On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001

14 Writing About Yourself
Part III Forms

The Memoir

Of all the subjects available to you as a writer, the one you know best is yourself: your past and your present, your thoughts and your emotions. Yet its probably the subject you try hardest to avoid.

Whenever I’m invited to visit a writing class in a school or a college, the first thing I ask the students is: “What are your problems? What are your concerns?” Their answer, from Maine to California, is the same: ’We have to write what the teacher wants.” It’s a depressing sentence.

“That’s the last thing any good teacher wants,” I tell them. “No teacher wants twenty-five copies of the same person, writing about the same topic. What we’re all looking for—what we want to see pop out of your papers—is individuality. We’re looking for whatever it is that makes you unique. Write about what you know and what you think.”

They can’t. They don’t think they have permission. I think they get that permission by being born.

Middle age brings no release. At writers’ conferences I meet women whose children have grown up and who now want to sort out their lives through writing. I urge them to write in personal detail about what is closest to them. They protest. “We have to write what editors want,” they say. In other words, “We have to write what the teacher wants.” Why do they think they need permission to write about the experiences and feelings they know best—their own?

Jump still another generation. I have a journalist friend who has spent a lifetime writing honorably, but always out of secondhand sources, expheating other people’s events. Over the years I’ve often heard him mention his father, a minister who took many lonely liberal stands in a conservative Kansas town, and obviously that’s where my friend got his own strong social conscience. A few years ago I asked him when he was going to start writing about the elements in his life that were really important to him, including his father. One of these days, he said. But the day was always put off.

When he turned 65 I began to pester him. I sent him some memoirs that had moved me, and finally he agreed to spend his mornings writing in that retrospective vein. Now he can hardly believe what a liberating journey he is embarked on: how much he is discovering about his father that he never understood, and about his own life. But when he describes his journey he always says, “I never had the nerve before,” or “I was always afraid to try.” In other words, “I didn’t think I had permission.”

Why not? Wasn’t America the land of the “rugged individualist”? Let’s get that lost land and those lost individualists back. If you’re a writing teacher, make your students believe in the validity of their lives. If you’re a writer, give yourself permission to tell us who you are.

By “permission” I don’t mean “permissive.” I have no patience with sloppy workmanship—the let-it-all-hang-out verbiage of the ’60s. To have a decent career in this country it’s important to be able to write decent English. But on the question of who you’re writing for, don’t be eager to please. If you consciously write for a teacher or for an editor, you’ll end up not writing for anybody. If you write for yourself, you’ll reach the people you want to write for

Writing about one’s life is naturally related to how long one has lived. When students say they have to write what the teacher wants, what they often mean is that they don’t have anything to say—so meager is their after-school existence, bounded largely by television and the mall, two artificial versions of reality. Still, at any age, the physical act of writing is a powerful search mechanism. I’m often amazed, dipping into my past, to find some forgotten incident clicking into place just when I need it. Your memory is almost always good for material when your other wells go dry.

Permission, however, is a two-edged instrument, and nobody should use it without posting a surgeon general’s warning: EXCESSIVE WRITING ABOUT YOURSELF CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO THE health of the writer and the reader. A thin fine separates ego from egotism. Ego is healthy; no writer can go far without it. Egotism, however, is a drag, and this chapter is not intended as a license to prattle just for therapy. Again, the rule I suggest is: Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work. Write about yourself, by all means, with confidence and with pleasure. But see that all the details—people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas, emotions—are moving your story steadily along.

Which brings me to memoir as a form. I’ll read almost anybody’s memoir. For me, no other nonfiction form goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience—to all the drama and pain and humor and unexpectedness of life. The books I remember most vividly from my first reading of them tend to be memoirs: books such as Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt, Michael J. Arlens Exiles, Russell Bakers Growing Up, Vivian Gomicks Fierce Attachments, Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life, Moss Harts Act One, John Housemans Run-Through, Mary Karrs The Liars’ Club, Frank McCourts Angela’s Ashes, Vladimir Nabokovs Speak, Memory, V S. Pritchetts A Cab at the Door, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, and Leonard WbolFs Growing.

