran over his cat not fatally in fiction we talk out insurance worries instead of mother threatening to shoot herself if I couldn't straighten out her reimbursements the novel's mom actually consoles The Grieving daughter my mother was more akin to a lacad isical reptile owner flicking the terrarium to see if I was still alive and here's the tone and voice on my 16th birthday my mother presented me a pair of 19th century opera glasses from France goldplated binocular small enough to fit in a pearl beaded evening bag this gift might lead you to think that we occupied a different sort of world than we did that we regularly attended some opera house that we climbed in and out of a lot of taxi cabs as doormen held umbrellas over us even while the novel's first paragraph refutes the opera glasses claiming they aren't who we are they start the dang book and as Freud says there are no negatives in the unconscious even the addiction presented instead of gave is a stilted standin for the vernacular I'd wind up with but the glasses had a source in lived events Daddy had once given me his old army binoculars instead of those this novel's mother somehow delivers in a feat goldplated doodah that opposes not just Daddy's field glasses but the whole Backwater Texas mil I was actually born to and not insignificantly the glasses come from my way disinterested mother not my thought I hung the moon daddy holy wish fulfillment sigment meanwhile I painted my character just as prettily as in this paragraph where I do my cliche double vision thing of looking through the glasses at the following idyllic scene a cardinal in a China Berry Tree picked at a green Berry that looked as big as an apple a dragonfly lit on a white Cape Jasmine flower its wings sring and shimmering chameleons dozed like miniature dinosaurs on tree Twigs I managed to find something pretty to blot out the rough industrial landscape I grew up in which was famously ugly run through by snakes and alligators and mosquito hordes how did I restrain myself from putting in the little Irish guy with a green Derby from the Lucky Charms commercial in truth the only time I was involved in nature at all was toing a shotgun to murder an animal what's wrong with this as writing I interact with no one there's no action no story I don't seem to want anything other than to pose adorably with a Lorette from the Lincoln Administration but isn't this using my strength poets are good at describing stuff right shouldn't I do that as much as possible yes but unless the description helps the story along or reveals something psychological it's fru fru embroidery Decor in 1991 after 5 years I delivered the novel to my hard drinking hell for leather writers Group which was famous for making people cry I still have longhand notes from Sven burkards and Robert pedo as Lewis h there they patiently say try this as Memoir your essays are good maybe do this as non-fiction trim looking back every arrow aimed at a throbbing neon sign that read Memoir as Elizabeth Hardwick told Robert LEL before he invented confessional poetry why not just say what happened the voice I'd eventually figure for that first Memoir Drew from a lifetime of reading which my mother had fostered an artist and history Maven she kept a wobbly Tower of books by her bed she was smart and witty Master of the oneliner but not much of a Storyteller the talk of my barroom afficionado daddy ran rich with figurative language if a woman had an ample backside he might say she had a butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag which believe it or not was a positive attribute instead of milking this current running naturally through my head I tried in my novel to sound like some fluffy roughly Little Bow Peep Daddy's manner of speaking would unlock the book for me Daddy the in-house Exile in our household of book reading females would solve my biggest literary problem he was a legendary storyteller in the bars and gambling joints across our County for an anthro class in college I'd even recorded some of his tales but his manner of talk was so singular I didn't need to listen to the tapes the stories hummed through my fibers it's ironic that the very redneck ease I'd spent some time trying to rise above wound up branding my work like hot iron on a steer's ass without borrowing from Daddy's Voice without the grit and grime of where i' grown up I'd been playing with one hand tied back when there is a thunderstorm Daddy might say it's raining like a cow pissing on a Flat Rock which for all purposes is a line of poetry the crisp image jolts a little it Yanks you out of the quotidian it operates just beyond the bounds of propriety as poem should plus the minute you laugh at it you become Loosely complicit in the speaker's offensive spe speech this binds you to the narrator you've bought in the same kind of Buy in happens in any super fantastic premise think George Saunders story Fox 8 where the minute you accept the premise that a fox is writing you've sort of been psychically hijacked by the narrator he owns your belief system that single line also invokes an entirely New World in which Cal piss on Flat Rocks and folks stand around a Marvel at it metaphors helped to flesh out experiences and texture the language as my father talked the wind came through Box Car cracks during the Depression like a straight Riser he had a talent for physical detail and a amused attention to the human comedy until drink ate him up he was a keen Observer with a knack for zeroing in on a luminous image at a random stoplight he'd laugh like hell just seeing a big fat guy on a moped with its tires squashed down he liked marbled meat and unfiltered camels he ate onions raw he argued from external evidence a fully imagined place and the slapstick and violence of his Tails Drew you in mostly through the Vivid portrayals a carnal person has a knack for but most of all daddy loved his characters they were buffoons sure but affection shown through every tale unlike a lot of other barroom showoffs I've listened to he had to be coaxed into talking and his stories never seemed designed to punk anybody he frequently made fun of his own lunkheaded Antics as when his brothers convinced him at a fair to get in the boxing ring with a kangaroo who quite literally kicked his ass I hoped his attitude of fond humility would underpin my own Vision however much I borrowed from Daddy's language and attitude I knew any voice authentic to my youth would have to accommodate the hours I spent pinched and wondering in my head my inner life sometimes felt bigger than my exterior it's just how I'm wired I guess so my voice couldn't just mimic his I had all manner of stuff to talk about that he'd roll his eyes at literary references in therapy were just two but to package those in idiom was to keep the voice consistent and to admit my posturing as I went I was in my 20s and likeed to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts in translation of course I was a lazy student I'd spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer or Aid or Virgil and waiting for somebody to ask me what I was reading no one ever did people asked me what I was drinking how much I weighed where I was living and if I'd married yet but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on great literature the aforementioned opera glasses I'd started with infiction finally became what they' been to start with in fact Army issue field binoculars written in below and a voice much more alive in time and place and with shame and Malice and an anecdote and a sense of place I stepped through the back screen and held the field glasses up to my eyes through our fence slats I could make out Mickey Hines sitting on his fat knees next door running his dump truck through the dirt I could never see Mickey without a wse once gotten him to smoke Nestle's quick we'd rolled up in toilet paper he blistered his tongue so bad he'd run to show his mother not considering how she and all his people belonged to one of those no smoking no dancing churches Mrs Hines whapped his butt bad with a hairbrush we listened to the whole thing squatting right underneath the Hines bathroom window the whap whap of that plastic brush on Mickey's blubbery little ass him how in like a banshee I was longing for Daddy's truck to Lunge into the garage this scene rendered truly as I could make it comes in the language of the kid I was at the time it has some character data inside it that I handled my own bad feelings by picking on Mickey Hines but felt somewhat bad about it at least plus I am situated among other kids who POS dramatic possibilities for me later the scene includes some inner life an anecdote and finally daddy shows up at its end I spent nine hard exasperating concentrated months on the first chapter of liars Club alone which was essentially time developing that voice a watchmaker's minuscule efforts noodling with syntax and diction were I to add on the time I spent trying to recount that book's events in poetry and a novel I could argue that concocting that mode of speech actually occupied some 13 years 17 if you count the requisite years in therapy getting the nerve up what was I doing during those 9 months mostly I just shove words around the page I get up at 4:00 or 5 when my son was asleep then work I'd try telling something one way then another if a paragraph seemed half decent I'd cut it out and tape it to the wall The Voice had to be consistent to sound true tone could vary but diction and syntax had to match up a reader had to believe the same person was speaking throughout this is an apparatus of course listen to anybody all the time and the mode of speech shifts around mostly assembling the voice was intuitive but I did find some minor rules for my narrator to stick with even if naturally I'd speak a whole lot of other ways like I consciously ended sentences on prepositions there was a lifeguard whose bathing suit we spent half the summer looking up the leg hole of this is idiomatic and oral it scorns formal grammar you can't have one sentence that way then warp the syntax around in the next paragraph to sound correct to it it was the same yellow door we gone through as a different Critter speaking than the one says it was the yellow door through which we had gone the diction had to be consistent too so I kept calling my mother mother not Mama sometimes then Mommy then Mom whether that's how it really happened or not changing what I called her would signal some psychological shift which I'd have to stop and explain I just picked mother and stuck with it it's a cliche to talk about finding a voice but it does feel arrived at fixed and immutable as the angel hidden in Michelangelo Stone about 9 months into working on the first chapter for a proposal I've been told I needed 100 pages in an outline I started knowing where the words went plus an obvious order rose up mostly chronological with one Flash Forward at the outset it didn't happen in one instant but over a period of a few days I went through a profound psychological shift the images in my head suddenly had words representing them on the page and accompanying the words was a state of consciousness it almost felt like I'd walked into some Inner Room where my lived experiences could pass through and come out as language if the voice worked as a living contract with the reader it also strangely bound me to cander to make stuff up would somehow have broken the spell The Voice had cast Over Me even fake names slid some glass down between me in the past I had to do the whole book with real names and descriptions and do Global find replace afterward odd that whatever the source of the voice self hypnosis psychological piece the ghost of Papa hem saying write one true sentence or the Lord God on high it's arrival changed the whole game I honestly don't know if a shift in mind predated the voice or vice versa but suddenly I felt the wagon I've been pulling like a trudging Ox was a vehicle with an engine moving down the road Pages started piling up and 2 and 1/2 years later I had a full draft of what went into print so close they set tight by it chapter 15 on book structure and the Order of information do you wish to be great then Begin by being do you desire to create a vast and lofty fabric think first about the foundations of hum the higher your structure is to be the deeper must be its foundation St Augustine city of God in terms of basic book shape I've used the same approach in all three of mine I start with a Flash Forward that shows what's at stake emotionally for me over the course of the book then tell the story in straightforward linear time I wouldn't suggest that shape for everybody but I would say you have to start out setting emotional Stakes why the Enterprise is a passionate one for you what's at risk early on that's why the flashback structure which I borrowed from Conroy and Cruz among thousands of other storytellers is a timeh honored one it's sitting on the coffin telling the tale of a death or rebirth in my case young writers often ask me to help them order information in a story but there's a proven method you can try imagine sitting down to tell it to a pal at lunch you'd have no problem figuring out what goes where usually the big story seems simple they were I was a saint if you look at it ruthlessly you may find the story was more like I richly provoked them and they became or they were mostly but could be a lot of fun to be with or they were so sick and sad they couldn't help being the poor bastards or we took turns being I always