A Very Long Play

Please note: The following post is something I wrote in the Spring of 2002. I was enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts Creative Nonfiction program at the time. One of our BIG assignments was to write what they called the 'craft' paper on any subject of our choosing. Since many of our discussions then (and to this day via our college's on-line discussion group and with the James Frey incident among others) were about the accuracy of memoir, I thought I'd post my craft paper (what I then affectionately called my crap paper) on my website...for what it's worth. After rereading it, I could add about three more acts including one on Ms. Vivian Gornick whose lecture at my former college caused a firestorm of response and still is to this day.

Also note that since it was a formal paper, the footnotes are listed at the end.


Perhaps, Maybe:
A Memory Play In Three Acts

"At any moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourselfbecause if you remember yourself while you are you you are not forpurposes of creating you."
Gertrude Stein

Act One: Scene One

I decided to take myself to a film. There were only two showing at the local theatre and I’d already seen one of them, so I settled on A Beautiful Mind since it was nominated for numerous Academy Awards. I had read the book of the same name written by Sylvia Nasar and found the nonfiction story of John Nash’s life to be painfully intriguing. In addition, I admired the author’s ability to show Nash as human – filled with flaws, both brilliant and bothered.

Movies made from books always lack something, be it ironic twists of plot or the internal monologue of the characters. When the books are fiction, this doesn’t seem to bother me greatly and I’m able to enjoy films such as The English Patient or even Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone forgiving the limitations of cinema to successfully bring a novel, as experienced by the reader, to the screen. But when the book is non-fiction, and therefore considered to be a “true” story, I find the limitations manipulative, arrogant, and deceptive. This was the case with A Beautiful Mind. John Nash was a bisexual, a misogynist, a horrible father, and an anti-Semite who separated from his wife though lived with her for forty years so she could take care of him. None of this was shown in the film.

Yes, he was brilliant. Yes, his illness was sad and debilitating. Yes, his story is a complex web of reality and the power of the mind to create a world so real, so paranoid, it
tortured him and those he loved for years. But he was more than just a mind to be examined by the director and cinematography as a one-dimensional genius. He was a human being. He was a human being with a horrific illness. He was human being who was more than just his accomplishments, more than his manipulation of numbers. He was a human being and his humanness included his prejudices and his spite, his opinionated ego about children and women, and his child-like inability to trust something other than his mind.

I walked away from the film more than disappointed; I was angry with the director and with Hollywood for minimizing such a complex and beautiful story into something so sappy, thin, and myopic. I wanted to scream at all the moviegoers – those who just left as I had done and those waiting in line for the next showing – and say, “Read the book; it’s so much better, it’s so much more human!” Of course, I didn’t. Instead, I walked home all the while pondering that thin line between what is fact and what is fiction. I know it’s blurry. I know there is no clear delineation between what is perceived or lived and what is told as story or as fact, but the exploitation of such a powerful story for the coffers of Hollywood made me feel even more violated and cheated, as if they’d broken some unspoken contract with me.

Was the story told still factual? Was the story I watched on the screen still the truth? Or was it now a distortion, a misrepresentation of an author’s work? If I had not read the book, would I walk away from the theatre believing a Hollywood lie as fact, as truth?

As I work on my own memoir, these questions trouble me daily. Memoir, or “a narrative of experiences that the writer has lived through”[i] is different than biography perhaps in that the writer is writing of her own experiences. In A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar was writing about the life of someone else, the life of John Nash. Yet are there different contracts we make with our readers, or in the case of a film, with our viewers depending on whose story is being told and who is telling the story? How much can we bias the truth?

The murkiness of this internal dialogue grows even murkier when I think about the role of memory when writing of self. One can’t tell of their past without remembering, yet what is remembered is often tainted, if not by time, than by what? By bias? By circumstance? By relationships? By perspective? By how much we have forgotten? If our remembering shifts and changes for a myriad of reasons, how do we, as memoirists approach our stories with any faith in accuracy, with any faith in our ability to tell an honest tale? Furthermore, how much will our audiences “allow” us to bend a memory and still believe us? Where are the boundaries of memory and at one point do they move beyond the boundaries of what we deem to be the facts or the truth of our lives?

