On Writing Memoir

I write memoir because of a picture that hung on the hallway wall of my childhood home. Taken in 1969, it showed my maternal grandmother in a weary pose, prematurely gray hair neatly combed and teeth gleaming. It rested against the dark paneling, just below my first baby picture. As she died nearly two years before I was born, our adjacent portraits became my connection to her. I would wait until my mother was cooking or on the phone, and creep into the hallway to stare at her kind face and cream blouse with the Peter Pan collar. After experiencing these secret moments of communion, I was confused when her portrait would disappear for months on end, only to reemerge at seemingly random times. It was much later when I understood that my mother sometimes couldn’t bear to look at it because of her grief.

As a writer, I find that I’m often carried back to that hallway, gazing up at a blank space on the wall. My job is to be a spiritual detective of sorts, to look for clues leading to the location of the missing picture, or at least the reason for its absence. This sleuthing isn’t simply restricted to my deceased grandmother, of course, or even my mother, father, aunts, uncles.

I must investigate my own life as well. I must tell my story—my truth—as best I remember it. I must discover, understand, communicate, preserve.

In Writing Down the Bones, author Natalie Goldberg puts it like this: “Here is a chance to bring your reader deeper into your heart. You can explain with deep knowledge what it means to be a Catholic, a man, a southerner, a black person, a woman, a homosexual, a human being. You know it better than anyone else. In knowing who you are and writing from it, you will help the world by giving it understanding.”

Reaching that place of understanding is often a difficult process. Unlike fiction writers, we memoirists don’t have the luxury of a buffer zone between the story’s plot and our own lives. We must mine the hidden recesses of our hearts—its sins, triumphs, motivations, desires—and then go public with our findings. We must summon the courage to be vulnerable, to put our struggles down on the page. We must own our story, ugliness and all, and throw ourselves into what is hopefully a net of self-identifying mercy from the reader.

There is a statue that stands on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Designed by the noted sculptor Robert I. Aitken, it depicts a woman with an open book in her lap, lifting up her eyes to the broad avenue. Carved into its base is a Shakespeare quotation, taken from The Tempest: “What is past is prologue.”

Memoirs, then, are spiritual documents, prophecies that direct the writer—and hopefully the reader—to a place of awareness and acceptance and even salvation. We memoirists have to do what my mother eventually realized she must do—take the picture out of the nightstand drawer and return it to its proper place on the wall, and in doing so, confront the turbulent emotions that accompany its reemergence. It’s only then that we can hopefully get to a plain of understanding. Or at least to its edge.

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