joke to students that everything I've ever written started out I am sad The End by Mary Carr there's the big almost capital S story of a whole book how I survived becoming an orphan by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail say and there are the smaller stories or anecdotes the time sto and I stole the Watermelons if you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or Stories the overarching capital S story will eventually rise into view chapter 16 the road to hell is paved with exaggeration don't brandish your stomp over other people's heads don't knock your white cane on the Pains of the wellfed zv Herbert Mr Cojo reflects on suffering to hammer home for practitioners what I've said before the worst events or the most spectacular wins don't make the best books maybe the most truly felt event does or some cunning mix of voice and story shaped by Passion plenty of folks have triumphed over way more than I ever faced I was born in the richest country in the world to literate employed parents who owned their home some start out brain damaged in rape camps in far-flung Googs my suffering is not one iota of what such folks endure to manufacture stuff and hopes of selling more books means you never do honor to your own trials in Conquest what fauler might call your postage stamp of reality if you trust that what you felt deeply warrants your emotional response try to honor your past by writing it that way sometimes true Agony is not even discernible to the human eye as a kid when I saw my mother's mouth become a straight line and heard her speak in a Yankee accent as her posture went super straight I knew she was Tanked the rat Scrabble this set off in my head as I tried to figure out how to stop the chaos approaching us like a runaway train was torment rendering a small external stimulus inside a child's impotent body can provide a moving experience for a reader also making you and yours seem hyper bizarre can keep a reader from identifying with you or being inside an experience some writers talents work in the realm of the hyper Bazaar but they're rare my abilities seem more Tethered to the real rather than The Surreal so I try to normalize the strange so the reader can access it chapter 17 blind spots and false selves we apply certain kinds of pressure to you under which you you are forced to flee to your highest ground but hopefully under that pressure you leave behind all of the false 's the imitative you the too clever you the avoiding you and settle into that sometimes at first disappointing beast real you real you is all you have and all other paths are false and in the best case real you is so happy to finally be recognized it rewards you with originality George Saunders MFA graduation speech Syracuse University 2013 in Memoir the heart is the brain it's the guer counter you run over memories landscape looking for precious metals to light up a psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of Truth gives you courage to reveal whatever you une Earth whether you come out looking vain or conniving or hateful or not any memoirist false selves plural will take turns Plastering themselves across his real mouth to silence the scarier fact of who he is writing as directly as possible out of that single true core and nent ability will naturally unify pages otherwise there will be inconsistencies that read as fake false choices based on who you wish you were will result in places where the voice goes ay or the details chosen ring false if Helen Keller wrote from the Viewpoint of a nearsighted girl rather than a blind one or if Maya aelu made herself an orphaned paraplegic or a light-skinned black girl who could pass in the Jim Crow South well you can see how their stories would have been bled of raw power many of the truths a memoirist starts out believing morph into something wholly other again anybody madroid at apology or changing her mind just isn't bent for the fluid psychological state that makes truth discoverable you think you know the story so well it's a mansion inside your head each room just waiting to be described but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her there are shattering earthquakes tectonic plate type shifts or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside Jeffrey wolf claimed he over the years inadvertently shaped his old man into a more dashing gangster esque figure than he'd been it had always been convenient to see my father in melodramatic terms as extraordinarily sedy or criminal but the things I dined out on weren't emotionally accurate before writing his Vietnam Memoir Tobias wolf discovered that the letters he'd sent his mother which he' remembered as soft focused composed to Shield her from fret actually ramped up the danger he'd faced when Gary steinard worked on his mesmerizing little failure he came to realize what a dutiful son he'd in fact always been family lore held he was an ingrate and a Bounder who cost his parents no end of misery of course Revelations come to anybody who prods around in the past asked memoirist or not 10 years before my first book I confronted my mother about why daddy who'd stoically tolerated her tantrums and wagging Firearms at him had stayed with her she'd said he felt sorry for me the instant she said it I knew it for truth and yet it overturned a life time of believing she'd held all the power in their marriage his silence hadn't been helplessness it hadn't even been love it had been pity mostly we get in trouble when we start trying to unpack those sound bites I mentioned ideas that hold Decades of interpretation can lie to us worst of all I was tough I was baguer I was ugly in sard's little failure his parents called him ugly so often I was astonished to find plastered across the Public Works cover having read an early manuscript a snapshot of the slim Darkly handsome long lashed boy he was solemn enough to rival the young hemophiliac zard to be hell who wouldn't look solemn when called ugly so often of course for the purposes of memoir it matters not whether he was perceptibly ugly only that he felt so no matter how much you're gunning for truth the human ego is also a stealthy low crawling bastard and for pretty much everybody getting used to who you are is a lifelong spiritual struggle start trying to bring yourself to the page and fear of how you'll come off besets even the most forthright the best you can hope for is to rip off each mask as you find it blotting out your vision we each nurture a private Terror that some core aspects of either ourselves or our story must be hidden or disowned with every manuscript I've ever edited even grownass writers the traits a writer often fights hardest to hide may serve as undeniable facets both of self and story you Bumble onto scenes that blow up fond Notions of the past or whole shifts in Attitude practically rewrite you where you stand in even great writers books you'll find whole chapters worth skipping because they feel like emotional detours they're included because the writer has some shiny aspect of the self that the chapter polishes to high Sheen Nabokov devotes the third chapter of speak memory to all his family estates and heraldry and his fancy pants ancest Baron Bond so and so and count suck on this it's stuff he's secretly proud of without ever admitting as much but here's how dull the writing gets inside that small understandable vanity two other much more distant Estates in the region were related to bovo my uncle Prince Vicken Stein's blah blah situated a few miles beyond the cerski railway St station which was 6 M Northeast of our place he's pring in a way eventually he also casually drops how Uncle Ruka left him a couple million dollars in 1916 and he claims he has no long grous against the Soviet dictatorship for having made off with this rightful inheritance but he argues this disinterest in cash so hard I have a hard time swallowing it the following passage is not for the general reader but for the particular idiot who because he lost a fortune in some crash thinks he understands me the Nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood not sorrow for lost banknotes point being it would feel more honest to this reader if he confessed to begr the Lost cash who wouldn't at this chapter's end he gets back to a beautiful Ry it's somewhat reassuring that even a masterpiece like speak memory sags a little with the weight of one chapter where we sense that Nabokov is showing off his exotic pedigree without admitting as much Mary McCarthy perpetrates a similar Gaff in Catholic girlhood devoting a chapter to her role in a school play and her mastery of Latin in a way that points up her cleverness students always wrankle against that chapter did O Hemingway who in a Movable Feast 1964 seems to be slightly mocking Fitzgerald when he chooses to recount a talk they allegedly had about F Scott's penis size someone once asked me if I minded the review that claimed I was too circumspect in describing my son's father in lit so he comes off two-dimensional as any wasp in an LLB catalog my answer if I'd written it better it would have worked for every reader writing about him had tormented me and those passages did feel weaker than the rest another divorce failure I think occurs in Elizabeth Gilbert's much adored eat prey love which otherwise displays a nice mix of circumspection and cander she overtly blames herself for the demise of her marriage for instance and for not wanting to have a baby she claims the reasons for the divorce are too private drawing a curtain I respect across those events without seeming koi but right after she mulls over at considerable length the Dickering details of her husband's settlement is that not too private she first offers to sell everything and then to split at 50/50 what if he took all the assets and I took all the blame he was also asking for things I never even considered a stake in the royalties of books I'd written during the marriage a cut of possible future movie rights to my work a share of my retirement accounts it would cost me dearly but a fight in the courts would be infinitely more expensive and time consuming not to mention soul corroding now divorce writing may be the toughest thing a Memoirs can do other than covering a war nor could I render my own any better but while she takes the time to detail all her ex's unfair requests she never lets us in on the source of what seems like buckets of money for a New York freelance writer she Sports an apartment a house in the BS a retirement account she flies a friend Along on her book tour for company even a simple i' come into some money or movie writs made me flush would help this is a minor bump in the book's long journey but it proves that even the most successful of us misstep from time to time showing what we should hide and hiding what the reader needs we more often fail by omitting key scenes Cheryl stray was almost done with wild when she discovered two incidents that once she've read her story seem so psychologically crucial you can't believe they'd ever been passed over the first involves how she and her teenage brother have to shoot their Dead Mother's horse before str's hiking trip her beloved mother dieses Swift and agonizing death of cancer leaving behind an ancient broken down nag named lady str's stepfather once an amazing dad has after her mother has passed gotten over it pretty fast even moving a new girlfriend into str's childhood house he promises to have the animal put down by a vet he's away on Christmas Eve when Cheryl and her brother she 20 he 18 come back to the homestead for the last time to find the Bony animal shivering in a snowfield she spoke to me about it recently on the phone my heart was shredded the closest we could come to killing my mother was killing that horse which was like her God it's a wrenching scene the bullet hit lady right between the eyes in the middle of her white star after the kids leave her for coyotes to drag away what's captivating to me as a writer is how the memory came to her in a Flash she was driving her kids home from school not thinking much about the Memoir when she experienced a brief moment of desolation you know the feeling a sagging sadness out of nowhere just way later and that feeling conjured the image of those two kids in the cold shooting that animal it's not like she'd forgotten the event just overlooked it who wants to show up in a book shooting an animal after all even if it's a mercy killing but of course she knew it belonged right off I've been trying to figure out what scenes would show how totally my stepfather had bailed on us she said of course she only needed that one the other memory also involves her stepfather toward the end of her thousands mile long hike she's staring into the fire recalling how her stepfather had taught her to build a fire and pitch a tent from him I'd learned how to open a cam with a jack knife and paddle a canoe and skip a rock on the surface of a lake but I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn't been for Eddie I wouldn't have found myself on the trail he hadn't love me well in the end but he had loved me well when it mattered so despite her heartbreak at his leaving and though it was true everything I felt for him Sat like a boulder in my throat wrote her lobe was lightened by all he taught her that she could use she wound up feeling he and her mother had given her all the tools she needed to make it maybe it takes a lifetime to get used to occupying your own body right or no self-deceit is the bacterium affecting