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.

Story-Editing - Not the Kind You Think

I have been reading Timothy Wilson's Redirect lately. While he writes in an approachable way, the main thing I want out of the book is actually the work of James Pennebaker, who has been researching writing as a healing technique for many decades.

The main exercise that interests me is called "story-editing." The twist I appreciate from Wilson is that one can focus on trying to understand what happened in a traumatic or difficult situation both a) from a multiple reasons perspective (aka don't just rehash again and again but try to find different reasons, especially ones that emphasize agency) and b) that actually work with multiple perspectives - in other words, writing about something that happened to you but in third or second person, so you can literally see it from another angle.

In this article about Pennebaker's work, you can see the story-editing process presented pretty clearly, minus Wilson's additions. Being a linguistic nerd, I am also super curious about Pennebaker's LIWC research - how can we estimate/see healing based on which words, how often they appear and how they change over time in someone's writing?

And all of this, does it relate to memoir? Of course it relates to memoir! It ties down deep in the way that contemplative writing in particular views the writing process. We are, from second to second, moment to moment, telling the story of who we are. It's how we develop ego, it's how we know there is an us - we are tying together our sense of who we are based on constant story telling. Revising that story also happens constantly. So to sit down and do it - whether for healing purposes or for full-length publish a memoir purposes - all of it is along the same spectrum, in my opinion. Our intentions and goals vary, but the research still bears importance, regardless of how you apply it.

Dreaming and Memoir

Recently, I had a version of a dream about my parents. In the dream my parents were alive. 

I have had many dreams over the years in which my parents (now deceased for decades) are alive. 

What was unusual in this dream is that we were having a conversation about the fact that neither of them died. It was all a misunderstanding. In the dream I was, like I am in real life now, working on a memoir. I was, as I am, writing about their deaths. 

However, there they were, alive in front of me. That's a bit of a problem, plot-wise.

Articulation Versus Understanding

During a brief workshop in London a couple of weeks ago, some students and I got to an understanding that I have been mulling over for a long time, trying to articulate. Since this conversation, I have been discovering even more within it. To paraphrase the whole length of our exchange, the student and I eventually came to this conclusion:
Just because we can articulate something doesn't mean we understand it.

This is powerful for people who identify as "word people". I, for one, have not only valued in myself, but been valued for my ability to be articulate. I related to one student a story of an exchange I had with one of my brothers recently.

This

Like lawyers, writers seek consistency; they make a case for their point of view; they do so by leaving out some evidence; but let me mention the hundreds of sandwiches my mother made during my elementary school years, the peanut butter sandwiches I ate alone on school benches in the open, throwing the crusts into the air where the seagulls would swoop to catch them before they hit the ground. When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing...

I was distant. I studied her, I pondered her. My survival depended on mapping her landscape and finding my routes out of it. We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.

from Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

2013 Memoir Mind Round-Up

And More, Atlanta GA 2011

Help me celebrate a full year of this blog being online!

What this post IS:
The best of what I read (could be published this year, could not be)
A list that focuses on my particular slant: mindfulness in memoir and seeing the writer's mind
An extension of my page that lists recommended memoirs and books about memoir

What this post is NOT: 
An industry summation
A list of what was published this year
A conclusive list of all I read of/about memoir this year

On to my round-up for 2013

The Most Important Memoir Question

Are you ready?
It's a question to ask, not to answer.
It's a question that can create madness if you are too forceful with it.

Who Am I?

That's right. I would contend that a lot of the problem with this question, which certainly plenty of memoirists are asking, is not that they are asking it. It's that they are hoping to answer it.

I am going to break the suspense: There Is No Answer.

No one answer. No memoir will capture you forever. In fact, memoir is supposed to be one aspect of you - not your whole life or whole self. Most of my students overshoot, try to cover everything, or start writing about everything in order to see if they can feel out what is underneath. This kind of feeling out is very helpful and useful, but does not replace the actual understanding that needs to come with picking out themes and structure:

There. Is. No. You.

Stories We Tell

Screen shot from Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley

A few weeks ago a student told me I needed to watch a film she had just seen called Stories We Tell. For a brief time it was available at our local indy theater - Sundance - and now, because this is the miraculous and odd era we live in - it is already available to stream from Google Play online (not to mention to purchase as DVD). So last night I finally streamed it and got a chance to see it.

She recommended it heartily without saying much about it, which leaves me now in a similar position, having watched it last night. I want to say a lot about it, but also don't want to "give away" what is revealed over time. This is a good non-spoiler summary from Rotten Tomatoes:

In this inspired, genre-twisting new film, Oscar (R)-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley discovers that the truth depends on who's telling it. Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets kept by a family of storytellers. She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions. As each relates their version of the family mythology, present-day recollections shift into nostalgia-tinged glimpses of their mother, who departed too soon, leaving a trail of unanswered questions. Polley unravels the paradoxes to reveal the essence of family: always complicated, warmly messy and fiercely loving. Stories We Tell explores the elusive nature of truth and memory, but at its core is a deeply personal film about how our narratives shape and define us as individuals and families, all interconnecting to paint a profound, funny and poignant picture of the larger human story.

(c) Roadside Attractions