Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

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Dani Shapiro’s memoir “Slow Motion” is a study in desire. When she enters Sarah Lawrence, one of the top liberal arts schools in the U.S., she is young, beautiful, and rich. Then, a man 20 years older swoops into her life, picks her up in his limousine and showers her with flowers. At first she is disgusted. Then she gives in, and starts taking more and more of his gifts. The problem is he’s the step-dad of her best friend, he’s married, and he’s a liar. Every time he pulls another creepy stunt, I want to scream, “Run!”

I’ve heard plenty of real-life stories of people’s lives being destroyed by love affairs and addiction. Now this book puts me inside the head of someone choosing a self-destructive track, and I find her desires almost incomprehensible. How can a person want something that is going to hurt them? This book gives me a chance to peer into one such person’s path. If I can understand how desire works for Dani Shapiro, I hope to learn more about desire in other memoirs, and in my own life.

For more insight, I turn to one of the great explainers of human nature, the psychologist Abraham Maslow. In the 1940’s, Maslow wanted to push psychology beyond illness, so he studied highly motivated, challenged, and satisfied people. Based on his research, he developed an explanation known as Maslow’s Hierarchy. This famous model says that people satisfy basic needs first and then move up to more sublime ones. I tried to apply the hierarchy to Dani Shapiro’s memoir.

Dani Shapiro on food and drink.
At the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy are the biological needs. You would think hunger and thirst would be the first things that a person with money would satisfy. But when you look closer, you see how Dani distorts these needs. She accompanies her lover to the finest restaurants, orders any food she wants, and then either doesn’t eat it, or eats it and goes to the bathroom to throw it up. She is starving.

Similarly Shapiro’s relationship with drink is far more complex than simply satisfying a biological need. In one restaurant, Lenny, her lover, is disappointed that they don’t stock vintage wine from 1959, so he reluctantly settles for 1961. As he raises his glass, he says to Dani, “This wine is older than you are.” He is using drink as a tool of power and sexuality. As she becomes more dependent on alcohol, she drinks to fog her mind. Over and over, her biological needs are distorted by power and self-destruction.

Dani Shapiro on safety.
After the biological needs are met, Maslow says we try to achieve safety. Dani perverts this need, too. Even though she doesn’t see it, the reader can see that she is consciously moving out of safety and into danger.

Dani Shapiro on social needs.
The next rung up the ladder are social needs, such as friendship, intimacy, and family. Dani’s family, many of them highly successful, ought to be a major source of support. Except for the fact that they hate each other so venomously they had no room in their hearts for Dani. When she seeks satisfaction from her lover, he drains her like a vampire, sucking so much of her energy she doesn’t even have friends. What’s a reader to do? I want her to get this guy out of her life. And yet if she removes him, she might fall for another shallow, powerful man. To satisfy me, she must gain a clearer understanding of her own social needs.

During high school, instead of pursuing drama or writing, her extra-curricular activity is cheer leading. During college she models, seeking to be paid for her beauty. Her goal is to maximize the amount of praise and power she can earn from her looks. From this point of view, her affair with Lenny seems ideal. He shower her with wealth, his perfect trophy mistress. Unfortunately, Dani’s approach to social needs keeps her trapped in the bottom three rungs.

Dani Shapiro on esteem and actualization.
According to Maslow, once the basics are taken care of, people look for esteem, from others as well as from themselves. At the pinnacle are expressions of creativity, excellence, service, and sacrifice. I want Dani to reach the top two rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy, where life starts getting really interesting. These goals turn out to be Dani Shapiro’s saving grace.

When she first enters Sarah Lawrence as a young woman right out of high school, her path seems assured. Then she drops out, throwing away an opportunity. After much suffering, she stops her downward spiral, by rejecting her parasitic lover and overcoming her substance addictions. Ready to reclaim her life, she makes a call to the dean at Sarah Lawrence. “I want to come back.”

In the end, this desire for creative expression sets her back on track. She finds her strength, enters a community of supportive students and teachers, and moves towards safety, social rewards, and esteem. Her memoir provides a beautiful example that despite the many twists and turns of life the desire to create a story leads towards the triumph of the human spirit.

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Writing Prompts:
Look for an experience that will help you understand each of Maslow’s five levels in your life. As you look at these needs in your life, look for anecdotes that will illustrate them:

Did you ever starve, or ever look at food as the enemy?

Did you ever feel undermined by your lack of safety, or so safe you felt compelled to find adventure?

Did you ever feel so lonely you reached out to people you would typically avoid, or so glutted with people you wanted to escape?

List some of the ways you have searched for esteem. Write a paragraph or story about how each one succeeded or failed.

What was the most sublime goal you ever reached for? What is the most sublime goal you are reaching for now?

For further work along these lines, look for the intertwining of desires. For example, Dani wanted love, so she starved herself to look thin. She wanted esteem, so she reached towards a guy who treated her like dirt. A high school grad who wants esteem might sign up for the military, putting himself in harm’s way in order to achieve a higher goal. After college, to “find myself” I pushed away from my family, diminishing my social network.

Notes:
Here’s a Wikipedia article about Maslow’s Hierarchy if you would like to know more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs

Here is a well maintained commercial site which explains Abraham Maslow’s ideas in order to promote management and organizational strategies.
http://www.abraham-maslow.com/m_motivation/Hierarchy_of_Needs.asp

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by Jerry Waxler

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When I was in college in 1968, I grew long hair as a protest against my parents’ generation. The old ways obviously hadn’t worked, so it was up to me to unravel everything I knew and start over. I didn’t realize that at the same time, on the other side of the world, a billion Chinese people were trying to do the same thing. Repeating slogans like “Smash the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas,” Chairman Mao had stirred up a frenzy against the wisdom of the past. Since education was traditionally held in high regard, smashing the “olds” included shutting down schools, mocking and denouncing teachers, and shipping students into the country to work in fields. This social movement was known as the Cultural Revolution.

