Memory Writers Network

By Jerry Waxler

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

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.

Podcast version click the player control below:

 

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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.

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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
I think I saw Brooke Shields, once. I was having dinner with friends in Princeton, when Brooke was attending school there. I didn’t want to stare, but my friends swore it was her. Here’s an even lighter brush with fame. A guy I knew in college almost danced with Gracie Slick, the lead singer for the Jefferson Airplane. I was amazed that he was bragging about almost dancing with her, and now I’m even more amazed that I remember it 40 years later. I’m not the only one. When I tell people my stories, they share their own sightings. One saw a Broadway show. Natalie Portman was only 40 yards away. Another went into the same shoe store in Marin County frequented by Darryl Hannah. Yet, despite all this passion for stars I have absolutely no idea what their lives are like.

If you ever want to publish your memoir, you might have more interest in fame than you realize. Publishing breaks the barriers between a private life and a public one, and while few writers are hounded by paparazzi, we wonder what it’s like to be known by strangers. To help aspiring writers cope with their feelings about “Going Public,” I devoted a quarter of my self-help book, Four Elements for Writers, to the subject.

So what is it like to be “known” by strangers? That’s where memoirs come in. Memoirs are supposed to show me what it’s like being in someone else’s shoes. But which memoirs? Many celebrity books are ghost written, not even a direct expression of the celebrity’s own words. And most such memoirs play the celebrity card rather than shedding light on it. When I found the book “Vinyl Highway, Singing as Dick and Dee Dee” by Dee Dee Phelps I had reason to believe it would go deeper. I discovered through interviews and personal correspondence that Dee Dee had written it herself. That increases its value for other writers. And because she was famous decades ago and is famous no longer, it places her closer to regular life. Down from Mt. Olympus she walks with us mortals, and I hoped she could speak our language.

Dee Dee was an ordinary teenager, working in a candy store in Los Angeles early in the 60’s. She met Dick St. John, and based on their mutual interest in singing, they formed a duo Dick and Dee Dee. They cut their first record before they even performed together in front of a live audience. Californians loved the “B” side, Mountain’s High, and it shot to the top on the west coast. It was as if fate threw a switch. Soon Dick and Dee Dee were driving around middle-America, looking for crowds and DJ’s to help them spread the word and drive up sales.

The music business back then was simpler. Performers and producers were making deals in tiny studios. On her first couple of tours, she crammed into the back seat of a car. Traveling with black performers like Gary U.S. Bonds, she encountered explosive responses in the segregated south. When Dick and Dee Dee sang in high school auditoriums in the Los Angeles area, the other act was an up and coming boy band. These were early days for the Beach Boys, and so they were happy to play back up music for Dick and Dee Dee.

As Dick and Dee Dee gained recognition, the hotels and buses improved, but the grind continued: hoping for hit records, getting onto bigger stages, putting on a smile, and then getting back in the bus and doing it again. When they became regulars on the national television show Shindig, it looked like they made it, but the duo’s fame was only as good as their latest hit. Their style fell behind the rapidly changing music of the sixties, and gradually they sank back down into seedy night clubs, not much better than the ones they started in. At the end of the sixties the pair split up.

On the surface, the book is about the rise and fall of a singing duo. But if the only story arc was the “Dick and Dee Dee” act, and if the book ended with its death, it would have left me feeling empty. The death of the main character is better suited to a Shakespearean tragedy than contemporary popular fiction. So I looked deeper. What dramatic tension kept me engaged from the beginning, and then provided release and satisfaction at the end?

To find the answer I look more closely at Dee Dee’s own hopes and dreams. Her external world with its endless parade of night clubs, stage acts and television shows, seemed to be sucking the life out of her. Internally, I realized this book is a coming of age story about a young girl becoming a woman. At the beginning of the story, Dee Dee wanted to grow up, and by the end of the story she did by getting married and having a baby. Fame was a detour, a distraction from real life. When her act died, it felt like she had escaped the superficial and needy life style of a famous singer. She finished the detour and it was time to return home.

It reminds me of Homer’s Odyssey in which Ulysses was stuck on the island with the beautiful Calypso for years. It was only when he escaped this island and returned home to Ithaca that his journey was complete. Greek dramatists had a wonderful word for this circle. “Nostoi” is the coming home at the end of the story. When Dee Dee returned, she was not the same young girl who had left home ten years earlier. Her experience in the world of celebrity showed her sides of life that most of us never see. And so, like a good Hero, she returned from her Journey with wisdom, which forty years later she can now share with her community, telling us what it’s like to have been famous and to have returned. Welcome back, Dee Dee. And thanks for the stories.

