Parent’s Memoir Part 3b, Guide for Ghost Writer’s Interview

January 31st, 2012

by Jerry Waxler
This is part 3b of the essay, “Is this the year to write your parent’s memoir?” Click here for part 3a. In this final part, I give more tips to help you interview your parents so you can generate material for a compelling memoir.

Go deeper with coded family anecdotes

You may already have heard some of the stories for so long, they acquire a rigid sameness, with details and phrases you have heard dozens of times. Use your curiosity to break through the crust of repetition. Ask about other parts of the situation, or where they lived during that time, or how old they were when this event happened, or which parts made them happiest.

For example, I remember my Mom told the story about Dad’s father standing up at their wedding and saying, “To the bride and groom, I give a car.” Her tone of voice when she mimicked him always sounded pompous.  I wish I had asked more about it. “That was an expensive gift. Were you surprised when your new father-in-law told you? Was he wealthy? Did many of your peers have cars? Did you have mixed feelings about accepting such an expensive gift from him? How were you making a living during that period?”

Here are more unasked questions:
–    ”I heard that Grandmom spent her last years in bed. What sorts of situations did that lead to? Tell me about a time when you served her meals there. How did you feel only seeing her in bed?”
–    ”I only knew Grandpop when he was retired. Show me a scene that will help me visualize him. What did you do with him evenings and on weekends? What was it like going to worship by his side?”

Write
What incident have you filed away under “I’ve heard that a hundred times.” Take a page from my unwritten book, and ask your own parents questions while there is still time. Write questions that would help you see it more completely.

Break taboos

Over the years, you have learned to avoid topics your parents prefer not talking about. In order to get the story,  you need to break these taboos. Consider James McBride’s memoir “Color of Water.” His mother had angrily told him to mind his own business whenever he asked her about his past. As she grew older, he realized her past was going to die with her and he grew increasingly insistent. He finally convinced her to talk. From their interviews emerged one of the hallmarks of the memoir generation. As a son, McBride was grateful, and as a reader, so was I.

When your parents express reluctance:

–    Let them know how much you want to understand their story.
–    Point out that no one is perfect, so there’s no point in pretending they were. Why not turn take advantage of all that experience and turn it into a good story?
–    There is power in revealing the truth. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about hiding secrets. And for another, when you share your hardships you also share the courage it took to overcome them. [For more tips about responding to their objections, click here.]

Review and Edit

After each session, you face the technical hurdle of transcribing it to typewritten material so you can edit. If you don’t want to type it yourself, consider hiring someone to do this tedious work. A good place to look for such resources is on the website of the Association for Personal Historians. (APH) [www.personalhistorians.org]. Some people have had success speaking into the software called Dragon Naturally Speaking which converts speech into text.
When you have the interviews in written form, you can weave the information into scenes that readers can enter. Insert new material into your chronological file to show how one situation flows into another, and also give you insights into what is missing. When you hit a puzzle, turn it into a question for further rounds of interviews.

Their character takes shape

When you remember things about your family, you are looking back to your own childhood point of view. To write your parents’ memoir, you need to see those events through their memories, not yours. Try to set yourself aside and listen to the way they explain it, even if it is substantially different from the way you remember it. In fact, this entire project is going to help you enter their frame of reference, seeing the world as they did.

Once they start talking, they may share reminiscences about things they had not discussed in years, joining you in bursts of collaborative energy. As you pull together scenes and link them together, their budding story gradually takes shape. How far this goes will depend on your artistic drive and tenacity, and on their willingness to explore the psychological and social forces that shaped them. The more you polish it, deepen it, and structure it, the more readable it will become.

Wherever you decide to stop, you will find that through the course of the project you have gained understanding, and helped them connect some of the dots in their own past experiences. What started as a literary or historical exercise ends as an opportunity to build intimacy and mutual respect. It’s true that writing a memoir takes time and to achieve your goal you must overcome emotional hurdles. But in the end, everyone wins.

Note:
If you don’t have the time and do have the money, you could hire a writer to do the research and create the book of their lives. To find a writer or videographer for your life story, contact Association of Personal Historians.
Notes
For brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Parent’s Memoir Part 3a, Guiding a Ghost Writer’s Interview

January 24th, 2012

by Jerry Waxler
This is part 3a of the essay, “Is this the year to write your parent’s memoir?” Click here for part 2.

Writing your parent’s memoir is a big project. To make it more manageable, break it into steps. First, write the old familiar anecdotes and place them in chronological order. Take your time, digging up the snips and glimpses you have heard over the years. Brainstorm with siblings, cousins, and with your parents to make sure you have everything.

Next, begin to work with your parents to develop the timeline. Ask them to go through the years and list the dates of important events: when were they born, changed schools, moved, married, had children, got their first job, or other any milestones they feel are crucial. As you put these events into your file, you can check to see if your anecdotes are in order. “Did that come before or after the move to the new home?” By the time you finish this second step, you will have a wonderful repository of what you know, and when it all took place.

Seeing these story fragments come together will stir new questions. How did they transition from one segment of their lives to another? What were the underlying emotional drivers? Who were the other important characters? What did places look like? To turn the fragments into a readable story, you will shift from a left-brain researcher to a right-brain explorer.

Interview Prompts

To learn who your parents were, you will need to learn a wider range of their experiences, such as jobs, sports, dating, illness, siblings, art, hobbies, and so on. Along with the factual information, you will need to learn about emotions, such as loves, fears, and hopes.
Don’t expect to find all this information methodically. Instead, start loosely, let them talk freely. During editing you can organize the material. This is the same method I recommend for writing a memoir. When you research your own memoir, stir up lively anecdotes by asking yourself questions called “writing prompts.” For example, you ask yourself to describe each of the houses you lived in, or describe situations when your hair or clothing style was especially important.

You can use a similar strategy when conducting interviews, asking stimulating “interview prompts.” For example,
–    ”Tell me all about your education.”
–    ”What was Grandmom like in the kitchen?”
–    ”What was it like going out on dates in those days?”

“When did your hair became part of a story. Did it ever fall out, change color, or did someone say something flattering or rude about it?” You are likely to generate a fun, readable scene that will bring the past to life.

Growing your skill as an interviewer

Your style of listening plays an important role. Try to emulate your favorite television or radio interviewers. A good interviewer knows how to respond to the vagaries of conversation, steering between the extremes of too much and too little direction. If you exert too much control, you stifle authenticity and miss surprises. Too little direction allows disorganized, flabby rambling.
Strike a balance between these extremes. If they lead you into new territory, relax and see where they are heading. By staying with them, you can take advantage of potentially important inner associations. If you decide they are drifting away from useful material, for example philosophizing about the economy or complaining about the neighbors, you can gently steer them back to the task at hand.

