The Art of Memoir

Memory is a pinball in a machine—it messily ricochets 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 liken 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?

A good writer can conjure a landscape 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.

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.

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 affect, 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’s the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,” Samuel Johnson said.)

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there’s suffering involved.

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 ached after wind up erecting themselves around you as you work.

Memoir done right 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 good ones reward
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 titillation. 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’s truth for his own deeply felt reasons.

In this, memoir purports to grow more organically from lived experience.

Every memoirist had lived to tell the tale, and that survival usually geezed me with hope as if with a hypodermic. A comparable-sounding novel just couldn’t infuse me the same way.

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. I