Writing Is My Drink (29 page)

snobbery. To identify overlooked sexism, Gloria Steinem often

offers a substitution. The sexism of dumb-blonde jokes, say, is

exposed if the word “black” or “Latino” were to be subbed in for

the word “blonde.” Taking a cue from Steinem, I can’t help but see

that if the word “novels” were subbed in for the word “memoirs”

in the headline, “The Problem with Memoirs,” the bias against

the memoir genre on the part of the reviewer, the
Times
, and the reading public comes sharply into focus. It’s absurd to think

of an essay with the title “The Problem with Novels” because

we general y accept that the novel is a varied, inherently valu-

able, and irremovable literary form, a form in which few blanket

statements can be made and one that no reasonable modern-day

reviewer would ever suggest that we need no more of—a form

that, while often autobiographical, we do not tend to think of as

inherently narcissistic or “navel-gazing.”

But the memoir? The memoir is fair game. The memoir, rou-

tinely belittled in the pages of the
New York Times Book Review
, is a sort of an embarrassment, a literary form that any scribbler

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can create and that is somehow a symptom of the worst of our

culture’s narcissism. It is the Kardashian of the literary forms. To be a writer of memoir is to be forever a little flushed in the face, a little squeaky in answering the question “What do you write?”

While writers of every conceivable literary form from the

haiku to the screenplay draw from their own experience for in-

spiration and content, the memoirist is the most exposed; the

promise that the story told is based exclusively on her own expe-

rience makes her especial y vulnerable to scrutiny and, for some

reason, derision.

The snobbery seems to rest on the perception of the memoir

as
merely
the retelling of experience without the filter of imagination and on the assumption that the writer of memoir is more

self-involved than other writers who fold imagined ingredients

into the mix. Imagination, it would seem, is the elevating literary element. When
memoirists
have used their imaginations, however, this we do not like at all—and for legitimate reasons. We

want memoirists to stick to factual accounts of their lives, but

we also want the pleasure of snubbing them and insinuating that

their work is a mere recording of events, a sort of transcription

activity that anyone with a laptop and the will to write can pull

off. But the truth is much imagination
is
required in the writing of memoir—not the imagination needed to conjure events

or characters, but the imagination required to take a series of

personal experiences and forge them into a coherent story that

il uminates a universal experience.

Interestingly, the maligned memoir genre tends to be the

literary form with which women have enjoyed a great deal of

success. It is also a form that tends to be more compelling to

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women readers and writers than to their male counterparts.

Just saying.

Maybe some of this backlash is just growing pains. Hav-

ing become a recognized genre in the mid-nineties with books

like
Angela’s Ashes
,
This Boy’s Life
,
The Liars’ Club
,
An American
Childhood
, the contemporary memoir is just heading out of a rough, identity-searching adolescence. The James Frey debacle

represented, perhaps, the drunken grad party the police had to

break up. No longer scattered across the bookstore and mashed

into the biography section, memoir final y has a shelf of its own.

People recognize memoir when they see it. No one says
mem-

WAHs
with a French accent anymore.

Although the nineties witnessed the first wave of memoir

as a publishing phenomenon, the force that created the genre

originated in the humanist movements of the 1960s and 1970s:

namely, the civil, women’s, and gay rights movements, which

fostered a climate in which people met in church basements or

around someone’s kitchen table and said to each other “This is

what it was like for me” and received the nod of recognition from

each other, the “Amen” that says your coming-out story, your

story of discrimination, your story of abuse, has been heard.

Your secret personal story has been heard and now lives in the

public domain, where it can be seen for what it is: a retelling of

the universal experience of the individual seeking transforma-

tion, release, redemption, and a place in the world. Today mem-

oir offers us a place to express stories we have no other means to

ful y express—stories that often tell the tales of isolation, abuse, and recovery. And the fact that we stand by our stories with the

stamp of “nonfiction” that the label “memoir” carries gives the

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reader an assurance that neither the writer nor the reader who

sees her experience mirrored in the story is just “making it up.”

Those surreal circumstances that you sometimes question—
Did

that real y happen?—
they are, in fact, real. In reading and writing memoir, we bear witness to each other’s lives in a culture in

which we have become simultaneously more visible in ways that

don’t count and less visible in the ways that truly matter. Our

every movement conceivably could be documented on social

media, and yet our grief, isolation, and fear are the stories we

keep locked away in increasingly remote hiding places.

Memoir offers companionship through what surely must be

one of the loneliest moments in the history of civilization. Lisa

Jones, author of the memoir
Broken: A Love Story
, describes the role of the memoirist like this: “You’re simply a nice carpenter

who has helped make a shelter for other people’s uneasiness by

exposing your own.” No matter how important we are, how busy

our schedules, how big our houses, we all still need comfort and

shelter. From each other’s stories, we learn how to endure heart-

break, to feel connected, to survive, and to thrive. The stories

that were once routinely told around the fire, the kitchen table,

the living room, we need them stil .