every psyche to varying degrees especially in youth we like to view ourselves a certain way after warning my high school sweetheart a rock guitarist and music producer whose nickname back then was little Hendrick that he might make a cameo in a book about our teen years he asked could I please not mention all the pot weed smoked as kids I looked at him with his massive hair and slim fit jeans and boots and asked him who he thought he was fooling in my experience Young Writers May stumble early on by misunderstanding the basic nature of their t bance we want to be who we're not the badass wants to be a saint the saint a the an intellectual in Pon glasses my Syracuse colleague George Saunders murdered himself in grad school trying to sound like gritty working class minimalist Ray Carver Ry was a lumbering trailer park ofici andado who favored Stark realism using the fewest words so George showed up driving a beater pickup truck and sporting a cowboy Boy hat forget that he was actually a handsome Surfer looking guy son of a successful businessman prom King in his high school plus the nature of his talent which produced for us fantastic talking foxes and cavemen and Museum Tableau and masks that permit babies to speak stands worlds away from carbers George's surreal situations grow more from the mode of say Isaac Babel or Nikolai gole George trying to be Ray Carver would be like Gabrielle Garcia Marquez trying to be Hemingway one of George's teachers kept trying to steer him back to his humor pieces which George found too goofy they were just stupid jokes I put in messing around but eventually as he got older the satirical stuff started to make its way onto the page writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it in fact usually it growls like a beast and stinks of something rotten age and practice help you to Route out vanities after you've ruined perfectly good paper setting them down but you can't keep them from clotting up early drafts and every memoirist I know has a comparable story I have dozens even this book tricked me you'd think after three Memoirs and 30 years of teaching I'd have inoculated myself against posing as somebody other than this damn self I'm stuck with but the same diluted fear interferes at some point with pretty much every book I write before starting this my editor suggested right off keeping it simple modeling the book on my Syracuse syllabus but I argued I was going to elevate the Memoir for by following TS Elliott's model in his essays or James Woods's in broken estate or young ell Ban's brilliant Tome on Russian lit yet those three Role Models couldn't be further from who I am they're Ivy Leaguers laed intellectuals fluent in languages and philosophy leaking IQ points from every poor I am a backwood Storyteller who's made a living with Street vernacular as if can you guess what my fear is what kept me generating didly squat on this very text for months that I lacked the credentials to write anything with authority reared in the ringworm belt I am a Dropout the grab program I went to folded the day after I got my MFA and yet I plan this book as a work of Aesthetics and literary history and phenomenology and neurobiology and Y to Y to blah blah and this is the self-consciousness that haunts every book you'd think I could spy the wrong road without first traveling halfway down it you think I could at after Decades of tricking myself over the same fear head off the pretentious bustling that precedes my writing anything and always winds up in the trash and yet writing has never been linear for me I always Circle my own stories avoiding the truth like a pooch Stak to a Clos line pole spiraling closer and closer with each revision till with each book my false self finally lines up eye to eye with the true one I threw away over 1200 finished pages of my last Memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind if I had any balls at all I'd make a brooch out of it chapter 18 truth hunger the public and private burning of Katherine Harrison lying is done with words but also with silence Adrien rich women and honor some notes online it takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rumaging around in the past as memoirists are want to do particularly a fragmented or incendiary past in which facts are sparse and stories don't match up I don't know if memoirist are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more but it does seem we often come from the ranks of Orphans or half orphans through divorce trying to heal schisms inside ourselves like everybody I suppose people we loved broke our hearts because only they had access to them and we broke our own Hearts later by following their footsteps and reenacting their mistakes this earmark of a memoirist no doubt applies to every human being on the planet but many of us undertake exploring the past precisely because because it is so foggy and tenuous in its truths or maybe memoirist families and platoon and Empires actually did blow apart more spectacularly than they're less scarred or less likely to write about it counterparts but being an orphan oddly frees you to speculate and wallow around in memory bill without any correction from outside the minute our non- Memoir writing counterparts start wondering aloud about this or that event in the past the memory police either a tidy matriarch with a chronological photo album or somebody at the BFW rushes in to say that's not how it happened Robert Graves was in the same regiment as poet sigfred Sassoon and in the latter's copy of goodbye to all that in the New York Public Library sit marginal notes arguing the veracity of many points Graves made in my house say the recording Angels stopped regularly filling photo albums when I was about four certificates of divorce and marriage and death never got saved it's all rumor and guesswork Mary McCarthy in Catholic girlhood claims losing her parents had broken the chain of collective memory that binds the more solvent family without a solid history she and her brother spent a lifetime discussing the past bent like a pair of blood hounds to sniff out the old trails that ongoing dialogue helped to fuel her work for a lifetime before she set pen to paper the very difficulties of researching our story have provided an incentive as orphans my brother Kevin and I have a burning interest in our past which we try to reconstruct together like two amateur archaeologist falling on any new scrap of evidence trying to fit it in questioning our relations belaboring our own memories it has been a kind of quest having gone through the profound discomfort of writing from personal history I don't think most writers amble into this Arena to cash in on some grizzly past nor to settle scores nor to jack up every hangnail into a battle field amputation truth summons them as it summons the best novelists and Poets and it's not only memoirist who get it wrong what is the novelist sentimentality Tobias wolf once said whether expressed in unearned cheer or unearned cynicism but a lie of the heart most memoirists are driven to their projects for their own deeply felt psychological reasons as yat said said mad Ireland hurt me into poetry so most of us have been hurt into Memoir the memoirists I know don't cleave to veracity so as to keep kin folks from suing nor to avoid landing on opra blinking and sweating once they're unmasked for most knowing the truth matters more than how they come off telling it they've spent lifetimes Plumbing the past weighing question digging around in the old days long after their former companions have sallied forth into tidy forgetfulness or private versions of personal history in which they Star as Heroes Katherine Harrison was inwardly scalded into writing one of the bravest Memoirs in recent memory only to be blistered by the press for it no man I can think of ever took such a public butt whipping the year before har Harrison's Book Michael Ryan brought out his secret life about a sex addiction that drove him to prey on undergrads in his tutelage and even as a kid to boink the family Terrier it received much praise even Landing the cover of the New York Times book review War Memoirs in which male writers bomb ancestral Villages are never reviewed with such character Slaughter as Harrison suffered a man indicted can wind up wildly praed what sin did Harrison commit in the kiss she breaks the universal cultural taboo at age 20 she's seduced by her long-lost preacher father entering into what she calls an affair with him in choosing to digest fully her fractured past Harrison was possessed of a gnawing hunger for clarity because she paid such a high price for exposing said past the ad hominum attacks on her Remain the nastiest I've ever seen her complex motivations weren't a look I posit that her reasons are identical to those of long venerated Memoir Masters Like Richard Wright Mary McCarthy and Vladimir Nabokov to get the story right like some of us Harrison at first set out to tell her story in fiction books she' later Ru as un true and feel HonorBound to correct before the kiss the subject of incest insinuated itself it kept intruding into her first three novels but she particularly hated how in her first she located the daughter squarely among the innocent I wrote the kiss in many ways as a response to my own first novel thicker than water which was held to be autobiographical the woman in the story Isabelle has an affair with her father but Isabelle was younger than I was at the time she was more passive sweeter more of a victim when I finished that book I wanted to disown it I felt I had betrayed my own history I was dishonest in a way that has been inordinately painful to me over the years fiction rather than bringing events into sharper Focus for Harrison had blurred them further she was driven to make it right not squinting through your eyes looking through your fingers right but right as only ruthless scrutiny can make it she felt fiction had so falsified her tale that I'd obeyed the cultural silence to keep quiet about incest close qu so for those who think a writer can flip a switch and go from non-fiction to novel based on social convenience I've got some bad news your psychological proclivity determines which better fits your story that decision grows from the nature of your character autonomy in such choices is a fairy tale of course fiction can be ruthlessly honest or it can smear vaseline on the lens and obscure a real novelist tells the greater truth with a mask on I once suggested to Don delilo that he write a memoir and he recoiled but even black belt proser Martin Amos undertook his Memoir experience about his author father Kingsley Amos from a desire to speak for once without artifice for some subjects fiction won't do to free herself from the topic as an artist Harrison turned to Memoir it wasn't a decision it was a helpless act before and during the book's creation Harrison spent 5 years in analysis folks don't undertake that process to make up a pretty bedtime story starring themselves but to find out what the hell happened when Harrison announced the move to non-fiction to her husband he said I feel like the chemo has begun to finish the book she did a slog of 16 hour days over 6 months in therapy the window had come open and I didn't know how long it could stay that way so many reviewers deemed her motives venal but if you deduct the cost of mandatory therapy to get through the story in her heart before undertaking the books writing she'd have made more money working a deep fat fryer which might have also been more fun but with such personal reasons for writing why publish it at all to understand you'd have to Marshall some empathy for any rape or incest Survivor it's through shame and silence that a perpetrator seeks to capture someone else's Soul sentencing her to a lifetime collusion with him on top of everything else Harrison told me I was supposed to keep my mouth shut forever either she published her story or remained complicit with her Seducer which meant actually being allied with him against herself publishing the book was a way to reclaim quote what was left of me close quote Harrison is a study in the courage a book can demand from its Scribbler from page one you can hear her resolve to treat her young self to my eye anyway to fairly unblinking scrutiny The Voice has the brutal Detachment of a traumatized girl in a disassociative state during a rape or like some doomed prisoner speaking from inside an Iron Mask which psychically Speaking seems apt we meet at airports we meet in cities we've never been in before we meet where no one will recognize us one of us flies the other brings a car and in it we set out for some destination increasingly the places we go are unreal places the Petrified Forest Monument Valley the Grand Canyon places as Stark and beautiful and deadly as those revealed in Satellite photographs of distant planets airless burning inhuman against such backdrops my father takes my face in his hands he tips it up and kisses my closed eyes my throat I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck I feel his hot breath on my eyelids we quarrel sometimes and sometimes we Weep the road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us so that we are out of time as well as out of place she cuts herself no slack it's we meet we quarrel we weep she speaks as an adult choosing not as a girl with a gun to her head rather than praise the obvious precision and Grace of this Pros vanity fairs Michael schneerson calls Harrison a tease for not making herself smudy