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Memory Lessons, Memory Lesions
- University of Arizona Press
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Memory Lessons, Memory Lesions 1. On the Pain of Writing Memoir Like any memoirist who writes so revealingly about family, I’m inevitably asked what my family thinks about my work, which is a diplomatic way of asking how my family feels about my showing the world the intimate portraits of our household. How does my aunt sleep at night knowing one of her nephews has left the curtains opened and that strangers walking by might have caught her standing in the middle of the room while wearing nothing but her old bra? Does my cousin take exception to my writer’s graffiti—My cousin is a drunk!—on the public stalls? Does my thirty-something younger brother mind being judged for a comment he made when he was only eight years old? The quick answer is that few members of my family can read what I write. They either don’t know how to read, or they don’t read English. Both my parents are now dead, so that gives me a certain freedom from guilt or repercussion, and my brother, the only member of my family who holds any interest in my work, loves to read what I write and then shakes his head with disapproval—not at the fact I wrote it down, but at the flaws and follies of the past that we both remember. “Sad,” my brother declares each time. “So sad.” Despite these permissions, when I initially set out to write memoir, I did so with plenty of hesitation. First, I had a few excellent models within the Latino literary community to learn from, namely, Esmeralda Santiago, Richard Rodriguez, and Luis Alberto Urrea. I applauded their bravery, their skill at shaping memory into something bigger than themselves, but my own story seemed a little grittier—more sex, more drugs, more rock ’n’ roll. And so, I suspected, were theirs. I always thought this was the Latino writer ’s limitation: the inability to truly and without censorship air out the dirtiest items in the laundry basket. It’s a cultural expectation: keep it within 40 Self-Portraits the walls of the home, honor the privacy of the living, respect the secrets of the dead. My earliest attempts at nonfiction certainly adhere to these tenets. I wrote about my elementary school teachers, my first heterosexual crush, the longing for my beloved México after migrating to California. There was a certain childlike innocence that bothered me about what I was writing because even as a child I knew more than I let on, yet here I was, pretending yet again that I didn’t. But I wasn’t a child anymore. I had lost my innocence a very long time ago. In fact, it had chipped away over the years: after moving to the United States and living in poverty, after enduring years of physical and verbal abuse from my grandfather, after my mother’s death, after my father abandoned me, after leaving home as a teenager and never going back, after becoming involved with an abusive lover, after becoming entangled in drugs, alcohol, and the unhealthy lifestyle of many young and careless gay men. Who was I kidding? I held a very different lens to the world. It was cracked and scratched, and even the prettier things in life appeared somewhat smudged. This didn’t necessarily mean that I was walking the earth wrapped inside a cloud of depression —though I had my bad days. It simply meant that when I looked back to the past, when I dug through the rubble of memory, the difficult moments called out to me the loudest. Every hardship longed to be documented as evidence of my perseverance. I had lost so much, and yet I wasn’t empty-handed. I resolved to report my life completely if I was going to speak up at all, especially given another limitation of the Latino family: revisionist memory . When I was younger, I usually questioned my own ability to retain information because I was prone to remembering things a little differently. When I sat down to eavesdrop on the adults talking story, I usually found myself thinking, That’s not how it happened. Did it? But because I was only a kid, I deferred to the grown-ups and simply adjusted my own version to match theirs. This didn’t take place too many times before I realized that what those grown-ups were doing was getting their stories straight. It...