By almost any standard, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has led an extraordinary life. I’d love to read the story only she could tell about any segment of this story: born 1931 into a working class family in Lorain, Ohio; educated at Howard and Cornell Universities; taught at various universities (the last being Princeton); an editor at Random House; a literary giant with the publication of The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Song of Solomon and Beloved, the latter book, especially, an epic achievement. By most reckonings, she is the undisputed queen of American literature.

Her private life she has tried to keep private.  After her marriage to Jamaica-born architect  Harold Morrison ended, she brought up two sons as a single mother while accomplishing all of the above.  Anne Lamott has shown that this story can be utterly fascinating to readers. (Her new memoir, following another called Operating Instructions, is called Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son, debuts tomorrow, March 20.)

Last week Morrison spoke at Oberlin College in Ohio and was asked if she would write a memoir. Her answer should give all of us aspiring memoirists pause. She said she had agreed to write a memoir requested by her publisher, but that she had decided not to follow through. She offered this explanation:

 “My publisher asked me to do it, but there’s a point at which your life is not interesting, at least to me. I’d rather write fiction.”

She went on to advise writers to reverse the usual “write what you know” mantra and to “write what you don’t know. And never be scared.” (Via The Guardian.)

When I shared this news on my facebook writer’s page, Karin Larson pointed out that if you compare the story above to some of the main characters in Morrison’s novels, she may have a good point.

After all, some of them fly, are born without navels, and otherwise contain seemingly supernatural gifts.

But to her fans, the novelist herself seems to contain supernatural gifts. We would like to reflect on how she was born a navel-less child and how she learned to fly.

Some lucky biographer will get to tell this story instead. I hope she is already at work, interviewing her fascinating subject.

The rest of us can only ask: what is an interesting life? What relationship between subject and work makes memoir writing worthwhile — either between the writer and her life or the reader and the text? How does a memoirist use the advice to “write what you don’t know”? I actually find that rather inspiring advice. You?

 

Sometimes all one can say to an idea is “wow.” That’s the way I felt after watching Mashable editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow’s five-minute TED talk below.

Writers may not admit it, but one of their desires is to leave evidence that they were here on earth long after they are gone. Memoirists perhaps have this drive even more than fiction writers and poets (discuss amongst yourselves)??

Look at the possibilities future memoirists may have thanks to digital/laser/super computer combinations. This is not science fiction!

http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status_update.html

What questions does this video bring up for you? What possibilities for good? What shadow side do you see to the possibility of living on digitally after death? I’d love your thoughts.

My first post on 9-11 this week asked for stories. One friend, artist Erma Martin Yost could not just write a comment. Her heart and mind were bursting. So she sent me an essay, which I immediately asked permission to share. As journalists search for stories of hope, I wonder how many of them have told this kind of story? Erma tells an honest story of hope and courage.

By Erma Martin Yost

Memories that touch my heart most are those of the young children fleeing nearby schools. One young child asked his teacher, “why are the birds on fire?” The “birds” were falling human bodies.

A little child. . .

Another image is the photo of two-year old Patricia Smith pictured in the NY Times leaving the stage with her father after the Police Department’s highest award was hung around her neck in honor of her mother, also a police officer. On the 5^th anniversary of 9/11 she was pictured again.  I wonder if her photo will appear again this year.  As a two-year-old, she holds on to her father with one hand and sucks her fingers with another. Clearly she cannot comprehend what is happening. Her picture in The New York Times reached right out and grabbed me. It seemed to symbolize all the losses–of life, of innocence, of a sense of security within the “homeland,” that strange new word we all now speak.

Constant Code Orange

           For 27 years prior to 9/11 my photographer husband Leon and I lived in Jersey City just six blocks in from the banks of the Hudson River directly across from the World Trade Towers. Since that day we were never not under “Code Orange.” We stayed an additional seven years after, but the memories and daily reminders of that fateful day eventually became too much. We now spend most of our time living in Carlisle, PA, where rightly or wrongly there is a greater sense of safety, free from the frequent terror alerts and constant sense of fear.

My story of 9-11: A Survivor’s Tale

             On that bright beautiful Tuesday morning of 9/11/01, I went out the front door to go to a water aerobics class only to find the street and sidewalk filled with neighbors looking east towards the Hudson River. I turned to follow their gaze and saw the horrific sight of the first tower burning (lined up with the end of our block). Shortly, I witnessed the impact of the second plane which shook the ground so hard it buckled the knees of us standing there and the image of that orange fire ball burned into my memory permanently.

