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Relationship between Fiction and Memoir, Interview Pt2

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

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

To read the first part of the interview click here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie Lamba’s Home Page

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

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

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

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

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Posted in Author Interview, Coming of age, Fiction | 1 Comment »

Interview: Young Adult Fiction versus Coming of Age Memoirs

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview to be continued

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

Marie Lamba’s Home Page

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

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

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

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

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Posted in Coming of age, Fiction | 4 Comments »

Million Dollar Challenge: YA fiction is Coming of Age

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes
Marie Lamba’s Home Page

Click here for an interview with Marie Lamba

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

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

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

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Another way to write about childhood, memoir review Part 1

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

By Jerry Waxler

Tracy Seeley was born into a nomadic family in the Midwest. As soon as she settled into one home, her father’s demons and dreams forced him to search for a better place. After each move, Tracy left parts of herself behind. When she was old enough, she fled Kansas in search of her own place in the world. She earned her doctorate in English Literature at the University of Texas. She taught on the east coast at Yale University, and then shifted to the west coast to teach at the University of California in San Francisco.

In her adult places, when she told her educated peers where she grew up, their standard response was “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” The quote from the Wizard of Oz implied that Tracy’s childhood was irrelevant to her sophisticated world. Her life had become fractured in two ways. First her childhood was spread across thirteen homes, and second, her adult world was split off from the world in which she grew up. No wonder she wanted to return to the Heartland and make more sense of how it all fit together. Her lovely memoir, “My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas” chronicles her exploration of her origins, as she attempts to find a unified story.

Story of researching yourself

Tracy’s story reminds me of “Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls. In both books, restless parents failed to deliver a safe, stable environment. After each author grew up and settled down, she returned to her chaotic beginnings and tried to knit together the pieces by finding the story.

The two memoirs make an instructive duo, because each author chose to construct her narrative in very different ways. Jeanette Walls did the research outside the page. In her memoir, “Glass Castle.” we are inside the little girl’s point of view, following her journey of growing up. In “Ruby Slippers,” Tracy Seeley starts her memoir as an adult, wondering how she grew up. She takes us on a guided tour of her investigation into her past.

Every memoir writer steers between these two frames-of-reference. In the first time frame, we live through the situation, becoming the person we are today. In the second frame, we look back, trying to make sense of how we got here.

I have written a number of essays about the Coming of Age genre as told from the child’s point of view, in bestsellers like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club, and Jeannette Walls, Glass Castle. In part two of this essay, I will dig deeper into Tracy Seeley’s memoir about rediscovering the roots of her self.

Click here to see Part 2 of this review of Ruby Slippers.

—

Notes: Other memoirs about researching self

Another memoir about researching a childhood was A. M. Homes, Mistress’s Daughter. The book takes us on her journey to find her biological parents and reconstruct their past. In Thrumpton Hall by Miranda Seymour, as well as in “Reading my Father” by Alexandra Styron, a daughter creates the story of her father’s life through a combination of memories and his journals and letters.

In some memoirs, the early chapters tell the story of childhood, and then later reflect on earlier events. For example towards the end of “Glass Castle,” Jeanette Walls struggles to make sense of her relationship with her parents. In “Look Me In The Eye,” John Robison first tells of his childhood, and then later in the book explores how his earlier experiences had been shaped by Asperger’s Syndrome.

Notes
Tracy Seeley’s Home Page
Amazon Page for My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas
How Did John Robison End His Memoir Look me in the Eye
Why so many memoirs of dysfunctional childhood?

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.

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Posted in Coming of age, Regional Memoir, Tracy Seeley | Please Comment »

Publish This Book: The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold and Published This Very Book by Stephen Markley

Monday, July 5th, 2010

by Jerry Waxler

Scanning the memoir shelves at Barnes and Noble, I picked up a book I never heard of called Publish This Book by Stephen Markley. The subtitle tickled my imagination, “The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold and Published This Very Book.” Interesting! I kept reading the cover copy. The author is 24, a surprising age for a memoir writer. I flipped it open to sample the style, and liked what I saw. So I bought it.

