For the purposes of my class, I ask students to believe in a minor distinction. An autobiography, I tell them, tends to be a chronological retelling of a person’s life, from birth to the present moment. Hollywood autobiographies in particular tend to hit certain beats—childhood, the recognition that acting brought attention and applause, the high school plays, the first acting jobs, the first big break. Then it’s a career replay that proceeds movie by movie and rehab by rehab, with some celebrity parties and a couple of marriages thrown in, until retirement age and the happy, quieter years in Palm Springs.
That’s not what I want you to do, I tell my students, right at the beginning of the first class. You’re not attempting a scrutiny of your entire life. Sure, you’ll have every incident in your life available for material, but what I’ll be asking you to do during the semester is to begin focusing upon a specific narrative with a connecting theme, selected from your decades of experience.
An individual life has too many stories to include in a single volume. They’re too wildly varied and jumbled, to boot. Every person I’ve known has multiple memoirs in them—multiple narratives to share. By the end of the semester, I tell my students, I’d like you to have begun thinking about which story of your life you’d like to take your first book to tell.
A book-length memoir, I stress to my students, week after week, has a through line. It is a well-composed snapshot of a portion of your time on this earth. It’s focused. It has an agenda . . . a story to tell. Like any snapshot, it can have as wide or tight a field of view as you choose; it can encompass years of a single relationship, or spend a hundred pages dissecting the subtleties and vicissitudes of a single weekend at Cape Cod. The aperture can be narrow, so that both the figures of your life and the background can retain all their rich detail. It can be wide open, so that the background is an atmospheric blur while the figures in the foreground command the attention. Those artistic choices are yours to make.
I encourage my students to seek out and read memoirs to see what I mean. I like using Alan Cumming’s Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir as an example of a well-written volume. Cumming has been in dozens of high-profile movies; he’s a staple on The Good Wife. He’s been a notorious catalyst in stage shows. He could easily have written a quick and dirty manuscript that consisted of the same easy beats and celebrity gossip as any Hollywood autobiography. What Cumming crafted, though, was a highly-readable memoir with a tight focus (as implied by the title) upon his relationship with his father. The memoir begins at a moment when, mere days before Cumming is about to begin taping for the BBC celebrity genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are?, he receives a phone call from his father—a cold and abusive man who had terrorized Cumming’s childhood. Though they hadn’t spoken in decades, Cumming took the call only to have his father inform him, without emotion, that the show’s producers were planning to ambush him with the news that they were not biologically related; his father had not sired him.
The news comes out of left field. Cumming’s whole world is upended. The chapters alternate between deliberately-paced reminiscences, rich in sensory detail, about the abuses heaped upon him by his father, and the nervous days that follow in the current day of his narration as the show’s filming commences. The memoir’s scope, I tell my students as I describe the book to them, is narrow in its timeline—that is, the ‘action’ only takes place over the course of a couple of weeks as the show commences and finishes filming its one-hour segment.
But memoir is not tied to everyday chronology. It can wander, just as the mind and memory wanders from present to past to future. Cumming spends one chapter in the tense present-day, then in the next dwells upon his past relationship with his father and all the various indignities he suffered at the man’s hands. Back and forth in time he leaps, lingering in the past, inexorably advancing toward terrible revelation in the present. The book’s a page-turner. It’s a thriller in memoir form. If they’re as good as his first, Cumming could write as many memoirs as he likes and I’d be happy to read and recommend them all.
So I ask my students, right from the first class of the semester, to start reading memoirs. Or at the very least, to start looking at them—to pick them up at the library or the bookstore and to read the summaries on their jackets, or to browse Amazon and peruse synopses there. What I want them to realize is that each memoir is a mere slice of a person’s life, a view through a single facet into the jewel that is the author. I talk about authors who have written multiple memoirs, like David Sedaris, or my friend Anne Soffee, whose two touching and funny memoirs, Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love, and Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal LA, I bring in to class to pass around.
I talk about the ways in which an author can write multiple memoirs by changing her vantage point, by focusing upon another set of associated memories and sharing them in a literary way. I bring up the example of Betty MacDonald, a favorite humorist of mine and the author of the eternally popular children’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series. Between 1945-1955, MacDonald published no less than four popular memoirs.