Richer detail makes better reading

If your interviewee tends to speak in terms of ideas, summaries, and overviews, their memories won’t allow a reader inside their experience. To write compelling scenes, ask for more sensory information, dialog, and thought processes. “What did you see, hear, taste, touch and smell?” In addition to the senses, ask them about their introspective world. If they don’t tell you much about their feelings, ask follow-up questions.
–    What did you want?
–    What did you fear?
–    What got in the way?
–    What did you do in order to get back on track?

For example, if they say, “When we moved, I felt disoriented.” You could say, “Could you describe where you were and what it looked like.” It might take a few tries but eventually you could change this to, “When I walked into the new house, the painters still had their scaffolding up, the plywood floors were covered in splattered paint and cigarette butts. I started to cry.”

In Part 3b, I continue with suggestions for interviewing strategies that will generate a readable memoir.

Notes
For brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Answering Parents’ Objections to Writing Their Memoir

January 10th, 2012

by Jerry Waxler
This is part 2 of the essay, “Is this the year to write your parent’s memoir?” Click here for part 1.

When you ask your parents if you can write their history, they might block you with statements like: “Let sleeping dogs lie,” or “I can’t remember all of that,” or “No one would care.” Instead of letting these objections frustrate you, use them as conversation starters. “Really?” you say. “Tell me more about what you mean.” Let them explain why remembering makes them uncomfortable. By quietly listening, you will change the mood from a debate to a collaboration, and will shed more light on their relationship to the past. When they finish, offer comforting, reassuring reasons why you want to work with them to overcome these obstacles. Here are a few insights that might help you address some common concerns about writing a memoir.

Writing my memoir means my life is over
After a visit with my parents, I stood up to go. My mother expressed her frustrated with the lack of physical affection between me and my father and insisted that we hug. As I put my arms around him, he laughed nervously and exclaimed. “What? Am I dying?” He implied that a hug meant the end of his life, when in fact it was intended to be a celebration. Many people make a similar mistake about memoir writing, assuming it means that life is over. When you take the time to write one, you realize that it lets you reap life’s lessons and joys.

I’m too boring
When I grew up, my parents apparently believed we ought to hide anything that makes us look different. They wanted to look average. People who grew up in that generation became so accustomed to pretending they were like everyone else, that they came to believe it themselves.

In the twenty first century, our fascination with memoirs has flipped that convention upside down. In the Memoir Age, we have become curious about other people and assume they are curious about us. Instead of hiding messy emotions in order to appear boring, we reveal internal conflicts that bring us to life.

Hidden within ordinary life, you will discover that you are utterly unique. For example, my childhood in a row home in Philadelphia seemed thoroughly ordinary. Perhaps my after-school job at my dad’s drugstore made me different from most of my peers. I didn’t know anyone else who worked for their father. Digging deeper, I recall my dad’s brother who had achondroplasia, or dwarfism. When I was a teenager, I went with Uncle Harry to help him collect rent from the apartment buildings my grandfather owned, and I felt disturbed by the children who stopped and stared at his short legs and head too large for his body. Harry’s problem was visible to everyone, but Dad’s nephew, Jules, was another matter. Handsome, athletic, and a brilliant scholar, Jules graduated medical school by the age of 21, and was a psychiatrist by the time he was 24, when some secret turmoil caused him to hang himself. The family tried to cover up the tragedy, writing Jules out as if he never existed. Before the memoir age, it seemed natural to hide these facts. Now, I wish my father had been a memoirist, and left a record of how these complex experiences made him feel.

I have read and studied 200 memoirs, and continue to be fascinated by the enormous variety of human experience. Memoir authors write about growing up, about families, hardship, war, travel, spirituality, and so on. By sharing their authors’ lives, memoirs promise to deepen and expand our ability to live together on this planet.

I refuse to criticize my parents
To write about your parents, you must break down two sets of facades. The ones that block them from admitting to you that they are real people, and the ones that block them from admitting their own parents are real, as well.

Many people believe it’s a sin to criticize their parents. As a result they are stuck with shallow, unexplored images. I am glad that we are beginning to open our minds to an honest evaluation of those relationships . According to child psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, we need our parents’ stories in order to stay healthy ourselves. Authentic stories allow us to honor our parents for who they really are, rather than some glossy, idealized image.

To open up about their younger years, your parents will have to accurately portray their relationship with their parents. Certainly they might need some convincing. Let them see that you are not looking to blame anyone but only want to understand the realities in which your ancestors lived. By convincing them to reveal their childhood experience, you will be encouraging them to develop more compassionate relationships with their parents just as you are trying to do yourself.

What’s the point of returning to the past?
At first it might seem logical that writing a memoir would detract from focus on the present. However, almost everyone already keeps a photo album for the purpose of hanging on to the past. Flipping through the album, you glimpse echoes of the past and savor its pleasure.

Beneath the smiles in those photos were more complex, ambiguous feelings. Writing awakens that complexity. Perhaps fear of writing about the past is a way to try to resist the pain that might be lurking under the surface. If your parents are attempting to make hard times disappear by pretending they never happened, their strategy cannot possibly succeed. Burying emotional pain is like burying toxic waste. When it emerges from its hiding place, it is still poisonous. By writing about it, you can, help them disarm it and find embedded lessons, forgotten friendships, and the strength that carried them through.

By getting those earlier times on paper, you give them the opportunity to add meaning and order to what otherwise might seem like a chaotic batch of memories. I have found that memoir writing is compatible with a vibrant, energetic focus on the present moment.

My sister has it all wrong
With stunning regularity my mom and her sister argued about their family memories. Mom said something about her parents’ unhappy marriage and my aunt would vehemently disagree. “That’s not the way it happened.” A battle ensued, each of them intent to prove her version to be true and the other false.

To accommodate heated differences of opinion, interview the warring parties separately. Listen openly to both versions. You will no doubt favor one interpretation over the other, but keep your favoritism to yourself. Maintain harmony by validating each person’s version of the truth. “That’s the way you remember it. I’m okay with that.”

Learn more about the pressures in the family by trying to understand how the hot button works. What words or details throw them into a tizzy? If you can tiptoe around the edgy topic, you may be able to gain insight that helps portray the pressure without raising hackles. If you hoped to learn the Real Truth, such irreconcilable disagreements might frustrate you. However, memoirs do not offer an absolute version of truth, but only each person’s best recollection. That’s what memoir writing is all about. Delving into their recollection helps you understand more about them. And they played such an important part in your life, you learn about yourself as well.  In the next part of this essay, I offer insights into the process of interviewing them.