Act One: Scene Two
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a work of fiction. I know this because when I checked the book out from the public library I looked for it in the fiction section. “F/O’Brien” identified the book on the computer screen as well on the spine of the hardbound book shelved in the fiction stacks. But the novel is not a novel. It is an experience of the Vietnam War as told by a man who lived through all the truths and lies of such a historical time.

I’ve read the book over nine times, but the last time I checked it out, the librarian behind the counter said, “I don’t know why this book is considered fiction. In fact,” she said stamping the due date on the inside cover with annoyed firmness, “I’m not certain why we categorize any of the fiction books as fiction since they all are assigned a Dewey decimal number just like the non-fiction books.”

“Is it perhaps because these works of fiction are just that, fictional?” I asked her trying not to sound too obvious.

“Yes, but have you read this book?” Her tone was emphatic. I understood her point. The first time I read O’Brien’s novel I didn’t know it was a novel, I didn’t know it was a work of fiction, I didn’t know until I got to the chapter that told me, “this is a work of fiction.” Then I realized all that O’Brien had written up until that point were simply stories, stories he made up in his head. I was shocked. I wasn’t irritated, just amazed that such writing, such honest stories were not real, were not actual events. I refused to believe it. All writing, I told myself, comes from some place real, some place lived and while these specific people and places may be composites and amalgamations they were imbued with such a truthful quality, I knew they were more real than real.

“Yes,” I told the librarian, “Yes, I’ve read this book and I don’t care where they shelve it. It feels real to me.” We smiled at each other. She nodded her head and we both knew we spoke the truth.

Act One: Scene Three
I miss the city bus. Another one doesn’t come for almost an hour so I pop into the Barnes and Noble bookstore on the corner. Truth be told, I hate Barnes and Noble, or as my friends call it, Barf and Ignoble, but I am bored and so I set out to find a few books I’ve wanted to scan through before I decide to order them from my small, local bookstore at home.

“May I help you?” an over-zealous clerk asks.

“Sure,” I say though I am a bit taken aback by the cheerleader authority of this employee. “I’m looking for two books. One by Violette LeDuc and the other by Elias Canetti.”

Stumped, the clerk leads me to the computer terminal tucked in between a few cushy chairs and the Sci-Fi stacks.

“Yep,” says the clerk after punching in the spelling I offer of the two authors. “Please follow me.”

I am led out of Sci-fi, passed Self-Help, and through the New Age section to the “Literature” shelves. I’ve never a seen a section of a bookstore labeled “Literature” and so, to break the spunky-like silence I ask, “What books are considered literature versus fiction or non-fiction?”

“What?” the clerk stammers, surprised by such a question or perhaps stumped again without a computer terminal with which to temper her ignorance.

“Well, the books I’m looking for are memoirs, or non-fiction and you’ve led me to a section called ‘Literature’ and I notice there are works of fiction here as well as non-fiction. So, what determines which books get put in the ‘Literature’ part of the store versus over there, in the fiction section?” I point to the huge wall of books shelved to the ceiling.

The clerk smiles, “Literature is great works of fiction and non-fiction both. You know, you wouldn’t put Stephen King over here or J.A. Nance, but well, works of Eudora Welty or Hemingway, they’d be over here, in literature because, you know, they are literature not just fiction.”

“Oh,” I force myself to respond to her interesting logic. “Thank you,” I say at last and pull LeDuc’s memoir from the shelf. “It’s nice to know I have taste,” I smile and give the clerk a wink, but she doesn’t get it.

“You’re welcome,” she says, with a bit of a nervous jitter in her voice and then heads toward the fiction section where she proceeds to straighten up some Stephen King and J.A. Nance thrown hastily back on their proper, fiction shelves.

Act One: Scene Four
“Slater’s work is appalling. She is an insult to all of us who call ourselves memoirists.”