Many new memoirs languish on my reading pile for months. Markley’s book, with its promise of irony, suffered no such fate. I began reading it almost immediately. And unlike many other memoirs that I set aside after 10 or 20 pages, “Publish this Book” never stalled out.

I loved the style and sense of humor (I laughed out loud quite a few times), and kept finding fabulous observations about the human condition and the project of writing a memoir. I made it all the way to the end, where there was one more test to go. Would I recommend it to others? Absolutely! I was delighted with the experience, and felt it was a worthwhile read.

Almost four decades ago, I too struggled to make the transition from child to adult, a nerve wracking period filled with confusion and bad choices. Much of my life since then, I have been trying to make sense of the chaos of college during the Vietnam War and the post-college hippie detour. Many years of therapy helped, but my best leap towards understanding came when I turned my life into a story. I find that reading and writing memoirs is the best way to make sense of a life. And even though “Publish this Book” takes place now, in the twenty-first century, it provides fascinating glimpses into the mind of a young man trying to become an adult.

In addition to helping me understand my youth, the book provided a window into today’s world. It’s crazy out there, and instead of Vietnam, there are many other obstacles. “Publish this Book” helps me see this world through younger eyes.

And finally, I imagine college kids themselves would appreciate it. After all, Markley recently emerged from those hallowed halls himself. If I was that age, I would be interested in knowing what to expect. I looked on Amazon to see what other readers thought. Several reviewers liked it as much as I did. The reviews were sort of “positive flames” ranting about how great the book is.

I’ve decided this book ought to be the next Big Thing and the author Stephen Markley ought to become a cult hero, as embedded in our cultural canon as J.D. Salinger or Kurt Vonnegut, who captured the anxiety of being young and trying to grow up. So I had to hurry and interview Markley before he became too famous. It turned out he is as prolific and generous with his interviews as he is with his book. Read my six part interview with Stephen Markley, starting here.

Notes

Visit Stephen Markley’s Home Page

More memoir writing resources

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

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

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

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Posted in Boys To Men, Coming of age, Publish | 5 Comments »

Why Coming of Age Memoirs ought to be a genre

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

by Jerry Waxler

One of the most haunting books I read in high school was James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” His childhood in Dublin was radically different from mine in Philadelphia, so I couldn’t figure out why his story moved me. Now, I look back and realize we both experienced the terrible anxiety of being young. During the period between the ages of say 13 and 23, I struggled to relate to my family and to excel in school. I learned about friendships, sexuality, money, and responsibility. My decision about which college to attend profoundly altered my course. Finally, I was spit onto the shores of adulthood, gasping for air.

If this was supposed to be terra firma, why did I feel so shaky? To learn why life had not turned out according to plan, I spent years in talk therapy and read scores of self-help books. I went to graduate school to learn how to provide psychotherapy to others. But the transition from child to adult still wasn’t coming into focus. Finally, I found the solution. I can learn about that period of my life by reading memoirs.

Some of the most popular memoirs of recent years have been about that stage in the author’s development. The Liar’s Club” by Mary Karr tells about growing up in Texas with two parents who were drowning in their own lives. “Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls tells of a chaotic childhood, traveling from town to town escaping her father’s demons. In “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt grew up in Ireland in a family where alcohol and poverty played a key role. And “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff tells of an ordinary boy with a single mom. She tried to take care of him, but to a large extent, he had to take care of himself.

These Coming of Age tales make one thing clear. Parents have flaws. They can’t always be there. They make mistakes that cause their family to suffer. Each of these dramas reminds me of the extreme vulnerability of children and the importance of parental guidance.

These books often show the role of money. For example, Tobias Wolff’s mother married a man she didn’t love in order to provide a home for her son. Jeanette Walls ate margarine sandwiches to stave off hunger. Frank McCourt scavenged bits of coal that had fallen off trucks, and his mother went down to her husband’s factory to try to get his check before he could drink it away.

Alcohol comes up a lot. Sometimes the parents are drunk, and sometimes it’s the kids who have started to explore the anesthetic properties of drinking. Religion is often invoked as a way to keep kids in line, which in turn creates confusion about these belief systems. Other institutions come up as well. Kids spend a lot of time in school, where they must survive tests from teachers as well as from peers. And constantly, parents and society try to counsel the kids on how to behave.

