Conversations with My Father: Six Feet Under Edition

MY FATHER: I know you think you’re finished gardening for the day, but I have one more task for you.

ME: All right. What’s that?

MY FATHER: Do you have the trowel?

ME: Right here.

MY FATHER: Let me just. . . . [Begins grappling with the periwinkle at the edge of the patio]

ME: Are you trying to back those vines?

MY FATHER: Noooo . . . I’m just trying to find the edge. . . .

ME: Do you want me to trim the periwinkle to the edge? I mean, there’s two feet of growth over the concrete.

MY FATHER: Noooo . . . I want you to dig . . . there.

ME [peering at a patch of parched dirt that’s hard as sandstone]: Why?

MY FATHER: Because I told you to.

ME: Listen. That didn’t work on me when I was fifteen, and it’s certainly not going to. . . .

MY FATHER [ignoring me and regarding a patch of dirt a foot away]: No. There. Dig there.

ME [suspiciously]: What is this all about?

MY FATHER: Forty-six years ago, in 1972. . . .

ME: Oh god, it’s a history lesson.

MY FATHER: . . . the first thing your mother and I did, after the movers picked up all our furniture from the old apartment on Waldo lane was to stop at the pharmacy in Lakeside. . . .

ME: Where they sold those antacid tablets you couldn’t find anywhere else.

MY FATHER: . . . and picked up a box of the antacids you couldn’t find anywhere else. . . .

ME: I just said that.

MY FATHER: You mother loved those antacids. I still have a tube of them upstairs.

ME: You keep a package of antacids that’s decades old? Why? It’s not good any more.

MY FATHER: I keep it for sentimental reasons.

ME: You know that you’re the only person not on a hoarders reality show who keeps antacids for sentimental reasons, right?

MY FATHER: Anyway. The next thing we did was to go to the little hardware store next door and make a copy of the deadbolt key to the back door. And what do you think I did with that?

ME: No.

MY FATHER: I—wait, do you mean no, you’re not going to guess?

ME: I mean I figured it out, and no.

MY FATHER: I buried it, right there, and now you’re going to dig—wait, is that what you’re saying no about?

ME: Now you’re all caught up.

MY FATHER: It’s not more than a foot down!

ME: Listen. So far you’ve pointed to there and there and now there. Three spots. You don’t actually know where that key is buried, do you?

MY FATHER: I know it’s somewhere along the edge of the patio.

ME: The patio is eighteen feet long. I’m not digging an eighteen-foot trench.

MY FATHER: Oh, don’t be so . . . besides, I know I didn’t bury it at the end, so you only have to dig maybe a twelve-foot trench.

ME: No.

MY FATHER: Dig for forty minutes, then, and if we don’t find it. . . .

ME: No. Any key that’s been buried for forty-eight years is at this point going to be corroded and unusable.

MY FATHER: That’s nonsense. I buried it in a container.

ME: What kind of container?

MY FATHER: A soup can.

ME: A metal soup can. The kind that rusts.

MY FATHER: I filled it with tissue!

ME: No. What we are going to do is go to the hardware store and make another key, and we will find a magnetic key hiding box that you can attach to a metal object, like the far bottom side of the air conditioner condenser. . . .

MY FATHER [with scorn]: The far bottom side of the air conditioner condenser is the first place a thief would look.

ME: Or we can go to Lowe’s and get a key holder that’s shaped like a fake rock, with a hollow space inside, and we can hide it anywhere in the yard you like. But that’s what we’re doing.

MY FATHER: A . . . fake . . . rock?

ME: It’s a weatherproof manmade material, textured like a rock, that will blend in with its surroundings. It won’t cost more than a few dollars. Get your spare key. Let’s go to the hardware store.

MY FATHER [stalling]: So if there’s an emergency situation, and I need to go to the bathroom, or answer the telephone, or get inside to grab some medicine, and I’m locked out, I have to go hunting around the yard for a fake rock?

ME: If there’s an emergency situation and you need to go to the bathroom, or answer the telephone, or evade terrorists, what would you rather do? Grab a shovel and dig a twelve-foot trench in solid dry earth, or simply pick up a fake rock that you’ve placed in a convenient and easily-remembered spot to retrieve your spare key?

MY FATHER: How about you dig for ten minutes?

ME: Good god, man, but you are stubborn.

Conversations with My Father: Vagrancy Edition

MY FATHER: You know how, at the end of my street, how my street converges with the Boulevard and Westwood and Hermitage, all at once?

ME: I do.