The room is cool. The humid air outside can’t seep into this space and I am thankful. Heat would only make me hotter under the collar than I already am. A young woman – and I mean young – is criticizing Lauren Slater’s memoir Lying for crossing one too many boundaries. I’ve held my tongue up until this point, lost in the academic logic of this woman’s discourse, which has just turned into a tirade, but I love Slater’s work and I am particularly defensive when it comes to Lying, a memoir told using the metaphor of a lie or a multitude of lies.

“How is it insulting?” I ask, hesitantly.

“Her whole sensibility is that of a non-fiction writer, this is the contract she makes with the reader and yet she manipulates us, she lies and lies and lies without telling exactly what is the truth of her life and what isn’t.”

I’m frantically taking notes. Every word that flies from the gifted and childish writer I want to memorize. I’m not certain why, but I know she is good at her craft and I want to learn from her. Instead, I find myself seething.

“But,” I argue, “She tells us right from the start with the title and in the very first chapter and throughout the book, for that matter, that she is lying.”

“That’s wrong,” her strawberry blonde hair tosses back and she sits up straighter in her chair, “It is a violation of our contract to not tell the truth in this genre.”

“And what truth is she not telling?” I can’t toss my hair. It’s not in my nature. I pull it back; hold it tight against my scalp in a small ponytail, waiting for an answer.

“Perhaps this isn’t the best time and place for this discussion,” the professor steps in, “We can address this later in the program when we all have a chance to hear each other’s work.”

We both simmer for a moment and then get back to the discussion at hand: What is memoir?

Intermission
In a typical paper, in a typical paper that examines craft in writing, the writer would, traditionally, state a thesis or a question to be examined in the paper. So, in this brief intermission, let me share with you the theses that haunt me. First, memory is not the same as truth. Second, truth is not the same as accuracy. Third, accuracy is not the same as honesty. And fourth, honesty is not the same as memory. Therefore, it is impossible to speak an accurate truth through an honest memory just as it is impossible to speak a truthful memory through honest accuracy. Furthermore, it is impossible to speak an accurate memory through truthful honesty. In conclusion, my thesis is: it is impossible to speak.

Act Two: Scene One
What is memoir? Vivian Gornick writes, “Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of ‘becoming’…”[ii] That’s all well and good, but what if one’s becoming is trapped in unattainable memories, in the black tongue of silence brought on by trauma or self-inflicted sequestration? How do we tell of our “becoming” if we are only left with snatches and prisms of our lives?

This is the struggle of every memoirist. How do we tell the truth at all times and not be seduced by the colorful allure of a good story? In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Lauren Slater writes, “What matters in knowing and telling yourself is not the historical truth, which fades as our neurons decay and stutter, but the narrative truth, which is delightfully bendable and politically powerful.”[iii]

Storytelling is an age-old tradition. Whenever two or more people come together, they share the narratives of their lives usually in short anecdotes or in longer, more detailed accounts. Stories make us who we are, mark our existence in the world; connect us to others through common experience, validating feelings, beliefs, and values. For a fiction writer, what is told is done so through the words of characters created for the sole purpose of telling a story or a series of stories or one small strand of a story within the context of something larger. Non-fiction writers, even if they attach the term “creative” to their profession also write using characters, but the difference is, of course, that characters in fiction afford far more benefits to the author than characters do for even the most creative of non-fiction writers. Or do they?

While both are creating story, the assumption is that fiction writers are using their imaginations to tell of the events, characters, and emotions that make up the basis for plot while non-fiction writers are just that, they are writing with-non or without fiction. They are to be truth-speakers, willing to put on paper what is real and factual. Within the subtext of creative non-fiction writing is a range of genre from autobiographical works to strict news reporting. What falls between these two extremes are works of memoir, biography, personal essay, book reviews, and something called immersion journalism. What rules apply? Are they the same for memoir as they are for feature stories? Does a newscaster have the freedom to bend what is remembered like a memoirist might?

