The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

10. Which Life Am I Supposed to Live?

10 Which Life Am I Supposed to Live? Getting This One Right By now I hope it’s clear that the memoirist is she who sticks with the form long enough to undergo changes in how she sees the past. The act of memoir writing and its river of recollections has made her different from the person she would have been had she not traversed the rapids. The act has also changed and deepened those predictably indulged and semitrue stories she’s been telling herself and others, no doubt, for years. This is one reason my mother took umbrage at my messing with the family’s past, which she felt she had greater ownership of than I had. She wanted the past left unexcavated. Such digging, she rightly intuited, would change her, forget about me. Honest reevaluation guarantees revising what was. It may also include the unintended: discovering why my life turned out far different from what it could have been. At age thirty, I was a composer and a musician, on track in music school toward my PhD. But then, in 1983, my wife yielded  larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 113 to her anger at me (maybe at herself) and ended our marriage in a matter of weeks. The change was so devastating (I was broke and homeless for a time) that I reevaluated my musical path, which I believed I had freely chosen. Alone, and writing again, I saw that composing and playing music was a cover I used to keep myself from what I really wanted to do, write. (I had begun writing in high school and college but left it behind in my early twenties to seek a career as a performer, then a composer.) The music covered things up in two ways. First, I poured myself into scoring musical ideas and practicing the guitar and the piano, which removed the self-reflective quality of writing. And second, my love of playing and composing had me awestruck: this was what I was meant to do. That daily played embrace of the guitar—held on my lap, tucked against my chest, wrapped in my arms, fingertipped to life—lured me like the Sirens. Until one morning, as I was waking up in my van in a suburban neighborhood, it dawned on me that one art (music) might be keeping me from practicing another (writing). In other words, my affinity for music was deceiving me, had turned me, in a sense, against myself. How strange that the world of tone and rhythm could take me away from myself , though at the time I felt away was my home. All this taught me about music’s deviousness. From lullaby to dirge, music expressed my emotions, ruled out my self-analysis. Memoir writing, which I took up postdivorce, expressed and made sense of how music and literature had divided me and become my identity. Telling the story of my artistic affinities and delusions told me that there is a small yet fierce Armageddon between our divided selves, the person I think is me and the person who is me. I want to explain this self-split in simple terms first. The author , who is writing now, tells a story about the person, who has lived and is the subject of the work. And yet it’s never that easy, for author and person are intimately bound up. I, a memoirist, was once, not that long ago, a musician. I relate to him then as an  The Memoir and the Memoirist larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 114 author now. As I write—narrative action, summary, dialogue, statement , telling details, inner monologue, to characterize that other— his individuality grows, at times, beyond my control. The person I was can easily become as important as he once was to me. Ah me, the abiding one, the one who unites our past and present selves, and transcends them. That abiding me I like to call the core. In my case, I was duped by a sense of myself, the composermusician , as the person I hoped to be. My musicality led me away from my core. But music also took me through my core, for there was something quite appealing about being a musician that was also me. I was duped, but I was willingly duped. That person was the lost artist of...