MY FATHER: Well, last week the traffic lights weren’t working right. First the light for my street is supposed to turn green, and then once it changes to red the light for Westwood is supposed to turn green, and after it goes red the light for the Boulevard turns green, and then once it goes red the light for Hermitage turns green, and then finally after it flips to red, my street’s light. . . .

ME: Yes, I understand the general way traffic lights work, thank you very much.

MY FATHER: Well, I was taking my walk and decided to sit down and take a break, so I was watching the traffic, and I saw that the cars on my street were backed up for an entire block, and you know the blocks on my street are larger than the ordinary street block. So I watched for a while and you know what was happening?

ME: The light was mistimed?

MY FATHER: Go on, guess.

ME: The light wasn’t mistimed?

MY FATHER: No, the light was mistimed. The light for Westwood would turn as usual, then the light for the Boulevard would go for the usual length, then the light for Hermitage would be fine, and then my light would turn green and then three seconds later, guess what it did?

ME: The suspense is truly killing me.

MY FATHER: It would turn red! After only three seconds!

ME: I did not see that coming. Wow.

MY FATHER: I am sensing sarcasm.

ME: I can’t imagine why.

MY FATHER: Anyway. After watching for close to an hour, I called Public Works and let them know that their light was mistimed. Then the next day I went back down to the end of the street and do you know what? It was still happening.

ME: Did you really expect them to act on it immediately?

MY FATHER: Well, here’s the thing. I called them that afternoon, the day after the first call, and they informed me that they’d taken my report into consideration and that they’d sent out a worker to increase the duration of the pedestrian crossing. So not only was the light on my street only allowing cars out for three-second intervals, but they and everyone else had to wait an additional ten seconds during the longer pedestrian crossing phase. So I told them that extra crossing time was not what I’d reported.

ME: Did they fix it the next day?

MY FATHER: No! I went down the day after and the same thing was still happening. So I called Public Works once again and they thanked me for my report and that they’d done as I requested and reduced the duration of the light on my street. So on the third day, it was just blinking green for a second and the line of cars was even longer!

ME: I did not think I’d be saying this about one of your traffic stories, but this is actually entertaining me. Go on.

MY FATHER: So I had a brainstorm. I had an Amazon box that I’d broken down for recycling, so I got it out and got a magic marker and wrote on it, in big letters, CALL 311 TO REPORT THIS LIGHT. And then I walked down to the intersection and went out in the median. . . .

ME: Oh god.

MY FATHER: And held up the sign. . . .

ME: Oh god.

MY FATHER: And walked up and down the line of cars. . . .

ME: You didn’t.

MY FATHER: I didn’t what?

ME: You didn’t stand out there holding a homemade cardboard sign in those sad tatters you wear.

MY FATHER: I wanted them to call Public Works and report the problem!

ME: Oh god. Did anyone give you any money?

MY FATHER: No, no one gave me money. Why in the world would they give me money?

ME: Thank—

MY FATHER: One nice woman did give me a sandwich from her lunch bag.

ME: Oh god.

MY FATHER: I thought that was nice of her. It was ham.

ME: You ATE it?

MY FATHER: Why wouldn’t I eat it?

ME: She gave it to you because she THOUGHT YOU WERE A HOMELESS PERSON.

MY FATHER: She did not. She probably thought I was just hungry from doing my civic duty.

ME: Yes, hungry like a HOMELESS PERSON CARRYING A HOMEMADE SIGN BY THE SIDE OF A BUSY ROAD.

MY FATHER: I don’t think. . . . [Laughs] Oh. I see what you’re saying. Huh! Gawrsh. Well, that puts a different light on things.

ME: YA THINK?

Conversations with My Father: Spy vs. Spy Edition

MY FATHER: Just turn left at the end of the alley instead of right . . . That’s it.

ME: Okay.

MY FATHER: Oh say. See this house here? Right where this cross-street ends? I’m nearly one-hundred-percent sure that it’s a government safe house.

ME: Oh lord Jesus.

MY FATHER: No, strike that. I’m one-hundred-percent sure it’s a government safe house.

ME: You really, really, really watch too much television.

MY FATHER: Why couldn’t it be a government safe house?

ME: Why should it be a government safe house?

MY FATHER: Just look at it. Just look.

ME: Which of the CSI shows put this notion into your head?

MY FATHER (hurt): They have to get the ideas for the CSI shows from somewhere.

ME: They aren’t getting them from the street behind your house.

MY FATHER: Look at those big SUVs parked in front of it. What do you think of that?