Until the last few years, no one was ever supposed to talk about life inside their home. It wouldn’t be “right.” Coming of Age memoirs have broken through the taboo. Now that we’re comparing notes, we finally can discard once and for all the syrupy-fake television families of the 50s like “Leave it to Beaver,” “Father Knows Best,” and “Ozzie and Harriet.” Reality is much more complicated that they led us to believe.

But memoirs reveal more than secrets. They also reveal wisdom. In our younger years, we lacked the sophisticated thinking that would have let us make sense of what was going on. When we return to take another look, we identify the causes that tied it all together.

For example, in high school I did schoolwork while my peers were out playing in the back alley. Every Friday and Saturday evening I worked at my dad’s drugstore. At the time, anyone else might have immediately understood my pervasive loneliness but to me it was a mystery. Now, as I write my memoir, my adult mind untangles events and it all makes more sense.

James Joyce started the Twentieth Century by writing a semi-autobiographical story about his Coming of Age. At the beginning of the Twenty First Century such stories are becoming a regular feature of our culture. In my high school English class I also read poetry. William Wordsworth said, “The child is father of the man.” I knew it was important but its meaning was just out of reach. Now, thanks to reading and writing memoirs, I grasp the way that child gave birth to the person I am today.

Here are more Coming of Age stories.

– “Name all the animals” by Alison Smith. A Midwestern girl loses her brother, and discovers her sexuality amidst her grief.
– “Sleeping arrangements” by Laura Shaine Cunningham. An orphan in the Bronx was raised by two uncles, in a zany, heartwarming rendition of New York in the 50s.
– “Invisible Wall” by Harry Bernstein. A young man in Great Britain before and during World War I (yes, that’s a one) lived in a neighborhood split through the center of the street.
– “Colored people” by Henry Louis Gates. A black boy growing up in a tiny town in Jim Crow south finds himself. And he uses the book to try to explain this culture to his children.
– “Don’t call me mother” by Linda Joy Myers. A girl orphaned not by death but by abandonment, struggling to grow up despite her many emotional obstacles.
– “Black, white and Jewish” by Rebecca Walker. This is a book of self-discovery by the daughter of the famous author, Alice Walker.
– “Color of Water” by James McBride. A young black man explores the history of his white Jewish mother and in the process also discovers himself.
– “Tweak” by Nic Sheff. This young man falls into the clutches of crystal meth. Like any hard addiction, this one refocused his entire journey on the goal of getting high. It’s a sobering look at how badly drugs distort Coming of Age.
– “Funny in Farsi” by Firoozeh Dumas. An Iranian-American explores her childhood in America. These adventures of the Melting Pot update the many generations of immigrants who have tried to become part of this amalgamated culture.

Harry Potter was a coming of age story, about the hero’s adventure growing up in an unusual high school.

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.

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Posted in Coming of age, Lifelong Learning | 4 Comments »

How These Memoir Authors Emerged Into Adulthood

Friday, November 13th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

To learn how to write my memoir, I have been reading memoirs. The more I read, the more I learn not just about how to write a memoir, but also how other people’s lives worked, through a variety of situations and stages. And from this research about others, I learn more about myself. In the following list of memoirs, I show a number of examples of how memoir authors experienced this complex transition from childhood into adulthood. By seeing how this period contained so much dramatic tension for these authors, you may gain some insight into the dramatic tension of your own transition into adulthood.

Escaping gangs

Kids in ghettos are pressured from an early age to join gangs and get involved with drugs. It would be easy to stay within this lifestyle. The three men who wrote their story in “The Pact” by Drs. Sampson Davis George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt, were facing exactly that situation. But they stuck together, using the school system, combined with their mutual respect and support to escape the pull of the ghetto, becoming doctors, and then turning back to their community to inspire others to follow their lead.

Emerging From Foster Care

A child in the foster care system, Ashley Rhodes-Courter, constantly felt disconnected from her caregivers, as she moved from one home to another. Finally adopted as a teenager, she turned her disrupted childhood into a successful young adulthood. After this difficult turnaround, she launched successfully, going to college and becoming a national spokesperson for foster care. Her memoir “Three Little Words” enables her to share her message.