Xujun Eberlein was an educated girl, living in a small city in China during that period. Her father was the president of an educational institute and her mother was a school principal so the Cultural Revolution wreaked havoc on their family. Both parents lost their jobs, her beloved older sister died, and Xujun was taken from home and inserted into a rural village to live and work with peasants. After the fanaticism waned, she returned home, then moved to the U.S. and earned a doctorate from one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the past kept calling to her, and in the fall of 2001, she began to write stories about growing up. After several years honing her English writing skills, she started winning awards and placing pieces in competitive literary magazines. Recently she published a book of short stories “Apologies Forthcoming” based on her experience.

When I first picked up Xujun Eberlein’s book of fiction, I hoped it would offer me deeper understanding of the task of turning life into story. My hope was richly rewarded. Like any good story, her tales lifted me out my own world and offered me a glimpse of hers. I read about a little girl seeing her father on his knees on a stage, being forced to denounce himself in front of his community. In another story, a young woman tried to adjust to her new life of poverty in a rural community. In still another, the protagonist reached out to men for friendship, and for the first time confronted the complexities of sexuality. In every story I felt two things: the pleasure of losing myself, and a sense that I was witnessing a period of history through the eyes of someone who was there.

Surprisingly, my suspension of disbelief gave me the freedom to enter that world without picking it apart for historical accuracy. To learn more lessons about this connection between her stories and her history, I read one of Xujun’s memoir essays, available online in the literary magazine, The Walrus. You can read it here. It’s a wonderful and tragic story, and another window into her heart and into those times.

Like the Rosetta Stone, I tried comparing these two different versions of the same events. My comparison of Xujun’s multi-dimensional attempts to tell the story of her life gave me some of the clearest understandings I’ve had so far about how story and memoir intertwine.

While fiction can freely break loose from actual historical fact, the story must give the reader an emotionally authentic compelling experience. One of the best ways fiction writers can tap into such authentic emotions is by drawing on the realities of the world around them, and especially the world they have experienced themselves.

On the other hand, nonfiction writers must adhere to historical facts. Even though this seems to offer fewer choices, a nonfiction writer has an almost unlimited supply of raw material contained within tens of thousands of days of memories. To transform these historical facts into an engaging story we must draw on fiction techniques, such as pacing, language arts, suspense, and surprise.

As I ponder these observations, I wonder what lessons I can learn from Xujun herself. She has poured enormous amounts of time and energy in the pursuit of good stories, so I asked Xujun to discuss some of her own experiences as a writer, and what it has been like to return to an earlier time, to awaken and review her memories.

In my next blog entry, I will publish the first part of the interview I conducted with her.

—

Notes:

For more details about Xujun’s life and writing, including more information about her book, awards, and other publications, see her website. http://www.xujuneberlein.com.

She also blogs about her observations about life in the United States, about China, and about life in general. http://www.insideoutchina.com

To read more interviews with fiction writers about the relationship between fiction and life see:
Interview with Naomi Gal
Interview with Jonathan Maberry

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by Jerry Waxler

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When I was 17, my brother was in medical school and I intended to follow. I was getting A’s in advanced placement math and science, and after school I worked part-time in a research lab in one of the top medical schools in the country. Six years later, Ed had earned his credentials as a cardiologist, while I was living in a leaky garage, collecting food stamps, and going weeks without talking to anyone. Transforming from child to adult was horrifically difficult for me, and for a couple of desperate years, I teetered on the brink of failing altogether.

For most of my life, I buried these memories. First I was busy getting myself back together. Then, looking back towards what “might have been” seemed too disappointing to dwell on. But forgetting the past turns out to be a temporary state. As I try to explain my journey through life, those bad decisions and lost dreams keep coming back, fragmented, unkind, and confusing. Since I want to reveal an authentic tale of who I am, I might as well gather the broken bits of the past and figure out how to portray them. By shaping them into a tale that is interesting to others, I can share parts of myself that have been hidden, and learn more about myself in the process.

To learn how to tell a story of lost dreams, I turn once again to the vast repository of published memoirs. I’ve just finished reading three memoirs and a book of short stories by people who have tackled the daunting task of writing about a life that went down as they tried to grow up. Like me, they came close to ruination. Their tales from the brink show that even in the worst of times, there are glimpses into the richness and complexity of the human condition. By exhuming the remains, these storytellers revealed glimpses of wisdom and hope, buried along with the regrets.

“Slow Motion, a memoir of a life rescued through tragedy” by Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro at 18 had three markers of the top echelons of society: wealthy parents, beauty, and entry into a top college. By the time she was 20 she had dropped out of school to model and act. Instead of being discovered by a talent scout, she was recruited for a different kind of talent, becoming the kept woman of a married man, a lawyer who made her feel special by picking her up in limousines, supplying her with drugs, alcohol, and jewelry, and flying her around the world to keep himself entertained. Drinking and drugging heavily, she was falling rapidly into despair when her parents’ catastrophic car accident changed her life. Her parents’ suffering woke her out of her self-involved stupor and she began to get her life back on track.

“Native State” by Tony Cohan
Tony Cohan’s father, Phil, was a radio producer in the 1940’s who worked with stars like Jimmy Durante and Frank Sinatra, so big they were still household names a half a century later. So when Cohan, the son, started playing drums as a teenager, it was easy for him to rise into the company of movers and shakers. But unlike his father, who reveled in popular music, Cohan was drawn to the darker world of drugs, jazz, and the beat down ideas of the beat generation who dressed themselves in cynicism to cloak their despair. His fascination with that movement opened a trap door into degradation, homelessness, and addiction. Eventually his passion for writing helped him switch to a more sustainable approach, allowing him to clamber back to solid footing.

