What Is Memoir?

When I was young, famous men-usually retired generals, Shakespearean actors, or the disillusioned relatives of such people-wrote "their memoirs." I never read them but imagined them to be the boring ramblings of old fogies puffing themselves up. "So-and-so is writing his memoirs" was a phrase I might have heard occasionally. "So what?" would be my unspoken response as I turned back to my favorite reading: long, exciting novels with complicated plots and a cast of characters that required concentration.

Like many people today, I confused "the memoir" with "memoirs." It was easy to do back then, when the literary memoir was not basking in the popularity it currently enjoys. The term memoirs was used to describe something closer to autobiography than the essaylike literary memoir. These famous-person memoirs rarely stuck to one theme or selected out one aspect of a life to explore in depth, as the memoir does. More often, "memoirs" (always preceded by a possessive pronoun: "my memoirs," "his memoirs") were a kind of scrapbook in which pieces of a life were pasted. Of course, the boundary between these genres was not-and still is not-as clearly delineated as I have made it sound. Sometimes a book will be subtitled "a memoir" when it would seem really to belong more appropriately under the heading of memoirs or autobiography. Ned Rorem''''s Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir-which contains excerpts from journals and a variety of styles that, however fluent and interesting, do not form a shapely whole- is an example of such a book.

In my early reading days the memoir was in short supply. Looking back, I see that certain writers were paving the way for the contemporary literary memoir-Virginia Woolf, for instance, laid the groundwork for the frankly personal writing that would later become widespread. At the time, however, the library seemed to offer only fiction or essay. Essays were hard work, and I grumbled when, at twelve or thirteen, my English teachers made me read authors such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Now that I am writing my own stories, I have come to realize that the modern memoir belongs to the same family as those essays. Phillip Lopate, in his illuminating writings about the essay, includes the memoir (along with rumination, anecdote, diatribe, scholarship, fantasy, and moral philosophy) under the general heading of "the informal or familiar essay." It is not any particular form, he says, that distinguishes this kind of essay, but the author''''s voice.

The great essayist Montaigne understood "that, in an essay, the track of a person''''s thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure." Rather than simply telling a story from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge. (One place where this musing voice was not possible was in the African-American slave narratives that nevertheless form a part of the modern American memoir''''s history. Trying to appear "objective"- to narrate simply the facts of her life without interpretation or judgment-the author of a slave narrative was all too aware of potential accusations of being inflammatory or of exaggerating the facts of the story.) The contemporary memoir includes retrospection as an essential part of the story. Your reader has to be willing to be both entertained by the story itself and interested in how you now, looking back on it, understand it.

On Voice
Barbara Drake, writing about poetry says: "Voice is the medium and instrument of poetry, whether that poetry is spoken aloud or read silently. Voice is also the mark of the individual poet." This definition is also true for prose writing. We tend to think of voice as being something we hear; it can be squeaky or mellow, loud or soft. But in writing, voice is what we hear in our head: the medium.

A writer''''s voice is usually considered to be developed when it becomes recognizable. This may seem odd, given that the writer will sometimes assume the persona of another character or another aspect of herself. The fiction writer may speak through many very different characters, yet voice is something like the fingerprint of the writer-not the persona on the page but the writer with her own particular linguistic quirks, sentence rhythms, and recurring images. The memoirist needs to have this fingerprint too, even if she only speaks as herself.

In order for the reader to care about what you make of your life, there has to be an engaging voice in the writing-a voice that captures a personality. In all kinds of informal essays, including the memoir, the voice is conversational. One modern relative of the informal essayist is the newspaper columnist, whose chatty style is immediately recognizable in contrast to the impersonal, expository style of the formal essay or of the journalism found elsewhere in the newspaper. Memoir, like column writing, requires that the reader feel spoken to. In earlier days, this conversational quality included direct address from the writer to the reader ("Gentle reader"), but this faded from view after the heyday of the memoir in the mid-nineteenth century. Still, even without the direct address, modern memoirs aim to speak intimately to their readers, and those readers like to experience them as if they were sitting in a comfortable chair listening to a series of confidences.

Although the roots of the memoir lie in the realm of personal essay, the modern literary memoir also has many of the characteristics of fiction. Moving both backward and forward in time, re-creating believable dialogue, switching back and forth between scene and summary, and controlling the pace and tension of the story, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept storyteller. So, memoir is really a kind of hybrid form with elements of both fiction and essay, in which the author''''s voice, musing conversationally on a true story, is all important.

