Author of For A Dancer: The Memoir

                  I once attended a movie premiere with my friend, its director.  The success of his independent film hinged on good reviews, so I was surprised to learn that he had no intention of viewing them.  His reasoning was, “People will tell me the good ones.”  I assumed being an artist required the courage and understanding that not everyone will be a fan (which is probably why I gravitated toward subjects in school with definite answers like math), so his behavior seemed a bit fragile.  Now, after the release of my memoir, which was not just an exposure of my writing ability but also my life, I realize the damage that can be done to one’s creative spirit if their work is disliked.  This fear of disapproval is what keeps many from embarking on the vulnerable journey of self-expression.

I lack the discipline to prevent myself from looking at reviews of my book, and I also believed – (past tense!) – the assessments would help me grow as a writer.  However, I ended up more confused with each one.  Some readers claimed to be inspired and uplifted, while others called it whiny and self-indulgent.  Supporters compared it to classic literature; attackers pointed out misspellings and made accusations of dishonesty.  The nontraditional essay style was both applauded and scorched.  I wondered why were they so polarized, and which ones was I supposed to believe?

For starters, critics are interesting creatures.  Their goal is not necessarily to give helpful feedback nor to be fair, but rather to establish themselves as an expert with a believable, influential opinion.  I was slightly comforted by the discovery that my most antagonistic reviewer gave full stars to underground science fiction and vampire novels.  By that, I do not mean such interests discount one’s analysis, but it forced me to consider the unlikelihood that the same reader would be moved by my soul-bearing reflection on life.  Not everyone is on the path to self-actualization.  This begs the question why my title was chosen in the first place, but the curiosity ended there.  We cannot know the personal experiences that shape our critics’ subjective criteria, and this brought me to a place of recognition that all of the reviews are true.  Just as my story was true for me, each person has a truth of their own in response to it.

I must contradict this statement in one respect.  A particular blogger stated that my book needed more work before it was ready for publication.  This is a common prejudice in an industry ruled by gatekeepers, especially as the advancement of self-publishing (including blogs) continues to threaten that power.  Nevertheless, given the very natural human fear of inadequacy, a comment like that may have discouraged me from putting myself out there.  What a relief that I trusted myself, since unimaginable doors have opened up for me as a result.  With any luck, this will be looked back upon as my “amateur” work, and every piece will be better than the last.

So how does a writer of memoir keep it real?  How can we reconcile the conflict between inspiring versus provoking our audience?  I think it was clarified beautifully by Joan Didion in her celebrated essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which she asserts the purpose of writing:

“Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

If you can fulfill that, the message of your story will find those who need to hear it.

I, too, am troubled by the discrediting of James Frey and more recently Jonah Lehrer, authors exposed as liars when it was uncovered that they misrepresented events in Frey’s case and quotes in Lehrer’s that never existed.  I’m not a fan of either Frey or Lehrer, but not for the reasons they were discredited.  I find the work of both men inauthentic in the deepest sense, so I have no desire to defend them.  But I am concerned by the discourse about them: lumping of all nonfiction, as different as journalism and memoir, in the same basket.

Jonah Lehrer in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works was ostensibly writing journalism.  He wasn’t trained as a journalist, but as a recent hire for the New Yorker he was expected to understand journalistic standards of verification. I frankly don’t care if somebody makes up a quote or changes around dates in a memoir to improve the narrative.  I do care if I think I am reading a work of journalism, and Lehrer’s attributing a quote to Bob Dylan that Dylan never said, and then lying about it is beyond sloppy journalism. Yet I am equally troubled by a kind of lie that runs through all Jonah Lehrer’s books, yet is considered acceptable (except in academic circles): he presents as original to himself the insights and life’s work of other authors.  He does not have the respect for other people and their contributions to acknowledge them as sources. For me leaving out sources is as much as an offense as making them up.