“A Temporary Sort of Peace” by Jim McGarrah
When Jim McGarrah was a teenager, he was a baseball player, lined up for an athletic scholarship. After his girl friend dumped him, McGarrah rebelled against the college route his family expected him to follow. Defying his father’s vehement protests, he enlisted, knowing he would be sent to Vietnam. He thought his decision would make a man out of him, bring glory, defend his country, and all the other positive reasons young soldiers go to war. Within a few months of his arrival he began to unravel. All those good intentions could not protect him from war’s massive assault on his sanity. By the time he got back to the states, he was a wreck, suffering from PTSD, so now to achieve a satisfactory life meant overcoming a profound psychological injury, perhaps a topic for another memoir.

“Apologies Forthcoming” by Xujun Eberlein
If things go wrong while growing up, we often look back and blame ourselves. But some lives go off course due to forces outside our control. Take for example, Xujun Eberlein, who grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Education was a central element of her ambition. When Chinese society turned against education, her parents were denounced, and schools closed. Armed teenagers with essentially identical ideas fought each other with deadly force, simply to prove their superior idealism, tearing apart Xujun’s life along with millions of others. She has written about her experiences in a book of fiction short stories, called “Apologies Forthcoming,” and is currently working on a memoir.

In these examples, each author spent thousands of hours organizing their experience into a readable tale. The product of that effort is a book, not just a work that sits silently on a shelf, but one that speaks to me. While I strive to shape my own life into a story, I consider their lives. They experienced despair and returned. Then after some period of gestation, they strive to understand what happened, to explain it, and above all to share it. And through the magic of story writing and story reading, the authors and I have entered into an intimate relationship.

In a future essay, I’ll draw from these stories cautionary observations about the risks of growing up. By understanding the pitfalls of youth, we can learn more not only about telling our own hopes, but also gain insights into the journey children in every generation travel on their way to becoming adults.

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by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

At the beginning of the memoir, “Here If You Need Me,” Kate Braestrup takes us into her home, sharing her romantic, mutually respectful marriage to a state trooper, their love for their children, and their plans for the future. It seems like an ideal relationship. And then bam! In an instant, her partnership is torn asunder by an auto accident. The cereal bowl from which Drew had eaten an hour earlier sits in the sink while his body lies across the front seat of his police cruiser, the life crushed out of it by a broadside collision.

Now that Drew is dead, Braestrup continues to let us into her heart, this time to cry with her, while she learns the ancient lessons of grief. In order to raise her young children and get her life back on track, she enrolls in school to become a minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church. After graduating, she works as a chaplain for the State Game Warden Service in Maine. Traipsing around the countryside, she comforts loved ones while the wardens searched for lost children, potential suicides, and accident victims. If the search ends with a death, she offers the survivors condolences, embraces, and support.

On her journey from grief back into full connection with the living, Braestrup sets her sights beyond her personal experience. Through her study to be a minister and her work with the public, she raises huge questions, and then through the magic of storytelling makes me feel that together we can understand it all. As a result, this memoir turns out to be one of the most intelligent, loving, and compassionate books about life and death that I have ever read. It is one of those rare books I feel pulled to read again, and in fact, it was only after my third time that I began to tease it apart to see how such a simple story could carry me so far.

Her job with the game wardens takes her through the woods and across streams. With them she flies through the air, drives across ice, awaits the recovery of swimmers who had fallen 70 feet over a waterfall, stands in frigid silence as divers search for a body beneath the solid surface of a river, holds a mother’s hand as the wardens search the woods for a missing child. Through Braestrup’s eyes, nature becomes a backdrop for life, and also a backdrop for death. A tree grows through the skeleton of a dead body. A bear plays with a skull as if it’s a toy. After the death of her husband, Kate Braestrup dresses his corpse with her own hands, certainly the most affection directed towards a dead body that I have ever considered. Her relationship to his earthly remains expands my notion of death, by embedding it lovingly within the natural order.

Despite her religious training, or perhaps because of it, she treats people with equal tenderness no matter what their affiliation, or even if they have no interest in religion at all. To her, religion is simply one of the ways humans have chosen to explain love. Take for example this incident in which she consoles the brother of a woman who killed herself. The brother asks Braestrup if she thinks a suicide victim can receive a Christian burial. Here’s what she says.

“The game wardens have been walking in the rain all day, walking through the woods in the freezing rain trying to find your sister. They would have walked all day tomorrow, walked in the cold rain the rest of the week, searching for Betsy, so they could bring her home to you. And if there is one thing I am sure of, one thing I am very, very sure of, Dan, it is that God is not less kind, less committed, or less merciful than a Maine game warden.”

At the center of the book lies the great theological question, “How can an all powerful compassionate God allow evil in the world?” Attempting to answer this question is known as “theodicy” and whether we know it has a name or not, many of us grapple with it. If we conclude that suffering proves God cannot exist, we cut ourselves off from a valuable source of hope. For example, after my brother died of cancer, my dad landed on the “God can’t exist” side of theodicy. His choice drained his vitality. My mother responded to Ed’s death by extending her search for truth, a decision that allowed her to become an increasingly generous and spiritual person.

Braestrup steers through the battle of good and evil with exquisite finesse and dignity and comes up with an inspirational message. After a particularly horrifying crime was committed in the woods of Maine, she quotes the devil who threatens all goodness by claiming his forces are legion. In the aftermath of that crime, the community, whose hearts had been broken, stepped forward to care for those who suffered. Through Braestrup’s eyes, I feel this outpouring, and I agree with her that the multitudes of people are basically good. After making this case she throws it back in the devil’s face, asserting that he’s wrong about which side has the real advantage. “No,” she says. “We are legion.”

Guided by her images and explanations, the theodicy problem collapses into a tribute to love. From a psychological standpoint, I suppose grieving might mean simply recovering poise. Her story shifts the focus and shows how grief can extend what it means to be human. In fact, I wonder if this is the central challenge of grieving, to return from the loss that rips apart your soul, while accepting the presence of hope and goodness in the universe.