The first, the runaway bestseller The Egg & I, is the story of MacDonald during her twenties, who despite being used to life in urban Seattle, allowed her husband to persuade her to move with him to the most rustic corner of the Olympic Peninsula to live on a chicken ranch. Lonely and surrounded by eccentric neighbors and a lack of amenities, she learned—somewhat—to make do. Although MacDonald was miserable most of the time, and although the marriage ended after only a few years, the book comes across as comedy; its inevitable Hollywood adaptation spawned the nine movies in the lowbrow Ma & Pa Kettle series. She followed up her bestselling success with The Plague & I, which focused on her nearly-fatal battle against tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics, and of attempting to endure the rigid rules of the charitable sanitarium in which she was quarantined. Her ability to spin comic gold from such a forbidding premise is, frankly, one of the reasons I admire her as a stylist.
MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything chronicled the dozens of jobs she attempted to hold down during the lean years of the Great Depression, and of her older sister's persistence in insisting that whatever skills a job might call for, from typing to photography to animal husbandry, MacDonald could provide it. Her fourth and final memoir was Onions in the Stew, a memoir about a happy second marriage and a move to the Pacific Northwest’s Vashon Island, complicated only by the struggle to raise two teen-aged daughters.
All four books wander freely back to MacDonald's childhood, I tell my students; they weave in material from the writer’s past to illuminate the choices she made during the four distinct time periods of each memoir. Though the material is often kind of grim at its core—a bad marriage, infectious disease, poverty, problem adolescents—her tone is distinctly light-hearted. What’s more, her voice is recognizable. You get an idea of who 'Betty' was from book to book, despite the disparate topics.
We discuss all these things in the classroom for several weeks, and then midway through the semester I give them this assignment. I want you to envision your memoirs as finished, literary products, I say. This week, at home, take an hour and pretend you’re planning your career in advance. Make believe you’re going to write three memoirs. I want you each to envision what segments of your experience these memoirs will cover. Take some notes. Come up with a title, if it helps. Then I want you to write one or two paragraphs that describe each of these three books—and I want you to write those synopses as if they’re going to appear on the back covers.
Now, at this point there are always questions. There’s always a literalist in the book who points out that the back cover of HER books is where the author’s photo and bio goes, because SHE only reads HARD COVERS, the way the good lord intended CIVILIZED people to read. I tell the stickler that she can pretend she’s writing for the inside flap, then. Whatever. There’s always someone who claims he’s never read a book jacket description. Lies. It’s all lies. We’re force-fed synopses of stories our entire lives, I remind them. Every TV Guide entry, every Netflix blurb, every movie trailer is trying to reach and and grab an audience by summarizing itself in the most appealing manner possible. That’s what I want my students to do in this exercise.
Look, I tell them. Here’s one of many ways I could present my life story:
Shocking her conservative relatives and in-laws was my mother’s favorite pastime. When I was six years old, she visited England and saw her first drag show. She returned to the states and, hoping to be provocative, promptly announced, tongue in cheek, that she’d decided I could have a fine and profitable future as a female impersonator.
Although I’ve never donned women’s clothes, there's something ironic about the fact that decades later I was perfectly comfortable to assume a female pseudonym in order to pen several novels of chick lit. My mother’s early career goals for me, however, were just the start of a life in which I was a constant wildcard attempting to assimilate—like a drag queen attempting to replicate the feminine, I felt I was always trying to ‘pass’ as something I wasn’t. Learning how not to draw attention as the only WASP in public school, or re-assimilating white culture upon re-entry to a preppy Southern college, or erasing my Southern accent in order not to attract attention in academia—all of it was boot camp preparation to being the only male author among hundreds and thousands of women at romance writer conventions.
So look there, I say to my students. Two paragraphs summarizing a potential memoir of my life. The pitch conveys a certain sense of tone—somewhat comic, somewhat the story of a struggle. It clearly delineates certain periods of my life from which I’ll be drawing. At the same time, it gives me a lot of leeway in the material I choose. It gives me plenty of opportunity to talk about my children-of-the-sixties parents and their progressive child-rearing ideas. I could have a lot of fun with that premise.