Notes

Click here to read about “be here now” while writing a memoir.

For brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Is this the year to write your parent’s memoir?

January 3rd, 2012

Jerry Waxler

This is part 1 of the essay. Click here for part 2.

During dinner, my dad told endless stories about the characters who came into his corner drugstore in North Philadelphia. His shoptalk intrigued me so much that I started to work there every weekend, and extended hours during the summer. Through high school, I spent more time with my father than I did with my friends. By the time I left for college, I knew everything about Dad’s daily grind, but I never asked him about his earlier life, and he never volunteered.

Decades went by, during which I struggled to find myself. By the time I became curious about his early life, it was too late. He died without telling me anything about how he had come to own a drugstore, or what it was like to be the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant. Sometimes I wonder if my ignorance of his younger years contributed to my own confusion. If we had established a storyline about the challenges of going from boy to man, I could have relied on him instead of making so many mistakes on my own.

In my dad’s generation, it was normal for parents to pretend they were never young. Nowadays, that social convention is changing rapidly. With each passing year, our cultural interest in memoirs grows and our fear of revealing ourselves fades. This trend to see life as a story has opened many people to their own past, as well as their parents’.

If you decide to write your parents’ story, you will follow many of the same steps you would if you were writing your own. Gather facts and anecdotes and place them in chronological order, and then look for the psychological power that will draw a reader from one page to the next.

The first step is to gather the anecdotes you already know and type them into a file. When you arrange them in chronological order, you’ll begin to transform isolated events into a continuous narrative. You’ll reveal insights about how one thing led to another, and you’ll see a shape that you might not have noticed before. If your parents are able and willing to talk about themselves, you can join the growing legion of people who know that now is the right time to

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to procrastinate. In addition to the challenge of finding time and energy, you also must overcome anxiety about asking them so many personal questions. Perhaps they don’t really want to talk about their lives? Interviewing requires a different form of conversation than most of us are accustomed to. I will share tips about  overcoming objections and interviewing in later parts of this essay. If you are motivated to achieve the goal, learning the skills is merely a step along the way.

To counter the reasons to stall, focus on the many reasons to proceed. When you see their lives unfold as a story, you will gain a deeper insight into their humanity. They had hopes, desires, pressures from their parents, and if they were like most people, they defied their parents in ways that may still cause shame. Informed by this new information, you will understand them and also gain insights to yourself. And during the course of the conversations, you will have an opportunity for intimacy, breaking through some of the posturing that separates parents from children.

A memoir is more than a sequence of information. After you gather the information, you still have to find its shape.  To do it well, you need to think like a story writer. Look for unifying concepts, dramatic tension, and beginnings, middles, and endings. Your search for artistic elegance will force you to go deeper. Stories are built on the unfolding of psychological stakes, so to write a good story you must understand what makes your characters tick.

Even though I arrived at my curiosity about my own parents too late to learn about their early life, they emerged as characters in the pages of my memoir. For the first time, I imagined the pride my father might have felt when his son chose to work at the drugstore instead of playing with friends. And then, again for the first time, I wondered what disappointment he must have felt when I drifted off to my troubled, chaotic quest. These speculations awaken a more complex, rounded impression of his journey than I had before I began writing.

If you decide that this is the year to write about your parents, you will discover them as important characters in your own story, and reveal a mysterious resonance between your real life and the literature you create. As you develop your skills and experience as the author of their stories, you will gain deeper insights into your relationship with them than you ever dreamed possible.

Recommended memoirs about parents by children

Cherry Blossoms  in Twilight by Linda Austin
Ghost written memoir of her mother’s life starting with childhood in Japan before and during World War II.

More About Linda Austin’s Cherry Blossoms: Interview Part 1
Click here for Part 2 of my interview with Linda Austin
Click here for Part 3 of my interview with Linda Austin

Reading my Father by Alexandra Styron
Search for her father’s life. Essentially an autobiography of her famous father William Styron as told through the eyes and voice of his daughter.

Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham
Ghost written memoir of his father’s life in Vietnam through the late 50s to early 70s.

Thrumpton Hall by Miranda Seymour
By a daughter about her father’s obsession with a British country manor during the deterioration of the British class system.

Dreams of Our Fathers by Barack Obama
Search for a man’s identity by trying to find his father’s story.

Color of Water by James McBride
A man’s search for his own identity by trying to understand his mother’s past.

Mistress’s Daughter by A. M. Homes
and
Lucky Girl by Meiling Hopgood
An adopted daughter struggles to understand her biological parents.

For brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Ghost Wrote Her Mother’s Memoir, Part 3

December 20th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

This is the third part of an interview with author Linda Austin about her memoir Cherry Blossoms in Twilight. Linda’s mother grew up in Japan before World War II. After the war, she married an American serviceman and then moved to the United States. The memoir is a product of extensive interviews Linda conducted with her mother, and is written in the first person from Yaeko Sugama’s point of view. Click here [link] for my thoughts about the memoir and the first part of my interview with her. I continue the interview here.

Jerry Waxler: Your mother mentions her shame in a few places. For most people, shame creates a barrier so strong we try to hide the subject altogether. How did shame enter into your interviews? What convinced her to open up?

Linda Austin: The divorce was almost unbearably shameful to my mother. She eventually became used to the idea of divorce in America because it became so common, but in the 1970s  it was not. Even my sister and I were embarrassed. My mother still considers her divorce a badge of shame to her and her Japanese family, but because she feels a sense of victimization, she is open to talking about it to me and her American friends, so that wasn’t a problem. Talking about it too much was the problem. There were also some issues with her mother and brother, but again, since it wasn’t her fault she’s okay talking about it–to an American audience. I think I’m the one most embarrassed about the world seeing the intimate life of my mother.

Jerry Waxler: What did you learn about her or her family from the memoir that you didn’t know before?

Linda Austin: I learned why my mother behaves the way she does, which is one reason why I strongly encourage telling life stories. What happens to us affects who we are and how we behave. Once I cried with my mother while parked in the lot of the Social Security building. She had told me about some incidents with her mother, and suddenly I saw how that affected her own behavior toward me. I so wished I had known this long ago so I would have understood her own foibles and not have been so angry. I felt so bad for not understanding.

Jerry Waxler: How did writing and publishing the memoir affect your own sense of identity?