If we accept Gornick’s assertion, and I do, then we must accept that the rules for a journalist are different than that of a memoirist. Journalists are not in the business of becoming though the stories they report may be about the becoming of someone else and therefore, there is no room for bending what is perceived as truth or truth as perceived by the subject of the story. The subject of the story is becoming in her own unique way, but her journey is not up for interpretation by the journalist.

Gornick explains further, “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”[iv] Memoir, then, is combing through one’s life to make sense of becoming. So, why would it upset people to know that in becoming, in combing through her life, Slater uses a lie, or in the case of her memoir, many lies?

Act Two: Scene Two
What upsets us about lies? A recent Washington Post article begins, “A moving, richly detailed New York Times Magazine profile of a boy who became an Ivory Coast laborer turns out to have been a fabrication.”[v] This, then, is a violation. This is not truth. This is a lie. Yes, it is true that young boys are exploited in Africa as laborers. Yes, it is true that child slavery is a horrendous and growing problem in the ever-burgeoning world of global economics. Yes, it is true the writer of this specific story has written other such stories that are about “down-on-their luck characters in remote corners of the globe, gripping anecdotes [with] hard-to-check details.”[vi] But the lie is this: in the world no such young man with the specific name given in the original article existed. Others existed, millions of others exist throughout the world, but this one, this one that wrenched at our hearts, demanded our personal attention, did not exist and therefore it is necessary to dismiss the entire story, perhaps the entire career of the journalist.

Or is it?

Tim O’Brien can write a true war story and call it fiction, but a journalist cannot write a child slavery story and call it fact unless it is fact. That’s rule number one. Understand it. That is rule number one. Facts can be fiction, but fiction can’t be facts.

Or can they?

Act Two: Scene Three
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies specifically to electrons and is stated something like this: It is impossible to know both the exact position AND the velocity of any particular electron. The reason for this impossibility is partly related to the fact that the measurement itself, which relies on the use of light particles, affects the electron in such a way that it is no longer behaving in the same way while being measured as it was before it was being measured.[vii]

A writer, say a journalist, looks at an African child in a coastal village and sees poverty and hunger, sees a boy dying (and I mean dying) to find work, to find dignity in surviving. They talk, this journalist and this boy, and the journalist is moved by this story, so moved he knows he must tell this story, he must tell all of their stories because right now, in this coastal village of Africa, there are hundreds of these children with swollen bellies and panicked eyes. And so the journalist makes a decision. He will tell this story, but he will tell this story fictionally. He will take this boy’s story and that boy’s story and the story of that young girl holding her dying baby sister in her arms. He will tell of what he sees. But what he sees is influenced by what he knows and what he knows is not, and this is extremely important, what he knows is not what that boy knows or that boy or even that girl with the starving baby in her arms.

They are electrons and the journalist, despite his good intentions, is measuring their lives with a beam of light. It is impossible for the journalist to know the velocity and exact position of these children because the tool he is using to measure them changes what he sees simply because he is seeing it with Western eyes. Starvation is relative. Work is relative. Child labor, yes, even child labor is relative.

Isn’t it?

Act Two: Scene Four
Does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle apply to memoir? Okay, Ms. Slater, by looking at your life, at the lies of your life, at the truth of your life through the lens of a metaphor, a lying metaphor, have you changed what is observed simply because you have chosen to observe it this way?

“Not quite.

“This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is supposed to be true. In some instances names of people and places have been changed to protect their privacy, but the essential story should at least aim for accuracy, so the establishment says. Therefore, I confess. To the establishment. I didn’t really fall into the grave. I was just using a metaphor to try to explain my mental state. The real truth is I went to the funeral, the hearse had engine trouble, the coffin was late, I looked into the grave, and I thought about falling in.”[viii]

Ha! Take that, strawberry blonde who flips her hair with academic arrogance. Ha!
“We are in the presence…of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows – moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge. The act of clarifying on the page is an intimate part of the metaphor.”[ix]


Act Two: Scene Five
Why write nonfiction? Why write memoir as nonfiction? Why not just write a memoir like Tim O’Brien, fictionally?