What gives them their power is the narrowness of their focus. Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The memoir writer takes us back to some comer of his or her past that was unusually intense—childhood, for instance—or that was framed by war or some other social upheaval. Baker’s Growing Up is a box within a box. It’s the story of a boy growing up, set inside the story of a family battered by the Depression; it takes its strength from its historical context. Nabokovs Speak, Memory, the most elegant memoir I know, invokes a golden boyhood in czarist St. Petersburg, a world of private tutors and summer houses that the Russian Revolution would end forever. It’s an act of writing frozen in a unique time and place. Pritchetts A Cab at the Door recalls a childhood that was almost Dickensian; his grim apprenticeship to the London leather trade seems to belong to the 19th century. Yet Pritchett describes it without self-pity and even with a certain merriment. We see that his childhood was inseparably joined to the particular moment and country and class he was bom into— and was an organic part of the wonderful writer he grew up to be.

Think narrow, then, when you try the form. Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction. Thoreau wrote seven different drafts of Walden in eight years; no American memoir was more painstakingly pieced together. To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of halfremembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

One secret of the art is detail. Any kind of detail will work—a sound or a smell or a song title—as long as it played a shaping role in the portion of your life you have chosen to distill. Consider sound. Here’s how Eudora Welty begins One Writers Beginnings, a deceptively slender book packed with rich remembrance:

In our house on North Congress Street, in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was bom, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the living room, dining room, kitchen, and pantry, and up the sounding board of the stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes, even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us up. My parents’ bedroom had a smaller striking clock that answered it. Though the kitchen clock did nothing but show the time, the dining room clock was a cuckoo clock with weights on long chains, on one of which my baby brother, after climbing on a chair to the top of the china closet, once succeeded in suspending the cat for a moment. I don’t know whether or not my father’s Ohio family, in having been Swiss back in the 1700s before the first three Welty brothers came to America, had anything to do with this; but we all of us have been time-minded all our lives. This was good at least for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

My father loved all instruments that would instruct and fascinate. His place to keep things was the drawer in the “library table” where lying on top of his folded maps was a telescope with brass extensions, to find the moon and the Big Dipper after supper in our front yard, and to keep appointments with eclipses. There was a folding Kodak that was brought out for Christmas, birthdays, and trips. In the back of the drawer you could find a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope, and a gyroscope kept in a black buckram box, which he would set dancing for us on a string pulled tight. He had also supplied himself with an assortment of puzzles composed of metal rings and intersecting links and keys chained together, impossible for the rest of us, however patiently shown, to take apart; he had an almost childlike love of the ingenious.

In time, a barometer was added to our dining room wall; but we really didn’t need it. My father had the country boy’s accurate knowledge of the weather and its skies. He went out and stood on our front steps first thing in the morning and took a look at it and a sniff. He was a pretty good weather prophet.

’’Well, I’m not” my mother would say with enormous selfsatisfaction. ...

So I developed a strong meteorological sensibility. In years ahead when I wrote stories, atmosphere took its influential role from the start. Commotion in the weather and the inner feelings aroused by such a hovering disturbance emerged connected in dramatic form.

Notice how much we learn instantly about Eudora Weltys beginnings—the kind of home she was bom into, the kind of man her father was. She has rung us into her Mississippi girlhood with the chiming of clocks up and down the stairs and even out onto the sleeping porch.

For Alfred Kazin, smell is a thread that he follows back to his boyhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. From my first encounter with Kazin’s A Walker in the City, long ago, I remember it as a sensory memoir. The following passage is not only a good example of how to write with your nose; it shows how memoir is nourished by a writers ability to create a sense of place—what it was that made his neighborhood and his heritage distinctive:

It was the darkness and emptiness of the streets I liked most about Friday evening, as if in preparation for that day of rest and worship which the Jews greet “as a bride”—that day when the very touch of money is prohibited, all work, all travel, all household duties, even to the turning on and off of a light—Jewry had found its way past its tormented heart to some ancient still center of itself. I waited for the streets to go dark on Friday evening as other children waited for the Christmas lights. ... When I returned home after three, the warm odor of a coffee cake baking in the oven, and the sight of my mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum on the dining room floor, filled me with such tenderness that I could feel my senses reaching out to embrace every single object in our household. ...