Linda Austin: I think I’ve always had a strong sense of Japanese identity. I mean, I love natto!  [Note: For a definition of natto, see this Wikipedia entry.] When I was a child, there weren’t any brown people in our schools so my sister and I kept our heads low. But my mother enjoyed her Japanese heritage and my dad still loves things Japanese, so my sister and I were exposed to as much Japanese as possible for living in a small lily-white town in the Midwest. Thank goodness for Chicago.

Writing the book and getting lots of compliments and speaking requests really changed me as a person, though. My mother was astonished to see her painfully shy daughter speak comfortably in front of a crowd of about 100. “I didn’t recognize you!” I became much more confident and outgoing and took leadership positions in the Japanese and the writing/publishing communities in St. Louis. I called myself a renaissance woman.

Jerry Waxler: How does it feel going out on book signings and revealing so much about your own mother? Does it feel strange…? Liberating…? Generous…?

Linda Austin: When I’m doing presentations, I think only about the message I want the audience to take away:  that the enemy’s people are the same as you and me inside, and that we should write down our stories for our families. I’m passionate about both those messages. I don’t talk about the divorce or anything too personal. Only when I get home and see another book sold on Amazon, or a review posted, I cringe. It’s not even my story, but I feel a sense of protectiveness towards my mother and a sense that this information belongs to our family, not to strangers. It takes guts to show your lifewritings to others because if you’ve done a good job and told your story in all its glory and pain, it’s like you’re standing naked in front of them. So it really takes guts to publish for the public. Sometimes you don’t think about that until somebody you don’t know wants to read your book.

Jerry Waxler: Have you considered writing a memoir from the point of view of an American girl with mixed race parents trying to come to terms with her own identity?

Linda Austin: I have, but there are too many very good, similar stories published, although with American-born all-Asian-heritage kids struggling to make sense of living in the U.S. with two traditional Asian parents. Even as a half-Japanese, I can relate to Linda Furiya’s Bento Box in the Heartland. Grace Lin did a fabulous job with her children’s chapter books, Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat, which inspire me–those are fiction based on truth, and I would consider doing something like that. Nowadays, diversity is cool, so some of the pressures I felt seem passé.

This finishes part 3 of a 3 part interview

Click here for Part 1 of article and interview with Linda Austin
Click here for Part 2 of my interview with Linda Austin

—

Notes

Linda Austin’s home page:

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight By Yaeko Sugama Weldon and Linda E. Austin

For brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Ghost Wrote Her Mother’s Memoir, Interview Part 2

December 13th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

Linda Austin was the daughter of an American serviceman and a Japanese mother. Her parents met in Japan when he was stationed there after World War II. They then moved to the United States where Linda was born and raised. When Linda set out to understand her mother’s early life, she decided to write it as a first person story. Based on extensive interviews and research, she wrote Cherry Blossoms in Twilight. Click here [link] for my thoughts about the memoir and the first part of my interview with her. I continue the interview here.

Jerry Waxler: Did your mother talk much about these experiences, as you were growing up? Many kids have the experience of hearing about a few specific stories over and over. We roll our eyes and think “I’ve heard that story a hundred times?” Did that happen in your house?

Linda Austin: My mother did tell us the same stories over and over, but it took a long time for my sister and I to get bored of them because they were just so different than anything we knew growing up in the U.S. Actually, I had decided by my early twenties that I should capture those stories somehow since they were so unique. In those days, that meant audio tape recordings, and I did do a couple of those on cheap equipment because that’s all we had in the house. I never heard the WWII stories until I was a prying adult.

Jerry Waxler: What convinced you to make the transition from a bunch of anecdotes to a continuous, sequential story?

Linda Austin: It always was going to be a memoir. My mom had just too fascinating a life. She’d complain while I interviewed her that nobody wanted to hear about her tough, sad life, not understanding that that’s what was so interesting. The hard part was segueing the stories together and blending the mix of anecdotes, history, and culture–thank goodness for word processing! Many memoirs have transition bumps from story to story, but I think I did a pretty good job blending. An elementary-school librarian helped with organization and editing.

Jerry Waxler: When you started the memoir, were there places where you felt you needed to fill in but were afraid to ask? Did you ever feel you were prying or disrespectful? If so, how did you handle those feelings?

Linda Austin: My mom is very open about her life, unusual for a Japanese woman, but I guess she’d become Americanized quite well. I was afraid to ask some things because she would be way too open! I had to work on stories about my father very carefully to avoid upsetting her for days. I would only ask a couple questions at a time and then avoid the topic for awhile. That was a very difficult dance, and I stumbled many times. Editing was a fight because she would have liked some revenge in the book. My dad was amazing in that he never asked about what I would write and seemed to trust me. Incidentally, he and my step-mom love the book.

Jerry Waxler: Describe the interviewing process. What sort of questions did you ask? What was your mother’s attitude? Describe a situation when you were interviewing that might help us understand some of the challenges of interviewing your mother.

Linda Austin: My mother liked telling stories and talking about the festivals, but hated being interviewed, and she thought I was crazy for writing about her life. She thought her life was difficult and sad so who’d want to hear about that. She also thought since everyone in Japan had lived through those tough times that her story was nothing special. Her best friend at the time, Frankie, pushed her to get her life written down and actually started typing the stories while I was out of the country for a year. If it weren’t for Frankie, there might not be a memoir. Still, Mom would get really irritated when I wanted to know little details, like explaining the Japanese bathroom or kitchen. “Who cares about that?!” I repeated many times during the questionings, “I want to know, and your grandchildren will want to know. This is all new to us.” Sometimes telling stories and explaining details led her to make beautiful sketches, usually on scrap paper, which I tidied up for printing and added to the book.

The other difficulty was when she didn’t remember what she thought about events and experiences, if she even thought about some of them at all. Kids don’t always analyze how they feel, and in Japan in those times people were not supposed to think for themselves and were to do and believe what the government told them. I think the Japanese are more stoic and definitely more reticent about feelings anyway, at least in those days. One reviewer complained there wasn’t enough about how my mother felt. Well, I did the best I could with what I had to work with. Therein lies the difficulty of ghostwriting and the value of fiction.