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Writing Prompt: Consider the things, people, or opportunities you have lost. Write a story about that loss, but instead of letting the story lead you towards your pain, start from where it hurts, and move forward from there. Describe how you regained sanity, confidence, and the other things you have needed in order to maintain your healthy connection with life. Take advantage of tips from the Hero’s Journey, and focus on the allies and amulets that helped you proceed on your quest.

Note: Joan Didion was another author who shared her grief. In “A Year of Magical Thinking” she describes with exquisite insight her relationship with the person who is no longer here, and how her mind works and doesn’t work during the year following her tragic loss.

For a video interview of Kate Braestrup about her book, visit this link.

by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

When I first saw John Robison’s memoir, “Look me in the eye” I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, the subtitle “My Life with Asperger’s” provided a clue about the book’s topic. On the other hand, I was afraid that the label would narrow the scope of the story to just one dimension. I eventually decided to read the book, and after finishing it I realize how far off the mark my first impressions were. John Robison uses the label Asperger’s not to shrink his worldview but to expand it. And even better, his label has helped me understand some things about myself.

What is Asperger’s?
People with Asperger’s Syndrome are awkward in their relationships to people, and often are physically clumsy as well. The description of someone with this “disorder” sounds remarkably similar to me and my fellow nerds in the honors class at Central High School, the all-academic public school I attended in Philadelphia. We preferred books over people, and had little interest in sports. We had plenty to do within our own mind. Everything else came second, if at all. While many people diagnosed with Asperger’s suffer symptoms far more severe than these, I was able to relate personally to the comparatively mild symptoms described in Robison’s memoir.

Permission to be “dull and introspective”
I went to camp in the mountains of Maryland, one month each summer between the ages of 9 and 11. I remember lying on the scratchy wool blanket on my hard bunk. I feel the bang and bend as I pounded a shiny copper sheet into a wooden mold, forming a nubbly metal ashtray. I taste my first corn fritters swimming in maple syrup in a noisy mess hall. But I don’t remember one single other person, child or adult, from those three months. Except for a few instances, I don’t even clearly remember growing up with my brother and sister. I had figured out how to survive in my own world, preferring reading over sports or other games and on weekends working in my dad’s drugstore. One of the most emotional moments I remember from my high school years happened when I walked into a bookstore and I felt overwhelmed by grief that there were too many books for me to ever read. I actually started to cry.

My lack of awareness of other children makes my descriptions of those years sound like I was alone. How will I ever be able to explain my life, when so much of it was spent inside my own mind? Until I read John Robison’s book, I assumed I had to hide my excessive introspection, ignore my high tech jobs and love for math, and the fact that it took until I was 35 to relate to a woman well enough to form a loving relationship. I thought to be worth reading, I had to restrict my memoir to “normal” behaviors, and had to transform my experience into picturesque portrayals like other authors I admire.

Instead of hating my condition or trying to hide it, I can now look at it more appropriately. People in my “condition” behave this way normally! The facts are the same but now, armed with Robison’s insights, I am able to look more closely at a wider variety of memories, and explore how to find the dramatic tension in the person I really was, rather than trying to force myself to sound like someone I wanted to be.

Robison even makes the case that looking inward is a valuable skill. After all, engineers, scientists, and writers must go inside their mind to do their work. And everyone benefits from carefully weighing options in order to make the most effective decisions. After reading “Look Me in the Eye” I realize there is room in the world for a variety of memoirs, and that someone with a mind like mine can write an acceptable, even fascinating story about their lives.

He turned coping with his own flaws into an opportunity to serve others
Robison started in life feeling limited and confused. Through this journey, he has discovered many things about himself. First he applied his mind logically to create excellent pranks. Then these same mental attributes helped create special effects for the rock and roll band, KISS. Then he used his mental abilities to solve high-tech problems in game manufacturing company. Next, he added people to the mix by starting an auto repair shop. Learning to deal with customers was his new hurdle. Look at how the protagonist of Robison’s memoir evolved through the story. By the end of this journey he understood so much more about life than when he started.

When I look for the net result of my life, the “reason I am here,” a question that has haunted me since I was 20, I believe that John Robison’s book offers me an intriguing template. I too lived decade after decade, trying to understand who I was and how to live more wisely. Perhaps somewhere in that long journey, I can find experience that could help others. At least that is my dream.

Reaching my sixtieth birthday could look suspiciously like I’m approaching The End. Is this truly time to close the book? I don’t feel finished. Perhaps the opportunity to pass along my accumulated experience provides the topic for the next chapter. When I first saw John Robison’s book, I would never have expected it to provide a model for my future, but there it is. John Robison’s life, or more accurately, his memoir about his life, has landed squarely in the center of my dream. Reach the “end” of a lifelong journey, look back across the landscape and find the wisdom contained in it. Then begin the new journey of sharing that knowledge with others.

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Writing Prompt: Pick out some theme or period in your life that you think might make a good story. Now look for the main dramatic payoff to the reader. What goal did you want to achieve or what obstacle did you want to overcome. Now explain how you reached that goal by the end of the story.

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by Jerry Waxler

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The first chapter of John Robison’s memoir “Look me in the eye” was called “Little Misfit,” because Robison didn’t know how to get along with other kids, and he never seemed to do anything right. That might have set the stage for a Coming of Age story, but by the time he was 16, he had many more questions than he had answers. He left home and set off on a journey to figure it all out. His self-discovery took him the rest of his life. And I believe that’s why I love this book so much. The book does turn out to be a Coming of Age story — one that never ends.

The first time I heard a 65 year old woman say, “I’m trying to figure out who I’m going to be when I grow up” I laughed. And I also agreed with her sentiment. Decades trickle by, families grow up, jobs come and go, but exactly which morning are we supposed to wake up and say, “Oh. That’s what it was all about.” The only way I’ve found to tie it all together is to find the story. And that’s what Robison did. He lived, he learned, he grew, and then he wrote about it. Now I want to understand how he did it so I can do it too.