enough it's a painful book but not a sexually explicit one an almost impossible feat given the topic actually the most carnal scene in the kiss paints Harrison's disinterested mother standing alongside a gynecologist table as he de flowers the girl with increasingly large penis substitutes so she can go off to college with a diaphram and not get pregnant at 17 as Harrison's mother had with her schneerson's women Behaving Badly rebukes those of us who had the tarity to write about sexual assault or other psychic travails at all the Washington posts Jonathan Yardley wrote three is lambasting Harrison quote it is a measure of the times that this book slimy repellent meretricious cynical is enjoying the wrapped attention of the Gods of publicity he accused her not only of fabrication quote unquote Harrison claims but of financial motives quote this confession isn't from the heart it's from the pocketbook close quote in the new Republic James walc equated the book with reenacting Harrison's abuse on her three children in fact Harrison and her husband chose to bring the book out while the kids were too young to Twig to the media furor schneerson and Yardley and their fellows all used the same patronizing and Pious tone critics once brought to scolding Charlotte Bronte for her novel's excessive emotion how dare she it's hard for me to comprehend reading Harrison's story with zero feeling for the daughter particularly one who doesn't sugarcoat her own role not only does the father cudgel a young woman desperate for his love into a sex act he also claims she's his forever because he's polluted her quote nobody will ever want to touch you after what I've done close quote he actually hopes she'll bear his child so it'll be 75% him who could wish silence on a woman who'd had such a runin Harrison may have written to reclaim her own future but by breaking the Silence about incest she no doubt rescued countless others rather than vilify her critics should have given her a medal for public service chapter 19 old old school Technologies for the stalled novice yes I felt very small the typewriter seemed larger than a piano I was less than a molecule what could I do I drank more Albert Sanchez pinol Pandora in the Congo it's tough to keep going when you hit a roadblock in your own work many beginners just need to keep their heads in the game and their hands moving across Pages till they gain traction some people tout writing exercises but they never yielded squat to me I'd encourage you to find intellectual Enterprises to keep you studying craft maybe try some of the tools I've used to keep my ass in the chair learning from my betters some of these involve writing L hand shoving a gel tip across an expanse it will slow you down as typing can't one keep a commonplace book a notebook where you copy beloved poems or hunks of Pros out nothing will teach you a great writer's choices better plus you can carry your inspiration around with you in compact form two write reviews or criticism for an online blog or a magazine it'll discipline you to find evidence for your opinions and make you a crisper thinker three augment a Daily Journal with a reading Journal compose a one-page review with quotes make yourself backup opinions you can't just say naruda is a surrealist you have to quote him watching laundry quote from which slow dirty Tears are Falling close quote and you have to look up something about surrealism to Define it four write out L hand on 3x5 in index cards quotes you come across writer's name on the left source and page on the right Stanley cits taught me this Circ 1978 I now have thousands of these from which I cobble up lectures five memorize poems when you're stuck poets teach you more about economy not wasting a reader's time six write long hand letters to your complicated characters or even to the dead you'll learn more about Voice by writing letters how you arrange yourself different ways for each audience than in a year of classes chapter 20 major reversals in cherry and lit the idea that the looker affects the site is taken for granted in every field of scientific inquiry today but one needs to be clear about what it does and does not mean it does not mean everything is subjective anyway so that no clear and truthful statements can be made Robert Hughes the shock of the new warning label for decades lecture audiences have questioned me at length about the roller coaster reversals of my second and third books cherry and lit I know nobody else's reversals intimately enough to set them down some of this I've glanced past and other writing and while repeating myself is an athema the lessons belong here whether you're a practitioner or not if you can't suffer another word about my own work feel free to bound over this to the next chapter with my second and third books I overturned my comfy takes on the past as I'd never done in Liars Club Once I began it as non-fiction in both later books I kept bumbling into holes in my theories about my teen and early adult years LGH held ideas that had zero evidence in fact it started with Cherry's first chapter as I tried to render saying a weepy goodbye to my old man before heading out to California and a truck full of surfers and heads all my life I'd relied on the premise that Daddy had abandoned me a decade before I took off so I was shopping for a scene to show the reader his abandonment and perhaps dab a tear from my living eye as I did so but I could find no scene to exemplify his abandonment I'd be at work and he'd bring me a supper plate wrapped in foil he'd offer to make me breakfast in the morning or to take me squirrel hunting or fishing I'd say no I was the one who Shrugged his hand off my shoulder I was the one who kept quiet mother's Dianes with a cowboy on a Colorado vacation I was the one about to head for the California coast of course he drank like a fish and his emotional stoicism made him the strong silent type and he ignored my mother's Madness in ways that didn't protect us from her but he never said he'd be somewhere for me and didn't show up and he hated like hell when I left home that about face took me by storm though I'd spent decades discussing his abandonment in therapy and it was true he' drunk himself off a bar stool when I was just 25 but the view that he'd ever left me was tacit hogwash a convenient lie I told myself to Sav my own guilt about leaving him him the other bubble that got burst in Cherry was the long-held conviction that I'd been super smart as a teenager a real Brainiac but foraging around I found zero evidence for this I bailed out of advanced math after 10th grade my grades sucked I got a D in art for every great book I read Anna kinina I took in 10 crap counterculture Toms eldrid Cleaver soul on ice or Abby Hoffman's steal this book if I wasn't smart where on Earth did I get this idea well compared to the dope dealers I hung out and later roomed with guys who did Serious prison bids and who died young Knife Fight AIDS gunshot to the temple carbon dioxide in the garage I was a genius mostly though I was a fan of Eggheads my best girl pal was the smartest in school she and two guys I dated seriously aced the big standardized test and sifted through scholarship offers by the mailbox full I only posed as a smart person but that reversal rather than being something I'd hide actually buffed up my material because it exposed the Schism between who I'd wanted to be and who I'd actually been that's the stuff of inner conflict and plot the book had been a bur in my head for 10 years I wanted it to fill a hole I saw in the Memoir Canon not only did girls not write about sex in high school other than assaults or aberant sex they hardly rendered adolescence at all many pole vaulted from childhood to college men's Coming of Age Memoirs were jam packed with adolescent Rebellion including early erotics Frank mccort kept interfering with himself and was seduced by an older woman in Angela's Ashes the child Harry Cruz boinks an older girl under the porch watching a girl in the library behind bookshelves Frank Croy finds in a glimpse of breast that the world has become suddenly harmonious his poetic language isues the pornographic but makes a masturbation scene first tender then terrifying with exquisite care I made the necessary adjustments and delved into myself hello old friend companion in the wilderness Gift Giver I moved a few books and found her or rather found a piece of her neck to breast in white cotton in this state one sees with the clarity of a Mystic a breath a wrist a curved hip become images of pure significance passing directly into the tenderest part of the brain while he's in this state of intense Focus The View shifts and he suddenly sees that she's weeping in anguish I recoiled from the peepole as if a needle had pierced my pupil his scene in the chapter losing my cherry shows him transformed by the process her sex was no longer simply the entrance way one penetrated in search of deeper more tangible Mysteries it had become all at once slippery a lush Blossom Beyond which there was no need to go afterward I lay still dazzled but there was no comparable passage I could find among the women memoirist I admired they just skipped over desire puberty and masturbation were swept past and sex arrived at a decent age in clinical portrayals except for the aberant Maya Angelo and I know why the Cage Bird Sings describes a childhood assault complete with the guilt she felt about the nice part he held me so softly that I wished he'd never let me go but he's only warming up to raping her so VI violently then there was the pain a breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart the act of rape on an 8-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't the child gives because the body can and the mind of the Violator cannot I thought I had died her sense of culpability mirrored my own and my conviction that she was innocent helped me start to think I might be too Mr Freeman had surely done something very wrong but I was convinced that I had helped him to do it when the rapist was freed early and found kicked to death behind the slaughterhouse I felt a sick sense of justice and yet when Angelo's in college and sleeps with a boy there's zero description Katherine Harrison's College bow is likewise never described in any intimate way nor her sexual reactions Mary McCarthy's memories of a Catholic girlhood comes closest to the subject but she has more erotic feelings when she buys a book quote I was tremendously excited by this act it was the first expensive book I'd ever bought with my own money close quote compared this to her impressions of the married man she drinks and makes out with in a hotel I grew a little tired of his kisses which did not excite me perhaps because they were always the same I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue not for moral reasons but from The Dread of being thought easy later when in how I grew she loses her virginity she's also completely without desire as she makes out with her guy in a parked car I was wildly excited but not sexually excited at the time though I was unaware of there being a difference between mental arousal and specific arousal of the genital organs this led to many misunderstandings in fact he became very educational encouraging me to sit up and examine his stiffened organ which to me looked quite repellent all flushed and purplish of the actual penetration I remember nothing it was as if I had been given chloroform this writing is physically removed and clinical genital organs and penetration I presume it was the age she dwelt in but I couldn't find any clues to her having a body at all it was like the film they showed us on such things in health class circa 1960 embarking on Cherry I was prepared to overhaul all the tepid writing about puberty that women from the more prudent past had used to glaze over desire but the minute I hit the page I saw the problem male adolescence is Mondo celebrated in our culture all of rock and roll exist to cheer on guys grabbing their crotches and humping mics as preamble to reproducing the species and men have all these great childish words chubby and Woody that permit them to sound full of Desire yet oddly innocent there's no comparable language for girls applied to a prepubescent girl the standard nomenclature just sounds violently wrong the writing I was doing to represent my early feelings actually made me feel like some Lita luring pedophiles finally it came to me as I'd been working I'd unconsciously superimposed my 30s something libido onto my child's self the feelings felt untrue because they were what I'd been leaving out was the hazy soft focus obsession with being loved that really preoccupied my girl self all the sad happy romantic Notions that formed the basis of my early fantasies were completely G-rated being boy crazy was not being sex crazy I didn't fantasize being boughed into guacamole rather I imagined the boy I liked at the roller rink skating over to me during the couple skate with one red rose how unsexy that was uncool in every way yet that became my challenge to create the trans state that comes of writing a boy's name on your Notebook 10 times or watching him on the football field imagining he'll run over to give you a hug I wound up trying to capture early teen desire in the poetic metaphorical way it had come to me then there's nothing porno about it and yet it carries massive intent it also i' chosen Cherry as an ironic title I felt due to household upheaval and two childhood rapes I'd lost my innocence