I have been playing around with the idea of writing a memoir about my colorful childhood for more than a decade, writing up brief, mostly comic episodes about bats and Christmas trees and the conversion of our family barn into House Beautiful. But I don’t seem to be able to find the connective tissue that would make those episodes into something cohesive. The problem, really, is that a lot of that connective tissue is pretty dark, and I haven’t been sure how to write that stuff. And that I am constantly aware of what I think of as the Rashomon factor.
Rashomon is a Japanese film from 1950 staring the brilliant Toshiro Mifune, in which the same story is told from four different perspectives. A samurai is found murdered in a forest; a priest, a bandit, the wife of the samurai, and the samurai himself (through a medium) tell their versions of the story, in none of which they are the villains. Every single event ever has many different versions. Especially in families. In writing a memoir you either have to be rock-solid in your conviction that your version is the true one, or ready to deal with the anger or anguish of family response.
There was a fascinating article in The New York Times on a new book by Molly Jong-Fast, about growing up as the daughter of writer Erica Jong. In the ’70s Erica Jong was sort of a literary “It” girl, the author of the novel Fear of Flying, and the creator of the phrase “zipless fuck.” I read Fear when it came out; it was not my cup of tea. Jong continued to write, both novels and memoirs that made her money and acclaim. The memoirs were… honest? brutal? opportunistic? about some of the worst moments in her daughter’s life–from the viewpoint of her mother. I imagine (it’s pretty clear in the article) that it was not fun being the only daughter of Erica Jong.
I both get what Jong did and I don’t. As a parent, there are times in the lives of your children that have an effect on you, the parent. I can think of half a dozen such events in my own life, which were as hard on me and my husband as they were on the kid. I would not publish them (certainly not without the blessings of the child in question). I know there’s a whole genre of memoir out there: parents telling the saga of life with kids who have addictions, or terrible diseases, or depression. They serve a good and useful purpose, I think, of giving people who may be on the cusp of such experiences a view of the terrain ahead. And God knows a parent going through something terrifying and awful with their child is having an experience themselves, which they may want to write about.
But from everything I can gather, Erica Jong’s use of Molly’s life was opportunistic. She appeared to write about Molly, not as a child she loved, but as a lifestyle accessory that provided interesting writing prompts. Since turnabout is fair play, Molly has just published a memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, in part about her mother’s descent into dementia. As the Times notes,
Ms. Jong-Fast follows in her mother’s footsteps in one crucial way: She holds nothing back. With the kind of withering close-to-the-bone judgments that only a daughter can level at her mother she takes Ms. Jong apart, describing her as a fame-chasing, alcoholic narcissist who had little time for or interest in her daughter.
On the other hand, “Ms. Jong-Fast may be mangling her mother’s reputation, but in a weird way, she’s honoring her legacy.” And it appears that Erica Jong approves.
“My mom always said to me, You sit down at the computer and you open a vein,” she said. “Why bother writing a memoir if you’re not going to tell the whole story.”
Reached by phone recently, Ms. Jong… still agreed with that principle, even now that their roles are reversed.
“When you’re a writer your life is really an open book, and that’s true also for your child… I write about her, she writes about me, ” Ms. Jong said. “If you want to be an honest writer, you have to speak about it all. None of it bothers me.”
Well, isn’t that swell for for Erica Jong?
I had a childhood that was troubled in some ways and insanely privileged in others. When I move toward writing about some of the troublesome bits I remember my mother’s reaction when I was a teenager and I talked about maybe getting some therapy. “Why? So someone can tell you I was a terrible mother?” As it happened, that wasn’t what I was looking for in therapy (when I finally got into therapy, although the subject of my mother did come up a time or two). But I’m very sensitive to the fact that my mother, who has been dead since 1986, would hate to have her shortcomings broadcast.
I don’t think you write a memoir in order to tell the definitive truth; you write it to tell your truth, whatever that may be. But you do so in the awareness that your vantage point may be entirely different from that of other people who populate your story; you don’t gape with surprise when what you thought was Holy Writ is disputed, vehemently, by others who were standing on a different rock. And you accept, gracefully, the feelings your work may occasion.
I have noticed that my sister and I remember some things very differently, giving bits of my childhood something of the Rashomon effect. I’m not a big fan of memoir in general; I rarely read it and the more I think about it, the more I think it’s just another form of fiction, all the more so when someone is very invested in arguing the truth of it.
I do like the stories that come out of my life and out of those of other people (which is why I love your barn pieces), though. In my case, I do the occasional flash memoir piece. Mine aren’t as connected as your barn pieces, though it occurs to me I could do a lot of horse stories that way. But I suspect I wouldn’t want to dig in too deep around those stories — I’d rather keep them as pieces of the truth and not try to work them into the whole thing.
I’m not sure I ever read Fear of Flying, though I remember it as a big deal. It never seemed to fit into my feminism. I don’t think I’ll read Molly Jong-Fast’s book on her mother, either.
There is an essay in Rebecca Solnit’s new book No Straight Road Takes You There called “In Praise of the Meander,” which is, among other things, about structuring essays or stories. One sentence from it strikes me: “You’re not trying to get somewhere but to know better where you are.” The essay starts and ends with a mushroom-hunting expedition. The last two sentences are, “Those mushrooms Greg and I were picking were just the fruiting bodies of great underground networks, and you probably didn’t think I could come full circle here, but I just did. I was meandering but not lost.”
I’ve been thinking about how to structure in a similar way ever since.
“Meandering but not lost.” Perfect.
I’ve read some memoirs that I really liked, but they’re usually about someone’s experience of something–an event or a specific experience. I don’t remember if Death Be Not Proud was required reading in high school, but I remember reading it (and everyone around me reading it). It written by a father about his family’s experience when their son had a brain tumor (in the 1950s… the story ultimately does not end happily). And I remember reading Jan Morris’s Conundrum (about her transition from James Morris to Jan Morris in the 1960s); my recollection was that Morris was very alive to the feelings which her transition, and later her memoir, had on the people she knew and loved. I think memoir has a place; it’s not my chosen genre for light reading, but sometimes you get to the heart of something by asking someone who’s been through it.
My impulse to weave the Barn stories into a full memoir is maybe just because when I’m gone no one else will have those memories, and they seem to me to have some weird value. But then, for some reason, I think of the last episode of Buffy, when they’re all standing around, exhausted but victorious, and someone mentions that the mall was destroyed in the final, epic battle. Xander says, tongue in cheek, “All those shops, gone. The Gap, Starbucks, Toys “R” Us. Who will remember all those landmarks unless we tell the world of them?” So maybe no one has to know what I know.
You know, I remember when the first malls showed up within reasonable driving distance of our home out in the sticks outside of Houston. It was such a relief to go somewhere relatively close with parking to buy school clothes, housewares, and the like instead of driving into downtown Houston. So perhaps mall stories are important, as much as I’ve come to hate everything about malls and the suburban sprawl they represent.
I don’t think we need memoirs from everyone who had a difficult childhood — or even everyone who had a happy childhood. But there are still bits and pieces of our lives that illuminate things that no longer exist (like the Sunnydale mall) or that have resonance with other people. The trick is to figure which stories are necessary for those purposes. Always a trick.