Also see Part 1 of my book review for Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee.

by Jerry Waxler

I picked Brooke Shields’ book “Down came the rain” off the shelf. The dust jacket gave me reason to believe it was deeper than just another name-dropping celebrity puff piece. Flipping through it convinced me it genuinely focused on her issues of having a baby, and so I decided to give it a chance. Now that I’ve finished it, I can say that I liked it. It was a decent read, not because of literary genius. After all, she’s not a professional writer. But even though you wouldn’t read this just for the beauty of the sentences, there is a sort of straightforward genuineness about the way it is written. It feels authentic, and I think that’s one of the most important qualities of any memoir.

In addition to a genuine voice, I also found other reasons to enjoy and recommend this memoir as a good read and a teaching tool for aspiring memoir writers. Just as the cover promised, its central function was a story about a mommy. I believe it does a lovely job of showing how a young, first time mother deals with some of the issues of having a baby. And so, by reading this story I gained insights into what it’s like to be a troubled mom. In fact there are so many bits about how she overcame obstacles, it reads almost like an instruction book for moms, addressing the question, “how to get over the hump if your baby doesn’t feel like the best thing that ever happened to you.”

People are so saturated with the expectation that the moment of seeing the baby will be the best moment of a lifetime. But in about 10% of women, this experience is very different. Moments after the powerful physical act of childbirth, it’s possible a woman may not feel emotionally receptive to the baby, and for Brooke this lack of connection was an extremely disturbing experience, as she watched in horror at her own less than spectacular response. She does a terrific job of helping us understand this situation. Addressing this issue helped the book hang together into a coherent whole. Here are some of the topics she covers:

• When she felt depressed, she denied she had a problem, blamed herself and refused to rely on medication.
• She didn’t want any help from anyone.
• She spends a fair amount of time showing how breast feeding saved her from her depression and created a bond with her baby. (No it’s not titillating. Despite the celebrity value of those particular body parts, this discussion really is for moms.)
• She offers a fascinating insight into the fact that having a baby changes her relationship to her own mother. Now she’s bumped up a notch in the hierarchy, no longer just a child, but now a mom as well.

I think the most psychological insightful material was the contrast between her elevated grandiose expectations of a perfect connection with her baby, and the reality she actually experienced, as a tired, somewhat overwhelmed and flawed human being, who does not respond in such a storybook manner.

Teaching turns out to be a lovely added dimension of memoirs. Adding a teaching element to your story will help hold it together. It potentially can make your book interesting to a special-interest audience. And by binding the story into a unified whole, it gives the reader an additional incentive for turning to the next page. As you work on your own memoir, consider what sort of lessons you would share. Did you learn to garden as a method to cope while your mother was sick? Did you learn to fly an airplane, while you struggled for a job after getting out of the military? Or like Brooke, were your lessons more emotional? Explain how you and your child coped with bullying while he grew up with Down’s Syndrome. Or even more abstract still, are your lessons spiritual, like Anne Lamott’s lessons in Traveling Mercies?

As you look for teaching moments to share with your readers, stay true to the central power of memoir writing. Share your authentic experience, and as the lessons unfold, let the readers watch. Like Brooke Shields’ memoir, combine the force of your authentic voice with the unifying principles of the lessons you want to teach. So as you read Down Came the Rain, you could be enjoying and learning about the following aspects of memoir writing:

You would be enjoying hearing deeper background about an old friend. (That’s what the star system is about. While most of us have at most a few hundred people in our social network, she has a few hundred million. I don’t understand it, but there it is.)

You are learning about how to relate to a child, especially if you feel disconnected. This information about postpartum depression could even be life saving if you’re in that situation and don’t know how to handle it.

You would be enjoying an interesting story, opening a window into the lives of people you don’t know, or will ever experience firsthand. Since I’m not a mommy, and don’t have to hide from admirers, to understand those experiences, I have to read stories about them. This expands my horizon as a human being, lets me relate more genuinely to people who are different from me, and makes my world a richer, friendlier place.

I have been avoiding celebrity memoirs, because they often play by a different set of rules than other memoirs. They are often driven by name dropping and voyeurism, rather than great story principles. I love the pleasure of a fabulously written book, and celebrity-written books are not known for their literary merit. But I also want to know more about the insides of all kinds of people, not just literary giants. I am willing to setting aside elitist expectations of literary excellence to expand my own horizons.

All these thoughts went through my mind as I read the cover of Brooke Shields‘ memoir, “Down Came the Rain“ deciding whether to buy it or shelve it. This moment of reckoning is a great opportunity to understand the purchasing decision people will make when they pick up your memoir.