long before I should have but the more I wrote the more I discovered that innocence had never left me if you measure innocence as a capacity for belief particularly a belief in love what was mine in terms of Hope and sweet longing had been with me all along still in some ways is in lit I was also bedeviled by letting present knowledge block out clear memories of the past I just couldn't stop seeing my marriage except colored by our divorce and I wrote the same pages over and over not making stuff up but anting the material one way then another at first I wrote events that cast him as perfect and me as a drunken slag then I wrote him as an icy wasp and myself as a tender heart none of it rang emotionally true to me I despaired I even considered giving back the advance which I'd have to sell my apartment to do then after meditation one day when ID prayed for the seventh month running for some glimpse of the truth I had a vivid flash of us young and in love floating in inner tubes down a Vermont River the week we met how tender we'd been the memory brought a stab of pain almost physical I'd avoided writing about how in love we were brimming with hope it had been far easier to make glib jokey remarks about how shitty a wife I'd been dumb hope is what it hurts most to write occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades the blind alleys The Cliffs we stepped off if you find yourself blocked for a period maybe go yourself in the direction of how you hoped at the time ask yourself if you aren't strapping your current self across the past to hide the real story chapter 21 why Memoirs fail my last memory is The headmaster's Parting Shot well goodbye Graves and remember that your best friend is the waste paper basket this has proved good advice few writers seem to send their work through as many drafts as I do Robert Graves goodbye to all that most Memoirs fail because of voice it's not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling or there are staunch limits to emotional tone so it emits a single register being too cool or too shrill can ruin the read the sentences are boring and predictable or it's so inconsistent you don't know who's speaking or what place they come from you don't believe or trust The Voice voice you're not curious about the inner or outer lives of the writer the author's dead in the water we live in the age of the image and it's too easy to learn carnal writing for a memoirist to sketch a foggy physical world son's evocative sensory detail a lot of instruction manuals beam in on the physical simply because you can Master it but Pew textbooks take up how the inner life life manifest itself in a Memoirs pages in The more spectacular visual media like action films say the inner life fails to get much AirPlay at most a scene in a shrink's office or a snippet of voice over here and there but Memoir can compete against the pyrot Technics of visual imagery in film and TV only by excelling where those media fail writing a deeper moment from in IDE it you're looking for that inner enemy that'll help you to structure the book I always have inklings of it but tend to find it by writing interior Frets and confessions and yearnings as I recall them maybe it's only manifest after a first draft once I found it I'll revise with it as the spine how the self evolves to reconcile its inner conflicts over time your attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end another way a crap Memoir fails is if the narrator fails to change over time characters who don't transform or who lack depth become predictable if the bad characters were consistently bad in real life it would make all our heartbreaks almost palatable we could just steer clear of the always hateful human but that hateful or kind sometimes or sorry or they sound so sincerely sorry it's hard not to get lured in again and again those of us who grew up with seductive narcissist in the family know that they capture you not with their bullying but by somehow making you pity them in private so you imagine you're the sole Confidant of this individual's inner misery she needs your falty and you give it repeatedly despite brutal evidence that doing so puts you in danger shallow reportage usually stems from a lack of psychological self-knowledge the narrator is always tough or stoical or self-sacrificing or always ready with the quick quip or smartass posture worst of all such characters are hacked as hell predictable when life often fails to be and art must never be most stale of all is the butt whipping Memoir which abounds these days I took a butt whipping I got up and took another poor me here came yet another the great Holocaust Memoirs portray not just great suffering but great hope and wisdom and forms of psychological endurance and curiosity they seem written to help us understand something complex not to prove a single point and dreary repetition a book B that concerns itself only with one thing I was a teenage sex slave say might have some puruan interest but unless that thing is super dramatic a war or a concentration camp or buried in its portrayal you won't find yourself rereading it unless there's a political motive as for Robert Graves or Richard Wright a bitter book grows tired a vengeful one unreadable you know the writer's morphing every event to make a point or a memoir fails from a pacing problem it goes fast over dramatic events and Slows To A Snail's Pace to dispense Bal information or go on a tangent you can be too smothering close to an event so it's overpowering to the reader or you keep your distance so just when something key is about to be revealed it becomes glib or jokey I remember a piece in which a closeted gay writer was about to get laid for the first time after pages of Shame and fear he goes to the Disco gets picked up makes out at the bar then finally brings the guy home at the day num ma the author P vaals entirely out of the scene to launch into a long disquisition on his PhD dissertation which ended the whole piece certainly you can pull the shade on a physical scene for Discretions sake you don't have to detail a sex act as porn does but the psychic swerve not describing how the ACT affected the speaker denied the reader what the writer had been promising for pages on the most basic level bad sentences make bad books poet Robert hos taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better I rev and revise and revise any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me or how I see them now in lit my rough draft of one chapter started thus mother drove me to college in our yellow station wagon and every night we stayed at a holiday in where we got Dr drunk on screwdrivers this is information getting drunk with your mother suggests an emotional problem but there's no inherent drama or conflict other than the yellow car there's no carnality the screwdrivers suggest trouble but don't really capture the emotional tenor of the drive mostly there is no scene just reportage of data that's all I started with so how did I get from draft one's dried up little sound bite to something Lusher memory a physical memory of that time a carnal facted the car hadn't come with air conditioning so mother installed a cheap one which hung from the dash it collected distillation so when she made a sharp right turn iy water faintly rolent of chemical coolant would slos out onto my bare feet getting doused by that splash of freezing condensation was like a physical baptism miraculously dousing me in that Single Living instant it's as if memory's eye suddenly flipped open like many such scenes it comes to me in florid present tense I look down and see the giant bamboo bottom flipflops I'd bought in California with their black velvet straps getting drenched with cold water and I'm in that car again I can see the derby hat mother wore a pimp hat she called it she bought me one too in Houston and she wears a copper bracelet that turns her wrist green because somebody told her it helps with arthritis in her hand and another sense memory comes I smell peaches which we bought by The Bushel in Arkansas also vodka from the screwdriver mother drank all the way down I rest in inside those sense memories and a phrase comes to me Peach's Galore mother says we have Peach's Galore and I say wasn't that some burlesque dancer's name and mother says that was Galore her saying the word is almost as wi inducing as watching the savagery with which she devours a peach and I remember feeling cooped up with her a luxury in some ways since her attention was to come by but I also recall longing to run away those conflicting desires held the emotional fuel in that chapter and the memories start flying at me like bats swooping out of the past my reading allowed to her an early English version of 100 Years of Solitude that novel makes it in and the phrase about Galore the Derby hats do a cameo but the copper bracelet and the air conditioner vanish and that beautiful Iowa Corn the sheer order and wealth of it those Rich Farms with large white houses that's the kind of American scene I longed to enter it opposes my squalet hometown and mother's own dust bow childhood the cornfield is an app symbol for what I aspired to at the time folks from normal childhoods might fear that tidy repetition of the rows to me they look like an order that lent comfort so I used the image to begin the chapter mother's yellow station wagon slid like a monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa Corn which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in The Distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming unrested tractors glazed cinnamon red mother told me how the wealth of these Farmers differed from the west Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth who doled out mortgage seed from kroer Sachs but because I was 17 and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we'd reached that night which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight and because I was split headed with the hangover mother and I had incurred the night before po sucking down screwdrivers in the unapply named Holiday Inn in Kansas City I told Mother something like enough already about your shitty youth you've told me about 8 million times since we pulled out of the garage it has a carnal description the car like a monopoly icon from a point of view I could only have in imagination other carnal facts the girl me has both a hang and bit cuticles in addition to data from the earlier draft that this mother daughter team Get Drunk Together at night it gives background info that the first paragraph lacks mother's Dust Bowl youth the author's age where she's from that she's a worrior that the college she's heading to is one above her station the blight of her shitty High School record so there exists a boatload of interior information that help helps to create emotional conflicts the mother's low rent background adds to the daughter's a about going to a fancier College than normal in that family the daughter telling the mother she's sick of hearing about said mothers shitty youth shows the somewhat normal conflict between mother and daughter though for a daughter to call her mother's youth shitty was way outside the Moray of that time the idiom suggests a lack of boundary between the two that gestures to the book's central conflict in addition I explain several things about my notion of Truth the Monopoly icon image says I'm using imagined scenes from my adult point of view saying I told Mother something like proves I'm reconing talk not working from a diary or objective script most of all the scene holds core emotional truths that will eventually shape the whole book The teen me wanted to be like mother artistic boho we wind up reading a great novel together but wanting to become mother doomed me to become a drunk an emotional car wreck and not much of a nurturer I mean she got potted nightly with 17-year-old me as if we were sorority sisters teen me also longed to escape my suckhole hometown which mother likewise resented and blamed me for keeping her stranded in so to add to my enst I felt guilty leaving her behind the revision tries to infuse the scene with some undercurrent of the psychic Torrance trapped in that car's small space two squirrels in a coffee can Daddy might have said said chapter 22 an incomplete checklist to Stave off dread plain words on Plain paper remember what Orwell says that good Pros is like a window pane cut every page you write by at least a third stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours work out of what you want to say then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can eat meat drink blood give up your social life and don't think you can have friends rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink that will cure you a persiflage but do I take my own advice not a bit persiflage is my n dear don't use foreign Expressions it's elitist Hill mantel giving up the ghost for those of you with a naturally generative Talent able to bang out Pages by the ream this chapter may only help you later in the process when it's time to revise and organize and Titan but mostly I'm writing for that human creature who sits down brimming with a story then thinks oh what first this chapter answers that so far as I can it should should also lend some comfort it's okay to be lost being lost as I've said elsewhere is a Prelude to finding New Paths and any curious writer will have to do a lot of wandering before any book's done you won't have most of your elements on day one you should