An index finger. . . a forearm

I knew a friend of ours worked above where that plane hit. All that was ever found of him was an index finger and forearm.

My student’s voice on 911

More friends and neighbors perished, as did a former student of mine. The only civilian 911 tape that was released to the public was that student’s call and she was on the line until she was overcome and died. Victims from the WTC towers and surrounding buildings fled to piers on our side of the river on anything that floated. Still covered with ash, they walked past our house looking for their homes, cars, and any way to get away. There were many more horrific sights that on day and in the days and weeks and months that followed.

Twisted steel and lights

The iconic twisted burning metal that everyone is so familiar with was lit with bright lights at night for three months, a beacon for rescue workers, but also a glow in our bedroom. At first the smells included that of burning flesh, and the acrid smell of burning plastics continued for months permeating bedding, clothes hanging in the closets, curtains, anything absorbent. The drone of fighter planes flying their circuit’s overhead every few minutes sounded like buzz saws inside our house. There was the constant pull of wanting to stand with friends in spontaneous meeting places and wanting to stay inside the “safety” of one’s home.

Some stayed. Some fled. We did both.

Someone said there were those who stayed and those who fled.  In the immediate days, months, and years that followed Leon and I tried to stay. We knew from the beginning of this tragedy that city life had changed forever and assumed that one day we would adjust to the changes. Eventually the decision was made to move, as did many of our friends. Within the first year of living in Carlisle, PA, we met several families that had moved there too, their hometown, having fled life in the Big Apple. I hope such people are not viewed as quitters, non resilient, or not hopeful. Our new beginnings just have to take place elsewhere.

Bio: Leon and Erma Yost bought a row house in Jersey City in 1974 where they lived and maintained their artists’ studios for 36 years. They also worked in Manhattan, going through the World Trade Center many times a week on the PATH trains. In 1993 Erma missed the bombing of the WTC by perhaps minutes. She had taken the PATH train into the towers, went outside to buy art supplies and when she returned a short time later, people were running out of Tower One. No emergency crews had even arrived yet and no one knew what had just transpired. The crater that the bomb left was on the PATH platform where she had just departed the train.

Wow, Erma. Thank you so much for this gift. You challenge us to think about the many ways to make “new beginnings.” I hope 12-year-old Patricia Smith will somehow find this essay and know how important she is to you and to all of us.

When we help others heal, and when we tell truthful stories of how we have wrestled with the twin angels called Courage and Hope, we heal a little more of our own wounds. Shalom. Now, what are YOUR stories?

 

Living in New York for a year has many benefits. It’s like having a box seat to culture and history.

In a few days the focus in the city will be on the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center towers. I saw tenth-anniversary t-shirts on sale a month ago.

Among all the possible activities the one I look forward to most is this film: Project Rebirth. A combination of time-lapse photography from Ground Zero and nine individual stories followed over the last decade will celebrate resilience, hope, and healing from tragedy.

I’m looking forward to this film scheduled to be broadcast on Showtime on 9-11.

The film is based on this book. I met co-author Courtney E. Martin for breakfast recently and knew immediately that any project she is part of will be excellent.

If you read the book or see the film, please tell us what made the biggest impression on you. And also share your own memories. Where were you on 9-11? And what do you want to take away from this anniversary time?

We all get spam and the next thing to spam–email from companies we have done business with in the past.

Amazon just sent me an email, something that happens without my response several times a week.

But this one caught my attention. Here is the link to an offer I couldn’t refuse: an electronic copy of this book: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice.

Buying electronic books is so seductive even at the usual $9.99-12.99 price. It takes less than a minute to locate, buy, and possess a book when you use a Kindle or Nook or iPad. But at $1.49/book I am powerless to withstand Amazon’s wiles.

Amazon says it will offer a new Kindle bargain book every day. I wonder why they chose this one to inaugurate the daily specials. Or have they been doing this before and I just didn’t notice because of my laser focus on memoir??

Anyway, folks, I thought I had to share. Even used books for $.01 on Amazon end up costing $4.00. You won’t beat this price, and if Amazon keeps doing this, I will build my memoir collection on Kindle even if I can’t read them all for a long time.

If you decide to download, you must do so within 24 hours. Please let us know what your experience is. Do you own a Kindle or other electronic reader? What do you like or not like about reading this way? If you are considering a purchase of a reader, you might find this previous post helpful. Maybe you have already read the book and want to give us a mini-review. That would be wonderful also! Please comment below.

If you also love memoir–either reading, writing, or both–please subscribe to this blog in the easy-peasy box on the right hand side. You’ll find almost 300 blog posts archived here to help you find all kinds of treasures.