This finishes part 2 of a 3 part interview

Click here for Part 1 of article and interview with Linda Austin
Click here for Part 3 of my interview with Linda Austin

—

Notes

Linda Austin’s home page:

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight By Yaeko Sugama Weldon and Linda E. Austin

For brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Parent’s Memoir: Finding Roots Across Generations

December 7th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

Memoir writers reach back through time to find our own story. Is it still a memoir if we reach into our mother’s memory to find her story? That’s what I wanted to find out when I read “Cherry Blossoms in Twilight.” The book is about Yaeko Sugama Weldon, who grew up in a small rural town in Japan before World War II, married a serviceman and moved to the United States. Her daughter, Linda Austin, grew up in America with a Japanese mother and an American father. Naturally she was curious about her mother’s earlier life, and as her mother aged, Linda began to put it all together. After extensive interviews and edits, Cherry Blossoms is the result.

Is it co-authored or ghost written? Is it a memoir or a biography? These distinctions blur into artistic interpretations rather than hard definitions. For example, in the memoir “Color of Water,” when James McBride searched for his mother’s past, he maintained his own point of view, with occasional well-marked shifts into his mother’s voice. In Cherry Blossoms, Linda Austin drops out of the frame and lets her mother tell the story.

Thanks to Yaeko’s willingness to explore her past, Linda Austin has the opportunity to delve deep into her mother’s journey. It’s an achievement that many people, me for example, wish they had achieved with their own parents.

The book is pleasant, easy, and informative. Since it is written for a younger audience, it does not go into deep analysis of emotionally sensitive topics, but despite this lightness, it gives profound glimpses into painful subjects, like war, prejudice, family splits, and abandonment. Because Yaeko does not hide her pain or the difficulties in her family, the memoir feels authentic and respectful, allowing me to stay connected with the protagonist’s emotions and experiences. In the end, it satisfies my criteria for a fascinating memoir and has convinced me to extend my definition of memoirs to include assisted ones.

To learn more about this book, and the experience of the author in working with her mother, I interviewed Linda Austin. Here is part 1 of that interview:

Jerry Waxler: I love this book. It’s short and easy to read, and yet it feels complete, and authentic. Nice work! So tell me what made you decide to write it as a children’s book?

Linda Austin: Thank you, Jerry. My mother had a lot of stories of when she was a little girl, in a different culture and era of history, plus the many Japanese festivals are fun for kids. I also wanted to preserve the children’s songs she taught us, so I thought the obvious audience for all of this would be upper elementary and older school children. And my mother speaks simply, too—perfect for a younger audience.

Jerry Waxler: How has the decision to write it as a children’s book worked out? Are you happy with the choice? What sort of feedback are you getting?

Linda Austin: It didn’t work out that well as a children’s book, partly because as an indie-published book it could not get pre-pub reviews from the all-important Kirkus or School Library Journal which librarians use to help determine which books to stock in their libraries. The kids I know who have read it love the children’s parts, but lose interest when my mother moves to the U.S. as an adult. Instead, I was shocked to hear all the praise from older adults who had lived through WWII in the U.S. – they loved comparing their experiences to my mother’s in Japan. Another, less shocking, development was that university libraries wanted it, I’m sure for its unique perspective of WWII—I’m proud to say that Princeton carries it.

Jerry Waxler: In addition to interviewing, what other research did you do? Did you go back to her home, or interview people who knew her when she was young?

Linda Austin: Believe it or not, I have never been to Japan. It’s very expensive, the time was never right, my relatives speak only Japanese and I speak only English. My mother rarely went back to Japan. Mostly I had to research WWII history and what was going on in Japan during the War. I read books and searched online. If I could not verify something I either left it out or stated it as an opinion or personal belief. I had a Japanese gentleman and his wife who are close in age to my mother review the book for details of the Japanese culture of that time.

Jerry Waxler: If it’s not too personal, what role if any did your father play in helping you construct the story?

Linda Austin: My dad played almost no role in writing the story. He knew I was working on this so a couple of times he suggested things to ask my mother about, and he graciously reviewed bits that pertained to him and his early relationship with my mother. It is all my mother’s story and her perspective. My parents had a bitter divorce, so writing the sections about my father was very difficult for both my mother and I as she is still very hurt. I had to negotiate difficult terrain and we had some arguments. I had to keep reminding my mother that this was a children’s book.

Jerry Waxler: Your time frame continues into her adulthood. Since this is a children’s book, I might have thought you would be tempted to stop when she was no longer a child. Tell about your decision about where to end.

Linda Austin: It was logical the book should end when she moved to America, but she was about 28 years old then. I tried to make the adult-life part shorter, less detailed, and of interest to at least middle-school kids. This is actually the second edition out there because I learned so much from the St. Louis Publishers Association that I just had to re-do the original. I honed down the grown-up years and added songs, photos and a concordance and glossary of Japanese terms specifically for the kidlit market. Because of the sales channel setup, I can’t tell if the book sells to schools.

Many times I’ve thought to create a fictionalized version of this book just for kids because the story is an important learning experience for youngsters and fiction allows freedom to develop the story in a way they would respond to better. On the other hand, adults tell me they want to know more about what happened to my mom in the U.S.! I’m lost between audiences.

This finishes Part 1 of a 3 part interview.

Click here for Part 2 of my interview with Linda Austin
Click here for Part 3 of my interview with Linda Austin

—

Notes

Linda Austin’s home page:

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight By Yaeko Sugama Weldon and Linda E. Austin

Color of Water, by James McBride: a memoir of race, family and fabulous writing

I am reading another story of a father’s life, written by his son called Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham about his father’s life through the Vietnam war.

For brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Relationship between Fiction and Memoir, Interview Pt2

November 29th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

This is the second part of my interview with Marie Lamba, author of the young adult novel, “Over My Head.” In this part of the interview, I continue to seek understanding of the relationship between young adult fiction and the Coming of Age period in memoirs.

To read the first part of the interview click here

Jerry Waxler: Adult fiction is sorted on bookstore shelves by genres such as romance, mystery, and sci-fi/fantasy/horror. Are YA books separated along similar lines? Your book “Over My Head” reads to some extent like a romance. Would you or would booksellers categorize it as a YA romance?

Marie Lamba: It’s a contemporary YA or a romantic YA.  There is young YA for the tween crowd and older YA for more mature audiences (think PG13-R).  Then of course there is paranormal, dystopian, chick-lit, fantasy, literary, you name it.

Jerry Waxler: In Over My Head, there is an incredible amount of inter- and intrapersonal deception. Almost everyone was lying to each other, or to themselves. Girls lie in order to get guys, to save face, to override parental authority, to hurt each other, to protect each other, to brag. It was a deception fest. Naturally the lying created enormous dramatic tension. Did you accentuate this quality of human nature because of your own experience of what young life is really like, or is this just the way you felt these particular characters needed to act, or what?

