Category Archives: 60′s

Memoir writing tips from 60′s singer Dee Dee

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by Jerry Waxler

Dee Dee Phelps was a singing celebrity in the 60′s. Just out of high school, she joined Dick St. John to form the duo Dick and Dee Dee, had some chart-topping singles, and went on to national television, international tours, and singing with a few big name stars, and a lot of smaller ones. Forty plus years later, Dee Dee Phelps wrote a memoir about those times, “Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee Dee.”

While the book contains many celebrity scenes, on stage and hobnobbing with stars, she also shows me her life as a real person: what it was like for her as a young girl, surrounded by the hassles of the record business and how it felt working with her distant, at times emotionally abusive relationship with her singing partner Dick St. John who was intense and ambitious, and who thought of himself as both the brains and the talent of the duo. He treated her as an instrument of his own success. And she shares her long-term love with her emotionally unavailable manager Bill Lee.

Aspiring memoir writers wonder, as we dig back into our memories, how we could ever convincingly portray the dreams, the fears, or the passion of our past. It’s a daunting challenge. Dee Dee succeeded at this task. In her memoir Vinyl Highway I feel like I am back there with her, feeling her mix of awe at being involved with world famous people, exhaustion at being herded along from show to show, frustration with her business and singing partner, and so on.

She succeeds her task, not by telling me what she felt but showing me the scenes that made her feel that way. She crafts each scene to show the actions of the people around her, neither glamorizing nor complaining about them. While she describes her world, she understates her own emotions, allowing me to draw my own conclusions. This writing style is powerful, and follows a tradition developed by such masters of literary non-fiction as Tracy Kidder, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Sebold. In their memoirs they report emotionally complex situations, without beating me over the head with their emotional reactions. They make the reader do the emotional work. To learn how to write about emotions from your own life, take a closer look at how Dee Dee Phelps achieves this effect in Vinyl Highway.

[To explain more about Dee Dee's writing style I will be interviewing her in a future blog.]

As I admired Dee Dee’s page-turning style of storytelling, something bothered me. It wasn’t just her writing style that was sparse. She kept her feelings so under control it puzzled me. When her partner Dick was rude, I was thinking, “How can she put up with it?” And when her manager, with whom she was in love, sent her mixed signals, instead of asking for clarification, she kept silent. I felt like something must be burning under the surface, something almost tragic, as if she was a passenger in her own life.

Finally it dawned on me. She was staying silent because she was accurately reporting the true feelings of a “good girl” at a time when good girls were trained to be unassertive. Dee Dee was honestly portraying her state of mind, just watching the world without a sense of being able to change it much. It’s an interesting psychological study of a pre-feminist mentality. And I think Dee Dee’s insistence on an authentic style brings this out by letting me see it, rather than her telling me about it.

The way she portrayed her state of mind offers another lesson for memoir writers. To portray the most authentic picture of what life was like for you, stick as close as possible to reporting the thoughts and emotions you had during the original scene. Resist the temptation to retrofit your childhood experience with your adult understanding. Of course, you can see the situation more clearly now, through your adult eyes. But by inserting too much of today’s insight, you take the reader out of the scene, and into the present. This breaks their connection with the actual experience, and creates more distance between the reader and the book. To keep readers engaged, let them get into the scene the way it happened. You can report how you grew up in your next memoir.

Dee Dee’s memoir pulled me along with her. It was a different time, and she showed me a glimpse of what those times were like for her, which is exactly what memoirs are supposed to do. It was a wild ride, and you can share it in Dee Dee’s memoir, Vinyl Highway.

[In the second part of this review of Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee, I will talk more about the overall structure, and Dee Dee's character arc through her journey, how she developed and grew.]

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Beatles and other loaded words in your memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

“Beatles.” This word contains the memories of a generation. Who among us has not seen videos of them waving as they disembarked from the plane on their first American tour? As they’re playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan show, the camera pans to the girl screaming so hard she has to hold onto her face with both hands so her head won’t explode. Since such scenes were part of your life, you might want to tell about them. But to a listener these culturally loaded words sound like clichés. Events that happened to you also happened to hundreds of millions of others. We’ve heard and seen these images until we are weary of them.

