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The Art of Memoir

The Art of Memoir

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At a gathering last week I was asked if I write memoir. It was a congenial group of bird-watchers at the Ramsey Canyon, and the discussion had veered from the black-crested titmouse to medicine and writing and the screen habits of young children.

No, I said. I’m a private person, and we live in a confessional age. What I didn’t say was that I devour memoirs, I share memoir-ish details in this blog — and right now I’m reading Mary Karr’s book The Art of Memoir.

Karr, the author of bestselling memoirs The Liar’s Club and Lit, has mastered the form and has much to share. Here she is on voice:

Voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character. Just as a memoirist’s nature bestows her magic powers on the page, we also wind up seeing how selfish or mean-spirited or divisive she is or was. … So the best voices include a writer’s insides.

And here she is on sharing internal agonies:

Unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project, why should a reader have any? A writer sets personal reasons for the text at hand, and her struggling psyche fuels the tale.  

These wise observations plus a list of titles I now want to read — Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life — have made this book worth chalking up a few days worth of late fees from the library.

The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind

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In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt uses moral psychology to explain political polarization. One of his major points is that when we make decisions we may think conscious reasoning is in charge, but actually it’s just a puny human rider sitting atop a large, strong elephant (the automatic and intuitive part of our brains). The elephant almost always wins.

What does this have to do with politics? Actually it has to do with everything, but Haidt applies it to politics in this book by pointing out that we’re often unaware of the motivations that underlie our political choices and the narratives that bind us.

Published in 2012, this book long precedes the current political paralysis — but as I read it I had many aha moments. More than Hillbilly Elegy or any newspaper or magazine article, it explains how we ended up with the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s difficult to summarize the nuances of Haidt’s argument in one post, but here’s one of the passages I found most useful.:”If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not
consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for
trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It
explains why liberal reforms so often backfire … It is the reason I believe
that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal
opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach,
change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital
inadvertently.”


What to do now? Most of all, try to understand ourselves and each other. And, of course, read. On my nightstand now: The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt’s first book.

Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me

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I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book I’d read about and had wanted to try. It’s a short book, could be consumed in one sitting, and I almost did. 
Coates sweeps you up from the first words on the page and doesn’t let you go till the end. I don’t believe in
reparations, don’t believe the chasm of race is as deep as he thinks it is. But then, I’m white. I am, in his parlance, a Dreamer, someone (white or black) who shares the dream of American exceptionalism that is built
on the subjugation of the black body. Because the body is all, according to
Coates. There is no savior, no soul or mind that lives beyond the body’s end.
But I’m not writing about this book to debate its thesis but
to marvel at its prose and its power to sweep me up in an idea I don’t believe in and make me feel its force. His idea is an ocean wave, and we readers are the shore. Given time, it might wear us down.

I read this and think about my own story, my own lens. I don’t
see the world in black and white, but I see
divisions. The gulf
between the moneyed and the non, for example, and the canyons that yawn between the left and the right.
The passion Coates brings to his story is the passion each of us can bring to our own. 
Radical Love

Radical Love

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Usually on Valentine’s Day I write about personal love. And I’m certainly thinking of it today, feeling grateful for my family and friends, all those I hold dear. But these are extraordinary times, and they call for the most radical and extreme of actions.

They call for love.

“If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter,” says Krista Tippett in her book Becoming Wise, “we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good.”

Tippett, the host of NPR’s “On Being,” describes the love shown by 1960s civil rights workers, their belief in the “beloved community” that meant they were fighting for equality with courtesy and kindness.  “This was love as a way of being, not a feeling, which transcended grievance and painstakingly transformed violence,” Tippett writes.

Though her book was published just last year, it already seems to hail from another era, a time when were not yet as deeply divided as we are now. Tippett doesn’t address the division as much as she would had she been writing a year later, but reading her book makes me think about how much further we’d be if treated each other with courtesy and kindness.

Maybe love is what we need, love translated into forbearance and understanding, into biting our tongues and holding our applause. Divisiveness got us into this mess. Maybe love can get us out.

Reflections

Reflections

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I just finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a big-hearted book that picks you up and carries you along with it. It took me to the Africa I visited two years ago, to the sights and smells and bribes and chaos of Nigeria, just one country east of Benin.

And it took me to an America where newly arrived immigrants braid hair in low-end salons,  hoping for a break, a toehold — anything to avoid being sent back.

