Category Archives: Book Review

Nine Reasons To Read Memoirs

Posted on by
9

by Jerry Waxler

The more memoirs I read, the more lessons I learn, first about the literary form, second about other people, and third about myself. These benefits intertwine to form one of the best systems of self-development I know. Here are nine benefits, along with a few titles of memoirs that exemplify each one.

Reason #1: The Fascination and Relief of Story Reading

A good memoir offers the same release as any engaging story, allowing me to lose myself in the author’s world… a fine turn of phrase… a fascinating dramatic incident… a character I care about, travelling along an interesting path. All these factors contribute to my satisfaction.

Enough about me by Jancee Dunn: Enters the world of a young celebrity interviewer
The Sound of No Hands Clapping by Toby Young: Shares the world of an ambitious writer
The Man Who Couldn’t Eat by Jon Reiner: offers wisdom about physical illness
Girl Bomb by Janice Erlbaum: A runaway teen lives in the shelters of New York city

Reason #2: Inspiration based on life experience and loss

My grandmother used to say: “This too shall pass.” I didn’t understand her platitudes when I was young. They make more sense now in the pages of each memoir, which starts with an author facing a challenge and then proceeds through the journey to a resolution. In every case, life goes on and characters grow.

Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup: After losing a beloved husband, she searches to recover from grief and find the meaning of life and death.
Mothering Mother by Carol O’Dell: a daughter cares for a mother suffering from dementia
Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham: a non-standard childhood with her two uncles
Expecting Adam by Martha Beck: She pays homage to her Down Syndrome baby.
Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott; She shares her search for the meaning of life
Shades of Darkness by George Brummell: A black man escapes Jim Crow south by joining the army. His war injuries blind him and he must grow through another round.

Reason #3: Insight into cultural mixing, the melting pot of modernity

In modernity, cultures and races mingle at an ever increasing rate. Now, more than ever, we urgently need to understand each other. Through memoirs I penetrate the veil of the Other, by accompanying them on their journey. I accompanied a multi-racial boy, Barack Obama, who visited ancestors in an African village. I accompanied a girl who grew up in Michigan, Mei Ling Hopgood, when she traveled to Taiwan to visit her birth family. I grew up with an Iranian girl, Firoozeh Dumas, in California, a young Jewish immigrant, Harry Bernstein, in Chicago, and a black man, Henry Louis Gates, in the waning years of Jim Crow south. Memoirs turn the American melting pot into a vibrant, detailed, emotionally challenging and enriching personal experience.

Dreams of our Fathers by Barack Obama: A man of mixed heritage seeks his identity at home and in Africa
Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali: An African woman seeks asylum in Holland, and discovers that western culture holds the antidote to the injustice she suffered at home.
Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas: An Iranian child grows up trying to adapt to the American culture.

The Dream by Harry Bernstein: A Jewish immigrant arrives in the U.S. melting pot before the depression.

Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham: A Vietnamese American returns to Vietnam to make sense of his roots

Colored People by Henry Louis Gates: A black man in Jim Crow south tries to outgrow the limitations his culture has placed on him.

Reason #4: See deep into another’s point of view, including gender, war, celebrity

In order to live in the world, I need insights into the way other people think and feel. By reading memoirs, I no longer need to guess. Each author tell me themselves.

Athletes
Open by Andre Agassi: A famous tennis player shares his hopes, dreams and fears.

Performers
Enter Talking by Joan Rivers: A Jewish college grad attempts to escape the ordinary success mandated by her parents and enter the magical kingdom of entertainment.

Vinyl Highway: Singing as “Dick and Dee Dee” by Dee Dee Phelps: A young woman is invited into a singing duo and finds herself on television and on tour in the sixties.

Soldiers
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester: A veteran returns to the scene of his Pacific battles and tries to put his demons to rest.

A Temporary Sort of Peace by Jim McGarrah: A Vietnam combat soldier struggles to survive the war with his life and sanity intact. He just barely makes it.

House to House by David Bellavia: A vivid, gut wrenching account of house to house combat in Iraq.

Mental challenges
Look me in the eye by John Robison: A man with an unusual approach to life finds out in middle age that he has been living with undiagnosed Asperger’s

Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison: in the 1980s the author revealed the damaging effects of bipolar disorder, as told from the insider’s point of view.

Down Came the Rain by Brooke Shields: about giving birth and realizing she had  postpartum depression

Girls
Slow Motion by Dani Shapiro: a beautiful girl is seduced by power, drugs, and sex and must find her way back.

Name All the Animals by Alison Smith: small town girl must find her sexuality against the pressures of religion and grief.

A Girl Named Zippie by Haven Kimmel: a small town girl, who turns ordinary life into a fascinating journey.

Boys
Father Joe by Tony Hendra: about his fascination with the monastery and his admiration of a mentor.

True Notebooks by Mark Salzman about teaching writing to convicted juvenile offenders.

Townie by Andre Dubus, III about growing up as a fighter, trying to maintain his pride in a world that constantly tried to strip it away.

American Shaolin by Matthew Polly: An American college student moves to a Chinese temple in order to study martial arts.

Illness
Man Who Couldn’t Eat by Jon Reiner: a man suffers from Crohn’s disease and learns about life without food.

Seven Wheelchairs by Gary Presley: a man suffers polio and then learns to live with it. (Coming of Age in a wheelchair)

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor: a neuroanatomist suffers a massive stroke and during rehabilitation draws conclusions about the right and left halves of the brain.

Spirituality
Devotion by Dani Shapiro: She searches for deeper meaning in spirituality and religion.
Accidental Buddhist by Dinty Moore: A man trying to immerse himself in Buddhist practices and beliefs.

Fatherhood
The Film Club by David Gilmour: A father agrees to let his son drop out of high school with the proviso that they watch movies together.

Courage to Walk by Robert Waxler: A young man falls under a mysterious illness, and his father writes of the grief and search for courage.

Reason #5: To share their story, authors overcome shame and privacy

Some memories evoke the emotion of shame, which tries to convince us to lock our thoughts away and never reveal them. It requires courage to share such memories with the world. Every time someone achieves that goal, it offers a role model for other aspiring memoir writers. Here are some of the books that in another age would have been kept locked in terrible secrecy.

Lucky by Alice Sebold: A girl is brutally raped in college and must go on a journey of self-discovery, making sense of her life after trauma.

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff: A young man grows up with edgy, directionless experimentation.

Ten Points by Bill Strickland  In raising his little girl, the author tries to make peace with the abuse in his own childhood.

Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner: The author falls in love with a man who starts out charming, and the more she commits to him, the more violent and dangerous he becomes.

I Know Horror Father Because I Know You by Sue William Silverman: Sexually abused as a child, she shares a disturbing account of growing up fearing the man responsible for caring for her.

Reason #6: In the River of Culture, Writers and the Writing Life

All memoirs reflect the journey from life to literature, but when memoirs take us inside the writing life, we gain an even deeper appreciation for the written words that form the fabric of our culture. These stories shed light on the nobility and magic of being literate human beings.