First Person
(Because so many of you never had this in school.)

When we say something is written "in first person," we mean "first person singular." We mean that the narrator uses "I."

First person (singular):I---I woke up this morning.

Second person (singular):You---You woke up this morning.

Third person (singular):He/she/it---He woke up this morning. Susan woke up this morning. The cat woke up this morning.

First Person (plural): We---We woke up this morning.

Second person (plural): You---All of you woke up this morning.

Third person (plural): They---They woke up this morning. Susan and Jill woke up. The whole family, including the cat, woke up this morning.

Sometimes when I teach the memoir, a student will ask: "But how is the memoir different from autobiography?" Certainly some memoirs are booklength and therefore contain as much material as many autobiographies. But a memoir is different, and the difference has to do with the choice of subject matter.

An autobiography is the story of a life: the name implies that the writer will somehow attempt to capture all the essential elements of that life. A writer''''s autobiography, for example, is not expected to deal merely with the author''''s growth and career as a writer but also with the facts and emotions connected to family life, education, relationships, sexuality, travels, and inner struggles of all kinds. An autobiography is sometimes limited by dates (as in Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing), but not obviously by theme.

Memoir, on the other hand, makes no pretense of replicating a whole life. Indeed, one of the important skills of memoir writing is the selection of the theme or themes that will bind the work together. Thus we discover, on setting out to read Patricia Hampl''''s Virgin Time, that her chosen theme is the Catholicism she grew up with and her later struggle to find a place for it in her adult spiritual life. With a theme such as this laid down, the author resists the temptation to digress into stories that have no immediate bearing on the subject, and indeed Hampl''''s book tells nothing about many other aspects of her life, although it abounds in good stories. Vivian Gornick''''s memoir Fierce Attachments sets as its theme the story of the author''''s relationship with her mother. By setting boundaries, the writer can keep the focus on one aspect of a life and offer the reader an in-depth exploration.

When you select the material for a memoir, you will be keeping other material for later. Most people only ever write one autobiography, but you may write many memoirs over time. Mary Clearman Blew compares this process with the making of a quilt:

Remember that you have all colors to choose from; and while choosing one color means forgoing others, remind yourself that your coffee can of pieces will fill again. There will be another quilt at the back of your mind while you are piecing, quilting, and binding this one, which perhaps you will give to one of your daughters.

Another way of looking at the difference between memoir and autobiography is expressed by Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest. "A memoir is how one remembers one''''s own life," he says, "while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked." Although some memoirs do, in fact, call for research, the verifiable facts are not generally as important as they are in autobiography, where the author includes much that is beyond the realm of memory.

The Narrator
The narrator is the protagonist of your memoir. It''''s a term also used in fiction and poetry, and refers to whomever is telling the story.

When thinking about your memoir or discussing it with your writing group (if you have one), you should always refer to the character who is you in the story as "the narrator," not as "I."

Similarly, your friends or colleagues should refer to the protagonist of your story as "the narrator" and not as "you."

Although you are both the writer of the memoir and the central character of the story, they should be treated as two distinct entities. Thus, a friend could appropriately ask: "why did you [the writer] describe the narrator [protagonist] as a mouse on page three?" (Not: "Why did you describe yourself as a mouse on page three?")

Separating yourself as writer from yourself as protagonist will help give you the necessary perspective to craft the memoir as a story. It will also decrease the degree to which you feel exposed as others critique your work. (The information you reveal about yourself is the same no matter what terminology is used, but it can be less uncomfortable to hear others speak of "the narrator''''s" intimate experience than of "your" intimate experience.)

A word here about travel writing, which is an example of how fluid are the boundaries we have put around various types of writing. While often discussed as a separate genre, travel writing often overlaps with memoir. Sybille Bedford''''s A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller''''s Tale from Mexico is just one example of how nonfiction writing that gives information about a place can also accommodate the personal travel story that reads like memoir. Alice Adams''''s stories of Mexico have some of the same qualities.

Not every author of true stories chooses to label her work memoir, even if it has many characteristics of that genre. Dwellings by Linda Hogan and Never in a Hurry by Naomi Shihab Nye both contain stories that could be called memoirs. Nye''''s book is subtitled "Essays on People and Places," locating the book in the larger category of personal essay, though the writings abound with the kind of stories we often think of as memoir. Hogan''''s collection is subtitled, rather more mysteriously as far as genre is concerned, "A Spiritual History of the Living World," but the jacket copy tells us that this is a work of nonfiction, and the personal storytelling certainly hints at memoir.