My great moment came at six, when my father returned from work, his overalls smelling faintly of turpentine and shellac, white drops of silver paint still gleaming on his chin. Hanging his overcoat in the long dark hall that led into our kitchen, he would leave in one pocket a loosely folded copy of the New York World; and then everything that beckoned to me from that other hemisphere of my brain beyond the East River would start up from the smell of fresh newsprint and the sight of the globe on the front page. It was a paper that carried special associations for me with Brooklyn Bridge. They published the World under the green dome on Park Row overlooking the bridge; the fresh salt air of New York harbor lingered for me in the smell of paint and damp newsprint in the hall. I felt that my father brought the outside straight into our house with each day’s copy of the World.

Kazin would eventually cross the Brooklyn Bridge and become the dean of American literary critics. But the literary genre that has been at the center of his life is not the usual stuff of literature: the novel, or the short story, or the poem. Its memoir, or what he calls “personal history”—specifically, such “personal American classics,” discovered when he was a boy, as Walt Whitman’s Civil War diary Specimen Days and his Leaves of Grass, Thoreau’s Walden and especially his Journals, and The Education of Henry Adams. What excited Kazin was that Whitman, Thoreau and Adams wrote themselves into the landscape of American literature by daring to use the most intimate forms—journals, diaries, letters and memoirs—and that he could also make the same “cherished connection” to America by writing personal history and thereby place himself, the son of Russian Jews, in the same landscape.

You can use your own personal history to cross your own Brooklyn Bridge. Memoir is the perfect form for capturing what it’s like to be a newcomer in America, and every immigrant son and daughter brings a distinctive voice from his or her culture. The following passage by Enrique Hank Lopez, “Back to Bachimba,” is typical of the powerful tug of the abandoned past, of the country left behind, which gives the form so much of its emotion.

I am a pocho from Bachimba, a rather small Mexican village in the state of Chihuahua, where my father fought with the army of Pancho Villa. He was, in fact, the only private in Villa’s army.

Pocho is ordinarily a derogatory term in Mexico (to define it succinctly, a pocho is a Mexican slob who has pretensions of being a gringo sonofabitch), but I use it in a very special sense. To me that word has come to mean “uprooted Mexican,” and that’s what I have been all my fife. Though my entire upbringing and education took place in the United States, I have never felt completely American; and when I am in Mexico, I sometimes feel like a displaced gringo with a curiously Mexican name—Enrique Preciliano Lopez у Martinez de Sepulveda de Sapien. One might conclude that I’m either a schizo-cultural Mexican or a cultured schizoid American.

In any event, the schizoing began a long time ago, when my father and many of Pancho Villa’s troops fled across the border to escape the oncoming federales who eventually defeated Villa. My mother and I, traveling across the hot desert plains in a buckboard wagon, joined my father in El Paso, Texas, a few days after his hurried departure. With more and more Villistas swarming into El Paso every day, it became apparent that jobs would be exceedingly scarce and insecure, so my parents packed our few belongings and we took the first available bus to Denver. My father had hoped to move to Chicago because the name sounded so Mexican, but my mother’s meager savings were hardly enough to buy tickets for Colorado.

There we moved into a ghetto of Spanish-speaking residents who chose to call themselves Spanish-Americans and resented the sudden migration of their brethren from Mexico, whom they sneeringly called surumatos (slang for “southerners”). ... We surumatos began huddling together in a subneighborhood within the larger ghetto, and it was there that I became painfully aware that my father had been the only private in Pancho Villa’s army. Most of my friends were the sons of captains, colonels, majors, and even generals, though a few fathers were admittedly mere sergeants and corporals. ... My chagrin was accentuated by the fact that Pancho Villa s exploits were a constant topic of conversation in our household. My entire childhood seems to be shadowed by his presence. At our dinner table, almost every night, we would listen to endlessly repeated accounts of this battle, that stratagem, or some great act of Robin Hood kindness by el centauro del norte. ...