On Writing by Stephen King: A famous author shares the story of becoming a writer.
Mentor by Tom Grimes: A student at the Iowa Writers Workshop shares an account of his relationship with the director of the program.

Only as good as your word, advice from my favorite writing mentors by Susan Shapiro: Shapiro tells of her long journey as an aspiring New York writer, by sharing the stories of important influences.

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico – Memoir of A Sensual Quest For Spiritual Healing by Rick Skwiot: The author leaves his corporate job and moves to Mexico to find himself and his writing voice.

Mentor by Tom Grimes: An aspiring author enters Iowa Writers Workshop and practically worships at the altar of the craft.

Reason #7 Learn about the development of identity

Until I started reading memoirs, I thought childhood development was something I would only read about in textbooks. Now, in Coming of Age memoirs, I accompany people on the journey from infant to fully formed adult. Along the way are the strange trials and learning during the adolescent years when we must construct our notions of self. But Coming of Age doesn’t always follow a straight path, or necessarily finish by the age of twenty. Many authors tell of their ongoing effort to become themselves.

Coming of Age
Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls: Tales of chaotic upbringing land on the bestseller lists.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt: A boy in Ireland with a drunk father and overwhelmed mother, must figure out how to grow up.

Townie by Andre Dubus III: A boy grows up relying on his fists. As he grows, he becomes curious about his father, a famous story writer, and gradually trades in his gloves for a pen.

Name all the animals by Alison Smith: A girl loses her brother in a tragic accident, and grows up struggling to find herself.

Extended or Late Coming of Age
Accidental Lessons by David Berner: He loses his marriage and career, and becomes a schoolteacher, starting over in his 50s.

Dopefiend by Tim Elhajj: Squandering his teen years in heroin addiction, he finally becomes clean at the age most of us are finished Coming of Age. The memoir is his journey to discover what adult life is all about.

Tis by Frank McCourt: After he arrives in New York, he must invent his own life. Through trial, error, and education, he gradually develops into a fully formed adult.

Life Summary
In many of my memoir workshops, people over 50 try to make sense of the events of their lives. I love this journey of discovery, and at the same time I am aware of the fine line that distinguishes memoir from autobiography. If you attempt to describe your whole life, the result is usually considered less literary, and more historical. However, I have seen evidence that with a sincere, artistic attempt to find the story, such writers can develop a compelling work. And how else will we ever learn to understand the entire journey, unless we write about it? For now, most of the people who achieve bookstore success with this type of memoir are already famous. In the future, I believe ordinary people will achieve success with this form.

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill: An editor in a venerable publishing house in England writes about the journey of life.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda: His journey through life recounts formative experiences that help us appreciate the impact of extended periods of time.

Golden Willow by Harry Bernstein: After the age of 95, when his acclaimed memoir Invisible Wall was published, Bernstein continues to write two more memoirs. The third one, Golden Willow is written from the point of view of a man in his 90s, looking back on the sweep of life experience.

Moll Flanders by Daniel Dafoe is a fake autobiography written in 1721 about a woman who struggles to find her way, and often loses it, in her journey through life. Considering that it has survived as a classic for almost 300 years suggests that a lifetime can make good reading, when portrayed with expert storytelling skills.

Reason #8 Extend my vision to other parts of the world

At every stage of my life I have been influenced by wars and global politics. In high school, I was traumatized by repercussions of the Holocaust. In college, I was lost in the upheaval of the Vietnam War. In recent years, the power struggles of the mid-east have taken center stage. Over the years, I’ve been disturbed and intrigued by developments in India, Asia, and Africa. Now memoir writers take me on intimate tours of those conflagrations and forces of history.

Man on Mao’s Right by Ji Chaozhu: History of China during the reign of Chairman Mao.

Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson: Glimpse of the back country of Mongolia

House on Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper: Growing up privileged in Liberia

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Asar Nafisi: an English literature teacher faces danger in post-revolutionary Iran.

Vietnam: Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham: After Coming of Age in America, Pham quits his job and goes on a bicycle tour through Vietnam to discover his roots.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba, an African boy falls in life with practical gadgets and manufactures a windmill to generate electricity.

Reason #9 Learn about people attempting to relate to each other

When I was young, romantic love and lust were so tangled I had no idea how to tell one from the other. Over the years, I came to believe that the principle difference between the two comes to light in the commitment of a mutually respectful partnership. This simple insight took years of trial and error, but now that I read memoirs, I can speed up the movie. Memoirs tell of the emotional complexity of love, babies, sex, extended families, careers, and all the other things that go into a couple’s life.

Japan Took the JAP Out of Me by Lisa Cook Fineberg: a newlywed woman moves with her husband to Japan and in this foreign culture must also discover herself within the relationship.

Digging Deep by Boyd Lemon: In this retrospective attempt to understand his three failed marriages, Lemon completely exposes his own limitations. While it was happening he assumed it was all their fault, but now looking, he realizes his only contribution to the relationship was money.

Believe in Me: A Teen Mom’s Story, by Judith Dickerman-Nelson, she falls in love and becomes pregnant at the age of 16, and has much to figure out about love, social approval, commitment, and becoming a couple.

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman: a woman attempts to make a marriage work within the many rules and constraints of her Hasidic culture.

Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner: Her young love goes terribly wrong when she discovers her new husband is an abuser.

Again in a Heartbeat by Susan Weidener: Tells the whole journey of love, marriage, and then surviving his illness and death when he is struck with cancer.

(This is a complete rewrite of an article published January 4, 2008 called Eight Reasons to Read Memoirs by Jerry Waxler)

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on this blog, click here.

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

If you have a favorite memoir and/or a favorite reason for reading memoirs, leave your suggestions as comments. Thanks!

Bookmark and Share

Interview With The Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

by Jerry Waxler

This is part 2 of my interview with Jon Reiner, author of the memoir “The Man Who Couldn’t Eat.” Click here for Part 1 of the interview. To read my essay about the things I learned from the book, click here.

Jerry Waxler: What can you share about your editing process? For example, some writers have specific rituals for rounds of editing, say devoting one round to improve sentence structure, another to develop characters, a third to clarify dialog, and so on. What rituals or methods do you use for editing?

Jon Reiner: I’m an inveterate, obsessive rewriter. Frankly, the fact may just be that I’m slow, but I labor over the language trying to write perfect sentences. I realize this makes me sound insufferable, but I haven’t been able to settle on another method. I don’t discriminate between exposition and dialogue; they both require repeat attention. I write “by ear,” so I often read the sentences aloud, or listen to them in my head, trying to find the right sounds, rhythms, cadences, combinations, and that process continues through the editing. Even now, I’ve been on a book tour reading passages of The Man Who Couldn’t Eat, and I can’t resist the impulse to improve a phrase, or add a beat, which I have done extemporaneously on occasion from the podium. Henry James was motivated to do the same thing, rewriting his published work before he died (and he was a million laughs). I don’t mean to put myself in James’s league, but I can understand why he felt inspired to continue reworking his prose.

