Memoir, or: Why Are You Telling Me This?

In 10 days I’m attending a week-long writing workshop for women who write memoir about faith. For all of us, the faith is Christianity, and Lauren Winner, the author of the books Girl Meets God and Still and a religion professor at Duke, is leading the workshop. To prepare, she’s had us read some very interesting things, very focused and helpful, and it’s connected me strongly with my own journey– both my life journey and writing journey.

I spent about three years, (though really more like fifteen,) writing a memoir which I would by all accounts — except that it has not been published — deem successful. It has had many titles, including Prodigal Daughter and Healing, but the one that for me still most closely conveys what the book is about is Visions and Revisions, from a T. S. Eliot poem. In the book, in a real way, I wrestle the materials of my own life into a coherent story that itself considers a number of “versions” and that, in its complexity, makes sense to me and  stands up.

It is not entirely accurate. I realized afterward that I’d gotten the name wrong of a pastor who was very significant to me in my youth, giving him his son’s (more common) name. Some major issues of chronology only became clear accidentally during the writing of the book because of side conversations with my mother.

Because I don’t trust the versions of my own life that have been “written” by my mother and other family members, I had a deep need to construct this one as accurately as I could without access to their memories. I know that it is filled with inaccuracies and also illusions that I’ve carried with me– both because I’ve needed them as coping strategies and also because they help me to live as a person with a whole and coherent identity. I don’t even know what they are (thus is the nature of self-deception), but I know they are there. One of the essays I’ve read this week is Stanley Hauerwas’s great essay (with David Burrell), “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich.” He writes about the need for a “master image of the self” and also a need to keep questioning that image so that it does not reduce our engagement with a complex world.

I wrote four full drafts of my memoir and had the kind support of readers and of an agent at a major New York City literary agency. She represented it very well and was kind enough to share with me the rejection letters it received from every major publisher in the U.S., all of which praised the writing and had criticisms that were almost entirely based on marketing concerns– I am unknown, have no “platform” for selling the book. The story is too “small” for their readership; the story is too “big” for their readership, etc. Why would a general public be interested in my story?

The rejection didn’t much bother me. I would, of course, have loved to have the book out and be able to give it to people to read and build a “platform” on the basis of the book. I would love to be a “legitimate” writer. But it also would have been challenging. There are people who would have felt betrayed by it (see “The Anxious Artist”). Writing the story is very different from publishing the story.

It also would have in some ways held me in that particular version of my story. The great goodness of that book, really, is that it released me from some significant burdens. I no longer had to talk about the things that happened in my childhood and adolescence to show people who I was, hold onto those pieces of narrative in order to form relationships and be in the world.

Maybe the conflicts or the threats to that particular construction of myself were finally addressed in the writing of the book. It was solid and withstood even the blows of my mother’s response when she read the manuscript. I had won the war. I had grown up.

I also began at that time to omit from my writing goals the strong desire to publish. I self-published my first poetry manuscript. I tried to break the memoir into essays to place in smaller publications so as to attract attention to the whole, but it never worked as pieces and kept feeling overly simplified. In the end, I didn’t send it out to smaller publishers myself, which would have almost certainly resulted in someone publishing it somewhere.

When it came time to submit a piece to this writing workshop, I did not submit what I had in my application, a piece from the memoir. Instead, I spent a couple months writing a self-contained essay on women’s ordination and my experience with the Roman Catholic Womenpriest movement. Reading the writing samples from all the people in the workshop, I’m surprised by my choice.

This is an essay, not strictly memoir, although it’s completely rooted in my own experience. It is guided by ideas, and for a long time the elements of “story,” the anecdotes, struggled to expand beyond the boundaries of the essay, begged to become a full-blown book (ha!), wanted to just become a free-association jumble of all my feelings and opinions and experiences. The hardest problem I had (and probably one I have not yet solved) was finding a thesis for it. I did a lot of cutting and shaping and rewriting to get it into shape.

But also, reading the preparatory materials, particularly the wonderful graphic novel, Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel, and an essay by Patricia Hampl, “Memory and Imagination,” from her book I Could Tell You Stories, have made me sit up and say, “What do I believe about memoir? Have I given up on it?”

What do I believe about using a life, constructing stories based on a life, organizing a life and reflections on that life for a public readership? 

Because that is where I’m at right now. I  have lived with all these wonderful quotes on my walls about the importance of writing one’s life. For years, I have had a photo up of an upside-down house projected on a wall taken by a room turned into a pinhole camera, for me the ideal image of writing memoirs about childhood. I know that it is what I make in words of the life I have been given to live that is the gift I have to offer the world, not what I can invent or imagine about other worlds and lives.

And so I am moving deeper into the questions. Freed in part from the burden of confusion lack of authority in the telling of my own story, I need to find ways to keep making meaning out of images, experiences, and even memory, and offer writing that is truthful and true.

photo: I cut this photo out of a copy of the New Yorker many years ago and it has hung in my various offices ever since. It is a photo taken by Abelardo Morell out a picture window using a whole room as a pinhole camera. What you get is an upside-down reflection of the houses across the street projected on the walls of the room.

Here’s the citation from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where I found the image: Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of Houses across the Street  in our Livingroom, 1991; photograph; gelatin silver print, 18  in. x 22 1/2 in. (45.72 cm x 57.15 cm);  Collection  SFMOMA,  Foto  Forum purchase; © Abelardo Morell
Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/9253##ixzz1xh01DDCg San Francisco Museum of Modern Art