ME: I think the people who live there are fond of Ford Durangos.

MY FATHER: They’re big security vehicles with dark windows and they’re probably armored.

ME: Those windows aren’t dark! I can see right through them!

MY FATHER: They’re where the government safe house agents sit.

ME: Then why are they empty?

MY FATHER: They’re inside, guarding the occupants.

ME: I don’t think . . . oh god, this is making my head hurt.

MY FATHER: Think about it! This would be a perfect place to have a quick escape route when their cover is blown. All they’d have to do is hurry the people they’re protecting to the armored cars, then drive up Robin Hood Road to the on-ramp where they’d have access to both 64 or 95.

ME: Although there’s a certain weird logic to that, I really don’t think . . . Have you ever seen anyone going in or coming out?

MY FATHER: I saw a woman ‘going to work’ once.

ME: I can hear your air quotes. Was she wearing a dark jacket and slacks and a white shirt?

MY FATHER: Well, no, but. . . .

ME: Because that’s what the FBI would wear.

MY FATHER: That’s what they want you to think. You know nothing about the art of disguise.

ME: Oh, okay, Disguise Master. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you go up to the front door and knock and ask if they’re a government safe house?

MY FATHER (with scorn): You think they’d say yes? You know nothing about how these things work.

ME: Do you really think the government would set up a safe house on Whitby that is so obvious that the nosy retired history professor with poor eyesight from around the corner would be able to identify it?

MY FATHER (loftily): I happen to be a very observant concerned neighbor.

Conversations with My Father: Getting Nowhere Edition

MY FATHER: Now normally, to get to the Huguenot Bridge, what I do is to take Parham Road past where our old dentist’s office was—you remember Dr. Pryor, I really never have liked his replacement’s replacement since they moved offices out past where your old French horn teacher lived, right around the corner from that old pharmacy that was the only place I could get the indigestion tablets your mother liked—and then I turn onto River Road. . . .

ME: Wait, I’m confused. Are we driving out to the pharmacy? I thought we were going to the Huguenot Bridge.

MY FATHER: We are going to the Huguenot Bridge, after you turn onto River Road up here. I was talking about where the replacement dentist for the replacement for our original dentist moved, around the corner from the pharmacy where I got the. . . .

ME: Indigestion tablets, yes, I know.

MY FATHER: I still have several rolls of those tablets.

ME: Christ. Throw them out. What are they, twenty-five years old at this point? Thirty?

MY FATHER: They’re a nice memento.

ME: Indigestion pills are not a memento. God, you’re like those hoarders on TV.

MY FATHER: So up here, you’re going to pass first the hardware store where we got the paint for the dining room in 1986, then past where the donut place was that your mother liked when we first moved here even though they tore it down before we moved into our house—gosh, I hadn’t thought about that place for a long time—then we’ll drive by the University of Richmond, and then the Country Club where your mother staged that surprise protest when you were eight, and after we cross the bridge there should be some woods and then Riverside Drive, and then we’re going to look for Elm Street and turn onto Wayburn and then we’ll—

ME: I . . . I can’t. My synapses are melting. You need to slow down.

MY FATHER: What’s the matter?

ME: When I’m driving and I’m having to concentrate on traffic and directions, we need to cut down on the reminiscences and get down to some real directions.

MY FATHER: Real directions.

ME: Practical directions.

MY FATHER: Practical directions.

ME: Okay. We understand each other?

MY FATHER: I think we do.

ME: Okay. This is the bridge. I’m turning right. We’re getting onto the bridge. What’s the next thing we’re doing?

MY FATHER: Okay, we are going to be looking for a set of streets, perpendicular to this street.

ME: A set of streets perpendicular to this street.

MY FATHER: Correct. A set of perpendicular streets at which this street continues on, going both north and south, while the perpendicular streets, which are the ones we're looking for, cross the street we currently are on, easterly and westerly. That is, the perpendicular streets are going in both directions, but not the directions we currently are. . . .

ME: OH MY GOD. You are making my BRAIN ACHE.

MY FATHER: Am I being unclear? There will be a set of streets perpendicular to this one, easterly and wester. . . .

ME: You mean a FOUR-WAY INTERSECTION?

MY FATHER: Well yes, that’s one way of putting it.

ME: It’s the CORRECT way of putting it. Christ.

MY FATHER: Gawrsh. You’re cranky.

ME: What’s next?

MY FATHER: Well. . . .

ME: We are remembering to keep it exact. Keep it precise.