As I wrote in Your Life as Story, memoirists should not be held to journalistic standards of verification, so for me the treatment of James Frey as a pariah because he exaggerated and invented in a memoir is troubling in a different way.  Frey made up events that never happened.  Oprah was taken in, which made her mad, and the public, her choir, was taken in with her, and so a sledgehammer came down on all memoir. Certainly, Frey is not the first memoirist to exagerrate and and self-dramatize.  If this is a way to create the “objective correlative” to an emotional truth, I can accept that.  The problem for me was that Frey, an alcoholic, was still lying to himself and giving it to us as if it were the emotional truth.  I could not read more than the first chapter without feeling it was a con job, but then I am a close reader of literary texts and have been doing it for forty years.  When the forged Hitler diaries were published, I could tell immediately by textual clues that they were fake, but that is because I have done close readings of thousands of authentic diaries.

I will leave the question of lying journalists to journalism experts; as for memoirists I believe what matters is what Anais Nin called “the donee,” the writer’s contract with the reader. Are you writing an autobiographical novel or a single slice memoir capturing a particular place and moment in history?  The expectations for each in terms of verifiable facts are different. (You will find a full list of the subgenres of memoir with examples of each in Your Life as Story and a partial list on this website.)

Once you understand the expectations of your genre and subgenre, and you have been honest with yourself about how factual you have been, and communicated that to your reader in a “note to the reader” or within the work, I think you will have addressed the ethical concerns of memoir. There are readers who will choose not to read a memoir that is not completely factual; there are other readers who want the authenticity of a story that is as true as you can make it, while serving the demands of dramatic interest.  An informed reader can make a choice and will not feel conned.

Until a few years ago, reading memoir was about as appealing as sitting next to that uncle at a family reunion who wants to tell you all about his latest trip to the podiatrist.  “And there was an accident on the highway, and then they didn’t have me in the computer, and then…”  (You get the drift.)  Of the memoirs that hit the bestseller list, I assumed the protagonist was an extraordinary survivor of life’s injustice whose story was merely stumbled upon by a ghostwriter.  Realistically, who’d have thought girls like “Precious” would live to tell the tale.  The idea of writing a memoir myself was even more alien.  What did I really have to say?

The seed was planted when I embarked on a personal photo album project.  I began phoning relatives for additional pictures, accompanied by their memory of the occasion; most featuring my sister as the main character and I, her shadow.  This would become very relevant later.  I had never really detached from her in adulthood as I tried to pretend, subconsciously avoiding inspection of how significantly our paths had diverged.  As I scrapbooked my childhood (ours, really), I thought constantly of how different her version of the story would be.  There were so many unanswered questions; so much confusion.  I wanted to write it all down – at least how I experienced it – but it was like staring up the side of a steep mountain.  And I didn’t have a happily ever after.  Thus, it seemed to belong only in my head.  While my jumble of dysfunctional family rants always cracked people up, I longed for a true journey’s end.  One day I’ll write my story… I told myself.  …when I reach the proverbial finish line.  Of course, that would be at my death, but I was still looking for some kind of justification – that culminating event that causes everything before it to make sense.

And I was completely missing the point.

Many years later, during a period of obsessive spring cleaning, I dusted off my CD’s and vowed to listen to everything that, at least at one time, I loved enough to own.  Music is a powerful mood-inducer and often a time warp.  “Neil Young Unplugged” was my favorite album when I first moved into that snowy Rocky Mountain cabin with no plumbing at the age of seventeen.  The collection of tunes summoned ghosts of old lovers or the thrill of driving for the first time.  I could even smell my grandparents’ kitchen on Maple Street when I played bluegrass music.  The fleeting recollections were not enough; I sought out a pencil and notebook, lest these musical triggers fail me one day.  Being unemployed forced upon me the spare time to keep up with this seemingly useless new hobby of writing.  Inadvertently, I had tackled the daunting task.