If you tell a story with loaded words, people will hear what they already know, rather than learning about you. The loaded words will wash out the individual meaning from your story. So how do you write about the past, without falling into this trap? Use the storyteller’s advice. Slow down, set up the scene, and tell the reader how they affected you in particular.

So how could I unpack the meaning of the word Beatles and turn it into a unique image in my own life? I can see myself standing at the record store in Madison, Wisconsin, where I stopped on my way home every day from class, to stare at the rack of new releases. My mind was blazing with an almost supernatural desire, as if each album might release a Genii that would grant my every dream. But describing a boy standing at a record rack doesn’t give the reader much to go on. To share my unique feelings, I have to set up a scene in a way that you’ll be able to relate to.

Here’s a piece of advice on this topic by author and writing teacher Philip Gerard, from his book “Writing a book that makes a difference.” He says, “The key is always to include your reader in the process by which you arrive at your position. Instead of demanding that the reader experience anger or love simply because you say so, create for your reader the same experience that led to your reaction.”

So I try to remember a scene that would help me show my relationship to music in the sixties and I remembered the summer when the Revolver album was released. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I wanted to get back to campus early. When I returned in mid-August, all the summer classes were over, and even the faculty and staff were away on vacation. Madison, Wisconsin was essentially a ghost town. I didn’t have anywhere to live yet, but an acquaintance was out of town and told me I could crash at her place.

I walked in to the apartment building, musty from years of student tenants, and set down my belongings. My stuff was stored in another friend’s basement so all I had with me was a suitcase and the Revolver, which I had picked up from the record store on my way in to town. As soon as I sat down, I took out the album, turning it over and searching the graphics, the liner notes, and even the names of the production staff as if they might reveal some secret.

Ripping off the flimsy cellophane, I pulled the record envelope out, and then grabbed the record by the edges between my open palms to avoid letting any finger oil smudge the surface. Positioning the record over the turntable, I dropped it gently, feeling the anticipation not only that this would be the first time I listened to it, but also disappointment that this would be the last time I would ever listen to it for the first time. This troubled me because records lose 40% of their quality after the first playing, wearing down the little plastic ridges that jiggle the needle to create the sound.

In rapt attention, I turned towards the speakers and listened. And as I entered each new song, I felt a wave of excitement. Somehow the Beatles had broken with their genre over and over, as if they were inventing a new style of rock and roll in each song. I was especially smitten by the haunting violin accompaniment like cries of sadness, wails really, on “Eleanor Rigby.” I wondered who she was, and why I felt so drawn to her.

That afternoon, I left the apartment to buy food, and I saw a girl walking my way. A person! As she came nearer, I smiled. The smile of a stranger always made me feel okay, like the world was safer and more fun. So I smiled at this stranger, and she kept walking past me, as if she didn’t see me. Despite the long, cruel winters, Madison in August is blazingly hot and muggy. I looked around at the apartments that would in a few weeks be teeming with kids living in every possible space. The houses had not been painted recently nor were the gardens groomed. It was a student neighborhood, run by landlords we never saw, and kids who were just passing through. And now they were empty. I wondered where my home was. Certainly not Pennsylvania. I was no longer a child, and it was time to get away from there. And I didn’t feel at home here either, where there were no other students, and the only person I saw didn’t even smile at me.

The one thing I did have, the one element in my life that made me feel connected at that moment was the Beatles. Their passion for breaking with all the things that were wrong with the world leapt out at me. But rather than providing simple answers, they asked questions, set to music. Not just any music but orchestral music and fresh melodies and rhythms. They poured their creative energy into the album to let me know they shared my sense of urgency. We had entered a pact in which we agreed that our questions were important, were powerful. I closed my eyes, and hummed along with the lyrics, already starting to burn into my memory.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

I too lamented about life, while those violins tore into my heart. Hearing the lyrics made me feel more peaceful, understood, and one with the world.

