I stumbled upon an essay I wrote some years ago yesterday. It’s a pretty good piece, kind of funny, part of my ongoing “Raised in a Barn” series of anecdotes about my odd childhood. I finished it, was pretty happy with it still… and then the thought occurred to me: it’s weird that I do this. This being: write essays retelling anecdotes about my parents, the Barn, bats and Christmas trees and the trapeze that hung in our hallway, et cetera.
I mean, what’s the point? Writing fiction, you’re creating a world, and characters, and a narrative arc. Anecdotes may have characters and certainly take place in a world, and often they have a narrative arc, because otherwise it’s just… someone writing something that sounds like “My uncle had a frog named Bertram,” wth no therefore.
I think about this because I have been toying, off and on, with the idea of blowing my “Raised in a Barn” anecdotes up into a memoir. That’s hard because I run aground on “what’s the point,” or rather “why would this matter to anyone else?”
Memoir is a thriving subsection of American letters. Particularly popular are the “how I survived” memoirs, which range from true-life horror stories by survivors of crimes or horrific events, to “I had psychotic parents and I’m here to spill the tea” to “I left my abusive significant other, and you can too” to “I survived all that medical science could do to me, and I’m cured, but I’m still angry.” Survival memoirs can be instructional or inspirational, and some them are very angry.
Some memoirs are less about survival than they are about “what the hell happened?” Many memoirs by famous people, particularly famous women, fall under that banner. They promise the inside skinny, the truth that the news or TikTok or Instagram won’t tell you. Sometimes they’re inspirational too. And there are memoirs that are less about the author and more about evoking a time and place.
I have read memoirs that failed because they had no there there–the equivalent of talking about Uncle Fred and his frog Bertram. Books where the author (and presumably the publisher) thought there was something compelling about their story, what they lived through, saw, survived, but that missed that narrative arc. Maybe they thought it was implicit, but it wasn’t. If I read a memoir and I don’t come out of it with a sense of what the author really wanted me to know (beyond, say Abusive Spouses Are Bad! or Running for President is Unpleasant!) I don’t think it works.
It takes a certain mindset to write a memoir. You have to be convinced that other people will care about a story you’re telling about YOU. That requires some audacity, doesn’t it? To believe that your story will have meaning to anyone else? Audacity is a well-known tool in the writer’s kit, right there with grammar and spelling.
I spent the past weekend among family at the celebration of life for my late and entirely wonderful Aunt Julie. There was a graveside meet up (it was non-religious, so calling it a service is a misnomer) at which I spoke–and there were probably 30 or so people there, including caregivers, a co-worker, friends, and of course, family. And we all told stories about Aunt Julie and what made her so delightful, and there were tears and a whole lot of laughter. It was effortless to tell these stories, because everyone there loved my aunt. That was the point: to share the different aspects of my aunt’s life and her character and to celebrate her. The stories had meaning for everyone there.
If I’m going to write a memoir (and I haven’t talked myself out of it just yet) I need to have–not just the audacity to believe that someone is going to find meaning in it, but a narrative arc that creates that meaning.
This is why I am a fan of what I call “flash memoir” — short tales about specific experiences in my life. They have a narrative arc in and of themselves, but if I were to put them all together, I don’t think they’d have an overarching one. If I had enough of them for a book, I’d be inclined to think of them as a collection of glimpses rather than an overall memoir.
It seems to me that you have quite a collection of “Raised in a Barn” stories that would do much the same. I’m not at all sure that the stories as a whole need to have a narrative arc as long as each individual one does. Maybe part of the purpose is finding those stories that we all have of our lives and encouraging others to find their own and to appreciate that most of our lives are made up of such experiences. Yes, they shape us, but given that many of them are even contradictory, I don’t know that it’s even possible to put them into a coherent whole, or at least, not without taking the memoir into deep psychoanalytic reflection, which I think I might find boring.
I mean, I’m sure there is something deeply psychological about the fact that I got a horse for my 7th birthday when I had never once mentioned any interest in horses. It was all about my parents wanting me to understand my roots. But I have no interest in dealing with the underlying issues; the story’s funny and it gives some flavor of my childhood. That’s enough for me. Then again, I almost never read memoirs of people who had deep trauma, though I will admit that well-written biography that gets into the effect of experiences on a person’s life can be worth my time (Julie Phillips’s bio of James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon comes to mind).
Such stories are at the root of storytelling, like the stories at your aunt’s memorial or the ones told around campfires. Maybe storytelling is good for its own stake.
I’m not exactly arguing with you. I just know I’d read a collection of your experiences growing up with pleasure without needing it to create some kind of arc about how that made Madeleine. They’re good stories and you tell them well. I’m not sure they need deeper meaning.
And now I really want to hear the story about how you got a horse for your 7th birthday.
What really set this off was my sudden flash of “why on earth would anyone else care about this?” In fact, I’ve told these stories, and people seem to be amused by them, which is really the point. But I think only a certain kind of person wants to write them down. That and Uncle Fred and his frog, Bertram.
Maybe I’ll tell the horse story here on the blog sometime. I developed it into a story when I was learning oral storytelling at one point.
You know, you could develop the barn stories into an oral storytelling show. Those kind of stories are perfect for that kind of performing and you’d be good at it. Jeanne Gommol has taken up telling similar stories at the Moth of late and even won some prizes. Not that you need another artistic project.
In fact, I told the Bats story at Corflu this year at a storytelling event. It’s great for both the storyteller and the theatre geek in me…