MY FATHER: Exact and precise.

ME: Right. So?

MY FATHER: Okay. There are four lanes ahead. You don't want to be in the far left one, because it makes you turn left, and you don't want to be in the next-to-left one, because that also makes you turn left—there are two left lanes and the traffic light makes you turn left in both of them—and you don't want to be in the next-to-the-next-to-the-left one, because then you have to go straight, so. . . .

ME: IN OTHER WORDS, YOU WANT ME TO TURN RIGHT.

MY FATHER: If you want to boil it down like that.

ME: Oh, I do. I DO WANT YOU TO BOIL IT DOWN.

MY FATHER: Fine, fine. I’ll keep it succinct.

ME: THANK YOU.

MY FATHER [after a pause]: You know you missed the turn back there, right?

ME: GODDAMMIT.

Conversations with My Father: Sexting Edition

MY FATHER: Now, the other problem with my iPad is that it won’t take photos sideways.

ME: You mean, landscape?

MY FATHER: No, it takes photos of landscapes perfectly well.

ME: Well, I set myself up for that one. No, I mean the aspect itself is called landscape—where it’s longer from side to side—versus portrait, where it’s longer up and down.

MY FATHER: Yes. That’s the problem. My iPad won’t do it.

ME: I think what you mean to say is that you don’t know how to do it. Your iPad can do it.

MY FATHER: No. . . .

ME: Yes.

MY FATHER: No, I’m doing it right. . . .

ME: You are aware I’ve seen you use your iPad.

MY FATHER: To take it up and down, I hold it like this . . . and then I click on this. . . .

ME: Yes, and now you have a blurry portrait photo of your cat’s ass.

MY FATHER: Then to take it sideways, I turn it like this, and I click on this. . . .

ME: And now you have a nice landscape photo of the same cat’s ass.

MY FATHER: No, I don’t. It’s not sideways.

ME: Click here and let’s look at. . . . No, not there. Click here to go back. NO, not there. Here. NO, NOT THERE.

MY FATHER [mildly]: I’m just following your directions.

ME: Try keeping your other fingers away from the screen. Just use—Christ.

MY FATHER: My iPad has a weird tendency just to shut off.

ME: Yeah, it’s really weird how that happens when you push the button on top. Here. Give it to me. Good lord.

MY FATHER: You seem slightly tense, for some reason.

ME: Here are the photos you took. See? The first one is portrait. The second one is landscape. See? Sideways. Longer across than up and down.

MY FATHER [peering for a very long time at the screen and swiping back and forth]: Well, it certainly never did that before.

ME: It probably did. You just didn’t. . . .

MY FATHER [pointing]: What’s this?

ME: That’s the edit option. It will let you fool around with things like the brightness and contrast. . . .

MY FATHER: What’s this?

ME: That’s the trash icon.

MY FATHER: What’s this?

ME: You click that icon to send the photo to other people.

MY FATHER: What’s this?

ME: The heart icon just toggles on and off so that you can indicate your favorite photos. They’ll appear in a special ‘favorites’ album. Like, if you have a lot of photos. Let me show you on mine.

MY FATHER: I have three photos. I think I can tell which one is my favorite.

ME: No, you can have more than one favorite. It just means the ones you heart are the cream of the crop. I mean, on my iPad I have . . . fifteen thousand, three hundred and forty-five photos, but I’ve only favorited six hundred and sixty-two of them, which makes it easier to. . . .

MY FATHER: Fifteen thousand, three hundred, and forty-five photos?

ME: But I only have six hundred and sixty-two favorites, which makes. . . .

MY FATHER: Fifteen thousand photos?

ME: Right, so if I favorite the ones I really like. . . .

MY FATHER: Fifteen thousand photos?

ME: What? I mean, that’s from the last ten years, and it’s not really all the photos I’ve. . . .

MY FATHER: My god. Why do you need fifteen thousand photos?

ME: I like taking photos! What?!

MY FATHER: What do you do with them?

ME: I mean, I look at them, I print them. Most of our apartment is decorated with my prints.

MY FATHER: Are you emailing them to people? Are you sexting people?

ME: What do you mean, am I sexting people?

MY FATHER: You know. Sexting people. On your phone.

ME: How many photos of my junk do you think I have?

MY FATHER: Fifteen thousand? Gawrsh.

ME: I don’t have fifteen thousand photos of—! Wait, I think sexting is not the word you think it is. What is sexting, to you?

MY FATHER: When you get on your fancy iPhone and send someone a message with a photo.

