The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

6. The Writer as Archeologist

6 The Writer as Archeologist How Deep Do We Dig? Memoirists often choose a life phase in which to position the singular relationship they are writing about. A phase, or distinct stage of development, is good because its limitation keeps the knighterrant author on track. And yet such a limitation can bedevil a writer, chiefly by unlocking other, equally important phases: If I was such a talented stock trader in the nineties, didn’t my flair come from my father, who gambled his wages away when I was an adolescent? Which phase does the memoirist pursue: stocktrading days or adolescence? Again, I push the present-day rememberer : What is it about you now that’s so interested in whatever stage you choose? Pressure from now may help unearth the best phase to explore, especially the unfinished ones that haunt us the most. And yet woe to the writer whose interlocking periods are stacked, as it were, like coffins on top of coffins. Woe, indeed, when the most recent coffin is buried the deepest.  larson.1-99 3/20/07 9:18 AM Page 67 Sue, one writer I’ve worked with, wants to tell the story of her marriage to a Christian fundamentalist and pot smoker who enthralled and abused her. She divorced him, has remarried, and is, needless to say, much happier. But she is not free of the trauma. To survive the marriage’s worst moments she consciously put herself to sleep while it was happening. “This is so awful,” she wrote in an e-mail, “that I’m choosing not to remember it. I will blot it out of my mind forever.” When she began writing, she had no desire to recall her odious husband. Instead, she wrote about growing up Serbian in Milwaukee, recalling events perhaps less awful than the marriage. Sue describes her mother as “my role model for being a victim. She allowed my father to slap and kick her as well as my brother and me. We all tiptoed in terror around his temper . When he left—they divorced when I was nine—my maternal grandmother stepped in as resident ogre. My mother lived completely under the thumb of ‘the master’ as she called Grandma. My mother, in turn, controlled me with histrionic behavior, pouting , and the silent treatment—all under the guise of ‘You can’t do that because it will upset the master.’” Co-generals, grandmother and mother, choked off Sue’s selfesteem and caused her to seek a man cut from their domineering cloth. Marriage to him, she says, “couldn’t have been avoided, given my upbringing.” In her drafting of the book, the backstory ruled, harrowing in itself but, so she promised in teasing asides, not half as harrowing as living with the abusive pothead. Often, as she read excerpts to the group, Sue would erupt in crying jags; a paragraph recalling Elmer (she named him after Sinclair Lewis’s character Elmer Gantry) would be met with her own choking gasps. At times she’d be unable to finish reading, so I would. For two years she persevered, detailing her family saga. Until one day, dismayed, she realized that after one hundred pages, she still hadn’t got to the marriage. Those one hundred pages were, in her phrase, “just to set the scene.”  The Memoir and the Memoirist larson.1-99 3/20/07 9:18 AM Page 68 I would caution Sue not to despair that the nine-year marriage remained in the wings. “Pay attention to what you are doing, though,” I wrote her. “Your feelings now are dictating to you how you’re going to write your book. The present writing about childhood is preparing you—like a friend—for the revelations of your marriage, which will come because you are building a number of buffers, painful ones themselves, before you can get to his barbarity . You are”—and here’s a nugget personal narrators find particularly unwelcome—“writing about one part of your past so as not to write about another part, the part you really want to write about.” Aiding the fundamentalist’s ex-wife are Sue’s doggedness and humor, and a supportive group, some of whom are confessing their own marriage disasters. Ever so slowly, Sue is waking up from her slumber. As the book grows, she sees life with Elmer as pathetic and ridiculous and herself as a...