Each little slice of the story inspired another, as though I was being lured by a romance that I hoped would never end.  I created a list of all my previous addresses (there were a lot); each one sparking a dominant memory and chain reaction.  My thoughts flowed in ink, not out of relevance to the big picture but rather the joy of remembering and retelling.  However, when I arranged the separate stories chronologically, so much about my life didn’t make sense.  There were huge gaps.  Dots that just didn’t connect.  I decided it would have to remain a collection of essays since it was becoming disturbingly clear that my life had no intentional path.  I was just a pinball in a machine.  This is where the personal transformation began to take root.  I tried to think of how to explain to a reader, for example, how I went from being a pre-medical student to a wanna-be Hollywood actress, but I couldn’t come up with a reasonable excuse.  Finally I resolved, since it would never be read, there was no sense in applying a sugar-coating.  The truth is, there was nothing logical or noble about many of my choices, and the pattern revealed itself that my life’s woes were mostly self-inflicted.  Fear had always been my biggest motivation for perseverance but also repeatedly kept me from allowing myself to succeed.  This was a painful conclusion in itself, and at times I had to stop typing because the honest reflection on my own mistakes was too much.

Once I even convinced myself that writing was bad for me.  Uh-huh.  I was certain it was causing too much emotional distress and must be stopped.  I refer to this struggle in the book as a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder, but it led to the acknowledgement that I had even withheld truths from my own therapist.  But somehow I knew, if I could be honest with myself, I’d find cleansing in the murky waters.  The self-criticism was powerful, but I found solace in knowing that the finished product was for my eyes only.  It would not be a display of my degrees and trophies and ribbons or, for that matter, a heroic account of survival – rather, a true story of life’s adventure and a search for meaning from a real girl.  If necessary, I would find a quiet place by the river and dispose of it page by page downstream.  Unexpectedly, it was in that story that I found the acceptance I never got from my mother, the closure I needed with my sister, and the self-love that I had futilely sought from others.

Miraculous is the only word I can think of to describe the evolution that took place within.  This did not happen suddenly upon its completion.  In fact, the first time I read the book straight through, I became ill.  Sharing it with others was even more difficult, but in the end, I recognized it as part of the healing process.  After decades of chasing redemption, it was in the abyss that I found my true self.  Giving a shape to my life will forever remain the oasis I had been crawling toward.

By Emma J. Stephens  http://www.amazon.com/For-A-Dancer-The-Memoir/dp/0983668396

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. This is how I feel about having written and published two memoirs. I will never be the same. My first memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal was inspired by my bout with depression in 2001, following my cancer diagnosis. I wanted to learn about the origins of my grandmother’s suicide, which occurred when I was ten years old. I was curious about her state of mind prior to taking her life, and hoped that her journal would offer some useful information. The journey into the details of my grandmother’s story disclosed that she had a very tormented life. My research taught me that a life filled with war, loss, divorce, and ongoing misery, could lead to emotional issues such as depression and suicide.

During the writing process, I realized that the traumas of our childhoods could take decades to cause havoc on our psyche. Typically, children are very resilient. As a ten-year-old I shrugged off her death, but when I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of forty-seven, and began a battle with my demons and mortality, I began to understand some of my grandmother’s torment.

The most difficult aspect of writing my memoir was figuring out how to structure the story. I must have tried six different ways before arriving at the final published version. The book’s structure evolved into a weaving of our two stories, incorporating the pages of her journal that were found in her closet forty years following her death. Ultimately, the memoirist needs to keep revising until the structure is organic to the story. It helps to have mentors or early readers who have some distance from the subject because after a while, the structure and characters may become a blur to the writer. What was interesting was that my initial structure choice was the one that was used in the published version. Sometimes our first idea is right on.

While writing my memoir, I acknowledged and consequently had to reveal some painful truths about my mother who is still alive. As much as my instinct told me to leave her out of the book, so as not to hurt her feelings, early reviewers suggested that she needed to be included because she was the link between my grandmother and me. It was a risk, but in the end I have no regrets about sharing my own emotional truths regarding my narcissistic mother, who eventually read the book and acknowledged its candor. There were no rebuttals or grudges. In fact, for the first time in my life, my mother expressed that she was proud of me for writing the book, and she admitted that my grandmother would also have been proud and honored.

