Methodology: Writing
My Take on Memoir — Writing
“I am a question that never leaves me in peace.” -Jean Vaysse, Toward Awakening
After so many years studying history, I put my money on memoir—a genre that memoirist Mary Karr not even half-jokingly called “low rent.” Not respectable as history, not elevated like literature, just navel-gazing and often rendered poorly. What gives?
I’ll explain. For me, this passage by French writer, Jean Vaysse expresses why I think memoir is actually very worthy:
“We are lost in an immensity beyond our reach and in an analysis which our whole lifetime would not be long enough to encompass or enable us to complete in order to synthesize it all…and yet it is just this approach, this endless analysis that modern science has undertaken.
However it is we ourselves who are in question in this search; it is we, first and foremost, who need it. It is a matter…of our inner being, our place, our conflicts, our evolution…For us nothing is seen except through our own eyes.”
My take on what he’s saying: what we see is conditioned by how we see. And how we see is a matter of our ‘inner being, place, conflicts, evolution.’ Before we know anything else, it’s we who are first in question.
I have my eye trained on that ‘inner being, place, conflict and evolution.’ These are the valences affecting how the world becomes legible, derives significance for us. Here is the center of our work, on which everything else turns. Here is the raw material determining what and how we see.
How we tell our stories fundamentally ripples out and defines the worlds.
What if we worked not only to understand our being, conflicts, change but worked with them, trying out perspectives, seeing them differently? This makes us infinitely powerful creators. Change perspective and you re-envision your life – both your past and your future. Tell a better story, get a better world, even a different life.
Does your story matter? In this sense, it matters more than anything. How you live it and tell it affects how you see everything else. Perhaps even shapes everything else — the ‘immensity’ that Vaysse speaks of — because our lives take place within grand relational fields.
What is memoir?
Getting down to brass tacks: there are lots of ways we write about ourselves. People who want to document their life history – first breath to last gasp – write autobiography. Those facing life’s end stages can synthesize meaning from life review. People who have some observations to share might write a personal essay. Those who want to document unique experiences in wider context might engage in an oral history project or write family history.
I like memoir because it’s artful. It stands apart from other forms of personal narrative in three ways:
1 | Narration and Reflection
When you write memoir, you’re not just writing your story but how it’s meaningful to you. Memoirist Vivian Gornick differentiates between “the situation” and “the story.” Yes, in writing memoir, we recount what exactly went down. But as we do that, we’re shifting back and forth between what happened and reflections about why it matters to you. In fact, you and your readers will probably care more about the significance than the actual chronology of events you’re writing about.
2 | Just a Slice
A big part of your creativity lies in your choices about what you’ll include and what you’ll leave out of your memoir. Unlike autobiography, you’re not retelling everything from the moment you were born. As memoirist, Tristine Rainer instructs, you’re just talking about a slice of your life.
In a long memoir, the slice could be related to a particular theme or a defined period of time. For example, you might decide to concentrate on: “growing up in Ireland,” or “my struggle to overcome alcoholism,” or “love and loss in my life.” In a shorter piece, your subject matter will be even more narrowly defined. Defining your specific time period and writing according to an overarching theme will give your work definition and coherence.
3 | Centers on a Turning Point
Finally, your memoir turns on a problem you had, how you faced it, and what changed. In a classical sense, we’re talking about the Freytag triangle: desire, obstacles, crisis, climax, turning point, and denoument. Another way of thinking about this is: how you wanted something, how you went about getting it, what happened, and what you learned – whether you succeeded or not. This kind of dynamic can play out in an abbreviated way in a single scene or you can draw it out into a longform piece. Plot gives your work flow and momentum that is a real pleasure to read – and write!
My Twist on Memoir
It’s always tricky to mess with a defined form. But in approaching the craft I have a few specific interests that I think can improve the results and increase the rewards.
Integral
As memoir is typically approached, I’d argue that the creative process is mostly mental, even though in fleshing out the narrative, we are also tapping into different ways of perceiving and experiencing: senses (how things felt, looked, sounded, smelled…), emotion, and that elusive thing we call inspiration – creative sparks and intuitive leaps.
I think we can more intentionally mine each of these areas. We can recognize that the body has a distinct intelligence that can stand on its own. Same with emotion. And the psyche, as we know, contains troves of unconscious wisdom, both personal and collective. With these faculties together, we can sustain deeper perceptions of ourselves, which some call essence, Real I or true Self.
Can we draw from sense, feeling, psyche, and spirit to render a more interesting story about ourselves? Absolutely we can.
Transformational
I also think that writing memoir can explicitly serve our struggle to be more conscious, more integrated, more capable of creating meaning from life. In fact, our task as humans seeking maturity or wholeness is exactly this: to work with the raw material of our personas or personalities to uncover deeper levels of ourselves.
Put another way, writing about past transformations can aid our present transformation.
Collective
Memoir as a form has taken orientation from an individualistic culture. I think we can create stronger narratives by more deliberately taking a collective approach.
What does this mean? It can simply mean that we don’t try to write in isolation, but that we involve others in our process – seeking readers, input, energy, ideas. Second, it can mean that we recognize that we exist within in a vast collective – that we didn’t get here on our own and we don’t live simply to serve our own purposes. Rather there is a vast collective unconscious that we can draw from in our individual life journeys. And there is a conscious collective that will be helped by the contributions we make to it.
Can we expand the radius of ourselves in the ways we source, frame, and share the stories of our lives? Most definitely.
Working in these ways, I think we can produce really interesting work.
Mining our multiple capacities not just to think but to sense, to feel, to intuit and imagine will increase the dimensionality of what we write.
Doing inner work will deepen our work so we broaden beyond the mechanics of events and can tap into meanings. It will also help us move away from received notions about the course life should take. (Real life is way more interesting.)
And writing within the context of the collective will expand the pool of wisdom we can draw from in our writing experience and in what we produce.
Ultimately, I want accompany you to a place where you can take pleasure in being your deepest, most authentic self, more integrated and whole than when we set out.
Stay with me, and I’ll show you what I mean.