As if to deepen our sense of Villismo, my parents also taught us “Adelita” and “Se llevaron el canon para Bachimba” (“They took the cannon to Bachimba”), the two most famous songs of the Mexican revolution. Some twenty years later (during my stint at Harvard Law School), while strolling along the Charles River, I would find myself softly singing “Se Llevaron el canon para Bachimba, para Bachimba, para Bachimba” over and over again. That’s all I could remember of that poignant rebel song. Though I had been bom there, I had always regarded “Bachimba” as a fictitious, made-up, Lewis Carroll kind of name. So that eight years ago, when I first returned to Mexico, I was literally stunned when I came to a crossroad south of Chihuahua and saw an old road marker: “Bachimba 18km.” Then it really exists—I shouted inwardly—Bachimba is a real town! Swinging onto the narrow, poorly paved road, I gunned the motor and sped toward the town I’d been singing about since infancy.

For Maxine Hong Kingston, a daughter of Chinese immigrants in Stockton, California, shyness and embarrassment were central to the experience of being a child starting school in a strange land. In this passage, aptly called “Finding a Voice,” from her book The Woman Warrior, notice how vividly Kingston recalls both facts and feelings from those traumatic early years in America:

When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent. A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say “hello” casually, or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver. I stand frozen. ...

During the first silent year I spoke to no one at school, did not ask before going to the lavatory, and flunked kindergarten. My sister also said nothing for three years, silent in the playground and silent at lunch. There were other quiet Chinese girls not of our family, but most of them got over it sooner than we did. I enjoyed the silence. At first it did not occur to me I was supposed to talk or to pass kindergarten. I talked at home and to one or two of the Chinese kids in class. I made motions and even made some jokes. I drank out of a toy saucer when the water spilled out of the cup, and everybody laughed, pointed at me, so I did it some more. I didn’t know that Americans don’t drink out of saucers. ...

It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery. I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak. I read aloud in first grade, though, and heard the barest whisper with little squeaks come out of my throat. “Louder,” said the teacher, who scared the voice away again. The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.

That childhood whisper is now an adult writer’s voice that speaks to us with wisdom and humor, and I’m grateful to have that voice in our midst. Nobody but a Chinese-American woman could have made me feel what it’s like to be a Chinese girl plunked down in an American kindergarten and expected to be an American girl. Memoir is one way to make sense of the cultural differences that can be a painful fact of daily life in America. Consider the quest for identity described by Lewis P. Johnson in the following essay, “For My Indian Daughter.” Johnson, who grew up in Michigan, is a great-grandson of the last recognized chief of the Potawatomi Ottawas:

One day when I was 35 or thereabouts I heard about an Indian powwow. My father used to attend them and so with great curiosity and a strange joy at discovering a part of my heritage, I decided the thing to do to get ready for the big event was to have my friend make me a spear in his forge. The steel was fine and blue and iridescent. The feathers on the shaft were bright and proud.

In a dusty state fairground in southern Indiana, I found white people dressed as Indians. I learned they were “hobbyists,” that is, it was their hobby and leisure pastime to masquerade as Indians on weekends. I felt ridiculous with my spear, and I left.

It was years before I could tell anyone of the embarrassment of this weekend and see any humor in it. But in a way it was that weekend, for all its stillness, that was my awakening. I realized I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have an Indian name. I didn’t speak the Indian language. I didn’t know the Indian customs. Dimly I remembered the Ottawa word for dog, but it was a baby word, kahgee, not the full word, muhkahgee, which I was later to learn. Even more hazily I remembered a naming ceremony (my own). I remembered legs dancing around me, dust. Where had that been? Who had I been? “Suwaukquat,” my mother told me when I asked, “where the tree begins to grow.”