Jerry Waxler: Memoir is supposed to be “a story” based on scenes. Your memoir is almost entirely scenes, and yet occasionally you lift out into micro-essays to support your points. For example you are talking about your cravings and you mention that Richard Burton, a “man urged by unrivaled cravings writes of the pleasure of American short-order cooking.” The notion of Richard Burton’s craving is not actually in the scene. It’s you the protagonist thinking about Richard Burton. That’s interesting. Can you explain the technique? Why is it okay to have a side note about Richard Burton’s cravings in a memoir about your own? This is just one example, I am fishing for an understanding of your attitude toward this stylistic device in general.

Jon Reiner: No story is fully realized without a reference to Richard Burton, the greatest rogue of them all. For a more complete explanation, please see my essay on the same for NPR. So, a side note about Burton is always warranted. With regard to my “technique,” you’re a canny guy, Waxler. Your combination of flattery, critical praise, and artistic interest almost had me. [Me laughing] But do you really think I’d reveal the magician’s secrets and kill the act so soon? Come on, man, I’ve only published one book; I’ve got a family to feed. So, let me say this: I’m opinionated, have been writing in a cave for decades, and the opportunity to share the brilliance of my many “side notes” (The Elimination of Public Drinking Fountains as Indictment of the Privatization of Government, anybody?) with a whole world of readers was catnip to my ego, but also potentially deadly to the story.

What did make sense was to selectively riff on topics that were fellow travelers to the food-essence of the narrative but were seemingly so far afield from rational, linear thought that they dramatized the protagonist’s (my) state of social and psychological dislocation. That dynamic tension between reality and escapism would both alert the reader to my emotional distance from the core of people at the center of the story and, if the written detours were entertaining, draw the reader into my experience and POV. Now that I’ve shared the inner workings of my signature technique with your readers, I can never use it again.

Jerry Waxler: Okay, I’m really digging for dirt here. Let me try another one of my heavily finessed questions. [laughing] Some memoirs end with scenes that put a nice final touch on events. For example, if someone is writing about Coming of Age, the memoir can end when the protagonist enters adulthood. However, there is another type of memoir ending that becomes especially important when the topics are more complex, and don’t lend themselves to clean finishing points. This is the “essay ending.” During the denouement some memoirs end with lessons learned. In my opinion you do it brilliantly, with your passionate wrapping up of the implications of your experience, for yourself, your relationship to the healing professions, and to the nature of love and family. You even suggest some personal and social calls to action. Nicely done! Could you tell me something (anything) about how you decided to end the book this way rather than a more scene-oriented ending?

Jon Reiner: When I understood what event would comprise the end of the story, I also acknowledged that the event marked the one-year anniversary from the inciting incident at the beginning of the story. The narrative would encompass the natural closure of a 12-month calendar, and I felt that it therefore demanded an appropriate measure of closure to the physical, emotional, psychological, personal and dietary issues that had characterized my experience and my relationships with the principals in the story. That choice was a bit of a leap for me. My tendency for endings is towards useful ambiguity, and I didn’t want to abandon that entirely – I do end the book with a final gesture that dramatizes the central conflict I will continue to wrestle with after the book is closed – and I patently rejected the idea of a formal summing up or lessons learned in an epilogue. As it so happened, the scene I chose to end the book organically allowed for the stating of my “closure” in dialogue, portraying final dinner toasts that happened in that country house. Here, I must, again, credit my editor, Trish. My first-draft ending reflected something closer to my interest in useful ambiguity, but Trish encouraged me to find the opportunity in the scene to be more direct and give the reader hooks on which to hang his final experience with me. Of course, she was right.

Jerry Waxler: What are you working on now?

Jon Reiner: I’ve written a number of essays which have been published this fall – on writing, on food, on sports, on real estate, on Occupy Wall Street. I’m working on two books – one fiction, one non-fiction, and they’ve both been in my head for years. The novel is called Uncle Moses in the Promise Land. It’s about refugees, immigration, identity, and the future of this country. The non-fiction is also a personal memoir called Chutes and Ladders. It’s about corporate layoffs, living with unemployment, refugees, identity, and the future of this county. Perhaps a smart publisher will sell them as a boxed set.

Notes
Blog Post: Ten Reasons to Read a Memoir About a Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Pt1

Blog Post: Ten Reasons to Read a Memoir About a Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Pt2

Click here for Jon Reiner’s Home Page

Click here for The Man Who Couldn’t Eat on Amazon

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.

Bookmark and Share

Interview Jon Reiner, The Man Who Couldn’t Eat

Posted on by
3

by Jerry Waxler

When Jon Reiner’s life seemed to be slipping away, his doctors told him that the best chance for survival would be to stop eating. Sent home with an intravenous feeding machine, he attempted to live without food. The morbid premise put me off at first, until I started thinking of the possibilities for insight, as well as marveling at the seemingly endless variety of life experience accessible through memoirs. In my previous posts, I wrote ten reasons why I was glad to have read the book, The Man Who Couldn’t Eat by Jon Reiner. In this two part interview, I ask the author about writing it.

Jerry Waxler: When you were working in your career as a marketing executive, you were pitching gloss, convincing people of the marketing spin rather than the underlying truth. In this memoir, you have gone to the other extreme, conveying your gritty truths. You have done an amazing job of portraying yourself as an edgy, vulnerable, barely surviving victim of your disease.

When did you realize the guy you were writing about was flawed and didn’t behave like a prince or hero? Was it disturbing to write so honestly about these aspects of yourself, showing yourself so crushed, with all this dismal truth?

Jon Reiner:  Have you been talking to my mother? You’ve made an insightful observation contrasting marketing writing and literary writing (and you’re the first interviewer who’s commented on my office career. You have been talking to my mother.) In the former, depicting perfection is the writer’s objective. In the latter, the writer’s exploration of imperfection is essential to compelling storytelling. My literary training and orientation is as a fiction writer, and it was natural for me to apply that method to writing The Man Who Couldn’t Eat. For memoir writing, however, there’s another element in the equation that’s uniquely important — personal honesty, something that was impressed upon me at the start of the writing. My agent, Mitchell Waters, who had worked with other memoirists, advised me that I would need to be brutally, even painfully, honest in the storytelling if I were to write a compelling memoir. I held myself to that in portraying the arcs of the characters over the one-year-period that’s depicted in the book — but it’s a tricky business. Emotionally, writing a memoir was much more difficult than writing fiction.

