Memoirs

Memoirs (those that involve a considerable amount of biographical information abut a deceased person) are a curious genre--I just finished Ann Patchett's rather controversial narrative of her friendship with poet Lucy Grealy,Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, and, though I can certainly understand why Grealy's sister felt her grief had been "hijacked" by Patchett's haste to publish this work so soon after Lucy's death, reading it has made me more attuned to the inherent problem of memoir writing in general. This problem is that memoirs are just that--memoirs--written through the limited, imperfect terministic screens of human beings who are not necessarily intent on telling the "Truth," but rather a version of the truth. A version that suits them, a version that suits others, or a version that seeks to paint things as happier than they really were. And even for those who claim to give "the real story" in their memoirs, their tales are just that--tales. And they are dicey to write because, inevitably, you, as the memoir writer, will be vilified by someone who knew/loved the subject of the memoir as well as you and takes umbrage at the way you tweaked a story or left something out.

The sensitivity it takes to write a memoir has become more plain to me in the years since my mother's death. Several of her dearest friends, whenever I visit them, tell me that they are waiting for "that book you are going to write about your mother." This is a book that they created from thin air with the best of intentions. To them, this makes perfect sense--I write and teaching writing for a living, so why would it not be a perfectly natural impulse for me to take on exploring my mother's life in words? The thing that keeps me from taking on this task, and will probably keep me from it forever, is this: what they desire is not reallya book about my mother--it is a book about my mother the saint. But sanctification is boring, and I'd wager that even my mother wouldn't want to be associated with something so maudlin or saccharine. In reality, I could, and would love to, write a witty and fun memoir of my mother that unapologetically explains her through my eyes--but that effort, no matter how sincere and respectful, would undoubtedly fall short of everyone's expectations.

Here's an illustrative example from my own life, which I consider to be analogous to the tricky territory a memoirist must navigate:

The morning after my mother died, I was up at the funeral home making all kinds of arrangements, and I was told that I had 24 hours to gather up and deliver fifty photographs of her so that they could create a slide show for viewing at her funeral. I tried to find the ones that would display a kind of chronology--her as a little girl, her as an adolescent, her getting married, her with me as a baby in the hospital, and so on--the point, as I intepreted it, was to, in pictures, tell the story of my mother's life. However. There was this one photograph of her that, to me captured so much about her--it was of her sitting at a table in a restaurant about to take a bite of her salad, looking at my dad as if to say, "I'm going to shove that camera up your ass." She had this thing she did with her mouth when she was angry--we all knew that look--it was spectacular. I thought everyone would laugh when it came through on the slideshow rotation. Instead, there was a collective silence among the audience--almost a feeling of "Wow--she didn't want her picture taken then, I can't imagine she'd want it up here for all of us to see. What bad taste!" The air seemed to be sucked from the room in a vaccuum of awkwardness. Looking around, I literally wanted to say, "Hey, lighten up! You know this is hysterical. And you know that at some point, she looked at you like that too." But that experience taught me quite a bit about the rhetorical tact needed in such situations.

Incidentally, I recommend that if you do plan to read Patchett's work, you read Grealy's memoir of her own life, Autobiography of a Face first. If you read Patchett first, you may, as many people have been, be turned off by the image of Grealy that she gives us (much of the last part of the book focuses on Grealy's herion addiction, which, though part of the truth of Grealy's life and likely the reason for her early death at thirty-nine, gave me the uncomfortable feeling of reading tawdry tabloid fodder). Better yet, read some of Grealy's poetry first--sadly, 99% of the publicity surrounding Grealy, especially after her death, seems to revolve around the fact that as a child she had a good portion of her jaw removed, and, throughout the rest of her life, made her way through countless reconstructive surgeries, many of which failed. But, what seems to get lost in all of this is the fact that Grealy was actually an accomplished poet and writer. I can't say with any credibility whether she was a "great" poet, largely because I cannot find any of her poetry--but, when I do find some, I may post about it.