But it’s not the only book I could write about myself. Here’s another of several that I present:
I was twenty-three when I packed all my worldly belongings and moved into downtown Detroit, Michigan during the height of its reputation as the murder and crack cocaine capital of the country. On my first afternoon there, during a visit to the only grocery store within two miles of my new apartment, I found the market swarmed by cops. They descended on a vagrant standing next to me and shook him down, sending a cascade of knives and guns from his coat onto the floor.
My twenty-five years in the city that followed were a love-hate affair, as I came of age trying fiercely to defend my commitment to the city, yet found myself increasingly worn down by its violence, its arson and gun-related lawlessness, its crumbling streets and buildings, its overt racism, and its poverty. Like Detroit, I saw myself as a scrappy survivor trying to reinvent himself. And very much like the city, I eventually lacked the perspective to know when enough was enough.Again, I ask them if they can discern the tone of this proposed book. Can they envision the front cover? Yes, I’m pretty sure it’d be an artsy shot of a blooming weed flower in front of a burnt-out building, too. Very clearly this memoir would focus on the two and a half decades of my life when I lived in the city of Detroit. At the same time, though, there’s enough associative leeway to write about all kinds of things—the community in which I grew up, my expectations of living in cities based on the places I’d lived before, the youthful hopes and dreams I’d nurtured up to the point I’d reestablished myself. Could you see this as a book sitting on a store shelf, I ask? Of course you could.
So do this very thing with your own ideas. Pretend I’m an editor, and that you’ve got three memoirs to pitch as our elevator climbs from the ground floor to my ninety-seventh floor office suite. Sell them to me quickly with your book blurbs.
Here’s what I want from those pitches you’re going to present the following week, I tell them: I want a sense of who you are. I want to know what stories you need to tell, and how you’ll present yourself from volume to volume. Your tone doesn’t need to be the same from pitch to pitch. Each might cover some of the same events in your life from different angles. You might not even want to write any of these books when you’ve completed the exercise, and that’s okay too. Knowing what you don’t want to write is valuable, too.
Working up a number of book cover blurbs or pitches, though, will show you that you have options as you write. The exercise will drive home that in the end, as the author, you have complete control over how your life stories are narrated.
The next week, when my students come in with their pitches, a lot of them show they’ve really gotten the assignment. Their back-of-book blurbs often sound as if they were copied from publisher websites. Not everybody comes in with three, but most return with at least two in hand. I have them read their synopses, ask the rest of the class for their reactions, and ask everybody the big question: Would you want to read that? By and large, they absolutely would.
Then I ask the author: Would you want to write that? Because ultimately, that’s the most important takeaway from the assignment.
Almost universally, they do.
Even the students who only manage to eke out a single blurb benefit from the process. They start picturing their essays as part of a possible whole; they begin to understand that even class assignments can contribute to their overall goal. Some of the students with multiple pitches already know which, if any, of them they prefer to write. Others are giddy with choice.
Now, most of my students don’t aspire to publication. That’s okay. I stress throughout the semester that, at minimum, the rigorous self-examination that writing a memoir requires is its own reward. Having essays or chapters to share with family and friends is a heck of a bonus, though. The exercise is none the less valuable for those students whose work will never hit a Barnes and Noble. Once the students begin to imagine their life stories as finished volumes—as viable, valuable intellectual properties—their sense of pride swells. They become enthusiastic about their work. They stop seeing what they’re doing as disconnected weekly essay assignments, and begin writing in a way that contributes to a cohesive narrative. The glimmer and promise of a finished book, published or not, is a powerful carrot on a stick.
In a craft as reliant on self-starting as writing, students need to be able to spur themselves on a regular basis to sit down at their computers or with their pads of paper. A powerful motivation—particularly when it’s an idea for progression that they’ve envisioned themselves—can make the difference between a finished literary product and a dream that languishes, stillborn.
No comments:
Post a Comment