I had no reluctance to show my character flaws — I’ve been aware of them for a long time, and I believed they would make “Jon Reiner” a fuller, more interesting character in the story. But as I dug into the belly of the book, I was also conscious of the risk of exposing or violating the trust of the people who were closest to me and were required to be in the story. Fiction provides the writer with the devices to draw from reality with less likelihood of causing personal damage, or at least provides the camouflage that enables eventual repair. You can write fiction with greater freedom, unburdened by the conflict inherent in telling a true personal story. The memoir forces you to stand naked. Mining one’s life for material is impossibly tempting, because that material is so available, like it’s been delivered expressly for your use, but I still wanted to have a wife and friends after the book was published. There’s a difference between the examined life and the exposed life on the page. I had my wife, Susan, read the manuscript when it was finished because I knew she would be a better editorial protector of our family than I, since I was drunk with writer’s arrogance. She requested only that I delete one sentence. We’re still married, and I still have friends.

Jerry Waxler: How did you feel about including your wife in this radical honesty? Did you negotiate, discuss, cajole?

Jon Reiner: Though she may have preferred it personally, it would have been impossible to tell this story and exclude Susan’s role as spouse, mother, provider, companion, cook, and emotional counterweight. When I received the offer from Simon & Schuster/Gallery, Susan and I both understood what would be required of me, but, by that point, we had survived the most severe stresses on our marriage, so, the opportunity didn’t seem like it would be our undoing. The decision to include Susan — in terms of narrative dimensionality — was validated by my editor, Tricia Boczkowski, in her comments on the first-draft manuscript. In Trish’s meticulous, Eames-like block print, she penciled the note “MORE SUSAN” on the back-cover page. It was an agreeable note for me to absorb and execute. We’ve been married for 15 years; I have plenty of “More Susan” in me.

Jerry Waxler: Your writing voice is lovely, full of life, spontaneity and depth, and it’s fun to read. How did you evolve your voice?

Jon Reiner:  What can I say? ‘Lovely, full of life, spontaneity and depth, fun to read’ — guilty, as charged. It’s been particularly gratifying to me for the book to receive reviews that have singled out the quality of the writing. I’d been a struggling, unpublished fiction writer for 25 years. The memoir was my chance to get published; however, one of my anxieties was that it would be ghettoized as an “illness” story and evaluated solely on its emotional value with no consideration for the writing. As the Joe Gillis character says about the movies in Sunset Boulevard — and the same could be said about certain types of memoir — “Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.” Like all writers, my voice is a reflection of all the outsize influences that have excited me in literature, drama, poetry, music, popular entertainment, oratory, spoken word, conversation, the works. I grew up with my father telling us wild Baron Munchausen stories around the fire in Maine, and I’ve never forgotten them. You soak all that in, you admire it, you envy it, you copy it, and then you find your way. Some writers are lucky; they discover their voice when they are 25. I took a little longer to find mine.

Jerry Waxler: What do you like to read that reminds you of or inspires the voice you write in?

Jon Reiner:  Actually, I do the opposite. As I mentioned, there are certain writers that have had a terrifically profound influence on me stylistically, from all over the waterfront — Fitzgerald, Delillo, Updike, Chekhov, Williams, Joyce, Capote, Cheever, Ian McEwen, Richard Ford, Woody Allen, Groucho, somebody stop me before I get completely unbearable. I loathe interviews where writers flood the page with their reading — leave it in grad school — and I feel the same way about novels or memoirs that rely too heavily on citing other writers’ works. I want to read your story. If I want to read Proust, I’ll read Proust. Which gets me back to your question. There are a number of favorite writers whose work I deliberately avoided when I was writing The Man Who Couldn’t Eat. I needed to be free from the influences I love.

Jerry Waxler: Can you describe your writing process? For example, do you write a whole draft straight through? Do you write in various parts of your book and then knit them together later? I’m fishing here for some comments about how you work your craft.

Jon Reiner:  I’m the stay-at-home dad of two school-age boys, so their schedule is my schedule. I can work roughly between 9:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., and then perhaps late at night after homework, dinner, lunch making, showers, and clean up are done. There are plenty of days when I have to stop in the middle of a groove at 2:00 p.m., and I really would like to keep going, but those are the rules. I hate writing outlines, so I never start with that. Generally, I begin by writing notes, thoughts, sentences that come to mind, the larger thematic ideas, and then I finally get to it. I try to write the narrative sequentially, but it’s foolish not to follow your instincts, and they don’t need to follow the linear narrative. I didn’t know the ending of The Man Who Couldn’t Eat when I started writing the book. During the course of writing the first draft an event happened during a vacation at our friends’ country house, and in bed that night while I was writing some notes it became emphatically clear that the story’s ending had been presented to me. The ending had found me. It’s an exhilarating feeling when that happens. When I’m actively writing or thinking about a story, my mind opens itself to a more acute sense of observation and interpretation and, for weeks at a time, it can seem that everything around me is communicating some new detail or understanding of the story. It’s more than just “being in your own head.” It’s also being in everyone else’s head.

–To be continued–

Notes
Blog Post: Ten Reasons to Read a Memoir About a Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Pt1

Blog Post: Ten Reasons to Read a Memoir About a Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Pt2

Click here for Jon Reiner’s Home Page

Click here for The Man Who Couldn’t Eat on Amazon

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.

Bookmark and Share

Ten Reasons I Loved Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Part 2

Posted on by
5

By Jerry Waxler

Each memoir I devour reveals another corner of human experience. Take for example the memoir by Jon Reiner, “The Man Who Couldn’t Eat,” about a man suffering from an auto-immune condition that is destroying his intestines. When he stops eating, he learns many lessons about food, perseverance, courage and the loving support of friends. Here is part two of my list of ways the book taught me about turning memories into memoirs.

Extraordinary look at a doctor/patient relationship

Because Jon Reiner has been a patient for so many years, he forms profound relationships with his physicians, sometimes drawing an almost spiritual strength from their care. As a result, he is able to offer an unusually intimate look at the relationship between a patient and doctor.

Write
What unusual slant of life can you share in your memoir? As you read your draft material, identify an aspect of your life which you took for granted, but which readers might find unusual or informative.

Loyalty through thick and thin

One of the powerful strengths of the human condition is the social support that we give each other in times of need. This quality suffuses our lives so subtly that we barely notice it, and then during times of need, the loyalty of friends can become a life-giving force. That is certainly the case for Jon Reiner. His friends and family stood by him, overlooking the ugly side of his desperation. In fact, his wife’s willingness to stay with him through his trials creates one of the best love-in-marriage stories I have read.

Write
What resilient commitment of friends or family can add an inspiring note to your story?

Titles are important

Every book establishes a contract or “hook” with prospective readers. By the time you read the first line, your expectations have already been established by the title, subtitle, and blurb. When I picked up the “Man Who Couldn’t Eat,” I was curious about how that would feel, and what he learned from the experience. I doubt I would have been as interested in a book called “My Life with Crohn’s Disease.” Both titles are factually true, but the one that went to press sets up a compelling expectation that makes me want to read it.

And then I did read it, accompanying Reiner for the period when he was fed intravenously. He saw food as something that happened to other people. After finishing the book, I felt satisfied that it had delivered the impact its title and blurb promised.