The long middle
Most people who consider writing a memoir wonder if our years in the office or taking kids to soccer have turned us into drones, and so we utter the familiar cry, “Who would want to read about me?” We can go a long way towards answering that question when we review events and look under the surface. The passions and desires unfolded day by day, too slowly to make sense of at the time. Gradually, those days accumulated into our unique story, and now in retrospect we can find their significance.

To learn how you might tell your own long periods, consider the way John Robison showed his years in an office as a technology worker. Rather than excruciating detail, he highlighted key points. He described a few pranks in keeping with his passion for practical joking. He felt good about some of his contributions to the company, and felt bad about the corporate mentality and the lack of appreciation for individual initiative. He showed what he went through in snapshots, giving us the picture without boring us. His scan across those years, provides the insight you can see when you look back across your own journey. The middle years were steps on a longer road.

I always wondered why the Israelis had to cross the desert for 40 years. Now that I’m studying stories, I realize those long years represent a sort of “baking period” in the middle of life during which the inner self continues to grow. John Robison didn’t shy away from the fact that he worked in an office. And by looking at those jobs through the longer lens of a memoir, he revealed their secret. They were steps on a longer road. By including these periods, “Look Me in the Eye” offers a role model for all us who seek to understand how to transform memories into a story.
Robison’s persistent desire to grow creates a potential problem. Every good story ends with relief of dramatic tension. Through the book, we readers have been growing with him, step by step. How do we know when we’ve reached the goal? Robison signals the conclusion of his journey by using an ancient storytelling technique. When Robison grows older, he moves back to the town where he started.

Moving back to the suburbs doesn’t sound like much of a story element, but it turns out the simple idea of returning home has enormous power in storytelling circles. It even has a Greek name, “nostoi.” (I love it when I know a Greek name for a concept.) Once you start to look for it, you will discover this simple device everywhere. Ulysses returns to his home at the end of Homer’s Odyssey. The Hobbits return home at the end of Lord of the Rings. Homecoming can be symbolic as well. For example, in Barack Obama’s “Dreams of Our Father,” Obama returns to the home of his African father, a sort of ancestral returning.

Robison started in life unable to connect with other children, but easily being able to turn within his own mind. The adults around him had no clue what was going on, and he was frequently shamed for his differences. Had he stayed home, and accepted the shaming comments he might have turned out to be the failure everyone expected him to be. When John Robison went on his journey of self-discovery, he wasn’t setting out to be a hero. He simply wanted to learn how to live well.

When Robison set out into the world, one of his first jobs was working as a special effects engineer for the famous rock and roll band, KISS. His own differences gave him the opportunity to see a different slice of life. Through the course of his years, he was learning about himself, and how to make the best use of his talents and personality.

Towards the end of “Look Me in the Eye,” Robison shifted his attention to raising his youngest son who had inherited some quirky Aspergian tendencies, such as fascination with machinery. So dad took his boy to the train yard to watch the big locomotives. It was a lovely scene, with a powerful storytelling twist. This little boy faced similar issues to the ones Robison faced, but this second time around, the child was neither lonely nor a “misfit.” By this time, Robison knew enough about his condition to help his son cope with it. Robison started his memoir in his own childhood, and ended raising his own children, a dramatic circle I found extremely satisfying.

Return from Hero’s Journey Armed with Wisdom
In fact, Robison story continues past the end of the memoir. He now gives talks to help parents cope and guide nerdy, withdrawn, Asperger’s spectrum children. He also speaks to children, helping them understand each other and themselves. Robison’s story emulates the classic Hero’s Journey. When the Hero Returns, his or her experiences can be used to serve the community. That turns John Robison’s memoir not into the finish line of his lifetime, but simply the end of a chapter. The next page begins with a life of involvement and service.

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Writing Prompt: To decide where you want to begin the journey of your memoir, consider what sort of place and situation you were in when you started. Look at your hometown, your religion of origin, your initial dreams. Then as you come to the end of your story, see where you can “return” either physically to the same location, or symbolically to your roots.

Notes:

The Hero’s Journey provides fascinating material for any writer. To learn more about how to apply these ideas to your story, read Chris Vogler’s “The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers.”

In my book, “Four Elements for Writers” I explore the way you can turn this myth towards your own writing behavior, and use it to develop tenacity and courage. [link]

Another book that uses exquisite understanding of storytelling principles is Sound of No Hands Clapping. (Click here to see my review.) This explores a powerful use of the “character arc” in memoir. The author, self-conscious as ever, teaches a lesson about storytelling embedded in his memoir, repeating ideas he heard in a workshop from famous storytelling teacher Robert McKee.

To learn more about Robison’s work with Asperger’s Syndrome, or to see how he is doing, check out his blog, jerobison.blogspot.com For more information about the Asperger’s condition, he recommends the website, www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger

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By Jerry Waxler

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Jancee Dunn was an ordinary girl from the suburbs of north New Jersey who dropped out of college, became a cub reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, and stayed there for 18 years. At her zenith she told the world about celebrities on MTV and Good Morning America. In the memoir “Enough About Me, How a Small-town Girl Went from Shag Carpet to the Red Carpet” she became the object of her own reporting. Thanks to her reporting skills, I empathized with her as she started her career, a nobody waiting at the doors of some of the most famous people in the world. “Oh my God, what must it feel like meeting a famous girl band, or rock and roll star?” Naturally her knees turned weak, but she went in anyway, and I kept turning pages.

For example, she interviewed singer Barry White, who gave her a big wet kiss at the door and treated her to a romantic dinner for two. Then she closed the door behind her. When she emerged a couple of hours later I don’t know what happened, in a virtuoso example of informing without revealing. Her discretion could provide a good model for other aspiring memoir writers who wonder how to explain awkward situations without getting into trouble.

