The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

14. The World the Self Inherits

14 The World the Self Inherits James McBride: Mother, Race, Memoir Memoir tells of how we relate to a past and how a past relates to us during the time—the ever-nagging present—in which we write our stories. Along the way, authentic and inauthentic selves interact : a writer tries to find who is the private me that the public me has covered over. Another kind of relationship that compels the memoir writer is between an author and that which is largely outside him. Call this outsider an other and place the other in a realm of its own. How often it is that this other arrives in our lives as a memoir-making force. Mary Karr’s mother’s depression. The deaths of Dave Eggers’s parents. My father’s contradictory authority . Things that burden us, which haunt or oppose us in ways we cannot defend against, let alone avoid. Some of the best tales about ourselves we find have come for us, washed ashore in the wreckage of others’ lives and others’ traditions. What is beached—a set  larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 164 The World the Self Inherits  of biracial parents, a culture’s disapproval of homosexuality—one day insists that we start picking through it. Many write memoir because they are transformed by a power or a person greater than the self. This power is seldom supernatural , and yet it is not easily explained. We are not exactly passive in the relationship. But there is a sense that when the memoirmaking force chooses us, we must organize. We must separate what we’ve felt from what we’ve observed others have felt, and see our lives in context. For instance, my father’s unevenly applied authority toward me and my brothers during childhood. His authority is largely outside me: I see him order my brothers around with less severity than he orders me, and, growing up, I don’t understand why. I feel different than how I witness my brothers feel. His favoritism haunts me. Push this into the world. Because of his example at home, I experience school, neighborhood, adults—and their uneven authority—differently than my brothers do. They, too, internalize their treatment as special and inconsistent but also unfair. My life feeds into theirs. I try to find a balance: I am a self and a son and a brother; I interact with my father’s commands in ways my brothers don’t; I grapple with the unequal codes of discipline from school, neighborhood, era. Thus, in the writing I attempt, how my father shapes me is different from how my father shapes my brothers, which, in turn, is different from how my school and community shape me and them. All these things jostle for position until one day I discover that writing about my father is not only my struggle with his authority , it is also, perhaps more, the ways in which the advantaged and disadvantaged experiences of those close to me have shaped my struggle with the culture of authoritarianism. I have to see my years under the paternal and community thumb as mine, and my brothers’ as theirs; and I have to see that there was much in my father and in the culture of the 1950s that created me and the way larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 165 I relate to authority. Why does all this otherness matter? Because the maturity of authorship has shown me that it’s not all about me—even in the memoir. this sorting of self and other lies at the core of James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996). McBride’s purpose is apparent in the subtitle: what she endured has to be told so that what he endured can be comparatively appreciated. McBride alternates chapters: she tells her story and he tells his. (Her story is the result of his transcribing and organizing her reminiscences.) Ruth’s tale focuses on her parents’ lives, her Jewish upbringing, her father’s sexual and emotional abuse, her escape to Harlem, her marriage to McBride’s father, and her raising twelve children. At one point, she says (her words are in italics), “I stayed on the black side because that was the only place I could stay. The few problems I had with...