Related Essay: Who protects the children? Memoir by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

Smashed trying to do the right thing

Jim McGarrah’s childhood in a safe, healthy Midwest town came to a crashing halt, not when he made a terrible mistake, but when he tried to do the right thing. He joined the army, against his veteran father’s advice, and through the course of his launching became demolished by the horrors of war. As portrayed in his recently published memoir “A Temporary Sort of Peace,” the young man at the end of the launching was just a shadow of the hopeful, energetic one who started it.

Related Essay: Storytellers shed light on the horrors of war

Smashed by sex and drugs

Dani Shapiro’s life had all the right ingredients. She came from a wealthy family, attended a top liberal arts school in New York, picking up an occasional job as a model or actress. Then, an affair with her best friend’s father pulled her into the undertow of drugs, alcohol and obsession. She was crashing on the launch pad. A tragic accident involving her parents shook her out of her stupor. She regained her footing, returned to school, and by the end of the memoir “Slow Motion” was ready to reenter society.

Related Essay: What does Dani Shapiro, or any of us, really want?
Dani Shapiro Seeks Spirituality Through Memoir

A detour into temporary stardom

Dee Dee Phelps, author of “Vinyl Highway” was an ordinary high school girl who liked to sing. With all the advantages of a middle class girl in the early 60s, her path seemed straight and sure: find a husband, and settle down. But she took a huge detour. A guy she knew asked her if she would join him as a singing partner. They formed a popular duet called Dick and Dee Dee.

She had a meteoric rise to a famous singer who toured the world and appeared regularly on television in the 60s. Over the next few years, musical tastes changed rapidly and her partnership with Dick collapsed. Dropping out of the stars, she returned to her original life, ready for the next step of her delayed path towards a more traditional adulthood.

Related Essay: Fame and Story Structure in Dee Dee’s 60’s memoir
To read the two part interview with the author: Click Here for Part 1 and … Here for Part 2

A perfect career left some questions unanswered

Soon after high school, Jancee Dunn landed a job at the magazine Rolling Stone, interviewing celebrities in print and on camera. Despite these glorious encounters, or perhaps because of them, she still needed to develop her own sense of identity, purpose and relationships. Her memoir, “Enough about me” is an excellent travelogue through this period of self-discovery.

Related Essay: Celebrity interviewer turns the camera on herself

Double-launch, injury forces a second coming

George Brummell, author of the memoir “Shades of Darkness,” grew up in the Jim Crow south. In the early sixties, he escaped into the military. His assignment in Korea seemed like a storybook case of letting the military help him grow up and see the world. It came crashing down in Vietnam when a landmine blinded him and permanently damaged his arm. As a civilian, he successfully found a new path, going to college, and landing a job as an executive in the Blinded Veterans commission.

Related Essay: Blind veteran finds his voice by writing

Double-launch, Failure of first launch hurls Joan Rivers into a second

When Joan Rivers’ first marriage failed, she decided to trade in her promising career at a department store for the shady and uncertain future of a performer. She tried her hand as an actress, and then decided there were more opportunities in stand up comedy. The memoir “Enter Talking” follows her grueling journey from her early dreams to her on-air meeting with Johnny Carson that finally launched her into her second self.

Related Essay: Memoir by Celebrity Joan Rivers Offers Lessons for Aspiring Writers

Ambiguous Launch into the world, but still many questions

Frank McCourt, grew up in Ireland, and from early childhood, he was burdened by a father whose devotion to liquor came first. The chaos and poverty hobbled McCourt’s march to adulthood, dragging him down. The book “Angela’s Ashes” shows McCourt crawling across the finish line of childhood. Geographically he escaped his childhood by traveling from Ireland to the U.S. but emotionally he had not yet come of age, leaving the door open for a sequel in which he could continue to grow up.