Students often struggle to define the boundary between memoir and autobiography, or memoir and travel writing, and sometimes wonder which personal essays are memoirs, but they rarely ask about the difference between memoir and fiction, perhaps because it seems obvious that one is true and the other made up. But the more I think about memoir, and thus about truth, the less obvious--and the more important--that distinction becomes. After all, not everything in a memoir is true: who can remember the exact dialogue that took place at breakfast forty years ago? And if you can make up dialogue, change the name and hair color of a character to protect the privacy of the living, or even--as some memoirists do-re--order events to make the story work better, how is that different from fiction?

In memoir, the author stands behind her story saying to the world: this happened; this is true. What is important about this assertion is that it has an effect on the reader-he reads it believing it to be a true story, which in turn requires the writer to be an unflinchingly reliable narrator. In fiction, a story may be skillfully designed to sound like a true story told in the first person by a fictional character (who may be a quite unreliable narrator), but if the writer presents it as fiction, the reader will usually perceive it as fiction. Readers tend to look for, even to assume, the autobiographical in fiction, but they also recognize the writer''''s attempt to fictionalize, just as they recognize in memoir the central commitment not to fictionalize.

In this way, when you name what you write memoir or fiction, you enter into a contract with the reader. You say "this is true," or you say "this is imaginary." And if you are going to honor that contract, your raw material as a memoirist can only be what you have actually experienced. It is up to you to decide how imaginatively you transform the known facts- exactly how far you allow yourself to go to fill in the memory gaps. But whatever you decide about that, you must remain limited by your experience, unless you turn to fiction, in which you can, of course, embrace people, places, and events you have never personally known. While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing, the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe. These very different stages for the imagination allow recognizably different plays to be acted out on them.

You may interpret this contract with the reader differently from other writers, perhaps feeling freer to tamper with the details or choosing to invent more of the dialogue. Some memoirists, like Fern Kupfer in Before and After Zachariah, conflate several characters into one composite character and acknowledge in the book what they have done. Others reorder events into a different chronology or, like Deborah Tall in The Island of the White Cow, compress several years into one. (For some reason, I feel freer to mess with time than with people.) But although there is room for disagreement about many of these choices, you will gain little of value if you end up abusing the reader''''s trust. Making up a "better ending" to your story, while presenting it as true, or, worse still, inventing a whole piece of your life because it makes a good memoir, will often backfire. Readers may initially believe you if your deceptions are clever, but the more successful you are as a writer, the more likely it is that you will eventually be caught. Lillian Hellman''''s acclaimed "memoir," Pentimento, (later made into the film Julia) caught the public''''s imagination and was highly acclaimed, but later turned out to be more or less untrue: Hellman had never even met the real-life Julia. Had she lived to produce more memoirs, her disillusioned readers would have been less willing to place their trust in her words. In any case, her reputation undoubtedly suffered.

Even if no one ever finds out that you tampered with the facts, your memoir will suffer if you are dishonest. It is very difficult to be both candid and deceptive at the same time, and a memoir does need to be candid. Tampering with the truth will lead you to writing a bit too carefully-which in turn will rob your style of the ease that goes with honesty. Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing. Especially when written in the first person, purporting to be true, it has a faint odor of prevarication about it. It''''s the kind of writing that leaves some of its readers with a nagging doubt: What exactly was it I didn''''t believe?

Of course, none of this should prevent you from speculating about the facts. Readers easily recognize the honesty of your desire to make sense of whatever few facts you may have. Musing on what might have been behind that old photograph of your grandmother, or telling the reader how you''''ve always imagined your parents'''' early lives, is not the same as presenting your speculations as facts.

One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some aspiring writers, since so many of us have been influenced, through various therapeutic or self-help philosophies, to believe that judgment is bad. We connect it with "judgmental," often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.

If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self-revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.

* * *

When you sit down to begin working on a memoir:

First, remind yourself that you are not writing your autobiography: You do not have to write your entire life. So begin thinking in terms of theme and focus.

Second, get into an opinionated, or at least questioning, frame of mind.

Third, go to the library and check out a few good memoirs to read.

And finally, above all, remember that it''''s essential to find your voice. You can begin practicing right away.

*

From "Chapter One: What Is Memoir?" reprinted from Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art by Judith Barrington © 1997 by Judith Barrington. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from the author.

by guest author Judith Barrington
Posted by Rebecca B.