Until I wrote
Mostly True, I thought that memoirs were what you wrote if you lacked the imagination to write fiction or the diligence to write nonfiction. It's not that I don't appreciate personal stories. On the contrary. I live for them. I've lurked around the edges of life listening for as long as I can remember. As a very young child, I crept from my bed, and held my breath as I negotiated the creaky stairs and then crouched outside the kitchen door listening to my parents recount their days, their worries, their complaints about each other. When busted, my mother would say, "We are not talking about you, now go back to bed." But night after night, I returned. In second grade, I used paper cups to create a listening device that, when pressed to a floor, according to my science book, could allow one to hear a pin drop on the floor below. There was something illicit about overhearing, something powerful about silencing one's own life ? I had to all but stop my breathing to escape parental detection ? and riding the account of the world as somebody else found it.
The first experience I had of listening to someone other than my parents was a tent revival. The tent was in a field adjacent to the pool where I thrashed out laps with dreams of blue ribbons and golden trophies. The pool was located right on the perimeter of Columbus, Ohio, where the asphalt met the cornfields. It was evening, it was hot, I was about eleven years old and waiting for my mother to pick me up. She was late and perhaps this emboldened me to wander toward the tent. Attending a gathering of zealots would, in my mother's view, have been like piercing my ears or being friends with someone who drank Coke for breakfast. Yet I had the nerve to stand in the tall grass listening, watching, shaking chiggers form my ankles and swatting mosquitoes from my arms. All I could see of the speaker was the top of her pink straw hat, flashes from the sleeves of her flowered cotton dress, and the puppet-show of her white gloves when she raised her arms to heaven. But her voice was as thick and dark and indomitable as molasses and I closed my eyes and rode it back through her bruised and brutal life and into the trailer where she'd first met Jesus. I remember the sound of that moment in her voice ? an inhale like a window opening followed by a pause in which the possibility that life could be different registered ? it made me quivery, like watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Again, it was something illicit, prurient and by then ? I was, after all, nearly adolescent ? almost sexual, about surrendering my reality to the reality of another.
I had the same feeling years later listening to women's stories in consciousness raising groups and again in various self-help programs in which stories of destruction and redemption are told again and again. The possibility of hope moves me more than bacon. Eventually, I made a life of looking for personal stories that bear witness, or at least explain, a little sliver of the world. I became a journalist. And for twenty years, I've wandered around with a notebook, listening, watching, tasting, and writing it all down.
I felt comfortable recording the stories of others. Outside a story, it is possible to see other sides of it and to see its context. Listening to someone else's narrative, I can hear the pathos, the ring of truth, the stroke of brilliance. I can also hear the self-indulgence, the self-pity, the self-aggrandizement. I can then pare and filter and mesh all this on a page ? like a collagist, paring the essential detail from this picture and from that and then moving the snippets around to create a larger truth ? that's part of the discipline of non-fiction. And that's exactly the sort of discipline that's missing from so much memoir. At least that's what I thought until I wrote Mostly True.
And then, over a three year period, I learned a different sort of discipline. In order to write something more than a press release for myself, I had to be both a part of the story and a part-from the story. I had to tease the idiosyncratic from the universal in my story. I had to separate what is me from what-is-not-me.
This was a bit like taking a very sharp, very pointy boning knife and carefully dissecting one's self. A few strategic cuts and then RIIIIPPPP goes the skin, the persona that I so assiduously confected to present to the world. Slash, slash ? the muscles of individual accomplishment are loosened from the bone. Careful! Don't nick the fascia, don't sever the nerves that remember what it felt like to be alive at a certain time and in a certain place. Lift out the organs. Place them in pan. Clean off the bones. Arrange it all on a table. Now walk around the table, study each part. Decide if it needs to be included and if so, how. Then begin to put it back together on the page. It took me three years. I wrote for eight hours six days a week. My training as a chef came in handy, at least metaphorically.
Dissecting fifty years of living and trying to distill that experience into a narrative that entertains and enlightens and bears witness to the world is a little like taking an entire cow and distilling it into a single dish. I am going to be writing about the various stages of that process this week ? the remembering, the selecting, the structuring, the writing and the selling of the story of my life.
I don't really understand blogging so I hope that you can bear with me. I tend to go to the kitchen ? both in reality and in metaphor ? whenever I am overwhelmed or uncertain. I have this feeling that blogging is to a magazine essay, what simple, direct cooking is to, say, Haute Cuisine. I wrote weekly essays for the New York Times Sunday Magazine for nearly a decade. But I've never blogged a word in my life. In fact, blogging seemed a little like memoir writing to me. But that, too, was before I wrote a memoir.