The first book I ever bought that was written by someone I knew was a French memoir called Frany, one of those nifty European paperbacks whose cover folds inward to serve as a bookmark. The author was my theater professor when I was lucky enough to do a junior semester in Paris, a gentle, roly-poly expert in the French modernists. Frany was his wife, who died young.
The novelty of knowing an actual author for a few months wore off and I never pulled out my Harrap’s dictionary to read the book. This was decades ago, when I thought of memoirs—with notable exceptions from Walden to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—as a niche endeavor off in some back corner of literature, nowhere near as important or compelling as fiction.
To oversimplify a bit, memoir’s stature changed when Mary Karr’s badass The Liars’ Club burst on the scene in 1995. Memoir grew even hotter—and more bankable—with Jeanette Walls’ Glass Castle (2005), Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2010), Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and Tara Westover’s Educated (2018). In 2017, The Writers Studio, where I had been teaching beginning fiction and poetry for many years, caught on to the trend and asked me to teach the school’s first memoir class, probably on the strength of my nonfiction background. I was lukewarm about the idea, but said yes.
The first thing I did was pull out the small, motley assortment of memoirs I happened to own, scattered among the novels because it had never occurred to me to give them their own home. They made a solid foundation for that first term: Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl Interrupted, and one of my favorite books of any genre: Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage, which I revisit now and then just for this description:
She was a preview of things to come, an invention that was not quite perfected but that would turn out to be important, a forerunner or harbinger, like the shattering of the object in Cubism or atonality in music. When I came to know her better, I thought of her as a new disease.
In the school’s introductory classes we alternate prose and poetry assignments, so I also pulled some poems I’d loved over the years, not always by well-known poets and not always in famous journals. Here are a few lines from “Anyways” by Suzanne Cleary, about her immigrant Slavic stock:
A man dies and his widow keeps his shirts.
They are big but she wears them anyways.
The shoemaker loses his life savings in the Great Depression
but gets out of bed, every day, anyways.
We are shy, my people, not given to storytelling.
We end our stories too soon, trailing off “Anyways….”
The carpenter sighs, “I didn’t need that finger anyways.”
The beauty school student sighs, “It’ll grow back anyways.”
Our faith is weak, but we go to church anyways.
I asked my friends for recommendations, which is how I was introduced to, among others, Kristin Kimball’s delightful The Dirty Life, about an East Village punkette who falls in love with a farmer and becomes one herself. I also became a denizen of the library’s 920 shelves. Dewey Decimal, which dates to the 1870s, lumps the memoirs with the autobiographies.
What distinguishes one from the other? An autobiography is generally fat and fact-filled, a life story written by someone who is already well known in one way or another (Golda Meir, Malcolm X, corporate CEOs). Memoir has evolved into a more literary art. This is a shift from what used to be called writing one’s memoirs (plural), which to my mind had a whiff of vanity project, sometimes a louche one. Instead of packing a whole life into one volume, a good memoir usually tells a particular story, and it does so artfully, via the same storytelling strategies as fiction and often with the compression and lyricism of poetry.
At the library, I scan the shelves and trust my instincts about which memoirs to check out. Because my mother was a Betty, I took home George Hodgman’s Bettyville, about a gay man who moves back to small-town Missouri to take care of his ailing, totally impossible mother. Far funnier than you might expect. I chose Two Turtle Doves by British jeweler Alex Monroe because I was charmed by his jewelry pictured on the frontispiece. It turned out to be a rare memoir—both informative and moving—about a creative career that’s also a business. I pulled Criminal That I Am by Jennifer Ridha on the strength of the cover photo of two hands cuffed together: a woman in a business suit and a man in inmate orange. It’s a funny, alarming story of an Iraqi American lawyer and her way-too-close relationship with a client who happens to be the son of actor Michael Douglas.
