So you want to explore the fog of memory and write a memoir. Great!

Like the IRS, I’m here to help.

And so are many others. In fact, I am going to send you to them. But first, if you haven’t clicked on the video to your right and downloaded the free eight-page ebook (pdf file), please do. What I say below will not duplicate the booklet and will give you enough to chew on for a good long while. You’ll be as content as the Hereford cattle in the field above. (The picture above was taken from the deck of our Shenandoah Valley home).

If you google “how to write a memoir,” you will find this essay by William Zinsser, published in The American Scholar, listed first. I highly recommend it. It’s a classic, like everything Zinsser writes.

Why write another booklet on memoir when Zinsser and many others have already written so well on this subject?

• Because not all of them will find Zinsser or other literary giants. There are many people who would live better, fuller, lives if they spent time reflecting on their lives, even if they don’t write like Nabokov or Morrison. Jane Fonda referred to the life review process in her TED talk on the Third Act. She found her life purpose for her Third Act by writing her own memoir. Others can do the same, whether or not they publish the result.
• Because I am interested in building a community of memoir readers and writers and serving them by offering them valuable ideas. Because it’s so much fun to see this community grow by a few people every day!
• Because each of us finds the people we are meant to learn from and serve. Since memoir in the broadest sense — constructing meaning out of the events, thoughts and feelings of our lives — is something all of us are doing all the time, we will find our mentors and guides when the time is right. I have reviewed a number of memoir guides  (by Maureen Murdock, Natalie Goldberg, Linda Joy Myers, Nancy Miller, Judith Barrington, Ben Yagoda, and Marion Roach Smith). The first link above will connect to all my own review essays. If you click on the names of the authors listed between the parens, you will go directly to their websites. Explore the riches!

When Paul McCartney wrote the famous song below, he was sixteen years old! Now he’s living what he foresaw.

I have sung this song often to my valentine over the course of 45 years, and this is the year when it is most relevant, the year when I turn the big 6-4. This year I’m getting him opera tickets, and we’ll go hand in hand.

Today I sing this song to you, whether you are 16 or 64. If you aspire to love in old age, here are some roses to support and inspire you.

One Dozen Roses for Remembrance

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. It’s up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.”

– Coco Chanel

There’s a reason Betty White delights the whole world. She illustrates that exuberance doesn’t have to end in youth. She has enough joie de vivre to last several lifetimes. She and a handful of other female actresses — Vanessa Redgrave, Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, Myrl Streep — are offering us positive, often feisty, screen images of aging not available in the generations preceding them.

Here’s another short video celebrating beautiful older women.

Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, champion of the poor

Not all of the famous beautiful faces belong to women. One of the most beautiful to me is Dom Helder Camara’s. Years ago, I was showing a film to a class of Goshen College students.  In the film Archbishop Camara is attending a large youth rally in Philadelphia. He is singing, along with the youth, the song “I Believe in Music.” When he sings “I believe in love,” the camera moves close to his face. On his wrinkled, sunbeaten, skin and in his eyes shines a heavenly light. Tears rain down like rivulets along his wrinkles as he smiles. We see transfiguration.

I was so moved by watching this scene that I stopped the projector and said through my own tears. “You may forget everything else you learned in this class, but never forget what real love looks like on a human face.”

For most of us, someone not famous has taught us most about enduring love. If we’ve seen a transfigured face, we likely saw it close up.

I am fortunate to have a mother whose ability to love is written in her face. Barbara Ann Hess Hershey Becker will be 85 years old on February 27, 2012. Thanks, Mother, for pointing out to me the beauty and wisdom on the faces of the elderly saints around me when I was a child — Barbara Oberholtzer, Emma Forrey, Melvin and Mary Lauver, Elmer and Maud Eby, Anna Eby. You taught me to look for kindness and light in the eyes and illumination from the inside out. Now your granddaughter Joy has captured that look on your own face with her camera.

One Dozen Roses for Reflection

In addition to remember people who have carried light on their faces into old age, now is a day to reflect on the process of aging itself. No cosmetic will supply this kind of beauty and wisdom. You will see the connection of love and beauty to stories and story telling. I suggest that you print these quotes and place them on the bathroom mirror. They make good morning meditation inspirations:

If we knew how to read the faces of others, we would be able to decipher the mysteries of their life stories. The face always reveals the soul; it is where the divinity of the inner life finds an echo and an image. When you behold someone’s face, you are gazing deeply into that person’s life. (John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 39).