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To improve your memoir, break down the code

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by Jerry Waxler

My dad owned a neighborhood drugstore in north Philadelphia, and on the nights he was able to make it home for dinner, most of the conversation centered around him telling us about the menagerie of characters who streamed through the store and gave him endless raw material. We sat and dutifully listened, but since there was no rule about equal air time, I grew up without having picked up even a smattering of skill to help me tell stories of my own.

In fact, I spent quite the next several decades story-less, feeling awkward about reporting on what happened to me. And though I didn’t realize it at first, I gradually noticed that my lack of storytelling was cutting me off from people. Stories are how we tell each other who we are, and so without stories, I felt isolated. Once I noticed how important it was to be able to tell stories, I set out to learn in adulthood what I had not learned as a child.

It turns out that with a little digging you can find storytellers who will teach you their craft. For example, Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, has been studying story telling for years. For him, storytelling is a performance art. He looks like Mark Twain, including the flowing mane of hair and bushy mustache, and when he dresses in period costume, it’s like listening to your own copy of Mark Twain. In addition to the performance and folklore aspects of storytelling, he’s also interested in creating them.

Here’s the simple, powerful lesson he shared with me, that he’ll be teaching in more detail at the Augusta Heritage Folkarts Festival in West Virginia, July 8-13, 2007. Say you’re sitting around at a family gathering, and the older adults start telling stories about Uncle Bob. The ones who knew Uncle Bob start laughing, and everyone else glazes over. They never met Uncle Bob, they didn’t know his pranks, or the sadness underneath his smile, so the story isn’t working for them. The problem is that so many family stories contain codes. The people who know the code can make sense of the story, and those who don’t know the code are left out.

It’s like that old joke about a newly convicted criminal in the penitentiary. Someone down the cellblock screams out the number “68″ and all the other prisoners crack up laughing. The newbie asks what is going on, and his cellmate says, “We’ve heard these jokes so many times, we just tell them by the number.” It’s the same with family stories. As storyteller Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, explains it, say you’re at the dinner table celebrating a holiday with your extended family. You start telling stories about Uncle Bob, and all the adults who knew Uncle Bob crack up, while the kids who don’t remember Uncle Bob glaze over. Why are they staring at the ceiling, waiting for an excuse to get away from the table?

Kiernan’s family-oriented workshop will teach students to slow down and instead of telling stories in code that only insiders understand, they’ll learn to tell the story in a way that can be understood by listeners who never met Uncle Bob. The trick is to describe him in more detail. What did he wear? What was his hair like? What room do you picture him in? Sit down with someone who didn’t know him and describe him in as much detail as possible, so your listener could pick Bob out of a crowd.

If you want to tell a story, look closely at your language, and “unpack” it, laying out its content for everyone to appreciate. With a little learning you can turn the joke known only to the old inmates into a joke you can share with kids and strangers.

While this advice sounds simple, I consider it to be brilliant. For one thing, it acknowledges an important fact. Just because we think we’re telling a good story doesn’t mean the listener is hearing a good story. That in itself is a powerful piece of information, because most of us think that when we tell about events, we are doing the best possible job sharing the story. It turns out, the storyteller plays a crucial role, shaping a bunch of events into something worth listening to. Once we realize this fact, we can start looking for tricks to give our stories more impact.

Secondly, the message is brilliant because it is extraordinarily fundamental, sweeping across all aspects of storytelling. For example, I was preparing to write a description of my years in college, and was hoping to explain how the music of the times influenced my feelings. I could hope that by simply mentioning that the Beatles were intense or important, I might be able to convey what I was feeling, since everyone really knows about the Beatles. But I remembered Kiernan’s advice about avoiding code words, and thought how that applies to those icons of the sixties. If I just mention the word, “sixties” or “Beatles” I might hope everyone understands what I mean. But they will only get what they think, not what I think. That’s like the prisoner saying “68.” I have to tell a story.

So how can I unpack my thoughts and feelings about the Beatles? I’ll talk more about that in my next blog entry, and put into a scene what I mean by the coded word “Beatles.”