Write
As you develop the central idea of your memoir-in-progress, maintain a file of possible titles and blurbs, to help you imagine what a reader will see the first time they glance at the finished work. This file can help you organize your book along lines that will make future readers curious.

Radical honesty of memoir heroes: why am I crying for a jerk?

Jon Reiner is one of the most unnerving, edgy, confused protagonists I have ever cheered for. His behavior is often unsympathetic, self-involved, and yet, despite these flaws, my heart goes out to him. Raunchy, sympathetic protagonists highlight one of the fundamentals of memoir writing: hard living makes good reading.

When I started submitting pieces of my own memoir to critique groups, I realized with rising horror that the protagonist I was describing had been a jerk. That was the first time the thought had occurred to me. Before then, I always wanted to think of myself as the good guy in the room. Writing the memoir showed me that I behaved poorly, just like people I mentally criticize. I’m one of them! Ultimately, I realized that dropping this pretense of perfection is one of the most important reasons for writing the memoir.

If you want readers to stay interested, allow them in to see the real you. Jon Reiner obviously did that. Despite his less-than-noble behavior, I reached the end of the book and felt it was a worthwhile experience. Now, I know things about him that his non-memoir reading friends do not. I have faith in his ability to grow, and by extension he has increased my faith that any of can learn from our own experiences.

—

Other edgy, yet sympathetic memoir protagonists

Debra Gwartney, “Live Through This” – About a mom who helplessly watches, and fumbles as her children disintegrate into street life.
Andre Dubus III, “Townie” About a blue collar street kid who first turned to violence and then to writing in order to find himself.
Janice Erlbaum, “Girl Bomb” About a teenager who ran away from home to live in a shelter in New York City.

Notes
Blog Post: Ten Reasons to Read a Memoir About a Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Part 1
Click here for Jon Reiner’s Home Page

Click here for The Man Who Couldn’t Eat on Amazon


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.

Bookmark and Share

Ten Reasons to Read a Memoir About a Man Who Couldn’t Eat

Posted on by
6

by Jerry Waxler

Jon Reiner’s intestines were riddled with the autoimmune condition called Crohn’s Disease, a cruel punishment for a man who enjoys food as much as he does. His memoir, “The Man Who Couldn’t Eat,” turned out to be a gut-wrenching journey through one of the most yin and yang dilemmas I have read in nonfiction. It is an exquisite interweaving of the intense pleasure of eating along with the intense suffering that results when his body rebels. The book is also about love and marriage, about a man’s responsibility to his family, and about a chronically ill person attempting to find meaning in life. Here are 10 things memoir lovers will appreciate in “The Man Who Couldn’t Eat.”

Intertwining of food, life, and pleasure

Even though I obsessively try to understand what makes people tick, the one huge area that escapes my attention is food. To me, food is a source of constant battle between satisfying craving and avoiding fat. This simplistic attitude has left me starved of thoughts about food’s more sublime social and psychological roles.

Reiner has filled me up. By showing me what it’s like not to eat, Reiner takes me on a meditation through these intricate byways of our relationship with food, serving up a banquet of thoughts about this intensely human experience. Here are just a few of the many aspects of food that Jon Reiner shares with brilliant, artistic writing.

–    The tastes and textures of foods that he loves
–    Food shopping as a way to serve his family
–    Preparing food as a romantic collaboration with his wife
–    Feeding and nurturing his children pulls the whole family together
–    Eating together creates a social bonding among friends

Write
How does food enter into your life during the period you want to write about?

Learn about the emotional burdens of being chronically ill

While Jon Reiner defends himself against a deadly intestinal condition called Crohn’s, an even more important battle rages in his mind. He must somehow stop the disease from sucking all the joy from his family and activities. His effort to maintain dignity becomes a crucial step. When he wins the mental game, his life began to fall into place.

Note
Some branches of the medical community acknowledge the mental aspect of chronic illness. To learn more about this introspective approach, read “Full Catastrophe Living,” in which psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn helps patients learn to live fully despite their physical symptoms.

Write
What situation have you been unable to change, and as a result, had to learn to live with?

An insider’s look at intestinal disease

More than a million people in the United States suffer from inflammatory intestinal disease, and yet, unless you are a healthcare provider, you probably know little about it. Jon Reiner turned the suffering of the illness into a story that the rest of us can appreciate, opening a window into their world.

Write
What sort of specialized condition or situation could your own story show other people? (War, disease, culture, hobby, belief system, family, group, etc.)

Language arts draw me forward

Delicious taste adds to the pleasure of eating, and spicy language adds to the pleasure of reading. Jon Reiner’s word choices, sentences, and metaphors fly beyond the limits of ordinary thought, and make the book fun to read. The richness of language entices me to turn the page, eager to see what comes next.

Story structure: powerful beginning

The book begins with Jon Reiner collapsed, writhing in pain alone in his apartment. The incident starts the whole book moving. His delirium also provides an opportunity to weave in enough backstory to set the stage. The decision about where to start a memoir can be the hardest decision a memoir writer has to make. This memoir’s structure provides a brilliant and well-crafted example.

Story Structure: moving, philosophical ending

Reiner’s whole story is about facing a painful, life threatening, impossible-to-cure disease. Throughout the book, naturally he looks for a cure, but he also attempts to make sense of his situation. Books that ask such large questions often end with a philosophical denouement that sticks with you long after you finish reading. Jon Reiner’s ending is superb and inspiring. He teaches thoughtful lessons and leaves me with the sense that he is a better person than he was at the beginning. When he makes sense of his life, I feel a surge of hope that others can do the same. Good denouements lead to enthusiastic book recommendations.

Notes
Kate Braestrup, in “Here if you Need Me,” provides another profoundly philosophical denouement. In her case, after grieving for her lost husband, she makes observations about the meaning of good and evil.

—

Blog Post: Ten Reasons I Loved Man Who Couldn’t Eat, Part 2
Click here for Jon Reiner’s Home Page

Click here for The Man Who Couldn’t Eat on Amazon


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.

Bookmark and Share

Mom of Troubled Teens Tells Her Side of the Story

Posted on by
Reply

by Jerry Waxler

After Debra Gwartney’s divorce she packed up her two kids and moved a thousand miles to try to get them away from their father. She thought she was “starting over.” The new start however, was the beginning of a nightmare. In “Live Through This,” Gwartney recounts how her two daughters, age 12 and 14, dropped out of school, took drugs and slept in crash houses. With their tattoos, body piercings and heavy black makeup, Mom hardly recognized them. When she tried to reel them in, they withdrew further, until finally they hopped a freight train and moved to a different city.

There were many reasons I was interested in the story. For one thing, in my early twenties, I went through my own extreme rebellion, living in a garage on food stamps and not speaking to my parents for a year. In all the years since, I never tried to make sense of it from my parents’ point of view. Reading about another mom who watched her children fall apart revealed the other side of the story.