 

From the Facebook page of my friend Daisy Hickman: ‎”Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread.” Naomi Nye

It is a wonderful day in a life when one is finally able to stand before the long deep mirror of one’s own reflection and view oneself with appreciation, acceptance, and forgiveness. (O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, p. 191).

Rather than being a fall away from beauty, aging can be the revelation of beauty, the time when the inherent radiance becomes beautiful. (Ibid., p. 185).

 

 One Dozen Roses for Revelation

This blog post started in my head when Shirley Kurtz commented about Jane Fonda’s TED talk, noting the wicked irony that the new champion of the “Third Act” recently had a face lift for the sake of removing the bags under the eyes and “wattles” that might hinder a Hollywood career. I asked Shirley K if I should write about wrinkles and wattles. After all, I had already written about moving from auburn to grey hair. She urged me on.

But the blog post really started in my heart a few weeks before that as my daughter Kate and I were working on my new website together. When she showed me the home page of the new site, I first looked at it on a large monitor and cringed.

“Can you make that picture smaller?” I asked. “I see a lot of wrinkles!!”

She didn’t skip a beat. “I love your wrinkles,” she said.

That was valentine enough for my 64th year.

What Valentine would you like to offer to your own role models in aging? To the Beatles? To the aging process itself? Don’t hold back! Share the love. If sixteen-year-old Paul McCartney could be wise enough to celebrate old-age love, so can all of us. 

The first act in life occurs roughly from conception to age 30. The second act, 30-60. And the third, 60-death.

The 34 years that have been added to the human life span since the time of our great grandparents constitute a revolution in the field of human longevity. Naturally, if it’s a revolution, Jane wants to be there.

This group of older citizens worldwide, especially older women who live longest, could become an irrepressible, irresistible force for good. Much like the concept of Ubuntu described in my recent post, the life review process during the third act, if we actually conduct one, gives each of us the chance to find wholeness at last.

Instead of an arch that peaks in middle age and then declines, the best image for the human spirit in the third act, says Fonda, is a stairway. I like to think of it like a stairway to heaven. But we can only climb the stairway if we do the work of reviewing our lives, forgive ourselves and others, come back to our broken places and know them again for the first time. If we become whole, we don’t just seek our own salvation, we take risks so that younger people can climb the staircase also — and re-conceive their own lifespans. Instead of dreading decrepitude, they can envision themselves as evolving into wisdom figures.

No matter what you may think of the various stages of Jane Fonda’s own life, she seems to be walking her talk in this video. Without ever using the word memoir, she makes the case for a life review that builds peace in the world. To that I can only say, “Brava!”

What is your response to this idea?

Richard seems to be walking a parallel path in Appalachian Ohio to mine here in Brooklyn. When I found his blog Narrative a year or so ago, I reached for my shepherd’s crook and snagged it!

Richard has written about my post about the idea of Ubuntu and memoir on his blog. He also interviewed me. Part One of a two-part series asks me about my memoir’s working title, Rosy Cheeks and about how I structured my writing process over the last five years. While you are on Richard’s blog be sure to click on his favorite memoirs and read a few of his reviews. You’ll understand why I consider myself a learner in Richard’s classroom! And give him a little blogger love — leave a comment!

What other blogs do you love to read? Do you have any to recommend to me or to my readers?

Review by Lanie Tankard.

In Lunch Bucket Paradise, Fred Setterberg sketches “the dawn of promises that maybe promised too much.” His portrait of an era covers the time from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to the Vietnam War draft, with a geographic concentration on California and Oregon. He tosses in a touch of the Solomon Islands for good measure.

The reader follows the masculine voice of the story as he parses his father’s life, contrasts it with his uncle’s, and then tries to figure out his own. His mother makes appearances, but the majority of the story is told via the major figure’s childhood memories and depictions of the two males prominent in his upbringing.

Chapters alternate between escapades and experiences, with an occasional section musing about topics such as the rise of suburbia, America as the land of plenty, and tuberculosis. We catch glimpses of times past through the sprinkling of brand names (Betty Crocker, Jell-O, Dream Fluff, Rambler, Ronson, Scott’s Turf Builder), TV shows (Steve Allen), and songs (Archie Bell and the Drells, James Brown, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels).

I’ve never been a teenage boy, but readers who have will likely relate to depictions of sexual yearnings. (I did relate to the mention of Snake Stabler, with whom I went to high school. Roar Lions!)

Paternal wisdom is passed down from father to son: “General maintenance…is one of the secrets of life.” “You got to learn everything you can or otherwise you’re just going to be a prisoner, like we were.” “There’s just not a lot of room for mistakes.” “Work hard…stay lucky.”