During an interview with an unnamed celebrity who recently completed a month at rehab, he suggested that drugs were only a phone call away and asked if she would like to get high. She politely declined, and then went to the bathroom where she called her sister to explain the situation. Her sister said, “Are you crazy? Get out of there.” Jancee said, “But he’s so persuasive.” When she arrived home later, feeling shaken, she phoned her father, who talked to her about the routine details of his afternoon plans. His patter about gardening and errands soothed her and reminded her of all that was stable in her life.

Turned to the reader and offered interviewing tips
Walking with Jancee into interviews made me curious about how she worked her magic, getting the stars to say things they hadn’t said a thousand times. How did she work her way into their confidence? Occasionally she turned towards me and offered an insider tip. For example, in one of her more elaborate strategies, she started a celebrity interview by sharing a tidbit of gossip she heard about the star on the radio that very morning. Excited by this news, the star called over her publicity manager and they had a good laugh. By then, everyone was loose, and treated Jancee as a fine, generous person.

The anecdote showed me Jancee was smart, and gave me some insights into the mind of a celebrity. But I kept thinking about her interviewing tips long after I closed the book. In retrospect I see she was doing the same thing with me that she was doing with her stars. She was taking me into her confidence, making me feel like an insider. I felt her generosity and opened up to her. By turning towards the reader, she connected with me. I’m going to file this strategy away. Perhaps I can offer my own readers insider insights that will make them feel open with me.

Memoir of an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances
While I enjoyed learning about her interviews, this is a memoir, and I wanted to know more about her as a person. Rather than trying to be a star herself, she explored her life as an ordinary person. Her refusal to claim stardom for herself became a story element, providing a dramatic contrast between her own life and the lives of her interviewees. Her father was a manager at J.C. Penney’s, so loyal he named his daughter “Jancee” as a tribute to his employer’s initials. As children, when she and her sisters visited the department store, they were treated like royalty by the other employees. It was like being the fairy princess of suburbia.

In other memoirs, the exotic tastes and smells of food demonstrate the author’s ethnic life. Jancee uses food to show her background, too. Her family ate only beige and tasteless food. Think macaroni and cheese and Velveeta on white bread. These unremarkable food choices set a tone for her life.

What about inner struggles? Without the dark, there’s no way to emphasize the light. In Jancee’s memoir, the darkness came through her relationships with men. Her two disastrous boyfriends provided insight into her struggle to grow. The first guy was a sort of innocent sleaze, who left most of her self-respect intact. The second one was more self-involved, and his neediness and lack of care for her inner process pulled her into a darker place. When she started lying to her family, I wanted to cry out, “You’re going the wrong way! Turn back!” Eventually she realized that her strength came not from this self-involved guy but from within herself and her roots. As she pulled away from him, I felt dramatic relief, the sign of a good story.

Jancee found a compelling central arc to tie her book together
While she was paid to inform us about the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Jancee really celebrated the world of normal people, returning to her unglamorous roots as her safe haven. This contrast between her ordinary life and the lives she reported created dramatic tension. As the subtitle says, it wasn’t just about the famous nor just about suburbia but about how a suburban girl interviewed famous people. By the end of the book, she made it clear she was a regular person, with ordinary feelings, family, and circumstances.

So how did her simple life relate to the life of the stars? In one scene, she joins singer Loretta Lynn making fudge. They were talking so much, the fudge didn’t turn out right, and the next day, a courier delivered a better batch to Jancee’s door. It was a gesture that reached across the divide, a star saying “look, I’m ordinary too.” While the masses of celebrity watchers long for the stratospheric heights of stardom, Jancee raises the possibility that at least some of the stars aspire to normalcy.

I love her comfortable, trendy approach, not only to her stars, but to her readers. Through years of experience as a reporter and interviewer, she has apparently gained the knack of turning to the reader or viewer. I too am looking for a comfortable open voice, and her example inspires me. I look for other opportunities in my life when I have been forced to open my voice, such as in public speaking at Toastmasters, or doing interviews, or writing letters. It turns out that blogs are an excellent tool for finding a voice. Blogging creates a conversational atmosphere that leads to a more intimate connection with readers.

Many themes run through Jancee Dunn’s memoir. Her suburban roots, her meteoric rise as a reporter, her relationships with family and men. And yet, in thinking about the book, my mind returns to the central theme. Her ordinariness pulls the whole thing together. And while the subtitle of the book claims she made it to the Red Carpet, I’m not so sure. I find Jancee’s real intention is right there in her dedication, in which quotes Emily Dickenson. “Who am I? I am nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?” Thanks, Jancee for grounding me in ordinary life, while you share your story, your insights, and your tips for interviewing the stars.

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Writing Prompt: If you can’t find dramatic tension in just one theme of your life, look for two themes and explore the contrasts and conflicts between them.

—

Note: Memoir writers sometimes think the only way to get published is to be famous. If you’re looking for a counter-example, check out A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel, a popular memoir by a very ordinary person. It’s her writing and observation that makes it so interesting.

Visit Amazon’s listing of Jancee’s book by clicking this link.

Check out Jancee’s website to see what she’s up to these days.

by Jerry Waxler

(This blog is also available as an audio file. See the Podcast player control at the end of this post.)

Perry Foster was an ordinary business man until he found himself on the wrong end of a cardiology exam. Now he bears a scar on his torso that looks like it was zipped shut, which makes him a member of the zipper club. When he chose to record his experience he was not drawing upon years of training as a writer. He simply wanted to tell his story and his memoir “Hands Upon My Heart: My Journey Through Heart Disease and Into Life” is the result. Whenever I read a memoir, I look for lessons. How did the author put it together? How did his words create the emotions as I was reading? I have found that new authors, in their passion to explain what happened, often provide lessons every bit as good as the ones I learn from the pros.