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Try This

1. Go to WritingIsMyDrink.com/26Minutes and read examples

of the 26-Minute Memoir.

2. Set the timer for twenty-six minutes. Write without stop-

ping with the idea in mind that you are trying to capture the

essence of your life. There is no right or wrong here. Some

26-Minute Memoirs describe one specific scene and others

describe a lifetime. Let yourself be free to go wherever the

writing takes you.

a) Try not to stop to correct or edit. If you pause to let the ideas come, that’s fine. This assignment should be something like

a freewriting: Keep writing without stopping for twenty-

six minutes. It can be handwritten or typed. Writers learn

quite quickly which method works best for them, and many

switch back and forth between writing by hand and work-

ing on the computer. (I tend to start all writing projects with

my fine-tip black Sharpie and a yellow legal pad. Once I feel

like I’ve got a good footing on a piece, I’ll switch over to the

computer). Find the method that works best for you.

b) When the twenty-six minutes are up, read over your piece.

What are you excited about here? Are there any ideas here

that you want to keep developing?

c) If you’re interested in publishing your 26-Minute Mem-

oir on the Writing Is My Drink blog, e-mail me at theon-

[email protected]

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3. Keep paper and pen on your nightstand. If you get a writing

idea in the middle of the night, write it down.

4. Make up a writing exercise of your own. If it feels like a vital idea, consider making a blog based on the writing exercise

and ask others to contribute. WordPress and Blogger blogs

are very easy to set up.

5. Make a list of memoirs that are important to you.

6. Pick a memoir from the list and flip through it again to iden-

tify how the narrator transforms during the story. How does

the narrator evolve from the first page of the book to the last,

and how does the writer bring that transformation to life on

the page?

7. If you are working on a memoir or personal essay, try to iden-

tify in a sentence or two how the narrator changes over the

course of the piece. Remember that the transformation can

be a very subtle one, but there must be some sort of change in

the narrator by the end of the piece.

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16

the Art of Lolling,

Lounging, and Loafing

Here’s the thing: If you’re going to write, you’re going to need to do some hard-core lolling, lounging, and loafing. You’re going

to be lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. You’ll be lying on

the sofa, staring into the fire. Sometimes you’ll be sitting in the sand, staring slack-jawed at the incoming surf. You’re going to

be
wasting time
—or at least it looks a lot like wasting time. And if you’re not completely comfortable with that—and frankly,

only half of me is—you will feel guilty when you are writing as

well as guilty when you are not. Welcome to my world.

“How’s the time wasted?” you ask. It isn’t
truly
wasted, but it will have the appearance of waste to both yourself and others. Time will seem to be squandered during the crazy gestation

period in which you aren’t quite ready to write and yet you can’t

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quite be out and about, doing other things that feel more “real,”

because any minute you might be ready to write.

Or maybe you won’t waste time. Maybe you’re not like me.

Maybe you’re one of those people who just sits down and does it.

Good for you! But me, before I start a new chapter, a new essay,

any new project, I need to do this lolling, this chaise lounging,

this wave watching, this autistic rocking.

Let’s take today. It’s the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.

Now, holiday weekends have always been a special struggle for

me, because I feel I should be doing the BIG-ticket activities

that people are prone to on these weekends: outdoor music fes-

tivals (too crowded, too loud), lake boating (um, no boat,) and

camping (life’s hard enough; why turn it into a three-ring circus

by trying to rub sticks together just so you can boil water for

morning coffee?). And while I love good weather as much as the

next person, I am often enjoying good weather from the great

indoors or from a sheltered balcony a few yards from fridge,

kettle, and my own bed.

Today I am on said balcony, lolling on the chaise, getting

ready to write. I’ve eaten a bowl of Rocky Road ice cream, fin-

ished the cold remains of my coffee, and watched the heartbeat

of a spiderweb pulse in the breeze. Any eyewitness could tell

you no work is happening here, and yet . . . and yet it is. I can-

not begin a new piece of writing without the “pre-writing lol -

ing.” Believe me, I’ve tried. So, this is work. Work that—to the

untrained eye or to the eyes of just about anyone over the age of

five—is the very image of loafing.

In these scheduled-to-the-teeth times, it’s an act of defiance

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to call loafing “work” or even to spend time earmarked as leisure

lolling and scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. But remember

that every movie we watch, every book we read, every song on

the radio, started out as someone’s scribble somewhere. And be-

fore there was the scribble, I’m betting, in many cases, there was

the lol . But in a culture that favors any type of activity, no matter how sil y (shopping for dog sweaters, playing slot machines,

TiVoing reality shows) or destructive (invading small nations,

roaring all-terrain vehicles over fragile ecosystems), reclining

on a chaise and staring at a spider’s web can feel like a war crime.

Maybe that’s why if I have enough days filled with errands,

housework, and bill-paying work, I’m prone to dangerous think-

ing. It’s a type of thinking that is akin to a lust, a lust for a certain type of groovy, hippie writing feeling. And like many forms of

lust, this one is built on a fantasy and is merely an escape from