Memoir and Memory
In which I explain my process of dredging up memories.
Hello again! Before I tell you the stories of the 2nd and 3rd times I was fired, I thought we’d talk a bit about the process of creating a memoir. As you recall, I didn’t set out to write a memoir at first. I was writing about my brother. The project morphed and twisted under my fingers. When I discovered the T.S. Eliot connection, the memoir framework fell into place. Now it was a matter of getting as much of it down as possible and deciding which of the stories were the most salient to tell my tale.
I’m a keeper of sentimental things, or at least I used to be. Betrayal makes sentimentality hard like kidney stones. So I don’t keep as much anymore. But for a while, I had boxes and boxes of cards and letters, keepsakes of all kinds, trinkets and baubles and souvenirs. As a keeper of things, I also keep email. All of it. Once I left the University of Kansas back in 2005, I lost access to a lot of email I had. I had placed much of it on small floppy discs, but then later found out it was virtually impossible to extract them. I had to throw them away. But between digitizing polaroids and photos and the email I could keep, I have a lot of material to verify stories and accurate accountings of when events happened, as well as what events happened.
Much of the accountings are diffuse, like later afternoon summer light coming through soft curtains. My mother might write an email to keep me up to date on happenings with the family, especially my nieces, so everything is filtered, all criticism curtailed as she was prone to try to give the best presentation possible.
I’ve never been much of a journal keeper. I have a couple key journals from trips to hawaii I took. Otherwise, I don’t have journals. When my mother died and I helped my sister clean our her house, we ran into boxes and boxes of everything my parents kept that had to do with their children. There were boxes for each of us, cards and letters we had sent, school reports, grade slips, awards, everything, all neatly documented and kept. They never looked at these boxes that we know. They just filed things away.
They also once organized all of the family photos and numbered the albums. My sister raided the family photo album for years so when it was time to divvy up the famous family photos, most of them were already gone. My other sister took the majority of the photo albums. But I didn’t have access to them as I was writing. I have a few family photos and a small box of my own. The rest of the photos I have are more recent or had been digitized and are on a hard drive.
Enter Counseling
As I was getting deeper into writing my memoir, my benign paroxysmal positional vertigo grew stronger. I was at the end of my teaching jobs and heading into underemployment and then unemployment, until I got a job with a crew at Yale University re-organizing books in the library. I was having nightmares and suffering vertigo spells. Once I got the job at Yale, I had access to mental health services and I sought a counselor. It was very difficult to connect with anyone, but I was persistent.
I found a counselor and I tried to sort through everything. By this time, I was living with a girlfriend in Connecticut across the country from what I knew. We both were isolated from everything we knew. I had only scant contact with my sister, and was completely estranged from family and friends. My best buddy had become a Trumpist and we didn’t get along anymore, so I lost that connection, too. I had grown more isolated than ever.
Writing my story helped see how my life came to be - what factors were within my control and which were not. But I knew enough about memoir to not make this a story of blame or revenge or victimhood. No, this was a story of resilience and perseverance in the face of tragedy and calamity. There was enough blame to go around.
Counseling helped me to see and understand how I could make art from my story. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land provided the framework. But I wasn’t writing The Waste Land. My story fit the sections of The Waste Land quite well, including the vegetation myths, what with the drought in the west and the decline of moral and ethical values during the Trump administration*. These symbols and metaphors were handed to me on a silver platter. And my story fit into the slots so well that I couldn’t help but tell the story.
So with a combination of access to volumes and volumes of emails and digital pictures, and counseling, and study of books about memoir, as well as from reading primary memoirs themselves, I found a way to shape my stories into a larger whole, the pattern of which complements the actions and elucidates the fragmentary nature of memory in recreating a life on paper.
Next time, I’ll tell you how I was fired a 2nd time.
Have a fantastic week. We’re in for a week of rain here in Atlanta. I’d like to take my share and ship it to the West.
Thanks for reading. As for me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
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