Autobiography of Someone Else

After re-reading Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, it's tempting to say that any autobiography is the story of someone else. Even our inner other.

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you. -Jamaica Kincaid

Evidence

How rare it is, in the process of writing memoir, that we find evidence.
Evidence that our version of the story was true, or not true.
Evidence that something we remember happening happened, and, more keenly, happened the way we remember it.

The fact is, most of the time, we are composing in the dark. And as we write, our understanding (hopefully!) changes. Therefore, our story changes. All of this I have written about a lot on this blog. But today I have something new and powerful to share.

I recently found evidence I hadn't really been looking for.

Autobiography of My Mother

For this quarter's Read and Write, we read and discussed and wrote from Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid. The book, from title forward, is a bit of a mind-fuck, as I said to my students.
First of all, how can someone write someone else's autobiography?
Second of all, the character immediately writes that her mother died.
Third of all, it becomes clear (if it does) that the narrator is actually telling the autobiography of her mother, but in her mother's voice. So this is a story that exists - and yet - the mother claims she has no children, and her child is the one writing her autobiography.
Finally, this book is classified as a novel. What?

What do all of these gaps do? They turn the head on its side, playing with our expectations and biases in literature and memoir. Hopefully, they keep us wide open. The book demands that we stay open, keep exploring, sometimes coming in at a distance, sometimes going in full face, right up to oppression and trauma.

Half a Life

hell fire entrance, photo 2012 herspiral

Last night, I began reading a book I'd picked up at St Vinnie's a few days before. It was a half hour before bed, not a great time to start a new book, but I was in book limbo and didn't want something as stimulating as magazine articles or the internet.

I picked up Half a Life by Darin Strauss. A beautiful cover, made by McSweeney's, with a strong recommendation on the front from Carrie Fisher. I'd read the first few pages, and a few from the middle, while still standing in the biography section of Vinnie's. It looked good. It only cost $2.
Why not.

I finished the book in 2.5 hours, two hours past my bedtime. I could not put it down. It's a very compelling story, and the kind that some would potentially call a faultily self-absorbed memoir. But for me, the fact that he reflects on his memory process, his growth process and even his writing process sold me.

A Few Seconds

I love this quote from an interview with Kevin Brockmeier about his recent memoir (previously mentioned on this blog): A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: a Memoir of Seventh Grade - 

I hope it's not graceless to say that while I was writing the book I also read a pair of memoirs that I found dissatisfyingly sterile or lazy in very specific (and fundamentally opposite) ways: negative examples. One of them was carefully and deliberately composed and seemed wholly faithful to the facts of the writer's life, but failed to offer anything like the lived experience of those facts, and the other was brimming with the lived experience of its writer's life, and was probably faithful to the facts, but was very poorly crafted — passionate, but at the expense of some vibrancy or precision in the phrasing. I did my best to avoid those shortcomings.

So many people focus on "how did you remember all that?!" And instead Brockmeier says the importance for him is emotional resonance. Read more here:

http://m.arktimes.com/arkansas/a-qanda-with-kevin-brockmeier-on-his-new-book-a-few-seconds-of-radiant-filmstrip-a-memoir-of-seventh-grade/Content?oid=3257765

And another couple of quotes, from a different interview, where he more directly addresses questions about his book being on the edge between fiction and  memoir:

While I was working on the book, I found myself describing it interchangeably as either a memoir that employed the tactics of a novel or a novel that employed the tactics of a memoir—and, in fact, the version of the manuscript I submitted to my editor came with a long string of subtitles: a memoir, a novel, a recollective, a nonfiction novel, an autobiographical novel, a novel from life, a kind of memoir, a memoir-novel-thing, and, finally, what is this? True, I organized the book around one particular year of my life, and I tried hard to remain faithful to the way I actually experienced that year, but my stance toward the material was certainly peculiar, and behaving as though your past is unspooling before your senses in all its color and specificity is as much an act of creation as it is of recollection, don’t you think?

I suppose I would say that both memoir and nonfiction attempt to convey the truth, stripped of fabrication, but that memoir is in part about imaginingthe truth and that most other forms of nonfiction are simply about telling the truth. I’m sure there are other distinctions to be drawn, even contradictory ones, but that’s what writing A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip felt like for me: a sustained act of imagining my way into the truth.

