Just as painting had to break new ground after the camera was invented, memoir has to do work that a movie or a TV show can't do. Painting moved from figuration, trying to represent a person or a place, for instance, into explorations of the abstract, the gestural; freed from showing us the actual world, painting could delve into abstraction. Of course this is an oversimplification (representational, figurative art is often imbued with ineffabilities and emotion), but I started to wonder what memoir/narrative/nonfiction writing can do that a documentary film or a TV show can't do that well. What are the strengths of memoir as a genre; what can writing do that other media can't do that well? A narrative can give us nuanced explorations of the mind at work. I can't think of a lot of films that do this well. Memoir might give us the sense of one single mind at work, as it roves through memory. That one single mind made evident can give us a sense that we all share the same feelings and most of the same flavors of experience. So, memoir could be an exploration that creates deep empathy. Moving way beyond reality tv. There is just something compelling about a real life written out on the page, composed by the person who lived it. But, that life and its evocation had better be significant, singular in its knowledge, to be interesting!
Researching Grants and Awards to Support Your Memoir
Just this morning, I was looking at similar books, doing a little market research, and discovered a possible grant from the Carter Center for writing about mental illness--the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. Now, I'm a professional writer, and have received grants totalling over $100,000. I regularly trawl AWP directories of grants and awards. But I'd never seen this grant, probably because I am not usually a journalist. Maybe it will prove beneficial to me. The lesson is, I guess, be resourceful--look for random possible sources of funding...
Emotional Hiccups in Writing Memoir
The month of May almost killed me. I didn't get any real writing done. My family had a crisis--my dad, a stroke patient, half paralyzed with big cognitive deficits, checked himself out of his personal care home with no notice, and decamped back to my 90 year old grandmother's house. A suspicious new money-grubbing, mentally unstable "girlfriend" was behind it all. Who knows how it's going to play out, but this new crisis, heralding a "new normal" in the family, completely stopped me from writing my memoir. It wasn't jus the new time constraints--the constant phone calls around the family trying to untangle my dad's new unpaid bills, the time it took for me to learn to run a federal background check on the new girlfriend, the sleepless nights when I worried about my dad's unsupervised medicine-taking, the Sunday he called and said he hadn't eaten for 9 hours. (He is one-handed; he can't open a jar of peanut butter by himself...)
The big metaphysical problem was that this new crisis caused my interpretation of the past to change. Paragraphs that I'd written no longer seemed to contain the emotional truth I was aiming for.
I bet this happens to other folks--life never stops, and current happenings in our lives color the past events that we are interpreting in our memoirs. Without going into a lot of details, this new crisis in my family made me see my parents in a new light, and what seemed "true" in March 2013 no longer seems absolutely true here in June 2013.
What helped me start writing again? Giving myself a short break, regaining the strength and equilibrium to open up my word file ("official narrative") again. The realization that life would probably never just stop and the story would probably never be "over." That the act of writing a book required honoring some arbitrary constraints.
What emotional hiccups have you experienced in writing your life stories? Do you have any advice about how to write memoir as life's rich pageant continues before our eyes?
W.G. Sebald as Memoirist? Sure.
Since I started this blog last summer, I've had a new baby, taught several classes, and made some progress on research and writing. My new son will be three months old this week, and I'm working as hard as I can on my writing during my maternity leave from teaching. Something about having another, beautiful new baby makes me want to write even more--I feel the pressure to fulfill my own goals as I start to raise my boys to create their own rich lives. And the days when I am well-rested enough to think clearly about memoir-writing are few and golden... I've always loved the German fiction writer W.G. Sebald. He taught at the University of East Anglia, where I was a writing student in 1995-1996. I didn't read Sebald until my first year at Stanford in 2001, the year he died in car accident.
In 2011, when I was at Queen's University, Belfast, I went to a talk on Sebald. (Where are my notes on that talk--that March when my first son was three months old?)
Anyway, in moments of inattention to my own writing (the doc file is called "Official Narrative and has reached 3000 words), I'm reading my favorite memorists: Howard Norman, Mary McCarthy, Geoffrey and Toby Wolff. And strangely, Sebald. His narrators often seem like himself; his concerns are always the concerns of the serious memoirist--memory and history. So why not classify Sebald as a memoirist for our own purposes in this blog. Maybe if I turn him into a member of the tribe he'll reach out and help us from beyond.
Here's a list of writing tips from Sebald compiled by one of his last students:
http://richardskinner.weebly.com/2/post/2013/01/max-sebalds-writing-tips.html
And his obit. I've been reading a lot of obits lately in my research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html
Some "Best Of" Memoir Book Lists
THE PROBLEM WITH MEMOIR
I am the type of person who doesn't want to be a member of any club that will have me. It's perverse and a quality that doesn't usually serve me well. But I'm also a bulldog: when someone advises me not to do something that I believe in, I'm determined to get it done.
Thus I present you with this article from the NYTimes about boring, unnecessary, fatuous, poorly written memoirs. Nota bene.
Read MoreThree Great Books on Writing Nonfiction
My friend Zach Shore came over for a little dinner party the other night. I'd made four different types of meatballs (lamb, beef, turkey, and veggie sausage) for us to try, in honor of the "pasta bars" that I remember from 1990s eating establishments and country club buffet lines. Curiously, no one at the table recalled these "pasta bars," but they enjoyed the meatballs anyway. And, more importantly, Zach turned me on to a great book: Thinking Like Your Editor by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. Then I discovered The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner, and Writing and Selling Your Memoir by Paula Balzer.
Writing a memoir under 40
In a cursory web-sweep, it looks like a lot of memoir sites are for older folks in their twilight years who intend to self-publish their work. That's great, but I didn't see sites for "younger" writers who are telling tales--cartoonists like Alison Bechel, or early Joan Didion of the "Goodbye to All That" years, or Megan Daum, or Robin Romm, or, you know, writers that I like to read, and whom I'd like to write like. So this blog will skew younger...