have one crisp memories that carnal World in your head two stories and a passion to tell them three some introductory information or data to get across four the self-discipline to work in scary blankness for some period of time for me it takes 3 to 5 weeks to find a way in though I've been in the weeds for a year at a pop everything else you can figure out as you go in fact if you start telling your stories the pieces tend to fall into place as you work you're looking for those other El mentioned before a voice that exploits her talent and an interior point of view complete with an inner enemy to organize the book around writers hate formulas and checklist it's way more fun to masquerade as a natural Shaman who channels beautiful Pages as the Oracle once channeled Zeus but looking at my own books I found they all include most of the stuff below as do most of the books I teach here's my list one paint a physical reality that uses all the senses and exist in the time you're writing about a singular fascinating Place peopled with objects and characters we believe in should include the speaker's body or some kinesthetic elements two tell a story that gives the reader some idea of your milia and exploits your talent we remember in stories and for a writer story is where you start three package information about your present self or backstory so it has emotional conflict or scene all the rest of these are interior four set emotional Stakes why is the writer passionate about or desperate to deal with the past the hint of an inner enemy five think figure Wonder guess Show Yourself weighing what's true your fantasies values schemes and failures six change times back and forth early on establish the Looking Back voice and the being in it voice seven collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory eight show not so much how you you suffer in Long passages but how you survive use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over the Dark Places nine don't exaggerate trust that what you felt deeply is valid 10 watch your blind spots in revision if not before search for reversals beware of what you avoid and what you cling to 11 related to all of the above love your characters ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past sometimes I pray to see people I'm angry at or resentful of as God sees them which heals both page and heart and one big fat caveat lead with your own Talent which may cause you to ignore all I've recommended chapter 23 Michael hair start in Kansas end in Oz oh Return To Zero the master said use what's lying around the house make it simple and sad Steven Dunn visiting the master part one what he does every reader who didn't fall for Michael hair's voice and his seminal War Memoir dispatches 1977 fell for it as a movie goer and The Haunting narration of Apocalypse Now or his later script for Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket both of which Echo the book how many people had I already killed there was those six that I know about for sure close enough to blow their last breath in my face but this time it was an American and an officer that was was n supposed to make any difference to me but it did charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the nd500 I took the mission what the hell else was I going to do but I didn't know what I'd do when I found him Charlie didn't get much Uso he was dug In Too Deep or moving too fast his idea of great RNR was cold rice and a little rat meat he had only two ways home death or Victory Apocalypse Now Michael hair invented what Americans think of as the hypnotic surreal sounds of that awful War maybe any awful war and it made him famous in a movie genre I've heard him Darkly refer to as Vietnam porn dispatches landed the unassuming Syracuse Dropout and the upper echelon of Literati work working in English John lare called it the best book I have ever read on men and War in our time the Vietnam War era perhaps ushered in the great age of the liar Nixon confessing that he'd been bombing Cambodia all along after denying it his collusions with Watergate burglars his paranoid tapes in the 1970s kids like me who found hairs work in Rolling Stone or Esquire cherished him as the folk hero who'd called on the government reports we'd been fed about Vietnam for decades enemy body counts have been beefed up a fact later confirmed in defense secretary Robert S mair's Memoir our massive bombing runs had so decimated and exfoliated the country that we could never win the people's faith quote we never announced a scorched Earth policy we never Ann anounced any policy close quote drugs we went to jail for in the states were practically handed out with mess kits over there and Me Lie wasn't an isolated incident ha's cynicism about the big dogs made him a beacon he even dubbed High command the mission ironically marrying military goals was so-called spiritual ones in Vietnam here tells us whether we came feigning or intending rescue or not we still wound up Invaders so here's Uber trippy view actually came off as truer than the other War noises we'd heard but his was that new truth it came with quotes around it I sometimes wonder if dispatches doesn't Mark that place in history when subjective truth began its rise to supplant historic IAL and religious certainties a trend that helped the current craze for Memoir along coincidence doesn't imply causality but still however a warped memory might have marred hair's unique take on that Bloody patch of History we trusted him more than we did official them perhaps because he wrote like he was on acid half the time he lacked the Steely piety of a ficial government dispatches and his passionate sense of his own moral culpability even for just watching the war affirmed our national feelings of Shame about the conflict ha claims much of dispatches is mashed up characters and unchecked facts it was published as fiction in France despite that he recently told me he cared about nothing so much as veracity he gone Half Nuts trying to write it his wife coming home to find him in a chair surrounded by wated up yellow legal pad pages and then quote I finally gave myself a kind of permission that I've been reluctant to give to write about certain things now it sounds so pompous to say it a truth-telling while other reporters went out with troops for short stints then came into wire stories on Deadline hair had no deadlines he'd stay embedded for months and all that time he was cramming his notebook capturing dialogue that still prows my head quote we had this go and we was going to skin him a grunt told me I mean he was already dead and everything ha's Talent rest and weaving together conflicting voices juxtaposing dialogue from all over the tender and the Monstrous side by side he speaks in rock and roll lyrics hippie aphorisms hepcat ebonics Army acronyms and the pop religion of redneck Grunts and lacing it all together is his own elic longing for some Solid Ground he never really finds this talent for capturing unforg able dialogue no doubt Grew From a childhood of innocent curiosity about strangers playing detective as a kid he mastered memorizing the spoken word at an age when his peers were fixated on their little league swings I was a voyure I trained myself to EES drop while looking out the train window and not to miss a word I used to walk around when I was 12 and follow people home this would involve even taking bus rides with them I just wanted to see where and how they lived the fractured poetry of American idiom naturally enthralled him and he cultivated an ear for the small Majesty of the average human unit speaking here confesses that much of dispatches was pieced together but he stands by the quotes that ring so true quote very few lines were literally invented close quote in other words the voices that transfix us and for me form the core of his talent may be the closest to verbatim reportage plus his lack of Historical Method is moot anyway we read hair not to nail down external events the date of this bombing rate or that regimental movement but to share the Journey of the narrator's terrified puzzled heartbroken broken outraged psyche the landscape he reports on never stops shape-shifting so blurry and hallucinatory is his crazy quilt collage you'd no more Look to Him for facts than a court would privilege an eyewitness on shrooms at the time listen to how he appropriates the bureaucratic n about why we were there and ends with a scary truth about why he was you'd hear some overwrite about it hearts and Minds peoples of the Republic tumbling Domino maintaining the equilibrium of the ding-dong by containing the ever encroaching doodah all that's just a load man we're here to kill gos period which wasn't at all true of me I was there to watch we emerge from his sentence about ding-dong And dudah into the presence of a young grunt hungry for murder and from that into hair's dark vigilance I was there to watch which comes with a backwash of being mortified quote you want to look and you don't want to look this moral struggle shapes that inner enemy I keep squawking about like Hemingway before him here had gone to war in part to satisfy his young man's thirst for adventure an obscene wish he later felt his desire to be there implicated him as if Vietnam were a giant snuff film he supported by buying a ticket to it seeing the Deb was like looking at quote all the porn in the world I could have looked till my lamps went out and still wouldn't have accepted the connection between a detached leg and the rest of the body or the poses and positions that always happened making them lie anywhere and any way it left them hanging over barbed wire or thrown promiscuously on top of other dead or up in the trees like terminal acrobats look what I can do he undercuts the drama of the scene with that black humor common among some vets the dead like acrobats saying look what I can do the moral certainty he craves always eludes him for lies and mystery cover every seen spooky is a word he uses a phrase coming from a pop song of the day a soldier enigmatically says spooky understands and hair's able to make us feel both the vastness of that mystery and the chilling breath of wind around some ghost that haunt him he doesn't obscure facts or withhold them he says everything he can about what he's staring at and it still denies him any certainty he he makes it sound as if many people survive War by grasping a single truth those people were a monsters we had to destroy say clutching it like a god while a thousand conflicting truths go unstudied ha never makes himself a figure of pity but I disagree with a reviewer who claimed the book is not about him it's not in the sense that he's never doing what Leo Tolstoy blamed Ivon t for pointing to the tear in his eye as with many great memoirist you are never not behind his eyes the Carnage of course Sparks a natural urge toward moral outrage a position that demands somebody be blamed but blame makes deep compassion impossible and in spiritual terms which is what hair grows into by books end when he becomes a Buddhist only compassion can bring about deep healing he can never reconcile the beauty and joy he found in the war with the horror it reeks havoc on the western mind he notes it was way off the ordinary scale of good and bad it's just another level for hair the war's gorgeous polyglot of voices however beautiful and horrifying and in his word glamorous keeps the nature of information fluid the constantly mutating landscape prevents him from finding a moral stance that doesn't include rage at somebody rage again serving as a compassion blocker nowhere is ethical judgment more desperately called for and nowhere is it more impossible his tenderness for the young soldiers is infectious I had such love for them and thought I was n supposed to he says they were capable of profound barbarity they threw people out of helicopters tied people up and put the dogs on them but those same young men also took bullets for each other and threw themselves on grenades they quite literally kept him alive laying down fire for him in a Hot Zone so he could Dash to a helicopter whenever he fled a place they were often doomed to die in they offered to hump ha's pack or give him the only warm sleeping spot in a wet trench he never let them ha admires pities adors and shrinks from them over the course of the book I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet ha's compassion for the soldiers quote how do you feel when a 19-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he's gotten too old for this close quote somehow mitigates his horror and ours was it possible they were there and not haunted no not possible not a chance I know I wasn't the only one where are they now where am I now but disgust was only one color and the the whole mandala gentleness and pity were other colors I think all those people who used to say they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn't squeeze out at least one for those men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them but of course we were inate I'll tell you how enate they were my guns and I let them do it we covered each other an exchange of services talk about impersonating an identity about locking into a role about irony I went to cover the war and the war covered me I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything serious because I acted on it and went crude because you didn't always know what you were seeing in until later maybe years later that a lot of it never made it in at all it just