We Should All Read Memoir
I used to write fanfiction. Lots of it. Harry Potter, mostly, which was kind of strange because I wasn’t even that obsessed with the books themselves.
I’d skimmed through the first couple, gotten pretty into The Goblet of Fire, and then started writing my own storyline and posting it online. Later, I read The Half-Blood Prince over three feverish, obsessive days that ended with me sobbing on the bed in our guest room, limbs akimbo and the book heavy on my chest like a defibrillator. And just a few months ago, right before leaving New York, I spent an entire weekend curled up in my white-and-grey bed, feeling, as I always did there, like I was resting in the welcoming warmth of a whale’s mouth, and watched every one of the movies in a row, breaking only to sleep, buzz up the delivery guy (with more dumplings or, on Sunday morning, bagels extravagantly ordered from the shop two blocks down), or to fish a new skein of yarn out of the craft bag in the back of my closet. (In an attempt to use, sell, or donate all of my non-vital [read: non-book or leather boots] belongings before my trip, I’d taken up my crochet needle again to make something useful from the leftovers from a blanket-making project I’d undertaken the year prior.)
While I now love the characters and the dialogue and the allegories of Harry Potter, it was never any of that that first fascinated me. It was the world. A big, creative, made-up world of magic and potions and monsters, all of which, inserted into otherwise conventional plots, brought them alive with danger and bravery and novelty that I, as author, had quite a fun time manipulating. Plus, I was pretty in love with Cedric Diggory and thought J.K. sacrificing him was a monumental waste. In my stories, he was alive and getting up to all sorts of hijinks as Hufflepuff’s prefect.
So yes, I wrote fanfiction, which was a gateway drug into me writing my own fiction and also posting it on the internet. I had a story about a teenage shapeshifter who was solely responsible for saving her kind from dark magic being released into the world and whose best guy friend was in love with her (I drew heavily from what I wished my own life was like).
I had another story about a woman living in San Fransisco and the two men who fell in love with her over the same summer, and the trials and tribulations of her choosing between them. I could tell you the names of them (too-long, cringe-worthy names that still make me smile when they pop into my head, which they do, unprompted, at least every few months), but even though the site that once hosted them has long been bought and redesigned and my page destroyed, I’m wary of the resuscitative powers of the internet, so I won’t.
I was good. I had a sizable following. People I’d never met would spend hours making banners for each new chapter of mine, displaying what was at the time cutting-edge Photoshop skills: curlicued fonts superposed over stock images of Kiera Knightley (whose physical description pretty closely matched my shapeshifting heroine—except my heroine had purple eyes, of course, so they’d edit those).
I’d get fan mail every time I posted. I even became good friends with a reader of mine; we shared our real, physical, non-email addresses and sent each other care packages filled with treats from our respective countries (she lived in England), and to this day, I regularly like her Facebook photos from ComicCon.
I thought rather highly of myself at that point. My readers were clamoring for advice on how to write their own stories, and I felt more than qualified to answer them. I wrote a how-to guide whose first and most important point I was confident was both accurate and edgy, turning a platitude I’d probably picked up from online writing message boards on its head: write what you don’t know.
Why write what you know, I railed, when what you know is probably incredibly boring? Who wants to read about your drive to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, I asked, where you ate some dry turkey and got in a dry argument with your selective-listening aunt and sulked the whole way home? Not a story. Not a plot worthy of your readers’ time. Make things up!, I advised. Dig into the recesses of your most creative self and weave characters out of your dreams! (A bit ridiculous of me, since most of my characters were based, consciously or not, on characters in Tamora Pierce books. I mean c’mon, Katherine, purple eyes?)
I must’ve been about 11 when I started writing fanfiction. I remember, because my mom was alive at the time—I’d sneak over to the computer in our guest room when she was asleep to hammer out another chapter—and she died when I was 12. (Most of my memories are delineated that way. Was Mom a presence or a spectre in them? Pre- or post-2006, then.) So I must’ve been about 13 when I was preaching to the faceless masses about never, never writing from real life, because that’s boring, and we don’t read to be bored.
Now, I couldn’t disagree more with 13-year-old Katherine. Now, I find the meaning mined from the mundane—from bedtime routines, from fights with siblings, from the street-sweeping schedule of a small town—the most interesting to read about. And as a writer, the most enjoyable to write about.
I no longer write fantasy, and haven’t written fiction at all in years, but every sentence that I get to construct about my existence, every descriptive paragraph of what’s in front of me, every essay reflecting on who I am by basis of what I’m surrounded by, is a pleasure. There’s something beautiful about taking something real, something true, and making it something that other people can identify with and imagine. You give it a touch of the immortal—you make it real beyond its physical confines.