Memoir like a novel
One of the most basic lessons in this book is Foster’s knack of telling a story like a novel – that is, he lets me see events for myself. His descriptions are so quintessentially “show don’t tell” that reading the book is like attending a “show don’t tell” seminar. Take for example a stressful scene in a doctor’s office when Foster’s wife pulls out a bottle and takes two aspirin, showing the headache rather than telling it. And precisely because the example is so basic, its lesson is easy to learn. If he had written, “she had a headache,” he would be reporting a fact that was inside her head, not his. A slightly improvement would be dialog. If she had said “I have a headache” at least he would not be reading her mind. But now she becomes the one who is telling. When he shows her taking the two aspirin, readers can see the evidence for themselves.

Foster also does a good job staying within a time frame. He immerses himself within each scene, providing sensations that let me lose myself in his world. Since the book starts around the time he learns his heart is failing, I know little about his history until he is sedated for a surgical procedure. In his drug altered state, he describes a picture perfect flashback from his childhood. This ploy supplies background about his family, and the flashback also provides pacing, letting me linger there with him while surgeons are poking at his body.

His observations include his own thoughts, feelings, and body reactions. These internally directed observations take me inside his experience. “Does anyone ever wake during surgery?” he asks his surgeon. He notices the taste of perspiration dripping from his upper lip. After this frightening meeting he becomes furious with his wife for trying to relax while she was waiting. “You’re buying a romance novel,” he asked in a restrained voice. “How could she?” he thinks.

Edgy characters make me turn pages
From the beginning Perry Foster showed me his messy emotions. He was afraid for his heart, angry at the doctors, and edgy with his wife. His thoughts are often judgmental, and paranoid, and I think, “No wonder this guy’s heart is a wreck.”

I also wonder how he could be so honest about these feelings. This is a big issue for me, because my instinct is to hide my imperfections. “Hands Upon my Heart” shows me that disclosing authentic feelings, even if edgy and flawed, creates human warmth so palpable I want to pick up the phone and ask him about his health.

Perry Foster’s nervous tension serves another purpose. It increases dramatic tension. Consider Shakespeare’s characters Hamlet, and Ophelia, or Romeo, and Juliet. Their edginess creates suspense because you’re never sure what they’ll do next. Foster achieves the same effect. I kept turning the pages to see how he will juggle the pressure of his disturbing emotions.

Will he grow?
I love character development in a book. By the time I reach the end I’m hoping some lesson has been learned. Because this is such a satisfying payoff for me, as soon as I recognize the character flaw I start anticipating how the person will grow. It’s part of the suspense that keeps me reading. I found this suspense especially acute in “Hands Upon my Heart,” where Foster seemed like such a likable guy, I couldn’t wait for him to find inner strength and peace.

In the end the author does become more accepting of his situation and his wife, but his changes did not match what I expected, resulting in a feeling of being let down. What can I learn from that? It feels like a variation on the famous advice offered by Anton Chekhov. If you show a gun in the first scene of a play, you should fire it by the end. It looks like this advice could also be applied to character development. When the beginning of the book shows dramatic tension in the character, then by the end that tension should be relieved.

My expectation that Foster was supposed to grow during the course of the book raises a fascinating question. Should a memoir take me on a perfectly crafted ride, or must it follow the course of events, precisely? My view is that from the same raw material, a storyteller could craft a thousand different stories. The memoir I end up actually reading is not the person’s life, but rather a creative representation of it. And it turns out that telling the best possible story provides a benefit to the writer as well as the reader. The more you strive to tell a good story, the more you learn about your life. Perry Foster’s “Hands Upon my Heart” has stimulated and informed my thinking about these issues, and as I look for the story within my own life, Foster’s work will be one of the sources for my deeper understanding.

See my other essay about Perry Foster’s memoir by clicking here.

See also: Dee Dee Phelps was another adult learner who developed her writing skill not as a professional writer but through workshops. Read her insights in the interviews we reported here.

See also: Chekhov’s Gun, a wikipedia entry

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by Jerry Waxler

To learn about memoirs, I have been reading them, and the more I read the more I learn not just about the literary form but about life itself. Here is a list of the many benefits I’ve been finding. While most of the books I’ve read provide multiple benefits, under each heading I offer a few examples that best represent that particular point.

Reason # 1: Pleasure
Reading a memoir lets me lose myself while I enter someone else’s world. It’s easy to suspend my disbelief because I’m curious about these real people.

Enough about me by Jancee Dunn
The Sound of No Hands Clapping by Toby Young

Reason # 2: Wisdom
By reading memoirs, I learn how the good, the bad, and the boring all accumulate into the journey of life. All those events that come and go remind me of my grandmother’s sayings, “Life goes on” and “This too shall pass.” Her platitudes make so much more sense when I see for myself how in real life, trials come and then drift into memory.

There when you need me by Kate Braestrup
Mothering Mother by Carol O’Dell
Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham
Expecting Adam by Martha Beck
Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

Reason # 3: Expand my circle of empathy
Despite the fact that I’ve only ever been inside my own mind, I occasionally slip into the crazy notion that I know what other people are experiencing. Now I no longer need to guess how they feel. They can tell me themselves. I have been with people as they visit relatives in an African village, have postpartum depression, escape the rough streets of New Jersey, grow up poor in Ireland, grow up with a world famous father, and on and on. Their version breaks down the walls of isolation, and opens me to other people’s needs, desires, fears.

Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas
Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
The Pact by Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, Rameck Hunt, and Lisa Frazier Page

Reason # 4: Learn about the world
By seeing the world through their eyes, I learn all sorts of new things about life, like what it’s like to race a bicycle or raise a child. I learn that Iranians are so focused on family their language contains words to describe the precise relationships of aunts and uncles. I learn about heart disease, pop culture, what it’s like to be a police chaplain, and how to write a screenplay.