One of the joys of writing a memoir blog for more than three years is that people send in relevant articles. Today I got this one about memoir replacing the novel from Simone; last week I got a message from Clif. Thanks, friends!

The article below, which appeared in Grub Street Daily, was written by Del Smith, who blogs as Unreliable Narrator, and was so stimulating I thought I would share it with you. It begins this way:

I’m a fiction snob. I read mostly novels and stories; I’m drawn to the characters, the voices, and the endless points of view. If a novel’s protagonist is familiar, I draw a sympathetic comparison and nod in recognition. If the protagonist is unusual, reading the story is a chance to discover something new and see lives drawn from outside my experience but with universal emotions and attitudes.

As a fiction reader (and writer), I need to know: Why are so many writers telling their stories as memoir? Starting in the early ‘90s, memoirs became a very popular narrative form, mostly because they were starting to be written with the techniques of character-driven literary and genre fiction. Books like Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen; The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls; Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers; Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs; The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr, and A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey, among many others have been bestsellers and award winners. The problems begin when these books are published as non-fiction. Frey admitted fabricating parts of his memoir. Burroughs was sued by the Turcotte family he lived with during the events of his story, and was forced to call his memoir simply a ‘book’.

Memoirs must be looked at through the spectrum of their origins. Namely the author’s memory. “Remembering by its very nature is a reconstructive process that often leads to distortion,” says Psychology Today researcher Nicole Dudukovic (1). “We piece together our memories from the fragments of life’s events that we’ve retained. We don’t have exact copies of events stored in our brains. Our memories of life experiences are influenced by our unique perspective during the experiences as well as at the time of remembering. The myriad of events that occur and the vast knowledge that we gain throughout our lives influence our memories of the past. If our autobiographical memories are always reconstructed and influenced by our current perspective, is writing an accurate memoir ever possible?”

Dave Eggers introduces his memoir with a disclaimer admitting his work leans toward the make believe: “This is a work of fiction, only that in many cases, the author could not remember the exact words said by certain people…and had to fill the gaps as best he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real.” He also says liberties were taken with chronology.

Here’s the complete article. I encourage you to finish it.

 Oh, and click on the links and read the “Fifteen Most Over-rated Authors.” Hint, Amy Tan, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins and Sharon Olds are on the list! I’d love to hear your thoughts. Lots to think about in this post. Smith has considered several important issues from many angles. I find the intersection of stories and the marketplace (both of ideas and of money) utterly fascinating. I keep looking for answers to the question, “Why memoir? Why now?” If you are equally fascinated, tell us what sentence caused you to take note.

Noble laureate Doris Lessing wrote her last book, Alfred and Emily, reviewed in The New York Times here, at age 88. She’s now 91 years old.

Apparently she’s been working out the meaning of her parents’ tragic lives all her life. Her father lost a leg in the trenches during World War I. Her mother was a nurse. They tried to find wealth and a refuge from the ghosts of war in Persia and Rhodesia. But they instead became frustrated and bitter. Lessing’s last book, a combination novella and memoir, tries to give them an alternative world without war in which they might have been happier.

I wonder if all of us do this to some extent. We seek the missing leg, we want to restore the wounded hearts. We want to find the missing piece and fill in the hole. If we can do it for our parents, maybe we can do it for ourselves.

Even when we are 88 years old.

Perhaps you can tell that I am about to take my draft materials and photos and sit in the park, ruminating about the lives of my parents. To what extent, and in how many ways, are our lives shaped by our parents, do you think?

 

Stanley Fish several years ago wrote his column in the New York Times about an essay by Charles Van Doren in the July 28, 2008, issue of The New Yorker.  If you saw Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford, you know that Charles Van Doren disgraced himself, his family, and perhaps even academic life, by participating in a rigged quiz show on early television (1956) before an audience of 50 million.

Fish first flips Van Doren’s clever title “All the Answers” on its head by telling us that we will find “None of the Answers” to the obvious question of “why did you do it?”  However, instead of excoriating Van Doren for failing to deliver, Fish chooses to praise him.  In the end of his article, he makes comments very relevant to the current state of memoir writing.  They are worth quoting in full:

“He does not cast himself as a victim, or as a reformed villain or a misunderstood hero, three narratives that are quite popular in these days of compulsive self-discovery. Now in his 80’s Van Doren still hasn’t discovered himself (do any of us?), still hasn’t been able to plumb the depths of his motivations for actions that remain unfathomable, even to him, especially to him. The best thing about the essay is its refusal to claim self-knowledge while still desiring it. He imagines someone asking, “Aren’t you Charles Van Doren?” — and implying by the question knowledge of what being Charles Van Doren means. Certainly it means that he is the person who did what Charles Van Doren did — “the man who cheated on ‘Twenty-One’ is still part of me” — but it also means more, although the bearer of the name is not sure what that more is. “That’s my name, I say to myself, but I’m not who you think I am–or, at least I don’t want to be.” It’s that last bit — “at least I don’t want to be” — that is so in keeping with an autobiographical writing that tells and hides all at the same time. It is what makes the essay at once maddening — because it tantalizes without finally delivering — and affecting — because you sense that the author is not playing a game or laboring to reclaim a lost honor, but trying, as best he can, to live out a life.”

Honesty, modesty, the refusal to conform to the three popular narratives already proven at the box office, these are qualities Fish admires.  I do also.

But I wonder:  if our greatest human failings are, in the end, unfathomable to us, why do we always come back to them?  Are memoir readers eager to fathom someone else’s failings because they cannot do the same for their own? What do you think?

I’m a regular listener to The New York Times Book Review Podcast. Every week I look forward to Julie Bosman’s “Notes from the Field.” In her case the field is “publishing.” In our case the field is “memoir.” And our reporter is Kathleen Friesen.

If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you started seeing Kathleen’s comments beginning more than a year ago. Comments are the way to any blogger’s heart, and so I started clicking on Kathleen’s name to find her own blog(s)–one about organizational management and the other a contemplative photography blog, which derives its inspiration from the concept of Miksang. I hope you discover Kathleen’s quiet and deep voice, both in her blogs and in these two essays about memoir she brings to our attention.

Notes from the field from guest scout, Kathleen Friesen:

Readers of 100 memoirs may find the following items of interest:

First is Dani Shapiro’s tribute to her mentor, Esther Broner. In this short piece, Shapiro offers insight into a woman who encouraged her to write and live authentically:

From her, I learned many of the lessons that I carry with me as a teacher myself today. It’s possible to tell the truth in a way that is not wounding, but empowering. It’s possible to be a role model with no ego involved. It’s possible to be a mother and a grandmother and a novelist and a feminist and a teacher, and have all of these things feed one another, rather than be in conflict.

These integrative life lessons are worth visiting. Of note, Dani Shapiro’s Slow Motion was included in Sue Silverman’s list published previously in this blog. Her most recent memoir is Devotion.

Who are the mentors who have paved the path for you? What lessons did they teach?

Second is Joyce Carol Oates rebuttal to Julian Barnes review of her memoir in The New York Review of Books. Oates writes, “A memoir is most helpful when it focuses upon immediate experience, not a clinical, subsequent summation from what would be the “future” of the individual ….” While this may be true for her, in my experience meaningful memoirs can and do focus on memories.

I have read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking several times, but a read-through of Oates’ A Widows Story ‒ done standing in four different bookstores over a period of a week ‒ did not prompt a purchase. Didion’s spare, direct prose resonates with my own experience as a widow. Oates’ memoir contains some of the same themes, but sprawls and crawls, with fewer insights into the path of grief and mourning.

I have one quibble with Oates’ reviewers: their judgment of Oates for remarrying too soon. They suggest that this choice disqualifies her from writing a memoir about her first year as a widow. In my opinion, memoirists may choose to limit the book’s timeframe from necessity or choice. And, in my own experience, remarriage does not nullify the ongoing experience of grief and mourning, of revising ones map of the world.

Barnes asks, “So what constitutes “success” in mourning?” As readers and writers of memoir, the question is, “So what constitutes “success” in a memoir?” Is it “most helpful when it focuses upon immediate experience?”

You may have read about how Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs created dissension in his own family and in the family of Dr. Finch, the psychiatrist with whom Burroughs went to live at the age of 13. There have been law suits charging defamation of character and invasion of privacy.

This book, which was a bestseller in 2002, has been joined by memoirs by his brother John Elder Robison and most recently, from his estranged mother, Margaret Robison.

Reporter Lynn Neary on Morning Edition of NPR today interviewed all three members of the family this morning. Listen or read the transcript here.

Neary’s conclusion is one we need to hear and discuss:

“Memoirs have been much maligned of late because they are all about memory. But while they may be notoriously unreliable vehicles for facts, they are endlessly fascinating sources of speculation about what really is the truth.”

I confess that, although I have been reading about Burroughs, his law suits, and his family, I have not read any one of the books mentioned in the NPR story. Have you? Please enlighten us with your thoughts.