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Boomer memoir is a step towards social activism

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by Jerry Waxler

Terrorism! Melting ice caps! Another traffic jam! When is someone going to do something about this mess? While I am waiting for “them” to change the world, “they” are waiting for me. It’s time to break this impasse by taking action. But how? I already tried to bring about world peace by disrupting a campus when I was in college in 1968. It was scary confronting a mob of police, and I don’t believe the world has become more peaceful as a result of those actions. Now that I’m older, I’m looking for better methods. I recently became inspired by a talk hosted by the “Coming of Age” organization in Philadelphia. The main speaker was the CEO of AARP, Bill Novelli, who echoed the sentiment of his book, 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America in which he claimed that I can join an army of new oldsters to help move the world in a positive direction. A week later I went to another Coming of Age event and heard similar ideas eloquently delivered by Marc Freedman, author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America.

When I was a kid, I thought that older people were the problem. They seemed so invested in the status quo. Now that I’m one of them, I find old people aren’t so bad after all. In fact, I feel just as passionate about changing the world as when I was 20. While Novelli and Freedman spoke of a variety of ways that others have chosen to pitch in and move their own little corner of the world, I have a grand idea. It seems to me that the missing element in modern civilization is that we don’t seem to be doing a good job of learning from our mistakes. And in my opinion, that’s where the army of us oldsters can help significantly. We’ve seen the world go by for more years than others have, and have gained an appreciation for what matters in the long run, and what fizzles out.

It’s not that I have all the answers. But if there is any wisdom at all to be gained from experience, and my experience tells me there is, then I’d say we need to communicate more of our life story. And we’ve been born at the perfect time. Just as boomers are reaching “that certain age” technology has provided new opportunities for us to collaborate. The printing press brought ideas from individual minds out into the public, broke us free from a layer of oppression, and opened the way for the Renaissance. The internet makes the printing press look like an old relic. We’re ready to take this thing global, and who knows what rebirths we can bring about?

By developing a community of thinking people who talk about life in an inquiring way, we can learn from each other. Your wisdom is contained in your life experience. Share it with the world! Even if you don’t know how writing could change your world, start writing anyway. Your experience turns into stories that are authentic, in a voice that is authentically yours. That’s all that matters now. Find the authentic voice and share the authentic experience. As you go, you’ll discover the sense you’ve made of your past, and then discover the impact your experience has on others. By writing and organizing your story, without even knowing how, you are already beginning to serve. And like any service to others, you’ll be the first to reap the rewards.

Writing about life will give you more energy. Even if you already have plenty of energy, writing will give you more. And if you are too tired to write, writing will wake you up.

Writing will make you more knowledgeable about how to write and how to tell stories. You can press these enhanced skills into service as you discover things you want to share with the world.

By writing about your own life experience, you open up parts of yourself to others. This makes the world a friendlier, more intimate place to live.

Write for a cause, write for a community, write for posterity, write to share yourself. Write to change the world.

More memoir writing resources

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

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

To learn about my 200 page workbook about overcoming psychological blocks to writing, click here.

Check out the programs and resources at the National Association of Memoir Writers

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Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP, transforms life for boomers

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by Jerry Waxler

I drove down to attend a Town Meeting in Philadelphia. The meeting was called “Coming of Age, Ignite the Revolution” for the over 50 crowd. I loved the meeting’s slogan, so appropriate here a few blocks from Independence Hall. Igniting revolution seems the right thing to do, in these times when the status quo seems to be sliding in the wrong direction. I wanted to be reminded that people really do change the world. The meeting was hosted by Philadelphia community organizer Dick Goldberg, a Director of Coming of Age. His guest was the CEO of AARP, Bill Novelli, author of “50+ Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America.”

I found Novelli to be charismatic, speaking with enthusiasm and conviction about how AARP was founded 49 years ago by Ethel Percy Andrus, an individual who wanted to help older people, and at the same time saw them as an army of social activists, using their experience to make the world a better place. He had my attention, because I’m hoping that I can direct my own energy towards changing the world, and looking for ways to join with others to do it. Even though  it’s so much easier to meet people online, it was great to be face to face with people who are interested in making the most of life after 50.