That second interview is here:

http://garev.uga.edu/wordpress/index.php/2014/01/imagining-my-way-into-the-truth-an-interview-with-kevin-brockmeier/

Recognition

I recently finished an amazing memoir by Heather Sellers* called You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know. 

Ostensibly, the book is about face blindness, but I admire how she handles the trickiness of talking about her mother's undiagnosed schizophrenia and her own undiagnosed condition, mixed with alcoholism in her father and others, and still comes out talking about love.

This is from the afterword, and I love it:

In childhood, it’s our parents who give us standards for experience: “Here’s an inch,” they say.  “And this is a foot.” And a child says, “Thanks! I can make my own yardstick now.” In my family, there wasn’t any kind of calibration demonstration. In the chaos, I struggled to figure out anything at all…

And then one day I went home and turned on the lights, and began to look clearly at my childhood. Gradually I could discern what was, and what was not…More than anything else, laying out the story of how I came to see has brought me to clarity.

But I discovered something else in writing this book, something even more graceful and vital than the elusive “perspective.” In all that darkness, there had been love. What I’d felt all along was not a fantasy, not yet another misinterpretation. I loved my parents. I wasn’t wrong about that. And somehow, against all odds, my parents (especially my mother) were able to bring their versions of affection into our world, into our family, as well. I’d set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt and anxiety. What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations…

The discovery that deeply flawed love and deeply flawed vision can coexist has been life-changing for me, and I feel uniquely able to illuminate it…Face blindness helped me to stay open to possibility – motivated me, on the cellular level, to try to know and understand what can’t easily be seen.

I hope that, at least in some small way, this story will help steer others toward clarity, and toward love, in spite of the greatest odds.

I deeply relate to this experience in writing memoir: recognizing love. The moment, the moments, of seeing how it was there, is there, despite it all. It's a powerful recognition, and absolutely necessary. It's harder to write stories out of the link to truth of story than vengeance or vindication, as Laraine Herring recently addressed. But it is possible.

And for me, in my process, the recognition of real love is really the only reason for surviving, and therefore, the only reason for memoir.

*Heather Sellers is also an amazing writing teacher. I cannot get over how pithy, smart and funny her book Page after Page is. Read it.

Keeping Memory Alive

There is a book on a technique called proprioceptive writing called Writing the Mind Alive. I often think of memoir as writing the memories alive. Despite Annie Dillard's cannibalism quote on the nature of memoir, I find the act can nurture the present by reviving the past. Neither lacks, neither is deprived by bringing both alive.

But last night I had a telling and haunting dream. I was sorting through the basement of our childhood home with my brothers. One had the Legos and some old letters, another had some figurines and tools. I had my old stuffed animals (of which I had legion) and toys. 

As I sorted the animals, some of them became animated. Untouched for decades, moth-eaten kittens and their brethren started to walk across the floor like zombies. More alive than they ever were in any of my fantasy-driven tea parties, at first I was enchanted. But then I went to pick one up and got a small pique of a bite on my hand.

It turned out rats, scorpions and spiders were revitalizing my childhood comfort beasts. My excitement turned to fear and disgust. I disinfected my hands, and I began to use tongs and gloves, laying them down to photograph them for the memories, then stuffing them down a trash compactor or roadside drain.

I can't help but think this is related to writing memoir. Thursday I meet with a feedback group to discuss my latest revision of an essay called Digging In The Dirt, which is about the act of digging up our family graves last fall, braided with musings on writing memoir and how it involves digging of its own. 

I am slow to get out of bed this morning, writing this post from between two very living animals - our cats - and strewn with some current, adult-acquired stuffed animals - adorable but not alive. I am in no hurry, other than the principle of early bird gets the worm. And yet, by lingering, I've been able to give breathing room to this dream. 

What's the worm here? A direct, palpable, single sentence insight I have yet to taste? Or just this: the space to feel, to be with while wide awake, hands on the animate animals that help me keep moving forward into the future, all the while writing about the past.