These precepts bombard the growing youngster alongside aphorisms spouted by his peers: “…where did working ever get anybody?” “Do it one day, and then you just got to get up and do it all over again.” “Nobody likes what they do.”

By the end, the boy has evolved into a young man ready to widen the city limits of the town he has known, poised at the abyss of the world yawning wide open before him — yet afraid of its promises.

And right there is the crux of my dilemma as a reader: I, too, am afraid — of the book’s promises in its subtitle. Is A True-Life Novel true? Is it a novel? Or is it memoir? Is it truth or fiction? Are the photographs from the author’s actual life, or an invented one? Have I read a nonfiction fiction? Faction? Autobiography? Docufiction? Mockumentary? Verisimilitude? Is it literary journalism? Journalistic literature? I find myself scratching my head in confusion.

I’ve pondered this topic before in book reviews: Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls,  The Mother Who Stayed: Stories by Laura Furman, and Freedom by Jonathon Franzen.

Walls explained her use of the term true-life novel to readers in an Author’s Note: “I wrote the story in the first person because I wanted to capture [my grandmother’s] distinctive voice, which I clearly recall. At the time, I didn’t think of the book as fiction…. I saw the book more in the vein of an oral history, a retelling of stories handed down by my family through the years, and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.”

Furman created fiction from diaries written by another woman who lived in the 1800s, and clearly detailed this on the copyright page: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

Franzen stated in his Ten Rules for Writing Fiction: “The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention.”

How does that occur? Novelist Amy Waldman speculates: “Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character’s actions or lines are truer than others.”

So just what is it that Setterberg has crafted in Lunch Bucket Paradise? It’s not Capote, Doctorow, Didion, or Eggers.

I opened my yellowed copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, touted on the cover as “Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties.” I bought this paperback in 1971 at the Hemingway Museum in Key West. In the preface, written eleven years earlier in Cuba, Hemingway commented: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” He counseled himself on page 12: “Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I’d feel less toyed with as a reader if Setterberg had clarified what he was doing in the book itself. Instead, I had to Google around to find out. He parsed his method in a recent interview, saying he started out writing a memoir. “Then I said, ‘I’m going to write, and every time the impulse hits me to lie, I’m going to give myself license to do it and see what happens.’”

Hmmm, okay, so here we have two polar opposite approaches — one using truth as a guiding principle and one using lying. I’m curious about how, assuming the ultimate goals are similar, the end products will differ. Is “Sketches of the Author’s Life” a more accurate summation, perhaps conveying the impressionistic method used by Hemingway’s artist contemporaries? Is “A True-Life Novel” truly a subtitle, or is it a disclaimer? Oh, if only James Frey had thought to slap it on the cover of  A Million Little Pieces.

Later, in an online essay on Talking Writing: A Magazine for Writers, Setterberg said he switched from memoir to fiction/lying because he wondered, “Did anybody need to hear about my childhood chemistry set”? Well, frankly, if it’s well written from the heart, I’d like to read about his experiments. Search Amazon on “chemistry sets for kids” under Toys and Games, and you’ll find 108 sets for sale, with 7,043 reviews posted. Obviously they’re still popular.

There’s a certain amount of trust on the part of the reader to allow an author to take liberties with literary license, if a work is well written. And there are individual chapters of Setterberg’s book that hold eloquence within them. His description of his father’s workbench, for example, moved me to tears, for I felt as though Setterberg had been standing in front of my own father’s workbench when he wrote it: “I liked the way the nails and bolts and washers rattled around in their ancient mayonnaise jars as I plucked them down from the wall of cabinet shelves—each container segregated by size and purpose, labeled with an ink-pen scrawl across a strip of tan masking tape.” Did all Dads do that in the Fifties? Mine sure did.

Setterberg’s digression on family photographs is thought provoking: “What do we seize and memorialize?”

His best chapter, perhaps, is the seventh, “Labor Day,” detailing work in a ketchup factory. The house fire thread, however, is dropped for way too long, IMHO, and never fully elaborated.

The copyright page notes: “Several chapters of this book have appeared in serial form….” Some of them won prizes and awards. Yet do they cohere when placed side by side? It’s hard to follow the timeline. And that approach can cause abrupt segues. There is no context, for example, when the protagonist of Lunch Bucket Paradise suddenly appears as a band member in Chapter Six, “Jungle Music.”

The book is a nice recap of a certain period of history in this country. Setterberg offers a look at the seeds of divergent views on the Vietnam War draft. As a reader, though, I felt abandoned at the end. I wanted to know whether the protagonist resisted the draft — and whether Phil survived Vietnam.