And finally, it took me to the book’s own beginnings.  In the Acknowledgments, Adichie thanks her family and friends, editor and agent. She thanks the latter in particular for “that ongoing feeling of safety.” And then — she thanks a room — a “small office filled with light.”

It’s a twist on Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” but singles out what for me is most important — the light. I type these words in a light-filled space of my own: windows beside and ahead, glass all around, reflections of reflections of reflections.

Living With Place

Living With Place

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I’m finishing up a book I bought a few weeks ago at the Reston Used Bookstore. Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Self (NeWest Press) is a collection of essays on place. The editors, Michael Aleksiuk and Thomas Nelson, have included everything from a powerful story of a drowning that forever changed the way one author came to see wild rivers to a piece about how changes to laws and landscape have robbed native Arctic peoples of community and self-sufficiency.

This morning I read an essay by M. Michael M’Gonigle in which he describes a book that he and his wife, Wendy Wickwire, wrote called Stein: The Way of the River. It describes their time of living  in a wild place, living lightly on the land, learning its rhythms and the rhythms of the people who lived on it for generations.

“The Stein may never be logged,” M’Gonigle  wrote of the book, “but now, fifteen years later, the elders that we spent time with are all dead. Here, as elsewhere in the world, with their deaths, the language of local peoples is being silenced to a whisper, and is about to disappear entirely. Here, as elsewhere, the experiences of local places, when there is yet wild spaces and spirits in those spaces, is eroding away. Here, as elsewhere, the strength and diversity and skills of a community living long with its place, and functioning together, is becoming a romantic memory. … Thus does the BIG consume the PLACE.”

“Living long with its place” — not “on,” not “beside,” not “in spite of.” But with.

Mid-Pause

Mid-Pause

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Here I’m enjoying the Great Pause, which in part has meant a blog pause, though not for long because, well, writing here is what I do.

I love the disorientation this time of year brings. Is it Monday? Tuesday? Should I start watching a movie at 10 p.m.? Why not?

The trick is to balance the vegging with small, discrete tasks. Tidy up the area under the bathroom sink. Look through one of the boxes from Lexington, Mom’s things, an activity that must be reserved for moments of lightness and strength. (Come to think of it, that may have to wait.)

Most of all, time for reading, writing, talking and walking. Four of my favorite things.

Notes to a Future Self

Notes to a Future Self

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I’m reading Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior, a memoir of mind, a book that reconstructs the awakening of consciousness. In the course of doing this, Auster laments the fact that, though he wrote stories as a child, none of his early scribblings remain.

He never much saw the point of keeping a journal, he says. The problem with the journal was that he didn’t know who he was addressing, whether himself or someone else. And if himself, he muses, then “why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as keeping a journal?”

I bristled a bit reading this passage. As a longtime journal-keeper I’m hypersensitive to journal-keeping being considered an idle or superficial exercise.

But Auster comes around. Here he is again, writing in second person, as he does throughout this book:

“You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self.”

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy

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In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance describes his unlikely journey from a chaotic childhood in Middletown, Ohio, to college, Yale Law School and a real shot at the American dream. It’s been a good book to read during this crazy election season, as we have a national conversation (shouting match) about “making America great again.”

While Vance does not disparage the government help he receives — the Pell grants and scholarships and the four years he spent in the Marine Corps that turned his life around — what made a difference for him, he says, was not policy but people: his grandparents, sister, aunts and uncles.

They were there to pick him up when he was down, to show him by example how to live his life. But they — his hillbilly tribe — have deep-seated problems of their own that government policies alone won’t solve.

To read this book is to feel both depressed at the depth of these problems and inspired that someone can surmount them. It is, also, to realize how complex are the workings of the human heart.

With Pen in Hand

With Pen in Hand

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The late Oliver Sacks was called “Inky” as a boy because he always had ink-stained fingers. He began keeping a journal at age 14 and had completed more than 600 of them by the time he died at the age of 82 in 2015. 

Sacks ended his autobiography On the Move with these words about writing’s importance in his life:

The art of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place — irrespective of my subject — where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupation or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and I have been writing all day. 

 Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun,  as when I started nearly seventy years ago.

In fact, he was writing with great clarity up until days before his died, his collaborator reported. “We are pretty sure he will go with a fountain pen in hand,” she said.

I can’t think of a better way.






(No photos of pens, but here’s one of paper!)