A parent suffering through the rebellion of a child is an important, under-reported facet of family life. Most kids rebel to some extent, and despite all the suffering and confusion that parents must feel, most of the social attention to the matter is limited to half measures and shared confusion. “Live Through This” provides a parent’s eye view of an emotional wrenching experience, as these girls hurl back in their mother’s face the life she was trying to build for them.

In addition to letting us see the girl’s bad behavior, Gwartney describes her own, including some glaring flaws in her parenting. She didn’t just break up with the girls’ father. She hated him so much she took the girls a thousand miles away, and throughout the hell of their rebellion she continued to do everything she could to turn them against their father. The story ought to be used as a textbook of how not to behave. And yet, while having screwed up so profoundly, Gwartney simply lets it all hang out.

In the book, she does not try to recruit us to hate her husband. She allows us to make our own decision. Nor does she justify her behavior in  a flurry of self-analysis and defense. She just tells the story. This turns out to be one of the hallmarks of powerful memoir writing. Tell the story and let the reader go for the ride. From that point of view, “Live Through This” is impeccable storytelling.

However, there is an aspect of the storytelling that aspiring memoir writers can learn from. Gwartney played fast and loose with chronology, as if she threw the pages up in the air, and didn’t take the time to assemble them correctly. In the middle of one scene, the narrative morphed into another time frame, and then from there, she might hop backward or forward, so quickly and with so little warning, I often lost track of where I was. She made me work far too hard to figure out where we were in time and space. Through the lurches, I kept reading because I loved  the underlying story. But it would have been far more enjoyable if she had held me hand and led me through the journey with more authority and grace.

Of course, storytelling does allow some breaks in chronological sequence, but to keep the reader immersed in suspension of disbelief, the author must deftly transition from one time frame to another. This usually involves far fewer leaps than there are in “Live Through This.” For example, in “Ten Points” by Bill Strickland, the author guides me through two well-defined time frames. In the present, the author attempted to win a cycling race. Inside himself, another story played out, in which he confronted the demons of his childhood. At all times, Strickland artfully let me know which timeframe I was in, and both stories, the cycling one in the present and the disturbing childhood scenes in the past let me maintain my sense of suspense, a sign of an effective technique.

In addition to well constructed flashbacks, another out-of-sequence technique is the essay-like focus that occasionally crops up in memoirs. For example, in the coming of age story “A Girl Named Zippy” by Haven Kimmel, the book is a chronological account of the author’s childhood. However, it is not strictly in order, and that’s okay because she controls my attention using other devices. For example, in one chapter, she focuses on the shenanigans of a particular friend. It is a gentle, barely discernible shift from story into essay style. Another example is “Seven Wheelchairs,” Gary Presley’s mainly chronological account of coming to terms with life from a seated position. In the chapter about his relationship with wheelchairs, he jumps out of his timeline to talk about the various contraptions he has relied on for mobility. He does this effectively, and I found myself just as engaged in that chapter as I was in the story, without a sense of disruption.

In general, most stories can and in my opinion should unfold in the same sequence they were lived. When the story moves along in that order, I jump on board and go with the flow. However, according to Brian Boyd, in “On the origin of stories” humans have evolved to grasp storylines. The capability is wired into our brains and we’re good at it. My ability to stick to Debra Gwartney’s underlying dramatic tension supplies a good example of this innate strength.

Debra Gwartney’s amazing journey offered me all the benefits that I enjoy from a memoir. And then in a fabulous closing scene, one of the best final lines I’ve read in a memoir, she redeemed all flaws. A good ending makes all the pain of the journey worthwhile. In fact, this is a fundamental notion of storytelling. The story’s tension primes the reader to crave release. Then in that moment when we cross the finish line, if we feel lifted and inspired, the way I did when closing “Live Through This,” we will race to recommend it to our friends.

—

Writing Prompt
Write a scene from your rebellion period when you were trying to step away or differentiate from your parents. Write one scene in which you were in flagrant violation of their rules. Write another in which you tried to explain to yourself or to them why you had to “do this” even though they couldn’t understand.

Click here to visit Debra Gwartney’s home page.

Note about wrapper stories
Bill Strickland’s technique of a story in the present that helps set up a story in the past is what I call a “wrapper story.” Another example is A. M. Homes search for her own genealogical past in “Mistress’s Daughter.” In “Color of Water” James McBride searches for his mother’s history. Such memoirs maintain my attention by artfully flipping back and forth between two stories, maintaining crisp, easy-to-follow dramatic tension throughout. A famous wrapper story was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which starts with sailors on a boat telling a story. The whole book takes place in the body of the story. Then at the end, the sailors come back to recount the way it worked.

Notes about Parent memoirs
Other memoirs that took me down a parent’s road were Robert and Linda Waxler’s “Losing Jonathan” and David Sheff’s “Beautiful Boy.”

Notes about favorite endings
My other two favorite endings in memoirs were Matthew Polly’s, “American Shaolin” and Joan Rivers’, “Enter Talking.”

More memoir writing resources

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.

Bookmark and Share

When is a memoir by a celebrity not a celebrity memoir?

Posted on by
4

By Jerry Waxler

Andre Agassi was one of the greatest tennis players of all time, and he was married to supermodel Brooke Shields. So it would be natural to expect his memoir, “Open,” to be just another celebrity memoir, taking a free ride on his household name. But the book was not a vapid look at the privileged life of a star. Instead the tennis player and his ghost-writer J.R. Moehringer, author of the memoir “Tender Bar,” converted a lifetime into a good story, filled with emotional insight.

The memoir had much in common with a good novel. It developed characters, built suspense and guided me through the protagonist’s emotional experience. The author found the prize all aspiring memoirists seek. Like a quest for the holy grail, he located the organizing principle that allowed him to collect his experiences into a readable whole.

Each of us must describe our own unique path, but after reading more than a hundred memoirs, I find that memoirs are driven by fundamental principles. Like any story, memoirs require  dramatic tension and story arc. But many people, especially those who fear their lives are not important enough to write about, make the mistake of thinking that all the action takes place on the outside, with flashy characters and big scenes.

I find that memorable memoirs use the external events as a shell. The heart of the story takes place on a more interior level. When I read a memoir, I want to gain a deeper understanding of what drove the protagonist through those events. What inner flaws made the journey more difficult and how did the author overcome those inner obstacles?  “Open” is a world-class example of the author’s inner journey, making the book not only a good read but also an instructive one, offering valuable insights into what makes a memoir tick.

This is the first part of a multi-part review of Andre Agassi’s “Open.” In the next entry I will pick apart the elements and suggest ways “Open” can help you write your own memoir.

More memoir writing resources

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.

Bookmark and Share

Use this memoir as a study guide: lessons 1 to 3

Posted on by
4

by Jerry Waxler

In the memoir “Slant of Sun,” a mother notices her child is more withdrawn than other kids. He sits alone for hours arranging toy cars, and furiously resists new situations and people. Jeremy is Beth Kephart’s first child. She is madly in love with him, and thinks everything he does is wonderful, but soon she realizes he needs to move along.