In a lengthy look at “The Rise of True Fiction” in Columbia Journalism Review, Alissa Quart termed it a mashup genre and indicated it’s here to stay. So we the readers probably need to try to understand it. On a creativity palette, it can be a useful hue.

Still, some small part of me wonders why true life itself is not sufficient.

###

Lanie Tankard

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

Welcome to the new look for 100memoirs.com! The old site still exists and has migrated to the new location, shirleyshowalter.com. I have now met the original goal of reading 100 memoirs! I discovered over the last three years and 315 posts that readers love lists of top memoirs for their own reading selection. So you can find many good lists here.

As you may recall, I announced the good news of signing a book contract for my own childhood memoir. After my hair color transformed from auburn to grey, I invited readers to help me choose photos here. If you’ve been riding the waves of change with me through the past three years, thank you! Stay on board because the fun is just beginning.

If you are new to this site and this blog, welcome aboard.

From now on, my emphasis is shifting slightly from reviewing memoirs and musing about memoir as a genre (although I will still feature guest interviews, author interviews, etc. from time to time) to sharing some of my own struggles, questions, and triumphs as I complete a manuscript. I have now drafted six chapters out of fourteen.

I’m sticking to my schedule, but I’m also finding that writing is hard work. Mary Karr recently said writing (especially memoir writing) is like hoeing a long row in the hot sun. I know all about hoeing, since I grew up hoeing tobacco. I think Mary’s metaphor is absolutely perfect. If you are a writer also, or if you are a reader who dreams about writing, I hope you will come out in the hot sun with me.

That’s why I created the video (see right-hand column) to introduce an e-book on the subject my readers care about: How to Write a Memoir. I hope you have watched the video and have signed up to get the free book and the weekly Magical Memoir Moments. I had so much fun creating them while thinking about you.

With Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Fetzer Institute colleagues

One of my strongest beliefs is that we are all connected to each other, and that good things happen when we tell our stories. One of the great blessings of my life has been the opportunity to spend time with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Along with a group of leaders from The Fetzer Institute, I was able to sit around a circle with this remarkable man for several hours on several occasions over four years.

Archbishop Tutu has made the South African word ubuntu (Xhosa language) legendary worldwide. He explains it to students engaged in the Semester at Sea program in a short video here:

The words that inspire me most from this video seem at first blush to be antithetical to the idea of writing memoir: “There is no such thing as a solitary individual.” But when you add the rest of the Archbishop’s words, you see why memoir writing is much more than a single writer with a pen in her hand. It is a radical act: “I want you to be all you can be so that I can be all that I can be. I need you to be you so that I can be me.”

I invite you into a writing journey that will help lead you to be more you than you ever have been before. I feel myself becoming more me just by extending the invitation.

How shall we begin the next phase of this journey? What is your reaction to this idea?

Terry Helwig signing her memoir Moonlight on Linoleum

Remember the wonderful interview with Terry Helwig in which she shared her book marketing strategies? Well, thanks to the gentle nudging of one of that post’s most engaged readers, Linda Gartz, Terry is back. Here’s how she found her agent and publisher, in her own words. I suggest you go to her site to learn even more. The link will take you directly to a set of great writing tips.

I like how Terry takes the process of writing, editing, and publishing seriously and herself lightly. I hope you’ll enjoy and learn a lot.

From Terry to Linda (and all of us):

Linda, in addition to the writing/publishing tips on my website http://www.terryhelwig.com/terrysdesk.aspx (open tab on writing tips), I strongly suggest authors go into a bookstore and leaf through books similar to the type of book they want to publish.  Oftentimes agents, editors and publishers will be mentioned in the acknowledgments which means these people and publishing houses likely have an interest in your genre.  I have been writing off and on for thirty years.  It wasn’t until I wrote Moonlight on Linoleum that I sought out an agent.  When my manuscript was finally read, I was told that I had a diamond in the rough; but in order for the agency to represent my manuscript, they suggested I hire a NYC editor to help me polish “my diamond” to make it more marketable.  I was told that publishers now prefer complete, edited manuscripts ready for publication because so many places are short-staffed and feeling the economic crunch.   The truth is, the cost of hiring a reputable editor gave me great pause—the cost was thousands of dollars, plus there was absolutely no guarantee that my manuscript would be accepted anywhere.  It was a gamble to be sure.  In the end, I decided to take the risk and, after undergoing the editing process, I was lucky enough to get an advance that more than covered the cost of the editing. I am well aware the ending could have turned out very differently.  I certainly don’t recommend this path for everyone, but it worked for me.

