The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

5. Myth-Making in Memoir

5 Myth-Making in Memoir How We Recollect Psychologist John Kotre writes in his White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory that our contemporary view of memory goes against the old notion that memories sit “inertly in our minds the way they do on an audiotape or the shelves of a library ” (37). This view challenges centuries of memory mariners, among them Freud, who believed each remembrance is stored in toto and can be retrieved as such. The new idea (common sense, you might say) is that memories “are constantly refashioned” (37) by age and experience, but, more significantly, by the brain’s storing and retrieving functions. Neurological activity forces memories to be updated without our say. Psychotherapy acts to move a troubled past from unexamined to exposed. Another catalyst, Kotre posits, is a remembering self, which is clear about its dual roles. One role is that of the archivist, who “guard[s] its original records and tr[ies] to keep them pristine.” The other role is that  larson.1-99 3/20/07 9:18 AM Page 59 of a writer-like self, who must “fashion a story about itself,” “a story that some of us call the personal myth.” Archivist and myth-maker establish “a comprehensive view of reality,” whose coproductive authority seeks “to generate conviction about what it thinks is true” (116). Kotre also suggests, as I’ve highlighted earlier, that we recall things differently during different life stages. While children’s memories are general instead of specific and teenagers begin to detach themselves from experience and may be reflective, adults continually review their adolescent and young-adult intensities, shaping identity and the past anew. Adults and elders remember in different ways also. In Kotre’s chapter “Memory in the Mature ,” the categories are flagged with purpose: “instrumental remembering ,” or the recollection of past achievements, is to “underwrite a sense of competence in the present” (175–76); “transmissive” remembering is “to pass on to others one’s cultural heritage or personal wisdom” (176); “self-defining” memory is to make “not a precise account of what happened” but to find “a precise metaphor for what happened” (103–6); and “life review” is to come to terms with the past and to understand our essential themes (173–82). Such designations remind us that memory serves the demands of the rememberer, who lives in the present. But these categories for the memoirist, in the throes of creating a book, are seldom if ever followed. How can they be? The act of drafting, akin to a two-year-old with a crayon, prompts the messiest details and exaggerations . All kinds of coloring ensue: my sisters always, no, mostly, no, often, no, regularly tormented me. What exactly should I recall, is one query. Another, perhaps more apt, is, what is my life now telling me to recall? We already know that our engagement with memory over time realigns the past. And yet we must learn as memoirists, through the years in which we work, that writing about the past realigns the memory. The question is, to what degree should such realignment be a part of the story. I  The Memoir and the Memoirist larson.1-99 3/20/07 9:18 AM Page 60 sense a lot of reluctance in memoir writers, whether in published pieces or student drafts, even to pose this question to themselves in their work. One reason for the reluctance to admit to memory’s role is the extranarrative demands it places upon us as writers and readers. To remember, which for Kotre means “to generate conviction about what [the heart] thinks is true” (116), requires the writer to show himself remembering, that is, generating conviction about what is and is not true. It requires the memoirist to be as much tale-teller as rememberer, the latter a role that might slow down the tale considerably. Many memoirists, even those with a limited subject, are content to cozy their stories to autobiographical certainty —the past is over and done with and here it is—rather than push into the risky world of memoir, its Didion-like narrators full of essaying self-doubt. Apropos of this is Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, which is usually regarded as a coming-of-age story, more autobiography than memoir, more what than who. The book is organized thematically as a series of semirelated topics: chapters on rocks, parents...