Her journey to help her son enter the game of life abounds with courage, psychological sleuthing, and love. It is a warm coming of age story of two people: Jeremy’s development into childhood, and his mother’s maturity as the shepherd of her son. I learned so much from reading the book that I think it would make an excellent self-study or teacher-led training manual for memoir writers. In this and the following posts, I share 20 lessons I learned from the book, and offer suggestions about how you can apply these ideas to your own memoir.

Truth in memoirs, Part 1. Sincere voice

One of the reasons I dove so enthusiastically into Slant of Sun is because of Beth Kephart’s voice. All the components of her written voice, her choice of words, phrases, and sentences, make me feel like I’ve known her for years. If my best friend told me a story, I wouldn’t put up any walls of doubt. Nor would I resist this author’s story. Her ease and spontaneity draws me into her world.

Writing Prompt
An authentic, sincere voice is an important goal for any memoir writer. But voice is a subtle quality without specific rules. Here’s one exercise: write an anecdote as if you were telling a best friend. Or call a friend, and turn on the recorder while you tell them your anecdote. Then look for phrases in your speech that might add a sense of intimacy to the written version. Another exercise is to write the same anecdote in your journal as if it was only for you. Look for intimacies in your private version that might make the public version more personal and believable.

Truth in Memoirs Part 2: Messy Emotions and Self Reflection

Another way memoirs convince us of their authenticity is through a sort of organic messiness. When Beth Kephart shares her worries, confusions, thoughts and daydreams, she takes me deeper into her psyche than I would expect in a fictional character. Fictional characters are sometimes wonderful and deep, but I know they only go as far as the author’s imagination. Real characters go on and on, into the depth and breadth of real life. I want the memoir to let me see the lack of boundaries, to show me the infinitude of individuality. The entire book is one big example of this principle. Here are a couple of passages that show her humanity, sharing her motherly obsession about her son’s thinking process.

“when Jeremy stares at length at the pictures in books, at the fire trucks and, increasingly, at the cars on the floor, at the mix of light radiating in through the window, [I want to believe] it’s poetry he’s thinking about. Something too resplendent to share.” [Pg 51]

“Without an obsession he’s forlorn and empty. He gets tangled in his tasks at home. He forgets to look us in the eye. It doesn’t occur to him to start a conversation. He gives fewer lectures. He’s less engaged in what we’re saying.” [Pg 111]

Writing Prompt
Instead of trying to polish your emotions, reveal their rough edges. Consider times when you worried without basis, or did something that made you feel flaky. Share these errors with your readers. The imperfection or spontaneity of your inner reality helps readers relate to you. Counter-intuitive though it may be, your flaws can give your character more authority, rather than less.

Some astonishingly vivid, unique visual images,

Mother and son go shopping for a hat and Jeremy selects a big green one. He loves it so much he demands she buy it. Then he refuses to take it off. People comment on how inappropriate it looks. Someone points to the hat and makes a gesture pulling a knife across the throat indicating “kill it.” On the cover of the book, there is even a wonderful photo of a boy wearing a bright green hat. Another beautiful visual object in the book was a hand crafted wooden car. I can see its “buttery surfaces” in the palm of the kind man who made it for Jeremy.

Writing Prompt
Describe a particular object that had meaning for you.

In following blog posts I will continue the list of lessons that I drew from Slant of Sun and suggestions for you, as well.

Links
Visit Beth Kephart’s Blog
Amazon page for “A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage” by Beth Kephart

Here are links to all the parts of my multi-part review of “Slant of Sun” by Beth Kephart and an interview with the author:

Use this memoir as a study guide: lessons 1 to 3

Lessons 4-5 from Beth Kephart’s Memoir, Slant of Sun

Four More Writing Lessons from Reading a Memoir

Memoir Lessons: Mysteries of emerging consciousness

Memoir Lessons: Moms, Quirks, Choices

Lessons from Kephart: Labels, Definitions, Language

Memoir Lessons: Buddies, Endings, and Beyond

Interview with Beth Kephart

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.

Bookmark and Share

Healing With Words, Hers and Yours

Posted on by
1

by Jerry Waxler

Breast cancer occurs with breath-taking frequency. It will strike one in eight American women in their lifetime, making it a present danger for every woman. To understand more about how that feels, I read Diana Raab’s memoir “Healing With Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey.” She offers the story of her own journey, detailing the emotional and technical challenges of being diagnosed with cancer, undergoing treatment, and surviving.

Cancer  is a strange way to face death, every bit as deadly as a bullet, but without the suddenness. When it strikes, we look back and realize with horror it has been building under the surface. After the diagnosis, cancer patients must continue with ordinary life, getting through each day with dignity, while death lurks in the wings. And even after the cancer has been eradicated, it is never really final, leaving its mark and requiring ongoing courage.

If breast cancer were to surface in a woman in my life, before now I would have been able to offer general compassion. Now Diana Raab has helped me tune in to the details of the situation. From the perspective of a person who has been diagnosed with the disease, she shows me the demoralizing effects, and also the courage, the community support, and the medical procedures that sustained her. (* see note)

For those readers who must cope with cancer, Raab offers some of the wisdom that helped her survive emotionally. Her most important tool, the one she loves and that has contributed to the title of the book, is her belief in the healing power of writing.

Throughout her illness, Raab wrote in her journal regularly, tapping into her heart and mind and pouring words on to the page. Much later, she decided to share her experience with readers, offering us a chance to grow along with her, witnessing her danger and her strength. For readers who are coping with cancer themselves, she includes writing prompts at the end of each chapter. The blank pages silently invite your words, allowing you to transcend the isolation and wordlessness of cancer.

Once you have written in your journal, you may desire to publish your story or you may not. Many aspiring memoir writers ask “why should I write my story?” While there are many reasons to consider, one factor to take into account is the value your story might have for other people. Consider the support  that Raab has shared with her readers, and then consider offering your own.

In an interview I will post tomorrow, Diana Raab shares more about writing and sharing this aspect of her life.

Diana Raab’s website ||| Diana Raab’s Blog

Note
Diana Raab believes so deeply in the value of journaling, she edited an entire book on the subject. ” Writers and their Notebooks” contains essays by a number of writers who share their habit of writing in a journal. The essays describe a wide variety of uses for keeping a journal, including self-development, finding a better writing voice, and developing material for publishable pieces. I highly recommend this book for every writer.

(*) Another excellent memoir about a woman who had to traverse these dangerous and troubling experiences was Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s book “Sky Begins at your Feet.” See my interview with Caryn by clicking here.

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.

Bookmark and Share

Memoirs Show Two Sides of the Islamic Revolution

Posted on by
2

by Jerry Waxler

I have always loved escaping into a good book. In my younger years, I escaped into the invented world of fiction. Nowadays, I escape into the lives of real people, through whose eyes I see a different view of my own world. Two memoirs I read within the same month provide a perfect example of this educational benefit. Ed Husain’s “The Islamist” took me inside the Islamist movement in Britain, and Nazara Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran” showed life in Iran under Islamist rule. The knowledge I learned in one book deepened my understanding of the other, amplifying the value of each.