Marie Lamba: Jerry, I’m sure you NEVER lied as a teen, but I might have once_ or twice? Teens try to be good, they really do, but sometimes it’s the lie that allows them to continue to be viewed that way, or to test out new identities or to fix what they may have broken, or to break what is too perfect.

The tougher the mess, the bigger the lies can be until they are so ridiculous that only the truth will do. Lies, like secrets, are also great story devices. As writers we do highlight elements in life, heightening them to make a story really shine.  In real life you might have one grand humiliating moment, in a book the character can experience a virtual fest of humiliation. Now that’s a story.

Jerry Waxler: Actual people are infinitely varied, and the situations that drive us have all sorts of nuances and details. I read memoirs so I can learn about these unique aspects of real people. However, in the genre fiction that I read as a young man, such as, mysteries, thrillers, and sci/fi fantasy, the characters often have far less human individuality or depth. Where do you see your books falling on this spectrum? Do your YA books aspire to offer authentic, unique challenges of real human beings, or more formulaic characters of a genre?

Marie Lamba: I hope that my books contain characters that are nuanced and not stock.  The bad guy has a soft side, the good girl does something horrible, they all have their own arcs and purposes and dreams. They say there are no original stories. But people are original.  I hope that by putting my own spin on characterization that I’m creating characters that are fresh and original and that feel real.

Jerry Waxler: What sort of real-world observations do you use to help you authentically portray your characters? For example, do you keep a writer’s notebook about growing up, or interview young people, or does it pour from your imagination?

Marie Lamba: It definitely flows. Once I have a good feel for the characters, that’s all it takes for me.  It helps that I’m surrounded by teens as a mom and that I’m an older girl scout troop leader. And I definitely remember my teen self vividly. No journal required for that.

Jerry Waxler: When creating your novels, what sorts of real life experience did you bring to your books? Can you offer any example of how you mined your own memory for situations, age appropriate emotions, characters and psychological tension?

Marie Lamba: It doesn’t take much for any of us to remember a time when we were heartbroken or mortified or how it felt to be in a fight with a really close friend. These are such visceral experiences that plucking those emotions to use in a story is a natural thing for most writers. In “Over My Head,” the uncle’s illness plays an important role. My brother-in-law actually had the same disease as the uncle in the book, and he passed away shortly after 9-11.  The novel is dedicated to his memory, and Sang feels what I felt_helplessness and a deep desire to do something, anything, to help.  So adult emotions and experiences can also be helpful in shaping the YA world.

Jerry Waxler: Have your characters ever taught you interesting lessons about yourself or about human nature? In other words, as you watch a character develop in your book, does the behavior or attitude of your fictional character help you piece together some aspect of real life?

Marie Lamba: In a way, a book is more than you are. You are creating different characters, points of view, experiencing things you never would have experienced otherwise.  I think it forces me to look harder especially at the villains in our lives to find a speck of good in even the worst of us, and writing difficult scenes forces me to linger and feel things that in real life I would eagerly speed past.

Jerry Waxler: In the last 5 or 10 years more and more writers are interested in memoir writing and the trend seems to be accelerating. I wonder if fiction writers are more open to real-life experience. Years ago, when the novelist Carl Barth visited the University of Wisconsin campus, I asked him if his fiction had been influenced by his life. He snapped at me like I was insulting him. Nowadays, I have met many fiction writers who are more open to discussing the relationship between their stories and their lives. What do you think? Have you noticed any change over the years in the attitude about using real life situations in fiction?

Marie Lamba: We fiction writers do have a dilemma. We want to be free to create honest stories, and this of course includes experiences from our past, but if the veil between truth and fiction is lifted, how can we feel free to be as frank? In my work, most things are a composite of experiences put together, plus a healthy dose of make believe. Is there a trend for writers to own up to the memoir-like aspects of their fiction?  Not for this writer.

The real truth is that people love to see themselves in your books. Even when they truly aren’t in there.  It’s pretty fascinating.

Jerry Waxler: What are you working on next? Are you going to stay within this period or are your characters going to grow older?

Marie Lamba: My YA novel “Drawn” again deals with a 17 year old teen, but the next novel I’m currently stirring around in my brain will probably reach into the 20-30 year old adult range.  And, hey, who’s growing older?

Notes
Marie Lamba’s novel “Over My Head” was described by New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry as “a funny, touching, and at times heart-breaking young adult novel about the search for love.” She is also author of the young adult novel “What I Meant…” (Random House), which was dubbed “an impressive debut” by Publisher’s Weekly..

Marie Lamba’s Home Page

Click here for an article about why Coming of Age memoirs deserves its own genre

Click here for a more detailed article that compares Coming of Age memoirs with Young Adult fiction.

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Interview: Young Adult Fiction versus Coming of Age Memoirs

November 15th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

I am fascinated by Coming of Age memoirs because they provide a window into the many emotional challenges that people undergo on their journey to becoming adults. Recently, I realized that Young Adult fiction is about that same period of life. To learn more about the way Young Adult fiction handles that period of human development, I read the novel “Over My Head” by Marie Lamba in which a 16-year-old girl falls in love with a college boy. Is it real love? To find out, she must process her own feelings as well as advice and opinions from friends and parents.

When I started reading, I was afraid I had entered a girl-zone where I didn’t belong. The more I read, the more engaged I became, appreciating my privileged front-row seat, where I watched the emotional and social challenges of a girl trying to make the leap to adulthood. “Over My Head” zooms into one particular aspect of Coming of Age: that awkward period when humans first steer through the outrageously intricate connection between romance and sex. The hero of the novel must learn those lessons under the spell of emotions so compelling they have an almost mystical power.

I have spent the last five years infatuated with the way memoirs allow us to see each other through the medium of a story. Memoir authors go deep inside themselves and then bring that intimate detail out into social awareness. Marie Lamba reminds me that the real people who write fiction also share their insights into the human condition. After reading the book, I asked the author her opinions about the relationship between real life and fictional characters.

Jerry Waxler: In “Over My Head” your character was 16-year-old character had to sort out romantic feelings from sexual ones. Some people advised her that the boy might be using her while others urged her to jump in. Her challenges represent the dilemma teens face in real life. When composing your novel, how conscious were you about representing these real-life Coming of Age challenges?

Marie Lamba: Hi Jerry.  Thanks so much for speaking with me about this.  I think when you write for the young adult market, it’s almost always a coming of age story. This is a time when we search for who we are as individuals.  The conflict of trying to make big decisions based not on the thoughts of our peers or our family, but on our own feelings and beliefs is key. This forces us to examine who we really are.  When I write about these sorts of things, it’s just natural for me. I don’t consciously plot out a coming of age structure, it just evolves from the characters and the plot.