Do you have your own publishing story? What else do you want to know from Terry? Isn’t she generous to share so many ideas with us? Please thank her. And if you are interested in family history, check out Linda Gartz’s fascinating website also.

Sonia’s blog can be found here, and her Twitter handle is Gutsyliving. I love her tag line — “life’s too short to play it safe” — don’t you?

Also, here’s a free class being offered on how to write a memoir with an emphasis on short ones. Perfect for the contest above.

All the info you need about signing up for the class is here. Tessa Smith McGovern, the teacher, sent me the link because she thought the readers of this blog could benefit. If you do, please come back and tell us about your experience here.

Online community networks are wonderful ways to find good opportunities and also good resources. Lots of them are free or reasonably priced. Enjoy!

If you have a resource you want to offer, please hop on to the comments section. 

Out of curiosity, how many of you are writing memoir, thinking about it, or have already done it. Hop on for this purpose also.

Brooklyn, New York

It’s nearly midnight. I’ve just closed the book A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. Outside Flatbush Ave. pulses with movement and light in the rain. The wet streets glisten and double the images of white headlights approaching, red taillights receding, and green traffic light swaying above.

The Express Lube carwash sign glows brightly, but the flag in front of it flutters wanly in the wind, its thin sodden fabric no longer furling, Under the large scarlet letters CAR WASH the burnt-out remains of another sign are faintly visible. But the last two letters burn brightly. OIL CHANGE has become merely GE.

High above the street looms a huge billboard with Adam Sandler’s face inviting us to his Christmas movie Jack and Jill. And above the billboard a huge blue logo accompanied by a single word in white letters: CHASE.

A woman heading this way onthe dark street fights the rain with a flimsy umbrella. From a distance she resembles a pteradactyl, giving the contemporary urban scene a touch of prehistoric mystery. Thousands of windows have a view of this same street, so perhaps I shouldn’t imagine that I am the only one watching this one woman in this particular place at this moment of time.

I think about the connections and differences between the life I’ve just read about and my own. Just five miles from the high-rise condo building on Myrtle Ave. where I am staring out the window, Alfred Kazin’s Brownsville still exists. His memoir, written in 1946 when he was still in his early ’30′s, already described a lost place, a place of immigrants yearning to breathe free, a place the author both loved and hated.

Alfred Kazin

I actually met Alfred Kazin in the 1980′s when he lectured at Goshen College and I was a professor there. He was at that time about 68 years old, only five years older than I am now. I thought he was ancient. The only one of his books I had read at that time was On Native Grounds. In graduate school it was considered an example of “old school” literary criticism.

Among New York Jewish intellectuals in the 1940′s-1960′s, where Kazin earned his literary and cultural street creds, his least honored work was his three-volume autobiography. Considered too personal to  ”count,” with his peers at the time they were written, the three books that begin with A Walker in the City (and also include Starting Out in the Thirties and New York Jew) may well become the most classic texts of his long and voluminous career. I now understand why A Walker in the City rates so well as a coming-of-age memoir even though it is basically a collection of essays rather than an integrated narrative. The secret lies in the layering of childhood and adulthood, the vivid sensory detail and the emotional intelligence of the narrating author.

How does a writer remember such vivid physical and emotional detail from childhood? Kazin is almost as gifted as Vladimir Nabakov in doing so. Here’s just one example. As he plays a game called Indian trail, “the greatest moment came when I could plunge into the darkness down the block for myself and hide behind the slabs in the monument works. I remember the air whistling around me as I ran, the panicky thud of my bones in my sneakers,and then the slabs rising in the light from the street lamps as I sped past the little candy story and crept under the fence.” Every child runs. Only a one in a million adults remembers running this way.

Flannery O’Conner once said, ”The fact is that anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”

The drama of childhood is all about newness, ritual, feelings expressed and unexpressed, attachment and loneliness. The experience may well be small, the space limited, and the information scant, but a great writer makes the most of quotidian materials.

I am awed by this ability. Sometimes, reading the work of really great memoirists, I feel very small because they seem to be able to remember and evoke such profound detail. Then I read an article in The New York Times last week about talent and its correlation with working memory. After that one, I feel like that woman on the street struggling against the wind, her umbrella offering no shelter.

Anybody out there know what I am talking about? I suspect that part of the solution to this problem is to write and write and write. Sometimes the detail comes back that way, the perfect metaphor flashes with light. The sidewalks of memory glisten in the rain. One thing is sure. If I don’t write a lot, I’ll never remember beyond the broad, sunny, surface. If I want to get to the double image, I’ll need to sing, a lot, in the rain.