What about this: “I need to write this as quickly as possible, because it is about my mother. I want to write it while we can still remember how we hoped that she would get well. That is sentimental and extravagant, I know. I once told my mother that I would never forget her because there is so much of her in me, but this year, I’m not so sure that I can rely on myself to recall everything I possibly can. Did I get this sentimental and extravagant streak from her? Five years ago, I would have said that it came from my father, but now I’m not so sure.”[x]

Fact or fiction? Hard to tell, isn’t it? Can it be both? Can Andrew Solomon tell us of his mother’s death through the voice of Harry, the concert pianist? I mean, can Andrew Solomon really tell us the story of his mother, tell us the story of Andrew and his relationship with his mother, all the while naming his voice Harry and not Andrew?

“My mother decided to kill herself on June 19, 1991, at age fifty-eight, because if she had waited longer, she would have been too weak to take her life, and suicide requires strength and a kind of privacy that does not exist in hospitals.”[xi] Whose voice is that, I ask you? Andrew’s of course, Andrew’s true and clear, and the situation, the dreadful situation of his mother’s cancer, of his mother’s choice to end her life is told in the fictional story Solomon tells through the voice of Harry and the non-fictional story he tells in his intensely non-fictional work through his true voice, the voice of Andrew – the son who had to write of his mother.

Is Andrew’s voice a truer voice than Harry’s?

Act Two: Scene Six
Character offers distance. To create yourself in the voice of someone else makes it hurt less. Try it. Tell a story, a story you know well, one that you actually remember about your life through the voice of a character named Mildred or George or Spike. Can you make it ring as true as the voice with which you normally speak? Can you dig deeper into the emotion claiming it not as your emotion, but as the feelings of Mildred or George or Spike?

Don’t lie; you know it’s different. You know, too, that it is the same. You’ve just taken those feelings and placed them where? You’ve placed them in another container, one that can tell your story without a connection as powerful as the one you would have if you, just you and not Mildred or George or Spike, just you had spoken the story.

So what? So what’s the point? Yes, I ask myself that often. What’s the point? Just write this story as if you were telling someone else’s story. It’s easier. Hell, it’s safer. Yes, we can agree upon that, can’t we? It’s safer because face it, who’s going to come after you if you play around with the delicate spring day when you experienced your first kiss? Who’s going to question their portrayal in your fictionalized account of this particular story? You can always write this in tiny, tiny print on the inside cover of your published work: “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.”

You can’t write that in the front of your memoir, can you?

Act Two: Scene Seven
Why can’t you? Ah, now we get down to it. Why can’t you have a coincidental imagination in your memoir? You could say, “This is a story of my grandfather, but any resemblance to the actual person is entirely coincidental.” You could say it, but then, key question here, but then who would believe you? Who would believe this is a memoir, a narrative memory of your life and your experiences?

So it comes back to truth, that slippery devil who haunts us all, writers or not. Is the simple difference between memoir and fiction that one is truer than the other? Is the simple difference between memoir and fiction that you can make up details in both, but if someone else questions those details you don’t, in the case of memoir, have that disclaimer in the front of your book and therefore, yes, therefore you are caught in a lie? And lies, let’s admit it, lies hurt people. Even if that lie, that one lie or two or perhaps even ten of them, helped you tell a truer story than one you could tell fictionally, it doesn’t matter because it is still a lie told as if it were true and it misrepresents your grandfather, or your sister, or the best, best friend of your entire life.

So, why Ms. Slater, would you choose to open this Pandora’s box? Why would you choose to piss, yes piss, everyone off by daring to write a non-fiction book, a memoir, filled with lies upon lies upon lies? Simply because you could? Simply because it required great skills as a writer to layer metaphor upon metaphor in such a way that we, as readers, believe you? We believe you are an epileptic. We believe you suffer from Munchausen Syndrome. We believe you surgically had your brain split in an attempt to control your uncontrollable seizures.