That was 1968, and I was not the only Indian in the country who was feeling the need to remember who he or she was. There were others. They had powwows, real ones, and eventually I found them. Together we researched our past, a search that for me culminated in the Longest Walk, a march on Washington in 1978. Maybe because I now know what it means to be Indian, it surprises me that others don’t. Of course there aren’t very many of us left. The chances of an average person knowing an average Indian in an average lifetime are pretty slim.

The crucial ingredient in memoir is, of course, people. Sounds and smells and songs and sleeping porches will take you just so far. Finally you must summon back the men and women and children who notably crossed your life. What was it that made them memorable—what turn of mind, what crazy habits? A typical odd bird from memoir’s vast aviary is John Mortimer’s father, a blind barrister, as recalled by the son in Clinging to the Wreckage, a memoir that manages the feat of being both tender and hilarious. Mortimer, a lawyer himself and a prolific author and playwright, best known for Rumpole of the Bailey, writes that when his father became blind he “insisted on continuing with his legal practice as though nothing had happened” and that his mother thereupon became the person who would read his briefs to him and make notes on his cases.

She became a well-known figure in the Law Courts, as well known as the Tipstaff or the Lord Chief Justice, leading my father from Court to Court, smiling patiently as he tapped the paved floors with his clouded malacca cane and shouted abuse either at her or at his instructing solicitor, or at both of them at the same time. From early in the war, when they settled permanently in the country, my mother drove my father fourteen miles a day to Henley Station and took him up in the train. Ensconced in a comer seat, dressed like Winston Churchill, in a black jacket and striped trousers, bow-tie worn with a wing-collar, boots and spats, my father would require her to read in a loud and clear voice the evidence in the divorce case that would be his day’s work. As the train ground to a halt around Maidenhead the first-class carriage would fall silent as my mother read out the reports of Private Investigators on adulterous behavior which they had observed in detail. If she dropped her voice over descriptions of stained bed-linen, male and female clothing found scattered about, or misconduct in motor cars, my father would call out, “Speak up, Kath!” and their fellow travelers would be treated to another thrilling installment.

But the most interesting character in a memoir, we hope, will turn out to be the person who wrote it. What did that man or woman learn from the hills and valleys of life? Virginia Woolf was an avid user of highly personal forms—memoirs, journals, diaries, letters—to clarify her thoughts and emotions. (How often we start writing a letter out of obligation and only discover in the third paragraph that we have something we really want to say to the person we’re writing to.) What Virginia Woolf intimately wrote during her lifetime has been immensely helpful to other women wrestling with similar angels and demons. Acknowledging that debt in a 1989 review of a book about Woolf’s abused girlhood, Kennedy Fraser begins with a memoir of her own that seizes our attention with its honesty and vulnerability:

There was a time when my life seemed so painful to me that reading about the lives of other women writers was one of the few things that could help. I was unhappy, and ashamed of it; I was baffled by my life. For several years in my early thirties, I would sit in my armchair reading books about these other lives. Sometimes when I came to the end, I would sit down and read the book through from the beginning again. I remember an incredible intensity about all this, and also a kind of furtiveness—as if I were afraid that someone might look through the window and find me out. Even now, I feel I should pretend that I was reading only these womens fiction or their poetry—their lives as they chose to present them, alchemized as art. But that would be a lie. It was the private messages I really liked—the journals and letters, and autobiographies and biographies whenever they seemed to be telling the truth. I felt very lonely then, self absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand. I had come to New York when I was young, as so many come, in order to invent myself. And, like many modem people—modem women, especially—I had catapulted out of my context.... The successes [of the writers] gave me hope, of course, yet it was the desperate bits I liked best. I was looking for directions, gathering clues. I was especially grateful for the secret, shameful things about these women—the pain: the abortions and misalliances, the pills they took, the amount they drank. And what had made them live as lesbians, or fall in love with homosexual men, or men with wives?

The best gift you have to offer when you write personal history is the gift of yourself. Give yourself permission to write about yourself, and have a good time doing it.