Mentor: A Memoir/Tom Grimes: Reflections

I have the very dear and very thoughtful Leslie Pietrzyk (we met at Bread Loaf years ago, I caught a glimpse of her once, a fleeting moment, in Alexandria, and we are in touch again, thanks to Facebook) to thank for suggesting Mentor.  This is Tom Grimes's authoritative, unfancy, and bracingly honest memoir about his relationship with Frank Conroy, who was, of course, the author of the classic and important memoir Stop-Time and the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  Grimes came into Conroy's orbit as a student—as a man waiting tables and writing at night, a man desperate to make a literary life.  Grimes becomes, quite quickly, someone more—someone Conroy can drink with, talk to, and selflessly encourage.  And oh, does Conroy selflessly encourage.  He urges Grimes on, he connects him to possibilities, he celebrates Grimes good moments and is there to buffer the bad.  Many writers—too many writers—focus only on themselves, their own work, their own fame.  Conroy clearly was not that sort, and Grimes's portrait of him is not just illuminating, it is restorative.

Yesterday in class we were talking about the difference between self-conscious writing and self-confident writing.  We were talking about the risks that get taken when certain lines are crossed.  Grimes crosses no lines here.  With remarkable quietude he parses his own career—his great ambitions, his successes, his failures, his coming-to-terms.  He sets this against and within the writers' workshop, giving us Conroy as teacher, friend, agent, and enthusiastic reader, reminding us of the power of memoirs that look beyond the author's immediate self.

"Frank read great writers without any fear," Grimes wrote, for Conroy's eulogy.  "He didn't worry about imitating them; he didn't worry about being overwhelmed by them.  Instead he took pleasure in them and learned from them, and by doing so he elevated reading to the level of art..."

Selflessness.  Enthusiasm.  A love for books, even those not one's own.  This is clear, unmuddied water.  This is spring, after winter.

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Can you take teaching too far?

This afternoon, between corporate work, I was reading Mentor:  A Memoir (Tom Grimes) and reflecting on what it is to be a teacher, what it must have been to be Grimes as he entered the orbit of Frank Conroy and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  I kept stopping as I read, thinking of my own strange methods, remembering the cookies that I'd promised myself I'd bake for students who will, among other things, be recalling first kitchens, first loved meals in class tomorrow.  "Don't you think you are going a little too far with all of this?" my husband asks me, as he watches me disassemble (again) my library in search of just the right passage for just this one student; I know it's in there somewhere.

But can you take it too far?  For here are students who want to learn, who have not yet succumbed to norms and utter everydayness, who are still seeking, still searching for their voices?

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Memoir Fetish (welcoming these new titles to my memoir library)

My appetite for books is insatiable, always, and when I teach, buying and reading memoir is a seamless compulsion.  Every student is on her own course.  Every young writer must be guided to just the right books at the right time.  To a memoir library already teeming, I this week add the following titles:

Devotion, Dani Shapiro

Mentor: A Memoir, Tom Grimes

How to Live:  Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell (yes, this is a biography, but it is a biography of one of our most iconic early memoirists)

History of a Suicide, Jill Bialosky

The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (I need a new copy)

Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf

House of Prayer No. 2:  A Writer's Journey Home, Mark Richard

Townie:  A Memoir, Andre Dubus III

Duke of Deception:  Memories of My Father, Geoffrey Wolff (hugely ashamed that I have not read this before)

Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman (classified as a novel, much like Dave Eggers classified his own memoirish story as a novel; my reflections on this book were posted two days ago)

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