Once in a Life Time, Talking Heads

Too many of us try to answer with lock step accounts of historical events. We think of memoir as a simple (and simplistic) recounting of what happened. At its best, memoir goes far beyond that. It seeks to capture the imprint the outside world makes on the internal world of the individual. The writer Vivian Gornick divides memoir into two parts, the situation and the story. The situation is essentially what happened, the story is the meaning you bring to what happened. It’s the insight you have into the situation, the connection and resonance between an event or a set of events and the rest of your life.

The true art of memoir navigates between the external world of events and the internal world of meaning. Memoir contains two I’s, the I who existed in the past and the I who remembers the past. The narrator is always this second I, the one with enough distance from the past to put it into context. You tell the story from your current perspective rather than from the perspective of your five-year-old self. This more experienced voice functions as the reliable narrator. From this perspective the writer can move beyond situation and create a sense of inquiry that allows her or him to approach the real story.

We’ve all heard the cliché, Show Don’t Tell. It comes from the world of fiction and it’s drilled into us from our first creative writing class. It’s a good rule of thumb in fiction where story is woven from a series of connecting scenes and interpretation of meaning is left up to the reader. Personal narrative involves a more complex storytelling. Memoir writers must show and tell. (See Phillip Lopate’s To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction.) We show the reader what happened through scene. We tell the reader why these scenes are important through reflection. Meaning is often explicit.

Some work relies heavily on reflection while other work emphasizes scene. The trick is to not linger so long or so close up in scene that moving into meaning-making becomes awkward. One way to move from scene to reflection is to bring in outside sources. In her moving memoir The Long Goodbye, Meghan O’Rourke moves between recounting her grief at losing her mother to cancer and examining the literature of death and loss. She goes beyond the facts of what happened and begins to question and make sense of her experience by placing it within a more universal context.

Our stories are larger and deeper than the events of our histories. We sense this intuitively. That’s why it’s hard to summon an answer when friends ask what our books are really about. The story, the real meaning of our lives, can’t be summed up in plot points. It resists summary. The beauty and strength of memoir is that it provides a literary form that enables us to approach the mystery of how we came to be who we are.

The facts are just the beginning.
Donna M. Johnson is the author of Holy Ghost Girl, a memoir critically acclaimed by the New York Times, O Magazine, Texas Monthly, Beliefnet, NPR’s Interfaith Voices, People and many other publications. Donna’s work has been collected in several anthologies including Beyond Belief. She has written about religion, family and culture for Psychology Today, Shambhala Sun, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American Statesman and other publications. She lives in Austin where she teaches writing workshops and is currently at work on a project that combines investigative journalism with personal narrative.