What Really Happens in a Memoir Class
For many people at the beginning of their exploration of the memoir, it seems as if god had provided them with the perfect genre in which
to vent a terrible load of bad feelings and to point the finger at the culprit(s) who caused such pain and injury in their lives. This may, in
fact, be the catalyst for many. Having lived through some kind of hurt and/or tragedy, the kind that live on and on in prospective
memoirist's memory, there also lives the desire to find some way to communicate this experience to an audience, and a memoir class
seems the ideal place to do this. Not all memoirs deal with betrayal and injury, but for most this is where the impetus to write a memoir
surely begins.
The memoir class, as I teach it, is made up of writers first, that is the key focus and the most necessary attribute. If the study of the
literature of the memoir, its history, the historical and philosophical discussions of its place as a genre, along with the real work of
learning the craft of writing one are not of interest, then I tend to believe like many critics of the genre itself, that the person who has
arrived in the class is looking for some kind of therapeutic resolution to their experience and not to become a memoir writer. There is
nothing wrong with wanting to find the therapeutic help many of us need no matter what our life experience has been, but the writing
class is not the place for it, except that I have to say, if the memoirist doesn't really know him/herself and isn't willing to get to know him or
herself, then the writing will go nowhere.
All writing, no matter the genre, teaches us a great deal about ourselves. Some of it we may like, we may take great pleasure in, and
some of it may shame us or remind us of aspects of ourselves we would rather never to have known and now have to find a way to learn
to live with. This is part of the process and part of the risk taking that is essential in all good writing. It comes with the territory. It has
probably driven some writers to drink and others to stop writing.
The other bad news about memoir writing, which is like all writing, is that it generally takes a pretty long time for most students to be able
to carve out what the real story is that they want to write and to learn how to write it. Along the way there is much that comes out in class
or while they are writing that is unpleasant or just downright unwanted. There are areas of their lives students may not be ready to look at
closely or they may not as yet have the tools to do so. Many people start these classes and give up within a short period of time because
they can't stand the pressure to write about the painful material in their lives, and the writing itself doesn't give them any kind of pleasure
either. For them, this class is clearly unnecessary.
Students have begun these classes with wonderful ideas about what it is they want to write about. However, their inability to deal with the
degree of candor and self-exposure necessary when discussing the significance of the material contained in their story has driven many
students away. It comes down to not yet having the requisite distance from the material to be able to consider what a reader needs to
know about the characters involved, all the characters, and their motivations. I cannot say this enough times, a memoir is a story and
must function as a story.
So on the one hand, the students arrive with a lot of tender, raw, pained feelings that are the basis of their stories and on the other hand
they have to learn how to shape that material into a story. This is a difficult balancing act that requires a great deal of patience on their
parts and a great deal of strength to stay the course. In many instances, students have found that their initial efforts have been praised
but mostly because of the courage it took to put down on the page to share with the class the bare bones of their experiences. When it
then came time to learn how to really shape the material, many students, I think for understandable reasons, felt that they had been lied
to a bit. There is a certain amount of time spent in just holding the line, remaining in place, for as long as it takes for the student to come
to the dead end that must be reached, where the story's path is thwarted and now the real story can emerge because the resistance to it
has been cleared away. There is no telling how long this part of the process will take. Sometimes it can happen in the classroom, on
one of those evenings when I dread having to deal with a student's work and she or he arrives and says that now he or she sees that the
direction of the story was all wrong and presents us with the real story. Those evenings certainly have a magical quality to them.
I suppose that this is a reminder that sometimes the most important lessons that the memoirist learns in the classroom are those that
are the most difficult to listen to. It is a common experience for students to cry in the class or to sink into some kind of depression for a
while and to dread coming to class or to think that they may not be able to write what they wanted to write and to complain that it is
becoming something else entirely. However, over the years of teaching and seeing the ways in which the dedicated ones deal with their
material, I would say that most end up writing the story they originally set out to write, but not in the way they initially envisioned it.
Part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that most of my memoir students are not writers when they first start working with me.
So, in addition to learning how to tell their particular story, they are also learning how to write. The struggle to learn some of the more
difficult aspects of the craft, for example, learning how to separate the narrator from the protagonist (see the essay on the site regarding
writing in the first person), can eclipse the student's wrestling with what more experienced writers would be struggling with from the
start, which is the structuring of the story. Sometimes I have an image in my mind of them trying to learn to ride a bicycle while studying a
foreign language and at the same time going about their normal lives as if nothing strange were going on inside them. Many times, the
morning after a particularly emotional class, while I am out walking I'll keep remembering the way a student held his hand to his heart
the whole time we were talking about his chapter or the way a student's whole face and neck turned completely red and she almost
stopped breathing. There are evenings when I leave the class and everyone goes home and I know we won't see each other for another
week that I wonder what it is that makes them want to go through this.
The answer is clear. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a certain kind of writer for whom the memoir is not only essential but the
highest literary form. The kind of writer for whom the unexamined life is really not worth living and for whom this type of writing endeavor
holds a real fascination. In the way that the mathematician needs to solve the problems he or she sees, the memoirist needs to find the
way to make literary sense of the lived experiences. They are a riddle of sorts for this type of writer until he or she can crack the code and
make it clear and find the logic and the structure that will give an order to that time in their lives. Many talk about this genre as self-help
recovery or as a way to get revenge or as a way to glorify the writer's status as a victim.
I disagree totally with that assessment, not because I don't believe there are those for whom that may be true, but because it doesn't
take into account the real reasons I have witnessed first hand for the necessity of the memoir-this need to use the craft of the storyteller
to tell the real stories of real peoples' lives in as artful a way as possible. By dedicating themselves to this type of storytelling, my
students consistently teach me a very powerful lesson-their efforts to understand and to tell the truth make them very empathetic people
able to truly acknowledge all the good and the bad that their lives have revealed to them and by telling their stories will reveal to their
readers.