Why I Write and Read Memoirs
Off and on for most of my life, I've felt compelled to fill blank books with thoughts, good quotes from whatever I'm reading and fragments of conversations from those around me -- all of these interspersed with the happenings of my day. Freud said that once something is written down, it can never be lost, something I must have believed long before I read Freud.
In 1976, my journals came to serve another purpose: I began to use them to establish a timeline for a memoir. I was seeking a contract with a New York publisher and I wanted to outline the project so I began to review what I'd written. I quickly learned that to edit the journals, I'd have to relive the experiences I found there -- an unexpected development that turned out to be stressful. To help me cope with these emotional upheavals, I began to imagine a reader -- just one. A kind stranger, perhaps someone like yourself.
"Written personal history," said Alfred Kazin, "is directly an effort to find salvation, to make one's own experience come out right."
I took comfort and purpose that if my imagined reader found some value once I got to the bottom of things, then the job would prove to have been worth the doing. I trusted this process.
Although memoirs are popular with readers, writers of the genre are assailed by some critics in ways that novelists aren't. I've never written a novel but when I edit my journal pages, I try to write as clearly and plainly as I can to describe that reality.
"Reality consists of the many realities that it can be made into," said the poet Wallace Stevens. If I've done my job right, you get to visit my life and decide what you think about it. Sometimes I don't like what I have to say, but strangely enough, because I'm locked into an honest attempt to tell both of us how it was, I force myself to continue.
"To write about one's life," said Jill Kerr Conway in a recent lecture in Boston, "one can't not deal with free will or one's deepest moral concerns. Reading memoirs and autobiographies are ways to shape up to those questions for ourselves. Just as the author must think in order to write the memoir, the ensuring narrative provides a reader with a benchmark to gauge her or his progress. This is an invaluable tool in today's loosely structured society."
Memoirs, by their very nature are intimate sharings. When I work on mine, I hope that I learn something in the reflection that I missed in the living. If that happens for me, perhaps you'll gain something too. This thought keeps me going.
"I sometimes think only autobiography is literature," wrote Virginia Wolf late in her life in a letter to a friend. "Novels are what we peel off and come at last to the core which is only you or me."
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