stayed there in your eyes time and information rock and roll life itself the information isn't Frozen you are the book's darkness relents in the clown play of the mission I spit coffee reading his interview with General William West Morland sending Heron to speak with him is like sending the Visionary William like into the tent of a Tilla the Hun the general expects since hears from Esquire that he's writing humoristic pieces I came away feeling as though I just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says this is a chair points to a desk and says this is a desk I couldn't think of anything to ask him hair's ability to mock official military speak Rivals comic genius Joseph Helen in Catch 22 here will set out by quoting somebody then he'll twist out of present reality reeling the point of view inside his own head where we hear through the warp of his psyche his interior is the home place for the reader the helicopter pickup Point whenever we wander off into some awful jungle scene we do so alongside that richly observant speaker it's hair's design for a solidity inside for some truth and his inability to get a firm grasp on that truth that keeps him fumbling around like a blind man now a practicing Buddhist and a fairly rigorous as I understand it Tibetan mode ha recently told me by phone that before Vietnam he hadn't known we're not just responsible for all we do but for all we see too this frees us from blaming or judging anybody in this it echoes my Catholic notion of original sin we're all the same quote great bodh Savas get sick and die from taking on the suffering of others they pray to be reborn in Hell close quote hell being the first place Jesus went after the cross reading Michael hair puts you in touch not just with the brutality we humans are capable of but with some nobility that persist and persist and is made glorious by refusing defeat in Horror's presence it's not sweet and Noble to die for one's country but anyone who insist on leaning into the light in the face of so much Darkness enacts perhaps the hardest one of fortitude a friend of mine recently diagnosed with one of the scarier cancers spoke of the unexpected Comfort reading top patches gave him on the phone here was so touched doesn't get any better than that I always tell people don't worry it has a happy ending part two how he does it note again the lapidary work here intended for the practitioner May bore the general reader if you bring a Jeweler's Loop to Michael hair's first chapter analyzing it line by line the way poets do with a gloss or exegesis of an otherwise mysterious work you can isolate that Memoir key Machinery that's what I get my grad students to do for any stylistic Master to pick apart one sentence at a time how a book's opener sets the terms for a whole book read that way here summarizes all of Memoirs key elements he lures Us in with direct carnality with information packaged in sizzling and evocative ways his inner conflict never Fades from you the psychological stakes in that inner enemy that make the book cohere and lend us the impetus to keep reading stay on display mainly he creates an intimate psychic space a mind perceiving and remembering and analyzing and pondering with such variety that we cleave to it here becomes as you read him as familiar and comforting as any friend a book known for its bizarre hallucinatory surface opens with the cheapest writing of all dull recorded fact describing a static physical artifact after coming back from the bush here studies the antique map left on the wall it's a quiet scene any reader can imagine herself inside then line by line he buil builds up to the Jazzy surface his book is known for the map embodies the book's Central worry how hard data or official information the stuff most reporters are shopping for avoids the real impenetrable mystery of human suffering and nobility always evident in Wars Carnage a real reporter trucks in simple data luckily for us hair clung to his talent that poetic sensibility an ear for dialogue and story and atmosphere he left hard facts to The Trusted journalists letting his true nature shine through there was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights i' lie on my bed and look at it too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off that map was a marble especially now that it wasn't real anymore for one thing it was very old it had been left there years before by another tenant probably a Frenchman since the map had been made in Paris the paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted Vietnam was divided into its older territories of Tong Ken Anam and coochin China and to the West past LA and Cambodia set sayam a kingdom that's old i' tell visitors that's a really old map if dead ground could come back to haunt you the way dead people do they'd have been able to mark my map current and burn the ones they've been using since 64 but count on it nothing like that was going to happen it was late 67 now even the most detailed map didn't reveal Much Anymore reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese and that was like trying to read the wind we knew that the uses of most information were flexible different pieces of ground told different stories to different people we also knew that for years now there had been no country but the war one take it a phrase at a time there was a map of Vietnam if the current craze for over-the-top drama had affected the writing of dispatches here might have started with some fiery guts spilled war scene instead he starts with a carnal object and his reflection on it a true thing maps are meant to confy veracity we should be able to find our way with them he starts in a small almost dull everyday object that just happens to be left behind in his transients apartment two too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off her doesn't tell us he's tired he gives us dramatic evidence of the extent it's another carnal moment of a type we all understand three that map was a Marvel especially now that it wasn't real anymore this is his interior interpretation of the map it's a marble something kind of miraculous phenomenon which is a theme that occupies most of the book The Phrase introduces his notion of the unreality or impermeable mystery of War four for one thing it was very old it had been left there years before by another tenant probably a Frenchman since the map had been made in Paris its antiques gives the map a kind of special radiance a spiritual value if you will we also see hair's mind feeling for the truth guessing that since it was made in Paris a Frenchman had probably left it it's his first use of the word probably the qualifier of a more truthful memoirist he's showing us his mind and action his thoughtfulness and how he tries to deduce the truth based on Hard Evidence five the paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted this again is carnal evidence Conjuring the tropical feel of Saigon a place whose sppy atmosphere insidiously seeps in to warp the map as the war he'll show us will warp him and those he meets the physical Veil or Mist acts as a physical metaphor embod ing the notion of spookiness or mystery whatever truth exists about the war is veiled as the map is six Vietnam was divided into its older territories of tonin Anan and coochin China and to the West past LA and Cambodia set sayam a kingdom these old places have an exotic Echo and ha's listing them again shows his interest in historical information siam's being a kingdom brings up for my generation the musical The King and I but even if you don't have those associations it's being a kingdom suggest an enchanted realm seven if dead ground could come back to haunt you the way dead people do they'd have been able to mark my map current and burn the ones they've been using since 64 being haunted by the dead is a psychological driver for the book and here's the first time here suggests burning up some dishonest depiction of the country in this case the maps the military had been using the disinformation of high command is part of what will obscure the truth for here and through him for us throughout the book he calls them they here making them separate from him other the capitalized current mimics and official stamp of the type military personnel used the capitals suggest certainty which in hair's view of this war is always bogus he occupies a visionary's demim eight but count on it nothing like that was going to happen the count on it is a little piece of hippie esque locution that brings you inside the more intimate colloquial speech hair will use the interjection forms a kind of bond with the reader on a literal level he's also saying the military will never rethink their map's accuracy because they lack the Curiosity or fluidity of thought that makes changing their minds possible and also makes truth impossible for them nine it was late 67 now a simple statement of fact this locates Us in the time of his being there at the height of the conflict the phrase is also an infusion of quotidian reality after the spookiness of the sentence before 10 even the most detailed maps didn't reveal much anymore again you can't get true information from military maps and official evidence will come to depend on the suggestively spooky 11 reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese and that was like trying to read the wind this beautiful metaphor makes even the native citizens impossible to read or serve as a source and it makes Mysteries of the indigenous the wind is also invisible mysterious as the bail of moisture over the map or the ghosts that haunt him 12 we knew that the uses of most information were flexible different pieces of ground told different stories to different people this is the first time here uses we it seems to mean everybody but High command but in some ways it also invites the reader into his wondering again the impossibility of locating the true story is what he wants throughout the book what drives him 13 we also knew that for years now there had been no country but the war despite all the disinformation there is one fact we him and other correspondents him and everybody in the war him and US readers no I sort of think he encompasses all those possibilities the war has devoured everything the war is everything this setup about the Curious uses of information leads us to hair's first three characters these three voices are the three main areas of disinformation an American Press official who's clueless a great scary medicated warrior in a tiger suit a man at home in combat and hair himself as hypervigilant mediator crouching in Terror in combat the Press officer and the warrior are both confident in their beliefs here's the confused one and his confusion becomes our home our certainty our resting place the characters throw each other into relief starting with the officer reporting in official speak on a helicopter tour he shows hair from the air how strikes had leveled the ground beneath what had been the hobo Woods a place wholly denatured by chemicals and plows and endless fires wasting hundreds of Acres of cultivated Plantation and wild forest alike describing the process seems to Thrill the officer who's been telling the same story over and over to every every visitor from quote half the armies in the world close quote ha's cool eye studies the guy seeming thrill letting him celebrate the story till hair eventually incorporates the guy's own voice into his interior hair's head just eats the guy's voice at the end entering into a long sentence of official sounding that warps at the end to hair's judgment it seemed to be keeping him young his enthusiasm made you feel that even the letters he wrote home to his wife were full of it it really showed what you could do if you had the knowhow and the hardware and if in the months following that operation incidences of enemy activity and the larger area of War Zone C had increased quote unquote significantly and American losses had doubled and then doubled again none of it was happening in any damn hobo Woods you better believe it this is the first time here appropriate somebody's voice to channel it like a medium none of it was happening in any damn hobo Woods you better believe it moving someone else's voice into his own head is one way he makes you feel intimate with him as a narrator and with the otherwise wild experiences he writes about the officer's voice stands in stark contrast to The Surreal magic of hair a man not nervously organized for war he's the next character and we see him embedded with troops in a state of profound ass- clenching fear how close is he to the grunts he starts out smelling the awful breath they get from doing speed for night patrols going out at night the Medics gave you pills dexadrin breath like dead snakes too long in a jaw I never saw the need for them myself a little contact or anything that even sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could bear a couple of rounds fired off in the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there kneeling on my chest sending me down into my boots for breath and from there he shows the other side of the horror show of War a guy who's great at it a long range reconnaissance patroller lurp in a tiger suit with dexadrin in one pocket and downers in the other I think he slept with his eyes open and I was afraid of him anyway all I ever managed was one quick look in and that was like looking at the floor of an ocean he wore a gold earring and a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair cut it fell below his shoulders covering a thick purple scar even at division he never went anywhere without at least a 45 and a knife and he thought I was a freak because I wouldn't carry a weapon his face was all painted up for night walking like a bad hallucination not like the painted faces I'd seen in San Francisco only a few weeks before the Other Extreme of the same theater all these different people are like places on that earlier map they're brought together by the accident of history and geography but what unifies them as they all pass through ha's curious loving horrified beautifully worried mind so right off he readies us for voices weaving together and for radical shifts in tone from light to dark as a writer you can't just start jamming stuff together hoping the reader will magically know what's in your mind you have to start out slowly by laying transitions like leaving breadcrumbs for the reader then the transitions get quicker through the book as you get used to the method the breadcrumbs grow fewer and eventually vanish by the end it's all sped up jump Cuts with invisible connections the reader already mastered a serious student of memoir can pick apart or analyze any mastered this way to start dismantling the underlying architecture of an otherwise seamless piece of Pros chapter 24 against vanity in Praise of revision the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug Mark Twain every writer I know who's worth a damn spends way more time losing than winning if success means typing a polished page that lands in print as is scriveners tend to arrive at good work through revision look at yates's chopped up fixes in faximile form or Ezra pound's swashbuckling edits of eliot's wasteland without radical overhaul those Works might have sunk like stones in fact after a lifetime of hounding authors for advice I've heard three truths from every mouth one writing is painful it's fun only for novices the very young and hacks two other than a few instances of luck good work only comes through revision three the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards per quality reading stuff in an antique sounding idiom is hard for many readers young I hated the oldsters and often swallowed them with my nose pinched as for a stank spoonful of cod liver oil they were rich in white and male so I started off very slowly Reading closest to my time period and feeling my way back Frank Conroy mentioned Robert Graves who was just one generation back Graves mentioned Samuel Johnson whose biography I read first TS Elliot mentioned maler and Valerie and bodair I started with existing Heroes and read back through time since I was always interested in how to be a writer I also gobbled up literary biographies Walter Jackson bate on Keats and colid Enid starky on bodair and Rambo Diane midbrook on Anne sexon Ian Hamilton on Robert LOL Paul Mariani on William Carlos Williams getting a sense of the person's time in history often help me to understand their Styles in that context what literary pressures and Fashions and values of the day were forging their Pages reading through history cultivates in a writer a standard of quality higher than the marketplace you can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history history is harder but also more stable and the books are better because they've been called over time yes the cannon remains deeply flawed and has only begun to open up but it's invariably true that work that's lasted for centuries has been sifted through over that time compare this to current work written to express a current Trend or fashion writing about 911 say writing to try to endure forever also lifts your eyes from the fickle vicissitudes of the wickedly unfair and often way dumber than you are Marketplace which is populated by loads of frauds in Charlotte before you can work consciously though you go through a phase of developing a critical self which makes a writer Wicked self-conscious some students in our three-year MFA program come in defending Every Word by midterm second year the more determined ones find themselves in despair at their own Pages through Reading and thinking they've raised their taste beyond their skill levels so when they stare down at their Pages they can no longer superimpose what's in their heads onto the work these students can't go back to their old tricks they can see through those now but the self-consciousness that hits them weighs them down it's like trying to dance with armor strapped on bulky and awkward by third year though most seem to grow muscles to maneuver in that armor the self-consciousness becomes simple awareness others can't stand to revise instead they decide they're Avant guard so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened note being Avant guard is now well guard revision is the secret to their troubles and yours that and a sense of quality that exceeds what you can do that gives you something to strive for actually every writer needs two selves the generative self and the editor self in the early draft the generative self shakes pom poms at every pen stroke and cheers every crossed tea in a month or so this diligent and optimistic creature jins out say 200 Pages the editor self then shows up to heft the pages give a Sniff and say yeah but the editor condenses 200 Pages down to about 30 I don't mean she cuts the rest she may well boil the whole thing down so the same amount of stuff happens more economically the editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience she can't turn her complaints and suspicions and doubts off I find generative me harder to get going but through sheer hardheadedness even I can grant myself permission to run Buck Wild down the page with sentences dumb as stumps and few glimpses of anything pretty the idea is to get some scenes Down Let Your Mind roam down some alleys that may land in dead ends that's the nature of the process for lit I spent maybe two years writing about short stance in California and Mexico in the UK and some old boyfriends before I realized that those stories by then hundreds of pages lacked emotional gravitas they were youthful years of drinking and frittering time away shallow easy sparkly rather than the more tormented phases in my life which were less glisteny on the surface and Argo harder to Route out plus they had zip to do with my mother whom I'd vowed not to write about anymore but surprise that was exactly what I needed to write about how making peace with her Legacy was something I had to do to become a mother myself still those early pages I threw away Were Somehow necessary even if I wrote past them they were way stations I needed to visit to eliminate them from the final itinerary in the beginning when there are zero Pages you have to cheer yourself into cranking stuff out even if it later lands on The Cutting Room floor each page takes you somewhere you need to travel before you can land in the next spot you zigzag and in the low moments you just have to keep plotting on saying the next small thing about which you feel strongly trying to Nestle down into that single instant of clear memory you know without Shadow of Doubt is both true and important to who youve become when it works it's like a spell has been cast for me it's less the old world that comes in clear as the old me how I felt what I schemed about who I lied to but the writing's seldom pretty the sentences are just bow the pushing comes when editor me comes back to comb over and over and over the pages unpacking each moment mostly I take General ideas and try to show them carnally or in a dramatic story I also interogate a lot of what I believe are you sure that happened how would he have told it differently and because the carnal is where I write from I write a lot of kinesthetic descriptions of my body in Old spaces all the while I question is this really crucial are you writing this part to pose as cool or smart for me the last 20% of a book's Improvement takes 95% of the effort all in the editing I can honestly say not one page I've ever published appears anywhere close to how it came out in first draft a poem might take 60 versions I am am not much of a writer but I am a stubborn little Bulldog of a reviser in the long run the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity each editorial Mark can't register as a mistake that threatens the spider ego remind yourself that revising proves your care for the reader and the nature of your ambition writing regardless of the end result whether good or bad published or not well reviewed or slammed means celebrating Beauty in an often ugly world and you do that by fighting for elegance and Beauty redoing or cutting the flabby disordered Parts there's a strange freedom in keeping the bar so high that poor me I'll never make it over if Shakespeare's my standard I'm at least free from worrying about the muddy fickle sales Market oddly when I'm working well the work ceases being about me even in memor rewriting on the page is safer than Revision in say painting or you can paint past a good place and wreck a canvas performers can't revise it all a writer can always go back to an earlier draft the point is to have more curiosity about possible forms the work could take than sense of self- protection for your ego so try learning how to cut out the dull Parts even the smallest towns have coffee shop bulletin boards or community centers with a writer's Workshop now even the less good groups can help you by speaking for your potential reader they're way better than the echo chamber of your own head one of the greatest Memoirs of all time is GH Hardy's a mathematician's apology nearing the end of his life Hardy felt his mathematical abilities wne and tried to kill himself he was a nerdy guy with few deep emotional connections a Sunday Cricket watching Bachelor of the type the UK breeds his friend from Cambridge CP snow found him in the hospital bleakly mocking what a mess he'd made of his near fatal overdose no's intro to Hardy's story is heart-rending as a touch of farce he had a black eye vomiting from the drugs he had HIIT his head on the lavatory Basin I had to enter into the sarcastic game I had never felt less like sarcasm but I had to play I talked about other distinguished failures at bringing it off what about the German Generals in the last war Hardy decided to go on living snow says his hard intellectual stoicism came back but he was infirm and he waited for death as many of the infirm elderly do as most of us someday will Hardy's survival is a profound Act of courage and often when I've been despondent about my own work or when that ghoul self-pity has tempted me from the Shadows you're work is aggressively minor you poser I've taken comfort in Hardy's slender book about a subject that bored me until his passion became contagious Hardy ends with one of the most brutal yet somehow hopeful credos for anybody trying to make anything I have never done anything useful no discovery of mine has made or is likely to make directly or indirectly for good or ill the least difference to the amenity of the world judged by all practical standards the value of my mathematical life is nil and outside mathematics it is Trivial anyhow I have added something to knowledge and helped others to add more and these something have a value that differs in degree only and not in kind from that of the creations of the great mathematicians or any of the other artists great or small who have left some kind of Memorial behind them I often hand this out to students as they graduate to remind them that anybody struggling to make something no matter how they succeed or don't in terms of the marketplace has entered into conversation with giants we're all in the same Arena and our efforts differ in degree only and not in kind just picking up a pen makes you part of a tradition of writers that dates thousands of years back and includes Homer and Tony Morrison and Cave artist sketching Buffalo it's a corny attitude to rever writers in this celebrity age when even academics cry the author is dead go to any book award ceremony and we're like America's homeliest video we are the inward looking goofballs who spill on our blouses and look befuddled in our selfies but I still feel awe for us yes for the Masters who brought lasting Beauty from their hard lives but for the rest of us too for the great courage all of us show and trying to ring some truth from the god- awful mess of a single life to to bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely the nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind and I'd like to leave you thinking about diffident old Hardy who by his own yard stick failed he did no work as lastingly beautiful and relevant as say Einstein or Newton I'm no judge of his mathematical work which may or may not be as minor as he finds it yet this book he thought so little of still published by a small press is the most widely read Memoir by a mathematician I know and every time I read it it showers me with sparkles like a Disney fairy none of us can ever know the value of Our Lives or how our separate and Silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world if only by how radically it changes us one and by one this is Mary Carr this production of the art of memoir was produced by John Marshall media and directed by Zane Birdwell it was recorded by Eric dbdu EX ex cutive producer Katie Oka text copyright 2015 by Mary Carr production copyright 2015 by Harper Collins Publishers All rights reserved thank you for [Music] listening