Memoir and Face As Time Code

Ruth Ozeki, who made the incredible short film on her grandmother which I have written about here before (Halvinf the Bones) has come out with a genius short memoir called The Face: A Time Code (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1632060523/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_6PUvxbX216BW2).

This incredible tiny title chronicles her watching her own face in a mirror for three hours. That's it. But it's so profound - her reflections on impermanence, self and lack of self, aging and racism, are all mind-blowingly astute, accurate and poignant.

To whit:

Eleven years prior to my birth, my two halves had been mortal enemies. My mother’s people were killing my father’s people, and vice versa, and at a very young age, I was aware of this enmity and aware, too, that I embodied it. And yet my face evinced its opposite: the force of the attraction—true love, sex, miscegenation, call it what you will—that brought me into being. With all these primal and contrary passions eddying below the surface of my skin, it’s no wonder people found my face disturbing.

I myself have been pondering the classic Buddhist Koan which asks what your face was before your parents were born. The fact that Ozeki opens with this question drew me in immediately. This question deeply gets at interdependence and the lack of a beginning or ending of a single self. Ozeki, in her prologue:

What did your face look like before your parents were born? I first read this koan when I was eight or maybe nine years old. Someone had given me a little book called Zen Buddhism or perhaps the book had belonged to my parents and I’d taken it from their shelves, thinking it ought to be mine. The book was small and slim, the perfect size for a child to hold, but more importantly, it had a friendly face, which made it stand out from the other duller books on my parents’ shelves.

She even interrogates the face of the book! And wonders about the nature of faces all together:

What makes a face so special? It’s just an organizational device. A planar surface housing a cluster of holes, a convenient gathering place for the sense organs.

Such an intelligent and genuine line of personal questioning from one of my favorite playful zen philosophers. 

And, of course, Ozeki also looks at her own process as an author and filmmaker:

It was so hard to put my first film out into the world, to publish my first novel, to break my family’s silence. I suspect all families have this, some code of silence that is absolute and inviolable and yet so omnipresent as to be almost invisible, too. Like God. Or air.

Noh masks, classic films and plays both Japanese and American, a million small moments of irritation and curiousity - this great small experiment is a treasure of a mini memoir. And, as always, her humor:

01:36:41 As a Zen priest, I probably shouldn’t be using makeup at all. Isn’t there a precept against lipstick? If not, shouldn’t there be? Surely I should be a bit less attached to my physical appearance by now, no? Is my lingering attachment a barometer of my unenlightened state? The author in me is apparently still vain. She is still trying. Is there a time when a woman is officially old enough to stop caring?

Yes, even Zen priests still care about their aging faces, at least female Ruth Ozeki ones do.

Your Body Keeps the Score

The title is reference to a masterful book by Bessel Van Der Kolk. He researches and discusses the endless spectrum of awareness we can experience about where in our body we hold trauma, in particular. With incredible stories from his own experiences as a therapist, and plenty of personal, readable discussion, it's one of my new favorite books. Incredibly life-affirming.

And it is good these kinds of resources exist, because it can be quite intense to unlock trauma in the body. Even if you don't have a history with "Trauma" (capital T), simply going through childhood gave you enough experience with separation, isolation and individuation to cause disturbances and neurotic habits that often persist in your body without your conscious awareness.

Last weekend I co-taught a program with Sasha Lasdon of Integrated Eros called Write From the Hip. It was a powerful experiment in doing simple movements involving the hips and pelvis, then writing from those experiences. Many of the participants found not only sex and sensuality arising, but also vulnerability and anger. For quite a few, it released something in them they would have never found not paying attention to those sources.

Embodied writing is crucial, especially in memoir. Not only does your body keep the score, it also keeps the story - the whole story, not just the single layer that may exist in your mind only. Keep exploring, deep into your body with people you trust. Explore EMDR, TRE, Somatic Experiencing Therapy; do yoga, walking, exercise. Find what your body has to offer to your writing and you will find all the layers you need to make your story strong.

Short Memoir Film and Memory

(Still from I think this is the closest to how the footage looked)

A friend shared this short film, called I think this is the closest to how the footage looked with me, after I posted on Facebook on Sunday (Mother's Day) that no matter how much I want to try and celebrate all the awesome moms I know, Mother's Day is almost always unbearably hard for me, even nineteen years after my mom died.