It goes for writing fiction, too; it’s the real bits that make the fantastic bits plausible, and I now see that all good writing is based, even loosely, on truth. But it’s extra-special in nonfiction. It feels harder, in a way, because you don’t get to embellish or edit or paste together the setting or characters or narrative. You have to work with what was already there. And when you can make meaning from that? When you can make readers suck in a deep breath of identification, seeing something in the meaning you drew from your life that applies to them, too? It’s dynamite.
That’s why I started reading more memoirs. Memoir, in the hand of a gifted prose writer, is so much more than an autobiography, than pages of facts and descriptions. It’s a guided boat tour through the channels of humanity with sea creatures leaping free of the water to be gawked at and sighed over at regular intervals, with just the right amount of big waves and bad weather navigated through and around by the deft hand at the rudder, but only after you got a genuine fright by their proximity. You arrive at the other shore different, changed, heavier or lighter, depending on the circumstances of your entry; you’ve thrown some weight overboard or you’ve decided to keep the lifejacket with you, feeling safe in its confines.
Memoirists flay their skin to the bone so that you can get comfort from seeing your own anatomy reflected there. They reveal to us what it means to be human and they make it okay, in all its complexity and joy and guilt and confusion. They make us see that we’re alive, and grateful, and connected.
This year, Dave Eggers and Tracey K. Smith made me feel that way.
I’ve read much of Dave Egger’s fiction, and while I’ve always been impressed by the way he turns a phrase—he’s been described as “David Foster Wallace lite,” which while potentially offensive I see as both accurate and complementary; he’s much more pleasant to read than DFW—I’ve never thought of him as a top contender for the voice of our time. Then I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
I read it in paperback, which made writing this blog difficult; my copy—dog-eared and already slightly falling apart when I bought it for $2 from a man selling used books in milk crates on a folding table on the edge of Washington Square Park last fall—is packed into a box with other books, resting safely in my dad’s new house or in Danijela’s or Tracey’s apartments in the city, and I’m tens of thousands of kilometers away, now fully accustomed to being able to pull up my favorite passages of a book with four swipes on my Kindle.
But that book was meant to be held, hefted, to have its spine actually cracked and its soft pages actually turned. In it, Eggers tells the story of becoming an adult, a writer, a guardian of an real living thing (his brother, Toph) and also of the hopes of a generation (through the avant-garde, self-flagellatingly ironic, let’s-not-look-like-we’re-trying-too-hard magazine Might that he published with friends in a picturesque San Fransisco loft they couldn’t afford—how 90s can you get?).
It starts, more or less, with both of his parents dying within a month of each other, leaving 20-year-old Dave to raise his 8-year-old brother Toph with occasional help from two other older siblings and a handful of well-intentioned family friends.
The story is tragic—midwestern small-mindedness and alcoholism; cancer, stomach and lung; the bitter, abrupt slaughter of youthful exploration and the irreversible settling of the mantle of adulthood and parenthood or, at the least, guardianship. But Eggers rarely focuses on the tragedy. He focuses on the humanity that’s left behind.
And each of us, no matter what tragedies we’ve faced, can find something beautiful in that humanity, in constantly seeking to live even when living means surmounting terrible things. Here’s Eggers, directing his readers as he narrates the cross-country road trip he and Toph took from Illinois to California to restart their lives somewhere where they could be brothers, neighbors, people first and orphans second:
Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the back side of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed.
And Eggers on recognizing that all of that makes up our humanity—all we see as justifications for life, all our family and friends and jobs and vocations and pets and volunteering and talents and ability and health and money and even happiness—is fleeting:
Nothing can be preserved. It’s all on the way out, from the second it appears, and whatever you have always has one eye on the exit, and so screw it. As hideous and uncouth as it is, we have to give it all away, our bodies, our secrets, our money, everything we know: All must be given away, given away every day, because to be human means: 1. To be good 2. To save nothing.
I’ve been thinking about that line a lot recently. When I first read it (on a warm September afternoon, months before I began my trip), I didn’t understand the “saving nothing” part. Where did that leave legacies? Where did that leave our hopes? How could you build towards anything in your (one and only) life if you were also constantly throwing it off?
I now see giving it all away every day as a way to better have what we have, not as a rallying cry against having it in the first place. I see it as living every moment as authentically as we can—of acknowledging and listening to our emotions, as taking risks, as asking ourselves daily “did the world see the best of me today?” and on the days when the answer is “no,” figuring out why.
This travel year has been that for me, and I think Eggers would get it. Here’s him describing the type of euphoria I feel every time I finish a hike and look out at the valley unfurling below me, or part the trees to see a beach being lapped by its waves, or turn my skis in a spray of snow to stop by the edge of the trail and gawk at whitewashed mountains:
We were content, because we were tired, and because we were already satisfied, having seen a whale, while kayaking, in the Bay, near our homes, in our city, on a clear day while we were young.