Here’s the copy I wrote for the school’s website:
How do you write a good memoir? You apply the narrative techniques of fiction and poetry: you take the fascinating, messy raw material of your life and build a frame for it. You distill. You find a voice that’s all you but that also offers you flexibility, perspective and the right counterbalance to the story’s content. You tap into your emotions to give your story energy and urgency.
I read. Oh, how I read, always on the hunt for two-page excerpts that contained deft, practice-able narrative craft, which is how The Writers Studio operates. I typed up the excerpts and annotated them in Track Changes. Soon I had six assignments for my first six-week class. Here are two typical annotations, from my Girl Interrupted assignment:
Note how the narrator steps right in with an emotional reaction, and note that she’s recounting a memory of embarrassment but without any embarrassment in the writing.
One way to write a good scene is to have two characters at cross purposes – it’s inherently dramatic and full of tension; here the narrator steps in to interpret her misreading of his announcement, and her inability to hear what he’s really saying and stake out her own position is both funny and tragic.
My class filled quickly. Some of my students in those early terms were returnees from Level I fiction/poetry. More than one told me they had no great interest in writing memoir but just wanted to be back in my class, one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.
Want a brutal definition of irony? Not long after coming back, one of these returnees who had been rummaging around in his childhood for material entered into a protracted, completely unforeseen personal tragedy, and suddenly he had ample material for a book. He’s deep into it, and it’s a beauty. Tears washed down my face at the most recent chapter. They’re all beauties, the hard-won stories of my students, all of them quiet Olympians in the field of prevailing.
I ended up writing more than 200 more assignments. This was selfish in two ways. First, reading memoirs was now one of my favorite activities. The best ones tend to get much deeper under my skin than the most hyped novels of the season, particularly the recent crop from the Big Five publishers, the ones with the color-blob covers.
The other selfish part: When I taught Level I fiction/poetry, I had to pass my students on to Level II after two terms. But memoir didn’t have its own track (at least not until I added an Intermediate and Advanced class). If I kept offering new assignments, my students were more likely to keep coming back. They did. A core of that initial group is with me nine years later.
I’ve written assignments using classics, too: Mark Twain, Richard Wright, Maxine Hong Kingston, even Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I’ve written assignments using the work of my teaching colleagues. The sweetest of all has been writing assignments using my students’ newly published work: a female rabbi on the subject of “Jewish geography”; a young woman with a successful U.S. corporate career who grew up poor in Romania as part of the silversmithing Roma clan; a recovering tax lawyer from New York City who now runs an upstate mobile-home park.
Teaching memoir is a privilege and a responsibility. I’m granted private access to people’s most vulnerable experiences. I’m also privy to the way they operate as writers. Everyone is mastering new skills to augment their natural ability, passion and dramatic material. They’re also looking their own habits, fears, traumas, furies and resistance in the eye. The ones who write with energy and sweep (but not so much precision) have to do battle with their restlessness. The ones whose every sentence glistens are generally up against debilitating self-doubt.
I mostly offer them a low-key, welcoming, safe atmosphere. I share my accumulated observations about narrative craft, which I pinpoint and name: use a small story to tell a big one; see yourself as a character in a story as worthy of care and compassion as any other character; make sure there’s yearning driving your story. I tread gently, because they come to me highly motivated whether they’re writing as an act of exploration, exorcism or redemption, as a record and a gift for their families, or as aspiring authors. I never have difficult memoir students. Every student who comes into my class improves. By any measure, my advanced students are now professionals. They are also a kind of chosen family.
I leave the Zoom room after a two-hour class feeling a little spent but satisfied, grateful, eager for the next week’s cycle to start. I start reading their new pages the minute the printer spits them out. They are fresh episodes in our private golden age of serials.
I could talk all day about my students and (as my husband would tell you) I often do. But my students have a slogan, and I must honor it: whatever happens in memoir class stays in memoir class. Until, of course, they finish their books and send them out into the world, at which point I will have to make room for a second shelf to fit all the books by authors I know.