The meeting was held at the convention center across the street from the studio of public television station, WHYY, and was being recorded for televising in the fall. I’ve never been to a televised meeting before, so that was a new experience. And when it came time to ask questions, I walked over to the microphone, an amazing feat for me, considering I would have been too shy to ask a question in public before I went through the Toastmasters program. So I really am getting better as I grow older. Thank God for Toastmasters, and the life long development of new skills.

I said to a room full of strangers, “I just celebrated my 60th birthday last week.” This was funny because in that room being 60 was a credential, and so I was actually bragging about it. I continued, “But when I think about what defines me as a boomer, I don’t think about my age now. I think about trying to stop a war in 1967 by sitting in a university building. I’m not interested now in protest, but am interested more than ever in making the world a better place. I came here tonight looking for institutions that can help. I always thought of AARP as an instrument of social self-defense. It sounds like you’re saying that AARP can also be an institution of social development. Is that true?”

In Novelli’s opening remarks he had talked about AARP as such an institution, but he kept coming back to individuals doing it on their own. I want institutions that can pull people together and create change, and wasn’t sure how much he was assigning to me alone, and how much his institution can help people work collectively. At least now I know the intention is there, and want to learn more about how it is helping.

After the meeting I met a couple of people involved in the Center for Intergenerational Learning, based at Temple University, and learned about their programs. Robert Tietze, Executive Director of Experience Corps, a program in which senior volunteers mentor school kids, including a branch at my old elementary school, Pennypacker, in West Oak Lane. And Aviva Perlo, Peer Counseling Coordinator of Intercommunity Action, Inc, a program in which seniors coach other seniors

My original goal was to learn something that I could write about in my blog about memoirs, and I thought the evening was wrapping up a little skimpy in that area. Then a woman asked me what school I had been protesting at in 1967. I told her it was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She said, “I was there, too.” I studied her face, trying to imagine if I ever saw her pass me on the campus. Every once in while, the wind blows and the veil of time flutters. Forty years ago, 1,000 miles away, I was hoping to change the world, and now, here in Philadelphia is a woman from that same time and place, trying to work towards social change, at Temple University’s Center for Intergenerational Learning. Ahh.. There was the lesson I was looking for. This coincidence reminded me that life is one unified flow. But I don’t need to passively wait for coincidences. I can do it myself. Memoir writing is a form of personal activism, that links together the past and present, and makes the journey of life more whole.

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Myths and Memoirs – am I a victim?

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by Jerry Waxler

I’m reading a book by journalism professor, Jack Lule about using myth to find story. I recommend his book Daily News, Eternal Stories to anyone who is looking to find a structure for their story. Lule wrote it to explain why some news stories jump into the headlines, while others don’t. My purpose in reading it is to pass along ideas that can help you structure your memoir.

His first myth is “The Victim.” In his example, a man on a cruise was murdered by terrorists, and elevated by the news media to the status of a hero. Since the man was in a wheelchair, the only reason the terrorists could possibly have for killing him was that he was an American. They used him as a symbol, killing him out of hatred for the nation. The news media accepted the terrorist’s symbolic message, allowing the man to stand in as proxy for all Americans. And once the victim became accepted as a symbol, he could be used for an additional purpose. The media and politicians used his story to send a message back to the terrorists. It’s as if the terrorists were saying “we hate you and we’re going to kill this guy to prove it,” and the American media responded by saying, “Oh yeah. Well we are strong anyway, and you don’t scare us, and we’re going to admire this man to prove it.” Many people who have been elevated throughout history from victim to hero were used in this symbolic way to represent their group. The murderers hated the group and used the victim as a symbol, and the admirers showed love for this victim, and rallied around in order to strengthen their identity and defy the murderers. For example, many of the Christian martyrs are remembered because of the way they were singled out.

While this myth is powerful in news and history, it is not an easy myth to apply in memoir. I believe one reason this is difficult to use in memoir is because to be elevated from victim to hero, your story must be told by others. If the news media declares that you have been singled out as a representative, then you can be elevated. It doesn’t work as well if you declare yourself a victim. On the contrary, you look like a complainer if you come forward and say “I’m a victim.” It loses its mythological power. In fact, “I’m a victim” can deflate a story, taking the energy out of it.