I don’t believe you, Ms. Slater. I don’t believe you, but I’m asking you to believe me; I understood you. I got it. I got the clues, the scent of jasmine as a tip that this next story, this next anecdote was a lie or possibly a lie and therefore, therefore I should pay close, close attention because it is in the lies you tell me the truth. Yes, it is in telling the truth you are making it all up. And I understand. “…we become what is done to us.”[xii]

Intermission
It is a struggle for any memoirist, this one in particular, to know completely if the story they are telling is worth the telling. I want my writing to be true, to be honest, to find a common ground outside myself, but in writing about self I must write about what makes up all of my self and that, dare I say, includes what is remembered. And we all know, or I think we all know, that what is remembered is a gray area, is an open field, is an abstract painting interpreted by those who bring to their viewing all they have experienced and all they have believed.

In a typical paper, in a typical paper that examines craft in writing, the writer would, after she’d stated her thesis (mine being that is impossible to speak), provide a minimum of three points to support and explain her thesis. Consider what follows as my three points:

1) Voltaire once said, “There is no history, only lies with varying degrees of plausibility.” Change the word “history” to the word “memory” and what you have before you is memoir. Uncertainty, yet still an attempt to find a story of one’s self that is plausible. That is the honest search. That is the truth of becoming.

2) “…sometimes you just don’t know how to say the pain directly – I don’t know how to say the pain directly, I never have – and I often tell myself it really doesn’t matter, because either way, any way, the brain shivers and craves, cracked open.”[xiii] We are limited by words. We are limited by what and how we remember. Still we desire story, we desire an honest and truthful story. We desire to know we are not alone. We desire to know others have suffered as we have suffered, others have laughed as we have laughed, and others have struggled to understand the pain of becoming.

3) The story we write in the end, may not be the story that is read, may not, in fact, be the story we intended to tell at all. As readers, we covet the writer who can draw us in, who can link our lives with theirs, who can tell the story we have always wished to tell, but were unable to tell for lack of time, lack of talent, or lack of patience. As readers, we covet the writer who can tell more of our story than we knew was even there. As writers, we covet the reader who is drawn in, who links with our lives, who understands what we wish to tell. As writers, we covet the reader who can hear more of the story than we knew was even there.

Act Three: Scene One
So, forget about honesty and truth and accuracy in relationship to memory. Forget about the critics and the breadth of the genre and the New York Times reporter who is worrying he may lose his job because he tried to tell a truthful and honest story that wasn’t exactly accurate. Forget about Lauren Slater’s assertions, Vivian Gornick’s guidelines, and the beautiful strawberry blonde who is absolutely clear about truth, honesty, accuracy, and memoir. Just take a look at memory.

First, try to define it. “The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience; the ability to remember.”[xiv] Then, in the little print at the end of the definition: from Latin memoria, from memor, mindful. So second, be mindful of what you remember. Once a writing teacher told me if I was going to speculate then I should use the words “perhaps” or “maybe” to tell the reader I am speculating. In other words, she was telling me to be mindful.

Third, look up mindful. “Attentive; heedful. Used with of.”[xv] When writing my memories I am to be mindful of my ability to be accurate, truthful, and honest in what I remember. When writing my memories I must pay attention to what is remembered, and when what is remembered borders on speculation, I must say perhaps or maybe, I must write a secret message to the reader that says, hold on, please, while I explore the accuracy, truthfulness, and honesty of this memory, while I am mindful of what I am saying.

If only it were that easy.

Letter to the Strawberry Blonde

Dear Colleague:
You seem to understand something I don’t. Actually, you seem to live your writing life by a rule I can’t seem to comprehend. You have said, as writers, we have a contract with our readers and as memoirists we have a contract to tell the truth as best we can and if we can’t, we must tell the readers that in this instance we are speculating, or in fact, we are making it up to better examine what might be true.