It brings me back to the movie Halving the Bones, one of my favorite short films on memoir and memory, and The Stories We Tell, a full-length feature exploring a we-moir of a family who finds out about a mom's secret life after she dies.

I cannot say enough about these movies. And as I am still recovering from Mother's Day, I won't. Please go watch them, and keep exploring these topics in other genres. Sometimes film - including a tiny movie made with a coffee grinder as father and door handle as son - communicates better than any written word what remains and what gets lost when we try to document the important things that happen to us.

The Spectrum of Memoir

There's a long spectrum of personal writing out there, and I like to think of the word "memoir" encompassing it all. A lot of what I discuss here isn't formally memoir - essays are technically not memoir, though collections like Brenda Miller's (see a list of them here) really play with that line. Technically, a memoir is a book-length project covering a particular era or theme of one's life. But one of my mindful activities is re-defining memoir.

Autobiography holds down the far left end of the spectrum of memoir-like writing. Autobiography is something book-length that famous folks write, or what used to formally be called "memoirs" - note the plural. Unless you are a former president or athlete, chances are no one is going to read your birth-to-death story. So most of the rest of us write something to the right of autobiography.

Provoking Empathy in Memoir

One of the potential powers of memoir is to bring readers deep into a life they otherwise would not experience. For someone who has never thought of themselves as an addict, reading a very real and raw depiction of drug addiction is more powerful than reading journalistic reports or statistics. 

However, it is also challenging to read - and write - such a thing. By how we write about our trauma, we can distance our readers - or encourage the further distancing we are prone to doing when we encounter someone else's discomfort and don't want to get close to it. The more difficult the content of the story - violence, extreme isolation, trauma - the more the writer has to do to develop safety so her readers will keep reading and relating to her without exploiting the tale.

One of my students is writing a memoir about a time in her life when everyone she had been close to for decades left her. Because of their misinterpretation of her health, people suddenly disowned her: canceled their friendships, and otherwise cut her out.

The effects, as you can imagine with even the smallest amount of empathy, were devastating.

As we have discovered in our intimate and supportive group working with her on the manuscript, even we who know and sympathize with her are doing our own distancing. It's an unfortunately common human way to subconsciously pretend we don't understand in order to not connect. On the one hand, this is because we don't actually understand - if all your closest friends and family have never given up on you, it's almost impossible to imagine it. Really. No matter how empathic you are.

On the other hand, "I can't even imagine what that was like," is not an uncommon thing for us to say to someone like who has been through horrific experiences. When I hear someone or even myself say this, part of what I hear is:"I don't want to imagine."

We want to keep extreme suffering at a long distance from our seemingly stable and companionable lives. By thinking someone os not like us, by making their experience separate enough, we can keep ourselves safe - or so we think. As if suffering is infectious by some imagination osmosis.

So, as readers, as humans, we can try to relate more. We can try harder. All of us.

As memoir writers, often our stories ache to be told BECAUSE others did not understand or relate or hear us when we are suffering. So from our end, what can we do to help people develop empathy, understand us, and see the whole picture in our story?

What Versus How

When they begin writing memoir or even reading it, so many people are concerned about the "what", or the content: Can I tell stories about my mom or dad or sister or brother or cousin? I can't really talk about my marriage, right, or my children, or my former job, right?

Starting memoir concerns are most often about these kinds of things - about what to tell, what not to tell. They belies a misunderstanding common in our culture - memoirs are "tell-alls" and what we tell is the hardest part. Will I get sued? Will my mother die? Questions like this are about content.

Content is important, don't get me wrong. Certainly Wild would not have been as strong a seller if her mother hadn't died (to be crude) and Eat Pray Love is leveraged on Gilbert's divorce (again, not to be crude). If those women had chosen to not write about these key aspects of their personal struggles because of fear over libel or dishonor, they would not have written the books at all.

However, what is more important is not what is written, but how it is written.

The Right Distance in Memoir

Recently, I've been working with a client on her memoir about becoming psychotic. She is a mental health care provider, which adds an extra depth to the whole experience.

Psychological care providers having experienced mental health challenges is a powerful topic, one strangely un-published about, save a few very notable examples: Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison,  The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks, and Undercurrents by Martha Manning. This client and I have been discussing why that might be the case, and the standard issues apply: professional reputation, respectability, stigma, etc. Of course, all of these challenges are even better countered by a professional taking the risk to tell their tale. But the lineage of stigma is strong. And it goes deeper than just the lack of publication - it also enters the form the tales take once they are written and presented to be published.