Let's talk memoirs. Some of you may have undertaken this exercise. We usually think of famous persons whose memoirs we read for their truth and their scandals and their gossip, most of which are all absent from the ultimate version. Apart from the concept that it is ipso facto a point-of-view retelling, and subject to all the misimpressions, misapprehensions and mistakes inherent in such an effort, there is some value in the memoir as gospel according to the narrator. Where would we be without that New Testament? We leave that to the theologians to debate.
Anyhoo, the memoir writer has a singular and difficult road to travel, trying to be fair and trying to be truthful, two objectives which are often in diametric conflict when it comes to recounting events. Of course it is not just about events. Those could just as easily be cataloged in a simple chronology. Instead, the memoir is expected to be an insightful account of forces, intentional and not, and personalities which shaped the pathway of a life; hence, the common thread is the effect on the teller of the tale from people and events, and there is plenty of room for interpretation there! As someone who kept a diary as a youth, I can say that immediate expression of these complex interactions may be entertaining but entirely unreadable if not unreliable, sort of like eyewitness testimony which is famously so. That is where the stretch of time and the perspective of years may add some leavening to the batter and produce a richer reading experience.
One of my friends Nancy Pants (not her real name) kept a daily journal well into her college years and may even have been doing so since then in a marathon of self-expression. As a creative writer she was tops but I can't imagine the drone of daily events having any coherence except as a highly condensed memoir. That I might find fascinating. It seems to me that in a memoir the writer ought not simply recount but also comment and here is where the going gets sticky. It doesn't have to have the sweep of history to it but I think it ought to have a narrative flow that offers perspective and context to all the twists and turns of a life story and, if one is talking about a family member, a friend or an acquaintance, then there may well be some judgment offered about them, in a most loving way, bless their hearts.
An elderly person of my acquaintance led an extraordinarily privileged life and undertook an oral history delivered to a professional transcriber/editor. After it was completed she had it suppressed because on reflection she felt that she might have ill-treated some of the still living characters. Sometimes the facts get in the way I suppose. That's a pity because if you don't tell your story, who will? If I were to undertake such a project I think I would be inclined to treat the whole affair as a graphic novel, had I the skill as an illustrator. For one thing I think that is the wave of the future in literature. Perhaps in a hundred years people will rediscover the pleasures of written linear expression in all its quaint detail, but for now it is not headed that way. There is no sense moaning about the dumbing down of reading. One can only soldier on as a scribbler and hope that the product may have enough inspiration to catch and hold a youthful eye. Pass it on, say I.
Forever, Celeste