Jerry Waxler: (laughing) Wow, I think you ought to be teaching a course in developmental psychology… In most Coming of Age memoirs, one of the protagonist’s tasks is to understand the relationship with adults, especially parents. We have to grow toward adulthood and yet at the same time, push adults away. I thought you did a great job in Over My Head portraying this dilemma.

When you were writing Over My Head, or when you read other Young Adult novels, how do you like to see the relationship between the young characters and their authority figures? How does the relationship of your fictional characters with their adults relate to your own observations of these relationships in the real world?

Marie Lamba: Family, whether absent or all-too-present, looms large in everyone’s lives. Intrinsically, children want to please their parents, even terrible parents, sadly. But there comes that moment when the point of view of even the very best parent seems so foreign for that child. That is when the child does take that giant step away from the parent and sees that maybe she’s on her own.  Pleasing your parents or listening to them isn’t always what’s right. That can be quite a revelation.

In YA fiction, the main character needs to have some independence, or needs to be fighting for independence, or the story just isn’t dynamic to me.

Jerry Waxler: The audience of YA is supposed to be 14 to 21. That’s a big range, considering the difference in reading level, emotional and life experience. So when you write, what is the age of the audience you visualize?

Marie Lamba: These days, the YA audience stretches straight up into adulthood. It’s not unusual for me to hear from adults that they related to my novels and that it took them back to their own teen years. And I also hear from readers who are much younger than I’d expect saying that they really related to the characters in my books. I guess I don’t really think about the audience, though. I think about the characters and strive to create as authentic a voice for the ages they are. For OVER MY HEAD, Sang was 16 going on 17, so that’s where my focus in voice and tone went.

Jerry Waxler: In adult life, a few years difference in age rarely makes much difference. But in a teenager’s life, each year brings them closer to adult empowerment. When will I be able to drive? When will I be able to earn freedom from my parents? When will I be old enough to earn the optimum romantic partner?

You bring out these tensions powerfully in “Over My Head” with the romance between a 16-year-old girl and 20-year-old boy. The age difference creates a big power imbalance. What interest brought you to the story of a 16-year old hero and her 20 year old love interest? How does age-related envy and power imbalance play out in your favorite YA stories?

Marie Lamba: There are all sorts of imbalances in relationships in novels, but age is a biggie. The younger character finds herself wondering if she’s mature enough, envying the freedoms of the older character, perhaps even glorifying what is mundane to an older person.  In OVER MY HEAD, the age difference isn’t exactly 4 years.  Sang is almost 17 and Cameron is just 20, but with him in college it is a great divide indeed.  He has a separate life from his summertime world, and this raises a lot of red flags about who he really is.

In my previous novel, WHAT I MEANT… all the teens were around the same age.  The adults had tremendous power and one especially diabolical aunt used this to set the heroine up to take the blame on numerous occasions. With OVER MY HEAD, Sang is 2 years older, and ready for true independence. I selected an older love interest to up the stakes and to really force Sang to be at odds with her youthful self and her family.

A favorite YA of mine, IT’S NOT SUMMER WITHOUT YOU by Jenny Han also involves a girl smitten by an older boy. The separation forced by him going off to college, coupled with the death of his mom, create huge rifts between the two, and the heroine wonders if he’s changed, or if he was ever who she thought he was. And perhaps she didn’t know her own heart either.

Jerry Waxler: I felt your novel “Over My Head” had especially good control over the passage of time. I wondered if part of that authorial control is related to the age of your characters. Since we all went through the school system during those years, your school-year markers remind us of our own coming of age. (Harry Potter capitalizes on this structure too, making each book correspond with a school year.) In addition, an illness in the family creates additional time pressure, and then toward the end, we hear the drumbeat of the approaching school year. Do you pay special attention to the suspense around the passage of time? Do you have any set rules about how to keep the reader moving through time?

Marie Lamba: I’ve learned through writing a number of novels to always keep a fictional calendar for my stories. Weekends make a difference. So do holidays.  So does the weather, the phases of the moon, stuff like that. With my manuscript DRAWN, which has a time travel element, this was especially critical.  I had to track the present day time as well as the critical events of the 1460s.  

I always know the big climactic event of the book before I write, and having a count-down to this helps me plot the pacing and keep the tension going.  An author (now I can’t remember who) once said that the things that keep story engine going are a secret or a ticking time bomb, preferably both. I always try to go for both.

Jerry Waxler: Sometimes YA books jump over into an adult readership. For example, Harry Potter obviously made the leap to a cross-generational readership. And sometimes adult books are picked up by young people. J.D. Salinger apparently wrote “Catcher in the Rye” for an adult audience, and then young people realized that the subject matter was about them, and they took it for themselves. So when you write about your young people, what sort of attention are you paying to the possible interest adults might have in reading your books?

Marie Lamba: With YA books, parents are often the ones who okay or nix the purchase, whether at a bookstore or online or at the library/school level.  Because of this, we YA authors are actually really conscious about the level of profanity and sex we put in a novel.  Win over the teens, lose the parents? It’s a delicate balance. I strive for authenticity, and then I assess how critical a curse word is or a sexual thought. If it truly is critical to the story, in it goes.

As for appealing to adults as readers, I believe that any well-told authentic story will speak to us all.

Interview to be continued

Notes
Marie Lamba’s novel “Over My Head” was described by New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry as “a funny, touching, and at times heart-breaking young adult novel about the search for love.” She is also author of the young adult novel “What I Meant…” (Random House), which was dubbed “an impressive debut” by Publisher’s Weekly..

Marie Lamba’s Home Page

Click here for an article about why Coming of Age memoirs deserves its own genre

Click here for a more detailed article that compares Coming of Age memoirs with Young Adult fiction.

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Posted in Coming of age, Fiction | 4 Comments »

Million Dollar Challenge: YA fiction is Coming of Age

November 8th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

Because of the millions of dollars earned by the Harry Potter series, it seems every author would like to understand the key to its success. I believe Harry’s power lies not in his magic but in his life experience. When you strip away the incantations and special effects, Harry Potter is nothing more nor less than a child trying to become an adult. The challenge to grow up has captivated the reading public, not just in fiction but in nonfiction as well. Many of the most successful memoirs that kicked off the success of that literary genre were about that period of life.

In 1997, the year of the first Harry Potter novel, Frank McCourt won a Pulitzer prize for his memoir “Angela’s Ashes.” As a child, McCourt faced incredible poverty, and then year after year had to learn about himself, his relationship to his family, his sexuality, and then push away to become independent person. Instead of a magic wand to get through these years, McCourt used his wits as he attempted to make sense of life.

In McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” and in the equally acclaimed memoir “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff we witness some of the gritty issues boys face, and in Jeanette Walls’ “Glass Castle” and Mary Karr’s “Liar’s Club” we accompany girls through their side of the process. All of these young adults struggled to understand themselves, with only sketchy guidance from parents.

The close connection between the fiction and nonfiction version of young adulthood seems to contain important information for all aspiring writers. To research the connection between fiction and real life, I recently read a Young Adult novel, “Over My Head” by Marie Lamba. The protagonist is a 16-year old girl who fell in love with a 20-year old boy. The protagonist desperately wanted to overcome her parents’ objections. In her struggle for clarity, I learned about young love from a girl’s point of view. I also learned a much broader lesson. In “Over My Head” I saw the underlying power of both Coming of Age memoirs and Young Adult fiction.

Humans have to spend almost two decades connected with caregivers. During that period we are their mercy, and more importantly we are at the mercy of the stories they tell us about the world and about ourselves. We desperately need the stories of young adulthood in order to know how to go out into the world. This process is built into our society, and according to a fascinating perspective on human evolution, it may be built into our genes. (see Brian Boyd’s Evolution of Stories).

We all had to go through this period once in our lives, and now we read Harry Potter, or “Over My Head” or the growing body of Coming of Age memoirs, and we vicariously accompany the protagonist to see how his or her journey works. All the while, in the back of our mind, we want to cry out, “Grow up. Get through those mistakes. You can do it.”

Adults automatically urge young people to reach toward the next step. And this urging often annoys young people who fear that too much guidance indicates lack of respect for their youthful process. That’s part of the fascinating dramatic tension of adolescence and young adulthood. We long for the protagonist of “Over My Head” to learn and become wise as she tries to steer through the difference between romance and sex. We want her to find some wisdom, avoid mistakes, and make the right choice. The reader knows what the character does not yet know, a perfect equation for powerful dramatic tension.

The young protagonist of “Over My Head,” with the unusual name of Sang, brought to life the intimate connection between compelling stories and the underlying psychological dynamics. By watching Sang’s authentic struggles and at the same time watching my own deep instinctive reactions to her growing up, I realize that the memoir wave is performing multiple services for our culture. Primarily, it opens up memoir readers and writers to the introspective realities of real life. However, I believe that it is also permeating fiction and increasing the cross-fertilization between our literary goals and our psychological ones. Real human beings with real human needs populate our fiction as well as our lives, and we can learn about ourselves and each other by reading books.

If you are considering turning your early life into a memoir, you are already guaranteed that your readers will root for you the moment they see that you are striving to grow. If you are composing a fictional account of a young person growing up, you can learn an enormous amount about the actual psychological journey by reading dozens of memoirs.

Of course, fiction writers have the authority to stretch and shape reality. And if they are creating fantasy-worlds, they can also take advantage of myth and metaphor. For example, when Harry faced evil, it was pure and demonic. When his birth parents were murdered, it provides a powerful metaphor for the transition we all must go through, pressing away from our parents to find our own independent path.

Fiction writers can also apply other literary tools. For example, they have the ability to slow time down and take us into moment by moment details. That’s what Marie Lamba did in “Over My Head” when she focused on Sang’s romance. Fiction gave her the artistic freedom to take readers all the way into the situation in a highly crafted anxiety-producing, believable, and enlightening way. For a much grittier look at sexual Coming of Age, read the memoir “Girl Bomb” by Janice Erlbaum about her confusing life as a teenager on the streets of New York City.

Many Coming of Age memoirs show the demoralizing, dehumanizing dangers of drugs and alcohol. In addition to Janice Erlbaum’s involvement with drugs on the street in her memoir “Girl Bomb”, author Dani Shapiro traveled a more privileged version. Instead of scrounging for her next fix, Shapiro was a kept woman, maintained in an upscale apartment with endless drugs in exchange for sex. In Harry Potter’s world, the danger of breaking the rules was to be imprisoned in Azkaban, where the Dementors sucked away all emotions. This sounds remarkably similar to the real-life danger of drugs, which can leave users in a state of anhedonia, that is, unable to feel emotion.

In the real world, we have to learn a trade or get a job to support ourselves. Harry Potter’s trade was magic, which is perhaps more familiar to real teenagers than you might think. Adults often joke about the tendency of young people to act like they know everything, but that is not necessarily so funny. Young people often use fantasy and magic to help them plot their life course, or to help them tolerate their sense of helplessness in the world. When I look back to that period in my own life, I see how obsessed I became when I discovered science and math. I thought if I learned enough formulas and equations I would be able to control the entire cosmos. For me, knowing everything was neither a joke nor an exaggeration. However, instead of granting my wish for infinite wisdom, this approach left me entirely unprepared for adult emotional challenges. Another person who became obsessed about having pure, magical knowledge was Tony Hendra, author of the memoir “Father Joe.” When he was 14, he was seized by the conviction that he wanted to be a monk. Religious philosophy became his entire universe, and when it didn’t work out as planned, he had to completely restructure his understanding of the world.

The vast majority of adults look back on early years and remember a lot of fuzzy thinking and disconnected anecdotes. Aspiring memoir writers have the unusual opportunity to collect those random bits of memory and organize them into the shape of a story. We watch ourselves stumble through adolescence, when we are forced to learn incredibly subtle lessons and make crucial decisions before we understood their consequences. We can’t change the outcome of those years, so instead we do what people have always done with such profound life puzzles. We read and write stories. Coming of Age memoirs and Young Adult novels let us relive this period of life, running through an endless series of what-ifs, giving us that peculiarly human magic of entering into a world of someone else’s creation.

When we do finally turn our own experience into a good readable story, we might not earn millions of dollars or win a Pulitzer Prize. But even if we merely complete the work and step back satisfied, we will give ourselves a million dollar education about our journey from unformed infant into the person we have become today.

Writing Prompts
Write a scene in which you went out on a date or fell in love, and then tried to sort out what that meant.

Write a scene or a series of scenes about how you first realized you were going to have to figure out how to survive financially.

Write one or a series about an argument with your parents when you were trying to do something more adult than they could tolerate.

Write a scene about a decision you made or that was made for you that took you farther away from your goal of becoming an adult.

Notes
Marie Lamba’s Home Page

Click here for an interview with Marie Lamba

Click here for an article about why Coming of Age memoirs deserves its own genre

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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