I know you love me by Doreen Orion
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester
On Writing by Stephen King

Reason # 5: Feel inspired by writers who keep growing
Memoir writers keep growing, not just within their story, but also through the process of writing about their lives. Every memoir writer develops skills, and organizes material. Many memoir writers report that this project brings the challenge of creativity into their lives at any age. If they can continue to increase their writing skills, so can I.

Vinyl Highway: Singing as “Dick and Dee Dee” by Dee Dee Phelps
Shades of Darkness by George Brummell

Reason # 6: I learn about stories from the inside out
The main character in most stories is concocted by someone’s imagination. The protagonist in a memoir describes the inner workings of an actual person. By reading real stories told by the main character, I learn so much about storytelling.

Name all the animals by Alison Smith
Sound of No Hands Clapping by Toby Young
Trading Secrets by Foster Winans

Reason # 7: I learn the bold art of self discovery
Fearlessly facing your own past, and organizing it into a story seems to be the pinnacle of courage. When other people report on their own fallible lives, they offer a role model that makes it easier for me to do the same.

Lucky by Alice Sebold
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
Ten Points by Bill Strickland
Look me in the eye by John Robison

Reason # 8: I participate in the community of life
I pause and look at the memoir I have been reading. An individual had to dig into their life and remember. Then they had to learn everything they needed in order to write it, polish it, and move it from their world to mine. There is something so essentially social about what they have achieved by reaching out across the boundaries of time and space. I’ve done my share too. I found the book, bought it, and read it. This exchange of energy between writer and reader, who started out as strangers and ended up as confidantes, adds to the nobility and magic of being a human being.

Hands Upon My Heart: My Journey Through Heart Disease and Into Life by Perry Foster
Down came the rain by Brooke Shields

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

by Jerry Waxler

(This blog is also available as an audio file. See the Podcast player control at the end of this post.)

After the success of Toby Young’s first memoir, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” he received a call from a Hollywood producer who was impressed by Young’s knack for transforming a jerk into a lovable character. In a sense, Young was being called to Hollywood. Now all he had to do was write a screenplay, and his attempt to do so forms the basis for his second memoir “The Sound of No Hands Clapping.” Just as the title is a send up of a Zen Koan, Young’s second memoir is a sort of send up of itself. Did I really want to read a memoir about a writer trying to profit from his previous memoir?

The tongue in cheek tone reminded me of the way Jerry Seinfeld’s television show was supposed to be “about nothing.” But unlike Seinfeld’s characters, who never grow or learn, Toby Young grows in all sorts of ways. “The Sound of No Hands Clapping” turns out to be more than light entertainment. It provides insights into life and some excellent lessons for memoir writers.

For starters, consider the familiar problem expressed by many aspiring memoirists. “How do you tattle on someone without incurring a law suit?” Young provides one solution. Instead of naming the producer who hired him to write the script, supposedly “one of the most powerful men in Hollywood” Young calls him simply “Mr. Hollywood” and states that the facts are altered to hide this person’s identity. You might try a similar technique to avoid the wrath of someone you want to write about.

When Young fears his wife’s pregnancy might derail his writing career, he discusses with her the wisdom of having a baby at this time in their lives. These are universal questions ordinary people ask every day. It’s a riot listening to him trying to convince her not to have the baby, and her flipping his logic upside down with the ease of an advanced judo master. By listening in on their discussion, I had a laugh, gained wonderful insights into both the male and female perspectives, and frankly feel wiser about the decision points of this issue than when I started.

While Young tried to kick start his own career, his buddy Sean Langan was trodding a parallel path. Langan, now a successful documentary film director, also had recently married and had babies. As the two men approach their domestic responsibilities, I am entertained by a buddy tale while at the same time I’m learning how a young man thinks when deciding to settle down.

Young provides more observations about the life of a writer through detailed conversations with another friend, a screenwriter and television producer Rob Long. These conversations with his mentor provide insider glimpses into “The Business,” in an entertaining portrayal, loaded with information for would be screenwriters. It’s typical of Young’s personal connection with his readers that the knowledge falls not from the sky but from a friend.

Through the book, the author discusses his observations of three main themes — making it in the movie industry, how to harness celebrity culture to succeed as a writer, and the shift in mentality of growing from a footloose young man to a married father. He develops these topics with the care of an expert essayist, without ever interfering with the power of the story. In fact, I became so intrigued by his observations, I began looking forward to these excursions. The lesson for me is that a good writer can offer lovely compelling observations about life without interfering with the story.

To learn how to write a screenplay, Young attended a workshop with story guru Robert McKee, author of a classic tome on writing, called simply “Story.” McKee says that by the end of a successful story the protagonist has psychologically grown as if he or she had been through a fabulously effective course of therapy. While McKee applied his rule to stories in general, I believe it is especially relevant for memoirs, which by their nature explore the protagonist’s inner world. When reading a memoir, I often feel that what the author learned and how they learned it is the main payoff for reading the book.

Young played up his flaws. For example, he would apparently do anything to become famous. (He actually posed nude to garner publicity.) And while he loves his wife, he wonders if his love for his career is greater. By making such a big deal about his character defects, Young aroused my curiosity to see how he would outgrow them.

Near the end of the “Sound of No Hands Clapping,” Toby Young stumbles down into the alcohol addiction he thought he had overcome five years earlier. In finding his way back from this slip, he declares his wife to be his Higher Power, thus sealing his faith in domestic life. Young’s reference to the Twelve Step Programs may sound like it was tacked on to the end of the memoir and not particularly relevant. But anyone who has studied the Twelve Steps will find an added layer of wisdom. The Fourth Step states, “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Taking a fearless moral inventory is a worthwhile exercise for any memoir writer, and by tackling our own memoir with this same enthusiasm, hopefully we, like Toby Young, will discover insights to help guide us more authentically and fearlessly into the future.

(Note: I listened to the Audible.com version.)

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