An important aspect of writing memoir is to remember that we are writing about our own emotional truth, not that of others. What also helped me dig deep was being in psychotherapy for a number of years. Although the writing assisted me in making sense of my past and my grandmother’s tortuous life as an orphan during World War I, my therapist also helped me realize that I was not the cause of her death. The nature of her childhood contributed to her torment. My therapist reminded me that we are not responsible for anyone’s actions other than our own.

My second memoir, Healing With Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey did not erupt as easily. I never wanted to be identified as a cancer victim. I wanted to be considered a survivor who dealt with her cancer and then moved on with her life, dreams, and aspirations. I feared that writing my story would submerge me deeper into the pain of the mastectomy and reconstruction. The reason I ventured to write this book is because of friends and colleagues encouraged me to do so saying that it would help others. I trusted and honored their sensibilities. Once I surrendered to the idea, the book was written quickly and effortlessly. Unlike Regina’s Closet, the structure was chronological. Although it was not easy to reprocess painful moments, in the end I was proud to have written and published this book, especially after receiving many positive reviews and hearing how many women and families it helped.

In both my memoirs, I admit to having embellished some sections. For example, when describing my grandmother’s childhood home in Poland, I researched what the homes looked like during that time in history, and had to fictionalize the street. Having an appropriate setting helped set the platform for writing her story. I think memoir writers need to do this in order to write compelling stories. Even in situations when we were present, it is also sometimes difficult to remember all the details from events that occurred decades prior. Sometimes we just have to use our imagination while crafting the story. There have been instances where the writer shows the memoir to another family member or loved one who encountered the same experiences and they recall scenarios quite differently. The memoirist must acknowledge differences and remember they are writing what they remember about the story through their own eyes, no one else’s. It is the writer’s emotional truth that is most important, and embodying that truth in the writing is what will make the memoir a compelling and powerful read.

Diana Raab, http://www.dianaraab.com

The first question to be explored on this blog, that I hope will become a forum, is addressed to those of you who have completed a memoir, whether published, self-published or unpublished: How are you different now than you were before completing a memoir? Do you have any regrets? Advice to share?

I’ll step up to the plate first with a confession. My novelist friend Jim gave me a backhanded complement the other day, after I’d succeeded in fooling him about his surprise birthday party. “How did you get to be such a good liar?” he asked me, amazed.

“I’m a better liar since I wrote a memoir,” I shrugged, and as I said it, I realized it is true. To order life events, you have to fudge and invent; life is not a story; it is one damn thing after another. So to make my memoir a story, I had to imagine what I could not remember. Now I find that I prefer the version of the past I have made meaningful by structuring it into a story to the rag-tag, willy-nilly memories from which I constructed it. The after-effect is that the accuracy of my memory is shot, while my ability to make-up story has been exercised and enhanced – hence, I am now a better liar after writing a memoir.

At the same time, I am more frank. More honest. I no longer lie about my age, for instance. Hard to do once you have placed yourself inside historical time. Plus, I’m more comfortable in my skin, blemishes and all, so I use less psychological make-up.