Ed Husain, “The Islamist”

Ed Husain was a teenager in Great Britain in the early 1990s. His parents and most of his neighbors were immigrants from Bangladesh. In fact, he didn’t have any white friends. His family’s spiritual approach to the Muslim religion cultivated a prayerful, almost mystical atmosphere in his home life. Then, as a teenager, Husain fell in with a crowd of boys from the Indian sub-continent who felt prayer was obsolete. Their goal was to overthrow Westernized governments and create the kind of world God intended, one all-encompassing Islamic state. At first, Husain’s loyalty was torn between his parents and his new friends. Gradually he aligned with his activist peers, fighting against Western values such as freedom and democracy.

The Islamists didn’t want their anti-Western message to be the dominant one. They wanted it to be the only one. When other activities were scheduled on campus, Husain and his friends stayed up late into the night creating plans to disrupt the competing event. They agreed in advance on the lies they would tell to make themselves look innocent and divert attention from their predatory practices. Whenever pressed on their unethical or manipulative behavior, they quickly shifted the conversation to global politics, claiming all their actions were caused by colonialism. I was especially intrigued by their coaching to “speak sharply,” to create an aura of fury and righteousness around their words. Between their angry tone, their rehearsed lies, and their instant shift to global politics, they controlled, and won, debates among the young Muslims on campus who were struggling to find their own path.

Azar Nafisi, “Reading Lolita in Tehran”

After reading about Ed Husain’s firebrand belief that Islamic law should take over the world, I read a memoir by Azar Nafisi, an Iranian girl who grew up under the secular government of Shah Pahlavi. The Shah promoted Western culture and violently suppressed opposing Muslim groups, earning a reputation as a ruthless tyrant in some circles and a forward-looking leader in others.

Taking advantage of the respect afforded to women in Iranian society, Nafisi attended college in the United States to study English Literature. Like many other intellectuals in the 1970s, she took part in the anti-U.S. demonstrations that pervaded campuses in the wake of the Vietnam war. She rallied against Western culture and especially agitated for the removal of Shah Pahlavi who was denounced as a “pawn of the West.” In a classic case of “be careful what you wish for,” within a few years, her revolutionary dream came true. Shortly after she returned to Iran in 1979, the Shah was deposed and Ayatollah Khomeini took over, bringing into power an Islamist government similar to the one Ed Husain would be advocating 15 years later.

Iran’s fundamentalist rulers quickly squeezed out so-called “decadent elements.” Reminiscent of the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, bands of armed young men patrolled the streets looking for women who dared walk with an unrelated man, who had a wisp of hair showing from beneath her veil, or who possessed cosmetics in her handbag. Women were flogged, imprisoned, and executed for such crimes. Nafisi lost her teaching position for refusing to wear the veil.

Two sides of the same page

The two books cover the Islamist movement from two entirely different perspectives and in two vastly different styles. Husain’s journey from boy to man leads him to street corners where edgy, pressured boys hand out fliers and engage in aggressive rhetoric. Later, after Husain distances himself from the movement, he begins a historical investigation trying to tease apart these two threads of his religion. In ancient writings, he discovers the religion of his father, the one that encourages an introspective, worshipful relationship to God. Husain also tracks the political aspect of the religion, and shows how it emerged in the twentieth century through the inflammatory writings of a few men who have had an increasing influence, especially on young Muslims in recent decades. While these men claim ancient authority, Husain finds their thinking to be more closely aligned to Karl Marx than to the Koran.

Nafisi is driven by ideas, too, but of a very different variety. She seeks her wisdom in English Literature. On her tongue, passages from Vladimir Nabokov and F. Scott Fitzgerald come alive, providing a rich poetic subtext to her own narrative. Her compatriots are the young women who have been forced by the Islamist Revolution to hide their femininity and enter the university through a separate door so they can be searched for cosmetics. When her girls come to a private literature class held in her home, they remove their scarves and Nafisi sensually describes their locks of hair. She bites into pastry, pours coffee over ice cream, and, above all, revels in the delicious pleasures of her beloved literature. Whereas Husain’s investigation is done with the protection of the democratic freedoms of Great Britain, Nafisi’s drama plays out in a police state, where students are seized and held in secret and summarily executed in the night because they showed signs of “Western decadence.”

The Muslim religion doesn’t need to be this way

In college, when Husain saw a boy murdered, he realized his terrible mistake. He started to suspect Islamism wasn’t promoting religion after all, but was merely using religious ideas to promote a political agenda. Trying to clarify these conflicting ideas, he moved to the Middle East to learn Arabic so he could read the Koran in its original language. In the Prophet’s teachings, he found an introspective, mystical religion which teaches a personal relationship with God and respect for people, including women and non-Muslims. Based on his findings, Husain returned to the prayerful beliefs of his parents. Through his writings, public appearances, and participation in the British government, he promotes democratic ideals, and raises awareness of the dangers of this divisive movement.

Two books weave a fascinating story

Before I read these books, I only knew about Islamism and life inside Iran from news bites and articles. After accompanying each author through years of personal, in-depth experience, I understand so much more. On one end of this matched set, I saw the Islamist ideas Ed Husain found so invigorating and urgent. I felt his pulse quicken as he rose to the challenge of dominating the world. On the other end, I saw how these very ideas were forged by the men of Iran into bars that imprisoned Azar Nafisi and her students, and stole their freedom and dignity.

The End

Writing Prompt
If you have been part of a political or a religious movement, your memories might seem insignificant, as if you were swept up in something of which you were a tiny part. But these events may have affected millions of people. Your feelings and observations as a believer and participant could offer a valuable contribution to social discussion. List or journal a few notes about the forces that influenced your life and look for scenes that would portray these experiences in your memoir.

Note
For another book that sheds light on the difference between the Muslim faith and the Islamist movement, read Greg Mortenson’s memoir, Three Cups of Tea. Click here for my essay on that powerful story.
“Find meaning through service” or “Making peace with the peasants of Pakistan”

Book Links
The Islamist, Why I became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left by Ed Husain

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Note
As Husain was growing up to become a young man, he was swept up in a political movement that preached not only the domination of the world, but also the domination of women. This reminds me of another memoir I read, a year ago. Frank Schaeffer, on his way through adolescence, also experienced an exploding interest in ideas that place women in a subservient position. Schaeffer, author of “Crazy for God” grew up in a spiritually oriented Christian commune in Switzerland in the 1960s. As he entered adulthood, his focus shifted from God to women’s reproductive systems. Using his father’s extensive political connections, Schaeffer brought his intense interest in abortion into the heart of U.S. politics, where they took root in the religious right. Maybe Freud was right. Maybe it is all about sex.

See my article about Frank Schaeffer’s memoir by clicking here: One man’s battle with sexuality changed 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.

Bookmark and Share