In scanning my experience with memoirs, I can think of one effective tale of a victim, Nien Chang’s “Life and Death in Shanghai.“ Her daughter was “arrested” or more accurately “disappeared” by the Red Guard during the infamous Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960′s. It’s a beautiful tale, carried not so much by tragedy of the daughter’s victimization but by the mom’s strength, and her struggle to hold up and maintain her poise despite persecution. The crime that Chang’s family was being persecuted for was their western education. As western readers, we can identify with their victimization. In the same manner as Lule’s mythical victim, the hatred that was being directed at that family was symbolically directed at us!

In most memoirs, even if the author has undergone horrific suffering, the energy that moves the reader is not the suffering but the courage required to cope with it. For example, in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, he never complains about being the victim of his father’s abandonment. On the contrary the whole book is a sort of celebration of survival. The reading public didn’t canonize McCourt for being a victim, but rather placed him on their shoulders for surviving.

For memoirists, the victim myth is a cautionary tale. Be careful about declaring yourself a victim. It probably won’t help your heroic image. Consider the dynamics of Tommie Smith’s memoir, a Silent Gesture. The reason I went to see Smith at a book signing this year, and bought his book, was because I wanted to understand the greatness of a man. He came from a poor black family in the segregated south, went on to set world records as a runner, won Olympic Gold in 1968. Then on live television in front of millions of people, he raised his fist in the Silent Gesture. In the tumultuous 60′s this was seen by blacks as courageous. From the media’s standpoint, it was defiant. Smith was blacklisted. He went on to teach and coach, but without the fanfare or success he deserved. See my previous post about Smith on this blog.

As a reader, and a student of history, I ought to be loving every minute of this memoir. But it doesn’t turn out to be a page turner. I think one problem with the telling of this powerful story is that he became entangled in the dark side of the myth making process. Instead of being adored by the media as a Gold Medalist, Smith was turned into an ingrate who abused his privileged position. No advertising contracts, television spots, or fancy coaching jobs resulted from his spectacular athletic achievement. He should have been singled out as a hero, but because of one wildly audacious act, from the glory of victory he slid away into anonymity, or perhaps more accurately like Nien Chang’s daughter, he “disappeared.”

His story is messier than the one Lule singled out in his section on the Victim. Smith was not a guy in a wheel chair, murdered outright. He was at the time, the fastest man alive, and then after he stepped off the podium, he was just a guy, trying to raise a family. It becomes a difficult story to tell. If you are stripped of your glory by the media, who then will tell the story of your courage and survival? It’s a fascinating question. Probably the only credible answer is in a memoir.

I recommend Smith’s memoir for anyone who wants to get inside his experience, whether you are curious about those events and the man behind them, want to learn more about memoirs, or are curious about the workings of the myths that drive our public stories. The book offers lessons for memoirists. How fame doesn’t guarantee success. How the public is fickle, and seems to have a mind of its own. And how myths of heroes and victims play out in Smith’s life.

As you read it, embrace what you like, and consider what you would do differently. From such an interesting life, he ought to be able to shape a compelling story that would again grab the attention of the world. He had the podium, and used it for a silent gesture. A memoir gives him a chance to tell it in words.

What approach would you use? Leave a comment here and let me know.

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Stories heal families

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By Jerry Waxler

When I was a teenager, I started pulling away from my parents. I didn’t understand who these people were, and didn’t think we had much in common. Ignoring all the support mom and dad had given me, the safe and sane home, I longed to escape their influence. When I moved out of my childhood home in Pennsylvania, I tried to put many miles behind me, first moving 1,000 miles to go to school in Wisconsin, and then moving 2,000 more miles to Berkeley, California. The geographical separation was only an external symptom of what I was feeling in my heart. I was trying to shake them off. Sometimes I didn’t speak to them for a year, and never reached out for support. All of this distance was accompanied by enormous pain. I had cut myself off from my family, and wondered why I felt so alone.

But I couldn’t figure out how to break through this wall, and see them as real people. Somehow I had built up such profound edginess I simply couldn’t approach them. So I stayed away, hurting them and myself in the process. While my situation sounds extreme, I have spoken to many adults who hold on to complex, painful resentments about their parents, and would greatly benefit by finding a way back home.