Or maybe, less modestly, I’d agree with Eggers in his transcript for his audition for The Real World:
Why do you want to be on The Real World?
– Because I want everyone to witness my youth
Why?
– Isn’t it gorgeous?
Tracey K. Smith, current poet laureate of the United States and author of Ordinary Light, writes her memoir with the same exacting language that grace her poems. She’s not verbose and exuberant like Eggers; she’s not particularly conversational. What she is, though, is absolutely masterful at unpacking the vectors of our existence and what they hinge upon, and how the strength and angles of those connections change through time. Smith grew up in a religious black family residing in California but with strong ties to the deep South; her memoir is particularly focused on religion and family relationships and how they shaped her view of the world.
I went to Catholic school for thirteen years. I loved the magic of that faith. The plumes of smoke wafted around by the altar boys (which I saw, for a while, as especially plume-y, as my eyesight was terrible and while I could squint at the blackboard enough to make out my teachers’ writing, the pews we hunched into for weekly mass were far enough from the altar that all I saw during the Consecration were shimmering halos of light [later identified as lit candles] and giant grey clouds of smoke), the rhythmic chiming reminding us to repeat the responsorial psalm, the arched ceilings collecting our voices and stirring them up and out of the cracked-open stained glass windows. But I didn’t really identify with the whole Jesus-Christ-Our-Lord-and-Savior thing. Especially when I got older and started to have serious doubts about the likelihood of it all working as the Catholic Church, in all its obvious history of manipulating its constituents, claimed it did. By the time I finished my first semester at college, I was pretty sure I didn’t capital-B believe in God.
Smith had the exact same experience and describes it in a perfect pair of sentences that were plucked directly from 18-year-old Kath’s brain (but worded much more beautifully):
Before they were even out my door, I washed my hands of the Bible-study kids. If God is and was and always will be, I assured myself, then it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to save Him for later.
The fact that Smith walked away from her faith, even potentially just temporarily, distressed her parents, and the fact of her having distressed them distressed Smith in turn. Particularly since she had a relatively good relationship with them.
Here’s young Smith reflecting on her grandfather’s death and her realization that her mother—her heroine, her confidant—would one day die, too. I cried when I read it, thinking, again, that I’d had the exact same thought while crying with my mother over her father’s death:
But really, what I was crying for was myself and the fact that my mother, having come from a man who was susceptible to death, might one day die herself. I wept and wept, my body buckling under a weight I was too small to have ever considered before, a weight that pushed in from all sides.
Echos of Eggers’ point about leaving it all behind, no? The world will go on in the way it always has; we’re powerless to stop it. We may as well do with it while we can while we maintain some modicum of control over it. (Thus Smith loses her virginity, takes poetry classes, calls out racism, and shows up for her family, particularly when her mother is dying from cancer. Being good, saving nothing.)
Briefly, at the end of her memoir, Smith talks about being a mother herself. About the role that she and God and her parents will play in her daughter’s life. Early in the memoir, Smith wonders about her mother’s life before her: “Did I ever remember who my mother used to be, before she belonged to me?” This book remembers that Tracey—the one whose faith in God was addended with another kind of sacred word.
Both Smith and Eggers comment briefly on their own ambitions (or lack thereof—perhaps, more pragmatically, their impulses) to write in general, and to write memoir in specific.
Smith:
Like [Twain and Dickinson], I wanted to be able to say things that were moving and funny and true—things so original that they might even keep on being said and being heard.
She’s accomplished it.
Eggers, taking himself and me and the whole of human navel-gazing (that is to say, human history) down a peg:
Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage—oop!—yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel.
And Eggers again, synthesizing his self-aggrandizing, ridiculous (and almost irritatingly successful) attempt at putting his life story to work and the exact process to do so:
I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone’s. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I do not claim exclusivity. Have it. Take it from me. Do with is what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.
I don’t know if what I’m writing here is making beauty, but that’s certainly my overall goal for my writing. To roll around in all that dirt and come out having transmuted some of it into something that I can look at and turn around in my hands and get joy from. And that you can get joy from, too.
So go: read a memoir, open a journal, write down why you are who you are. Then send it to me to read, because I’m on a roll.
Okay wait, I couldn’t close without one more perfect Tracey K. Smith gem:
I suspect on some unconscious level, the anxieties we dwell upon provide us with a primitive, roundabout way of affirming the addictive delight of being alive. Like testing to see if a 9-volt battery still has juice by touching it to your tongue.
Off to go affirm the addictive delight of being alive.
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