ME: That’s texting.

MY FATHER: That’s what I said.

ME: You said sexting. Sexting has a shade of meaning that is very different. . . .

MY FATHER: What’s sexting?

ME: That’s when you take sexy photos of your private parts and sent them in a text message to someone. Sexy texting. Sexting. You know. Like Anthony Weiner. That’s probably where you picked up the word, on NPR.

MY FATHER: Who?

ME: Anthony Weiner. The representative who resigned because he’d sexted with several women.

MY FATHER [after a long pause]: How many photos of your private parts do you have on your iPad?

ME: It’s not fifteen thousand.

MY FATHER [curious]: Exactly how do you fit an iPad down your pants?

Conversations with My Father: Low Voltage Edition

SALES CLERK: Hi! Welcome to Batteries Plus! How can I help you this morning?

ME: My father needs a battery replacement for his cell phone.

MY FATHER: Well, I don’t need it.

ME: His battery can only hold a five-minute charge. He needs it. If it’s even possible for his model.

SALES CLERK: Oh, I’m sure that’s possible. We have all kinds of batteries for all kinds of cell phones.

ME: You haven’t seen the ancient artifact he’s carrying around, yet.

MY FATHER: The Verizon store sent me here. They don’t carry batteries for my model any more.

ME: That should give you an indication right there.

SALES CLERK: Let’s just take a look at . . . oh. Wow.

ME: I told you.

MY FATHER: Now, do you have any idea of how old this phone is?

SALES CLERK [with tact]: Well, it’s really large. . . .

ME: That phone is a bludgeon. It’s a billy club. That phone could be a murder weapon in Clue.

MY FATHER: Oh, gawrsh. It’s not one of your fancy iPhones, but it’s not that large.

ME: If I were a gangster and I had to get rid of a dirty rat, I’d tie his legs together and throw him into the river with that phone of yours as a deadweight.

SALES CLERK: Let me just open up the back so we can take a look at the battery . . . oh, my.

MY FATHER: What’s wrong?

ME: Good lord. That’s disgusting.

MY FATHER: What?

ME: How in the world has the inside of your phone gotten so dirty?

MY FATHER: I don’t know.

ME: Do you keep it buried in the cat box?!

SALES CLERK: Let me just blow this out.

ME: Good god, no, miss. You shouldn’t have to do that. Give it to me and I’ll blow it out. I’ll take it outside and blow it out.

SALES CLERK: I got it, but thank you, honey.

MY FATHER: It’s not that dirty.

ME: You aren’t able to see the filth. It looks like you use your battery cover as a boot scrape.

MY FATHER: I suspect you’re exaggerating.

SALES CLERK: Now, we do have this battery available, but since this is an, um, older model and not very common these days, I don’t want you to be shocked by the price.

MY FATHER [with suspicion]: How much?

SALES CLERK: Thirty-seven-fifty.

ME: That’s not bad. We’ll take it.

MY FATHER: I don’t know. I could probably get another year out of my battery. . . .

ME: By which point this battery could be no longer manufactured. Then you’d have to get a whole new phone.

MY FATHER: Oh, gawrsh.

SALES CLERK: Should I go ahead and replace it, then?

ME: Yes, please.

MY FATHER: Do you know how long that battery lasted me?

ME: A battery isn’t doing you any good if it only holds a five-minute charge. You really shouldn’t let it get that bad. Batteries are designed to be used. You need to take it off the charger occasionally, use it, and let it run down naturally.

MY FATHER: I don’t think that’s true.

SALES CLERK: Oh my goodness, honey, yes. You can’t leave it on the charger all the time. Not for this kind of battery. That will shorten the battery life by a lot.

ME: There. You have a battery expert telling you the same thing.

MY FATHER: This battery lasted for four years!

SALES CLERK: If you keep your battery in good condition, it can four years and still hold a charge for several hours.

ME: Thank you! See? She’s a battery genius.

MY FATHER: [grumbles]

ME: Sorry? Are you doubting the word of this fine, hard-working, underpaid battery genius?

SALES CLERK: Well thank you, honey! I’m going to ring this up and give you a fifteen percent Nice Man Discount.

MY FATHER [suddenly brightening]: Thank you very much!

ME: SHE MEANT ME.

The Memoir Back Cover Blurb: Another Writing Exercise

One of the concepts I tackle very early on in my memoir-writing class is the notion of how memoir differs from autobiography. On a very broad level, most people use the terms interchangeably. After all, librarians and book sellers shelve the two together.

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.