So I try. I try again and again to write my memories using this rule, this rule that seems so clear to you and so murky to me. Yet, when I’m in the middle of remembering it, remembering it on the page where I am writing, the rule eludes me. Instead, I am sucked into the energy of the memory, the little me who is remembering the scraped knee or the color of my bedroom or the smell of the family dog after her bath. I want my words to take you there, yes you who are so very clear about this contract, but even as I write that I know it’s an impossibility because what I really want is to take me there, take me back so that the telling of this particular memory is seamless. You will not have to “go back” because, through my writing, the going back will be brought here, brought to you via the page where I am writing.

But you, the young writer who I envy in so many ways, you can’t experience what I experience. You can only experience what you experience while reading of my experiences. Therefore, let’s redefine the contract. I swear, on this date in the early spring, that I will, as a memoirist, do my very best to remember mindfully in order that you might feel your experience with my experiences as authentic. I will write, from this day forward, authentically.

With the utmost respect,
*****


Intermission
An expanded traditional paper thesis: How does one speak authentically if one is writing from what is remembered? If I mark my past with orange flags or yellow tape the way the sheriff cordons off a crime scene, where is the outermost border of what is remembered? Ironically, this question doesn’t matter to Vivian Gornick who believes the persona, the voice of the memoir, is essential to the authenticity of the memory. “Yet the creation of a persona is vital in an essay or a memoir. It is the instrument of illumination. Without it there is neither subject nor story. To achieve it, the writer of memoir or essay undergoes an apprenticeship as soul-searching as any undergone by novelist or poet: the twin struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking.”[xvi]

For Lauren Slater, the metaphor is crucial. “…even those things that are not literally true about me are metaphorically true about me, and that’s an important point.”[xvii] For the librarian bound and confused by the Dewey Decimal system memory is classifiable, memory is story shelved next to the How-to books and Moby Dick simply because the call numbers require it. For the bouncy clerk in Barnes and Noble authenticity is determined by something more prejudicial. This is good, but this, yes, this is much better and this is considered a great work and therefore is shelved in this section as literature not simply as fiction or not.

And for the filmmaker, the authenticity of the story is limited to the slice the director chooses to view through the lens of a camera. A Beautiful Mind was truthful, but it was not honest. A Beautiful Mind was mindful, but it was not accurate; it was merely a story told by someone else who read what someone else had written about someone else who lived the life they were minimizing (due to time constraints and budget, no doubt) for the screen. It was a story of a life, but not the whole story.

Act Four: Final Scene
In conclusion, (though I know it is not really a conclusion, but a summation of something delicate and uncertain) memory is a field, a large, grassy field that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions. In this field lies your memory. Not right on the surface of the green, green softness, but underneath at varying depths. This then is your task as a memoirist: to find authentic memories to tell the story that must be told through the voice that must tell it, the story of your authentic becoming.

To unearth these recollections imagine you are carrying a memory detector. You walk this field in measured steps, slowly and methodically. You hear the steady beep of your instrument through black and heavy headphones. You hear your shallow, anticipated breath echoing inside, pressing against your chest. Suddenly, the beeps increase in volume and frequency and, with smaller and steadier accuracy you measure the ground just beneath your feet. Below you, one foot or maybe ten lays a memory. With a small hand shovel, you dig to unearth what is remembered.

Sometimes you pull up small bits, round pieces of metal that are worthless or insignificant, rusted screws and bent, used nails. Sometimes you must dig deep to find the smallest treasures, or scrape the field wide for a large mystery you can’t quite understand. Some days you want to give up the work, rest your weary body in the hot magnetic sun of your life. Then a memory unfolds, offers itself to you like a diamond or a cool glass of water or the slicing blade of knife sharp against your skin. You remember a goodnight kiss, the words to a lullaby, or even this: a wicked hand leaving marks across your innocent face. Yes, even these corrosive memories are worth the search, worth mining for they, collectively, form the you that is you, the you that you are becoming.