For example, when memoirist Gretchen Gunn first decided to write about her childhood, she knew she had lots of interesting material. She grew up in a hippie commune. And as a tiny child, she witnessed first hand the culture of the early seventies, where people, including her parents valued their own desires above common sense or standards of decency. But Gretchen felt unable to tell the story because she was so angry with her dad’s irresponsibility and abandonment. She thought her anger would get her in trouble, so she decided to write it as fiction. That turned out to be a great choice, because the more she tried to tell the story, the better she understood it.

To write a good story, the goal is to not describe characters like they belong in a cartoon. If they look empty, or the same as every other character you have read about, they will not be interesting to read. Instead of a superficial gloss, you have to look more closely for signs they are human. If your vision is clouded by strong feelings of resentment, disappointment, or other confusing emotions, getting to the human story beneath the cloud of emotions might happen in layers rather than all at once.

So when Gretchen wrote her early drafts, she expressed her disgust, but when approaching the story in this way, it didn’t seem interesting. So she shifted her image of him from a bad person to simply a dead person. By killing off her father, she was able to see the whole situation more clearly. He was out of the picture, and out of her life, and instead of hanging on to her fury, she let him go. This shift in perspective was so profound that she lost her grip on her gripes. There was no more point in being angry, and she felt like she released a huge weight, allowing her to see events more clearly than ever. Even though she had been writing fiction, the act of turning her life into a story had set her free from the demons of the past, and gave her deeper insight into her childhood and her parents.

After my self-imposed exile in California, I moved back to Pennsylvania in 1971. But moving closer geographically did not bring me closer in my heart. I went months at a time without calling home, and skipped most holiday gatherings. After decades of therapy, I went to graduate school and got my Master’s degree in counseling, and started to see the secret everyone else seemed to know better than me, about the ever-present intimacy between a parent and child. My interest in mom increased, and I spoke with her every week, trying to understand how to relate to this person who not only gave birth to me, but taught me how to be a human being. Week by week, year by year, our conversations cleared away whatever issues had kept us separate. Fortunately, my mom lived to 87, which gave me plenty of time to transform my attitude. Finally, I got it! She was a person! A good person. She longed to make the most of her life. She strived to stay fit. And I finally noticed she had many devoted friends who looked up to her. I became one of her admirers. We became friends! At the end of an aerobics class, she wasn’t feeling well, and a neighbor took her to the hospital. When she lay in bed, a few days before the end, she turned to me and said, “I lived a good life.” And so she had, and together, we were at peace with that.

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60′s Nostalgia memoirs of growing up black

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by Jerry Waxler

I am reading two memoirs right now written by blacks about their journey through the 60′s. They are George Brummell’s Shades of Darkness, and Tommie Smith’s A Silent Gesture. They are two very different books, and reading them at the same time I can look for things that are different and things that are the same. Reading memoirs is a great way to learn about writing them.

Both of these books are about growing up poor and black in the segregated south. That’s proof that what was incredibly boring and mundane while you were living it as a child can years later become fascinating in your memoir. If the reader has never experienced that side of life, it gives a window into something they didn’t know. If the reader did experience those things, the book can evoke nostalgia, that fascinating emotion that transports us into our own memories. Since I’m not black, reading the history of these two black men during those times informs me of their individual struggles, and the eternal struggle that human beings have always fought against the oppressive confinement of a dominant culture. There is also a degree of nostalgia for me as I am transported back into that great swell of civil rights compassion that filled the boomers’ “first golden years” – the sixties.

The differences  between the two books are also instructive. George Brummell’s book is written in scenes. You can visualize the events on every page, feeling the Vietnam battle scenes, and then feeling what it’s like to learn how to get around while blind. Like a work of fiction he brings you into the scene, but doesn’t comment on it, letting you walk in his shoes and draw your own conclusions. Tommie Smith’s book is almost the opposite, with relatively few scenes, and a great deal of discussion about what he was thinking and why he did things. The two different styles could help you see for yourself how to build (or not build) suspense and emotional intimacy with your reader.

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