Art and Craft - Writing Memoir
The take away for the reader in a book about loss, betrayal, and multiple crises of mental illness.
Hello again! This week, I’ve been distracted, reading much by George Saunders, getting ready to watch “Spiderhead,” a Netflix film based on Saunders’ story “Escape from Spiderhead,” and sorting through my old baseball cards.
I have a collection of 4716 baseball cards - most of them pre-1979. I have one complete set from 1975. I hadn’t realized it until just this moment but that was the year of the first World Series Championship of the Big Red Machine, hated rival of my Los Angeles Dodgers. Why did I choose that year to jump big into baseball card collecting? I was 11 years old, that’s why. Life was simple. In December 1974, when I was in 6th grade, I was the lead in our school Christmas play. I had to miss a couple of performances to fly to Seattle to be the best man (at 11 years old) in my brother’s wedding. That following summer, during the first year of their marriage, my brother took me backpacking to Hawaii for 3 weeks while his wife Jody backpacked in Europe with a friend or sister, something they had promised to do with each other. They kept their promises before diving in to their life and marriage together.
Some of my baseball cards are worth a lot of money. But getting rid of them en masse is almost impossible. Dealers will bid practically nothing for them, claiming tha you are getting a 5,000% return on investment, when they’ll turn around and sell for much more than that. Take the 1975 complete set, for instance. A near-mint sets is on sale for almost $20,000. But for a collection of cards like I have, people want to offer me $500 or $1000 for it. According to listings, some cards I have are worth more than $1000 on their own, so what gives? Do I pack them up and move them across country yet again, or try to unload them, or sell them myself on eBay?
But what do baseball cards have to do with memoir? Everything and nothing, of course. As a piece of my past, they’re inextricably tied to who I am, to the foundation of my being that awoke to the world at a certain time and place and to my connection with my brother who in large part influenced me as much as anyone can influence another.
Memoir as Art and Craft
In his book, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser offers the following insight:
A good memoir requires two elements—one of art, the other of craft. The first element is integrity of intention. Memoir is the best search mechanism that writers are given. Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are, who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us. If a writer serious embarks on that quest, readers will be nourished by the journey, bringing along many associations with quests of their own.
The other element is carpentry. Good memoirs are a careful act of construction. . . . [digression about how Thoreau wrote 7 drafts of Walden in 8 years, who went into the woods not a woodsman - he was a writer who came out of the woods having written “one of our sacred texts.”] Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events. With that fear of manipulation they arrive at a truth that is theirs alone, not quite like that of anybody else who was present at the same events.
The Art of Memoir
I’m not the first person in the world to suffer loss, betrayal, or multiple crises of family mental illness. My story, such as it is, offers something to others who also suffer - perseverance, resilience, the sustained belief that despite life’s ills, there is goodness in the world, both within and without.
I’ve had friends call me too trusting, too naive. People are bad, they argue, you can’t trust them. They say, people always have ulterior motives. They say, people are selfish and only look out for #1.
But I know that’s not always so. Because I know myself.
Finding a way not to be hoodwinked or manipulated or taken advantage of has been part of the work of my life. But living my life honestly and forthrightly and without compromising the good that exists in the world - that’s the part of the work.
If my spirit of goodness is crushed, all is lost.
When I set out in writing the losses, betrayals, and crises of mental illness, I don’t do so out of vengeance. These things happened. Most of them happened because I couldn’t see them happening. So like a leaf buffeted in the air by unseen winds, I was tossed about willy nilly by forces that I didn’t see, sent topsy-turvy in my own life. It (mostly) wasn’t willful blindess why I didnt see these events coming. It was due to always trying to do my best for family and self and trusting those around me to meet me half way.
The art of memoir lay in recounting the events of my life with a degree of fidelity that, to borrow from Zinsser’s passage above, nourishes my readers with the journey as they join me on my quest through memory.
The Craft of Memoir
The craft of my memoir is tied to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Each section of The Waste Land provides a set of images, motifs, themes that parallel events in my own life. Phrases and characters come to life when laid over my own story, like tracing paper, and all I must do is fill in the lines and color within. The pattern works so well. Add to that the California drought set against the vegetation myths and drought of spirit within The Waste Land and it’s almost uncanny with how closely my life fits the pattern provided by Eliot’s poem.
Let me provide an overview of my memoir cast against the titles of the parts of Eliot’s poem.
I. The Burial of the Dead - I recount the three suicides in my family along with my father-in-law’s death. My brother’s and father-in-law’s deaths occurred one day apart in August 2004. My nephew’s and niece’s deaths occured later in 2012 and 2013. They provide the bookends of deaths while my family is still intact until my ultimate estrangement. (about 20 pages)
II. A Game of Chess - In some ways, I am the pawn to my brother’s king, in the way I was confused for him for most of my life. We were virtually twins to outsiders and had similar interests and tastes ourselves. Our lives took different paths, but because of the extreme identification I had with my brother early in our lives, my life was inextricably bound to his, much more so than his way bound to my own. He left me behind. I never could leave him behind if I tried. The world wouldn’t let me. (about 15 pages)
III. The Fire Sermon - In this section, I start this section with a raging house fire that I witnessed with my ex-wife on a weekend trip in Kansas, and I end this section with the burning of a keepsakes memento book on the beach of Fiesta Island in San Diego. This section is about my second marriage, all the turmoil, all the trouble, along with taking up and giving up sailing, one of my life’s greatest joys. This is one of two very long sections of the memoir (about 150 pages).
IV. Death by Water - This is the shortest section of The Waste Land, and as such it is the shortest section in my memoir. A five-word sentence, both a tribute and a parody to Faulkner - “My brother is a fish.” There is an extended poetic note in the notes section which deals with this allusion. (1 page)
V. What the Thunder Said - This section covers my polyamorous relationship which ended badly. If you could take my almost 15 year marriage and compress it into a 3 1/2 year ball and pack it with all the pressures of dysfunction, that’s what I got. It’s a wonder I didn’t completely break. But I was on the breaking point, at which point, worries about becoming my brother surfaced. I found a way to turn things around, gain control of the narrative of my own life, leave the dysfunction behind. All that was left was to ritualistically assuage the emotional pain with physical pain through a flesh hook pull on New Year’s Eve. (about 150 pages in this section)
Epilogue - brings the reader up to speed about my life after my story ends and through the writing of the text. (about 5 pages)
That’s my story, and I’m standing by it.
While I seek publication and in working with an editor, some of the details may change, especially in the handling of parts 3 and 5. But the overall structure is sound, poetic even. It allows me to play with language, to play with the imagery, characters, motifs from The Waste Land. It allows me to make allusiosn to waste land literature. It allows me to bulid a texture to my memoir that it wouldn’t otherwise have. It allows me to create art out of life.
On the publication front
This week, I have contacted an editor for help with my query letter. I believe I’ve found a reputable editor for the work and I look forward to the results next week. I will then get back to the business of querying agents.
That’s all for now. Have a pleasant weekend. It’s Juneteenth! We have a three day weekend in store, though the weather is so awfully hot and humid that whatever we do will be indoors in the air conditioning. I’ve heard tell that we may be going to the Coca-Cola Museum. We’re trying to hit some standard tourist fare before leaving Atlanta for good in about 10 weeks.
Stay cool. More next week on memoir. Thanks for reading.
Until then, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!