My increased talent for lying successfully and my new frankness are but superficial changes, though. Something more intrinsic has changed, I believe, inside the very structure of my brain. Thanks to an ecstatic review I read last year in the Los Angeles Review of Books I discovered Self Comes to Mind, Constructing the Conscious Brain, about the latest research into brain structure and function. According to the author, U.S.C. neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, Ph.D., M.D., in the neurobiology of consciousness there are different kinds of self-awareness: wakefulness, in the smaller, primitive sections of the brain, the tegmentum and hypothalamus, and, in the larger, higher functioning cerebral cortex, an awareness of self through time, formed from sense images and feelings, which he calls the “autobiographical self.” This complex, higher brain function which sees the self as a “protagonist” is of quite recent evolution according to Damasio. He writes “I sympathize with Julian Jaynes’s claim that something of great import may have happened to the human mind during the relatively brief interval of time between the events narrated in the Iliad and those that make up the Odyssey. As knowledge accumulated about humans and about the universe, continued reflection could well have altered the structure of the autobiographical self and led to a closer stitching together of relatively disparate aspects of mind processing…a recent development on the order of thousands of years, a mere instant in evolutionary time. That self draws on features of the human brain acquired, in all likelihood, during the long period of the Pleistocene. It depends on the brain’s capacity to hold expansive memory records not only of motor skills but also of facts and events, in particular, personal facts and events, those that make up the scaffolding of biography and personhood and individual identity. It depends on the ability to reconstruct and manipulate memory records in a working brain space parallel to the perceptual space, an offline holding area where time can be suspended during a delay and decisions freed from the tyranny of immediate responses. It depends on the brain’s ability to produce not only mental representations that imitate reality slavishly and mimetically but also representations that symbolize actions and objects and individuals.”

Damasio goes on to explain that brain chemistry seeks “homeostasis”, a feeling of balance and well being. This is why on a bad day that leaves people feeling stressed and distressed, they use alcohol or drugs that instantly restore a feeling of chemical homeostasis, even though they may know that it is only a temporary solution, often with undesirable side effects. Yet, according to Damasio, it is this same longing for homeostatic balance in humans that was responsible for the building of culture: “forms of consolation for those in suffering, rewards for those who helped the sufferers, injunctions for those who caused harm, norms of behavior aimed at preventing harm and promoting good, and a mixture of punishments and preventions, of penalties and praise. The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable – in a word, of how to make it stick – was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution- storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly. Implicit storytelling has created our selves, and it should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures…Individuals and groups whose brains made them capable of inventing or using such narratives to improve themselves and the societies they lived in became successful enough for the architectural traits of those brains to be selected, individually and groupwise, and for their frequency to increase over generations.”

In other words, being an autobiographic storyteller has been an evolutionary advantage! Damasio even goes so far as to suggest that artists who most actively exploit autobiographical consciousness have an evolutionary advantage in attracting mates!  “We need only think of Picasso and smile in agreement.”

At this point, of course, Damaseo is far from scientific research and is speculating. He is writing, as he keeps reminding the reader, in the realm of suggesting hypotheses for further biological brain research.

Reading him and having recently finished a memoir, I have a hypothesis of my own: that writing memoir, like meditation, yoga, and diary writing, is a positive way of establishing brain homeostasis. As in AA and Alanon, the story of self is recast and shared, and a transformation of self results. Working within the uniquely human, evolutionary vanguard areas of the brain, memoir writing alters the willy-nilly, organize-it-as-you-go neurological maps that make up the autobiographical self. Writing memoir re-maps the brain, using the accumulated raw material of sensations and feelings stored as memory. It replaces the relatively disorganized consciousness of self with a more integrated, comprehensible and purposeful consciousness of self. It is self-therapy at the deepest possible biologic level and may one day replace expensive talk and drug therapies, once science figures out how to codify the means of creating symbolic homeostasis that artists have been using for centuries to comfort themselves and others over the human condition. If, as Damasio posits, each individual creates a conscious self through implicit storytelling, then, I believe, that through explicit autobiographic storytelling on the page, we consciously reorganize and re-create the self, achieving a relatively enduring brain homeostasis. We create for our brains a spiffed-up self that makes self-acceptance easier.

How about you? How are you different post-memoir than you were pre-memoir. Please leave a comment below, and include your name (or pen name) and the title of your memoir, as well as information about your publisher, if you have one, and/or a link. However, please, for the purposes of this blog, do not describe the thematic content of your autobiographic work in more than one sentence. The intent here is not just an opportunity for online book promotion. The intent is for all those who have graduated to another level of sense of self – as post-memoir – to share insights into that, as yet privileged, experience.

-Tristine Rainer, Director, Center for Autobiographic Studies