It takes a lifetime to walk this field and even as you walk, what lies before you grows vibrantly and more elusive. You come back to you in snatches and lies, in the memories of others and the memories you once thought forgotten. And when you get home, when you place what you’ve found in front of you, spread it full across the scarred and shiny table, the mystery of you is still unsolved. The pieces are disjointed, scattered, reluctant in their assembly. Among the rust and the dirt, the smell of sweat and the taste of your own salt, nothing feels profound, nothing feels understandable.

Until late at night, right before you fall into bed, two objects come together. There, that piece in the corner and this piece, this piece you once thought unimportant, this piece you almost tossed in the trash. From a distance you see how they suit each other and you place them side by side, breathe in deep, and slide them into the tight fit they once knew years and years ago. There is only a moment to admire the work for the pieces combined are small compared to the pieces yet without a home.

To tell the truth of your life, to tell it honestly and accurately, memory must be unearthed and placed before you on the table. There is no easier way and, in fact, the way is not easy. It is arduous, painful, exhilarating and irritating. It rewards and hurts you. It angers some and mesmerizes others. At the end, at the end of this life remembered, this life lived you will place what you have found in a frame upon the shelf. After your body turns to ashes, your bones crumble under the weight of worms, people will argue about the meaning of it all. What do we make of this life? What do we call it? They will ask. And you will laugh from your grave beneath that green, grassy field and whisper just like a breeze an answer we cannot hear for we must walk our own field of memory in measured steps, slowly and methodically.

“When I die, and am judged, either by myself or by the spirit that seeps through the universe, what will be said? Will I be considered brave for the fog I’ve tolerated, or too cowardly to face the bright light of truth, or, simply, too crippled, my brain too broken?”[xviii]

Encore
Presumptuous, I know, but let me leave you with this:

“If you do not keep remembering yourself you have no identity and if you have no time you do not keep remembering yourself and as you remember yourself you do not create anybody can and does know that.”[xix]

And finally, for the strawberry blonde who knows what she knows and what I don’t know, I ask what Lauren Slater asks: “Perhaps I’ve just felt fitful my whole life; perhaps I’m using metaphor to tell my tale, a tale I know no other way of telling, a tale of my past, my mother and me, a tale of pains and humiliations and illnesses so subtle and nuanced I could never find the literal words; would it matter? Is metaphor in memoir, in life, an alternate form of honesty or simply an evasion? This is what I want to know.”[xx]

This, too, is what I want to know, though I think I hear it in the wind when I look out on the field of my remembering whispering perhaps, maybe.



Works Cited
[i] Morris, William, editor. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, New York. 1989
[ii] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 93.
[iii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 219.
[iv] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 91.
[v] Kurtz, Howard. “New York Times Feature Was Fiction”. Washington Post. Washington D.C. February 22, 2002.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Discussion with David Thielk; high school science and math teacher and dear friend and philosopher.
[viii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 60.
[ix] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 36.
[x] Solomon, Andrew. The Stone Boat. Penguin Group. New York, New York. 1994. Page 1.
[xi] Solomon, Andrew. Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Scribner. New York, New York. 2001. Page 276.
[xii] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 116.
[xiii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 204.
[xiv] Morris, William, editor. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, New York. 1989
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Pages 7-8.
[xvii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 162.
[xviii] Ibid. Page 215.
[xix] Stein, Gertrude. “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them”. The Best American Essays of the Century. Oates, Joyce Carol editor. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, New York. 2000. Page 137.
[xx] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 192.


Works Not Cited But Influential

1. Baxter, Charles. Editor. The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting. Grey Wolf Press. Saint Paul, Minnesota. 1999.
2. Friedman, Bonnie. The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy. Beacon Press. Boston, Massachusetts. 2002.
3. Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 1997.
4. Kitchen, Judith. Distance and Direction. Coffee House Press. Minneapolis, Minnesota. 2001.
5. Mairs, Nancy. A Troubled Guest. Beacon Press. Boston, Massachusetts. 2001.
6. O’Brien, Timothy. The Things They Carried. Peguin Books. New York, New York. 1990.
7. Walker, Rebecca. Black, White, and Jewish. Riverside Press. New York, New York. 2000.