The celebrity phenomenon is a huge issue in our public life. We talk about celebrities, follow their work and their private lives, and weirdly often feel like we know them. I‘m dieing to understand what makes all this so important and what it‘s like for the people on the other side of the camera, and there’s the chance a memoir will provide insights.

Another reason I was willing to read this particular book is that it tells of her post-partum depression, a serious condition that I want to understand from inside. And once I started reading, I discovered she was unable to have a natural pregnancy, and so she threw herself into in vitro fertilization. I’ve heard this is a grueling experience, and I was interested to read what it felt like. She not only tells me the details of her feelings, but also provides the technical information to keep me informed and to help pace the story.

I‘m pleased with the tone of the book. She has an engaging way of showing me situations, sharing conversations, and telling me how she thinks and feels, that lets me get inside the situation and feel it myself. That‘s what I want from a memoir, and she is accomplishing that.

Amidst her celebrity life, she‘s also human, and I was able to find insights about how life works for her. For example, in the first scene in the book, while she is backstage waiting for her cue at a live performance, she gets a phone call that tells her the fetus she is carrying is dead. Here in real life was an example of the saying, “The show must go on.” She responded to her cue and went on stage moments later. It was a great glimpse into the emotional complexity of being a performer. And it was also a good example of the unthinkable interface between normalcy and tragedy. None of us can pick the most convenient time for tragedy, and often we learn something awful at the worst possible moment.

Another celebrity-oriented aspect of her story is paparazzi and reporters. She avoided going to the hospital, because she didn‘t want to deal with the media exposure. When she’s leaving the hospital, she prepares herself to face the gauntlet of photographers. She breaks into tears, pulls herself together, pastes on a smile and walks out. The photographers lean close to her baby, and she feels a stab of fear, and then she gets into the car. “At least none of them followed us home.” I‘ve often thought this whole notion of being hounded by paparazzi is one of the most intrusive things any human being should be expected to endure. It would drive me completely nuts. And yet, performers are not supposed to complain, because it‘s the attention of the media that fuels their financial success. So instead of complaining, Brooke Shields put on a smile and keep walking.

Such episodes may seem to apply only to celebrities. But there is a lesson here that could inform other memoirists. When the scene itself is so filled with tension, I don‘t need to hear her complaint. I want to feel my own reactions, and I am perfectly capable of being sickened by this situation on my own. The fact is, complaints stop the forward momentum of the story. We generally want the protagonist to “deal with it” and move on.

This is the way literary memoirs work, too. Tobias Wolff, author of the superbly written “This Boys Life,” is a master at letting the reader draw their own emotional conclusion. For example, when Wolff’s step-father steals the boy’s college savings, he asks his mother for more details about the disappearance of the money. “How could that happen?” But she doesn‘t want to talk about it. She hates complaining, and changes the subject. Wolff, the protagonist is left to figure it out on his own. It’s a powerful scene, and not a bad model to follow for a memoirist looking for a tone that will carry the reader to the last page.

Of all the celebrity memoirs, the ones that are most intriguing for a memoirist are those people who became famous for their writing ability. If you are a famous writer, your memoir ought to be a great teaching tool, right? For example, Stephen King’s “On Writing” maintains his stunning connection with his audience, and gives a great read while telling about his life. But one celebrity memoir that is more problematic is writer Sydney Sheldon’s “The Other Side of Me.” The first part of the book is a page turner, (actually I listened to the audio book), because he struggles against insurmountable odds, using his creative talent to escape the poverty of the Great Depression. And then, when he actually becomes a successful screen and stage writer, he settles into a rhythm, telling about his productions, what famous stars he meets, what famous producers and directors he works with. His milestones seem to keep coming in such a predictable, steady manner there is no more conflict, and as a reader, I wonder why I’m bothering. It’s yet another proof of that adage that a story needs to be going somewhere, gaining ground against some kind of odds. By the end of the book, I was feeling cheated. in the beginning of the book I had listened to a GREAT rags to riches coming of age story, and then in the last half a sort of gossip column celebrity name dropping fest. That is, until the afterward bailed it out. The professional book reader stopped talking, and Sheldon himself explained the end of his life in his own voice. One of the most compelling lines in the book was “I kept striving so hard to ‘get there’ but every time I reached a new milestone, I couldn’t find ‘there.’”

I think he added the afterward precisely because he or someone sensed there was no closure.  In the afterward,  Sheldon said he had no more need to keep writing best sellers. And I felt that in a sense, he was finally able to put down the sword and relax. Thank God! After all the pressure, and all the drive, I felt a sense of relief that he had found a ‘there.’ I don’t know if this was the intended character arc, but I found the afterward gave me the sense of closure I was seeking.