English 145 (3)

At the end of class, the question: But how do we imbue our memoirs with meaning? The answer, which came later:

First and foremost, memoir writing is not autobiography. It is not the straight line of the what happened. It is the what happened and why, and what did it mean then and what does it mean now. Mostly it is about asking the right questions about the past and about the human condition. What are the conditions that lead to violence? What is the aftermath of abrasion? How does one survive loss? How do we tell ourselves stories to protect ourselves from the chaos of experience? How are big things small and small things big? How do the refrains from the past shape the condition of our present?

And on and on. Sometimes you can get at those questions obliquely, through structure and elision, as we saw with Running in the Family. Sometimes, as with the Diving Bell, you very directly play the now against the then; it’s in the shock of the discrepancy that we most intimately experience the author’s horror. This is the beauty of memoir. There are a million methods, but in the end, the best memoir is the memoir we read again and again for greater meaning. If all we get is a story, unlayered, we have no reason to return.