Why structure actually does matter, in memoir

This morning, on HuffPo, I'm reflecting on why structure actually does matter in memoir — how indeed it helps to define the form—to distinguish it from autobiography, essay, war reporting, journalism, because that distinction matters. I refer in the piece to some of my favorite memoirs and memoirists, though there are, of course, many more.

And, because I must, I remember my brilliant students at Penn, and one particular Spectacular.

The full link is here.

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writing in defense of memoir in Chicago Tribune

In the Chicago Tribune this weekend I am writing in defense of memoir—and in celebration of the structurally intriguing work of Terry Tempest Williams, Joan Wickersham, and Susanna Kaysen.

The piece begins like this, below, and continues here. Please share it, if you are so inclined.

She leans in and tells me a story. There are two sisters, she says, both in their 70s. Each possesses a ferociously “true” version of a shared childhood scene. All these decades later, the sisters still can't agree, still won't agree, on the scene — not on its particulars, not on its meaning. One sister has to be right, and one sister has to be wrong — the proof is controvertible. Imagine the memoirs these two sisters might separately write. Whose would you read? Whose would you finish? How would you know who is telling the truth? Which of the two stories matter?

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Main Point Books and When Women Were Birds/Terry Tempest Williams: Reflections

This past Monday I stepped inside a brand-new independent bookstore.

Let me repeat that: a brand-new independent bookstore.

Main Point Books of Bryn Mawr provides a little extra proof (for those who doubt) that both books and those who love them are still very much with us here, in our twenty-first century. Cathy Fiebach, the store's owner and a Penn alum, has placed her shop right next door to a cupcake house (oh, those cupcakes), on the main drag of Lancaster Avenue. She has created a warm and welcoming space, a shop that, during my longish stay (in the company of the writer Sarah Laurence), was bustling with readers of all ages, and with conversations of the typography and paper sort. What do you love? What do you read? What do you have?

Find me a story.

I bought When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice by a writer who has always intrigued me, Terry Tempest Williams. Williams combines ferocity with a very particular brand of lyricism. She lives her life large (as an activist, an environmentalist) and writes it with care, and in this case her prompt—her exploration—concerns the blank journals her mother bequeathed to her.

On the very first page, we learn of the shock of that blankness. It is shortly after the passing of Terry's mother:

On the next full moon I found myself alone in the family home. I kept expecting Mother to appear. Her absence became her presence. It was the right time to read her journals. They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful clothbound books; some floral, some paisley, others in solid colors. The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves. I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It, too, was empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth—shelf after shelf after shelf, all my mother's journals were blank.

What do those journals mean? What mystery do they hold, what lesson do they teach, what room do they make for Terry? Over and over again, Terry examines the possible, refutes the obvious, rejects the simple, and in doing say she tells the rough story of her own life—her Mormonism, her love of country, her marriage, her explorations beyond marriage, her one night in a jail, and a frightening diagnosis. Over and again she designates and signifies the blank journals, and then, again, she looks past her own momentary understanding.

When Women Were Birds is often stunning. It can, at times, feel rhetorical, or deliberately obfuscating, or overly mythical—but that is the point. This book offers fifty-four variations on voice, and no easy answers. It is memoir—personal and unifying, wild and precise, needled together by this simple fact, Williams' words:

Each day we begin with the empty page.

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The Prologue in Memoir

Last night, in part two of my two-part class,"Very First Words," we spoke of the prologues that seem to launch so many memoirs—the pronouncements of theme and tone, the pencil strokes of frame, the percolated entanglements of story lines. We read out loud from books in the making and looked for wasteland stretches that might be eradicated, flat horizons in need of sky, opportunities to turn complication into complexity.

This morning, a day of corporate work begins (interviews! a succession of stories! schedule management!), and I'm about to put my many books back onto the shelves. Before I do, though, I share four teachable prologues, should you be weighing beginnings in your own mind.

We went there for everything we needed.... Most of all we went there when we needed to be found (The Tender Bar/J.R. Moehringer).

For a long time, my want for Texas was so veiled in guilt and ambiguity that I couldn't claim it for the sadness it was (A Strong West Wind/Gail Caldwell).

Everything about Great Salt Lake is exaggerated—the heat, the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal one can never know what it is for certain.... Volunteers are beginning to reconstruct the marshes just as I am trying to reconstruct my life (Refuge/Terry Tempest Williams).

So, dear son, where to begin? It could be the August morning I stood on our front steps wondering whether to go in for a jacket, but first let me step back as far as I can and say that what I remember most about my beginnings, besides the voice of my mother striding down through layers of dark to where I lay under the wonder of the onrush of sleep, is how I felt set apart (A Step from Death, Larry Woiwode).

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