Greg Mortenson’s long sputtering journey towards adulthood

Greg Mortenson could not quite find the path into adulthood. Passionate about climbing mountains, he maintained a marginal lifestyle that gave him the freedom to climb in the Himalayas. Lost one day in those mysterious mountains, he literally stumbled on his true mission. He would build schools for the poor people in remote regions of Pakistan. Without even knowing what he was doing, he became a social entrepreneur, raising money and lobbying for his cause. His desire to serve forced him to launch. In “Three Cups of Tea” he describes his long journey from child to fully engaged member of society.

Related Essay: “Find meaning through service” or “Making peace with the peasants of Pakistan”

Mental misfit eventually finds rightful place

John Robison’s launching seemed sluggish. In midlife he was still trying to find his center. After decades of trying to put his life together piece by piece, a casual diagnosis of Asperger’s made him realize he had been carrying an extra load. Armed with this new perspective, he looked back upon his life and understood more about how it worked. He became a more complete human being by turning his newfound wisdom towards raising awareness about Asperger’s through public speaking and writing the memoir “Look Me in the Eye.”

Related essay: John Robison’s Asperger’s gave me permission to write about myself

Trauma that smashes launching in mid-stream

Some launchings are going along well, and then a violent intrusion wrecks the road, turning what was supposed to be ordinary life into a struggle to survive.

“Lucky” by Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold’s “Lucky” portrays a devastating reshaping of a life after she was violently raped during college. The memoir portrays her long search to regain innocence and peace.

Related Essay: Alice Sebold’s Lucky, a searing memoir of trauma

“Picking Cotton” by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton

Another young woman’s life was torn to pieces by rape, but her journey back to adulthood was marked by an amazing story. Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton is co-written by the man who was falsely imprisoned for raping her. “That night two lives were destroyed.” The man she accused of the rape turned out to be exonerated, and her second launching has taken place in the social activism of reducing the number of such mistakes in the present.

Related Essay: Mistaken Identification: A memoir of injustice and redemption

“Crazy Love” by Leslie Morgan Steiner
Leslie Morgan Steiner, a Harvard graduate and rising magazine editor was set up for spectacular success. Falling in love with and marrying an abusive man, she quickly found herself struggling for her life. She tells the story in her memoir “Crazy Love.”

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.

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Posted in Book Review, Coming of age, Hero's Journey | Please Comment »

Failure to Launch Generates Dramatic Tension

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

According to the television shows “Leave it to Beaver” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” the process of going from child to adult was supposed to be easy. I expected to go to college, become a doctor, and raise a family. But the reality was far more complex. The turbulence during the Vietnam War shook me off course and sent me on a long journey that covered a lot of territory but never seemed to arrive anywhere.

Emerging into adulthood is sometimes dubbed “launching,” a term that reminds me of a woman in a fur coat smashing a bottle across the bow of a ship being sent to sea on its maiden voyage. My launching did not include getting hit with a bottle of champagne, but I was hit with other substances which contributed to my loss of focus.

During the first fifteen years of my extended search for my place in the adult world, I tried Plans B, C, and D, drifting on open seas, meandering from island to island, with no apparent route and for that matter no apparent destination. To gain control over my navigation, I began a decades-long course of talk therapy. Based on those discussions, my sense of purpose and direction came back into focus.

In my fifties, I realized that by writing a memoir, I could consolidate the knowledge I had gained from these years of experimenting and exploring. From this panoramic view, confusion gave way to wisdom. Dozens of alternate lifetimes later, I am finally regaining the confidence and purpose I felt before I fell off the launch pad. The whole point was to achieve a sense of empowered adulthood, and it appears I have finally achieved that goal.

I’m not sure that a memoir about this long, multi-stage life would be focused enough to sustain a reader’s interest. But since that’s the way my life actually worked, I intend to try. One of the few memoirs that offer a model for this long approach to adulthood is John Robison’s “Look me in the eye.” As a young adult, he pulled together relationships and career but something was missing.  My impression is that his life came into fullness much later when he realized he had Asperger’s, a mental “condition” that was preventing him from interacting with the world.

Robison was not the only one to have a difficult emergence into adulthood. Many memoirs relate the difficulties of this journey, and while each one offers its own unique slant, together they demonstrate that this developmental challenge of life, to go from child to adult, can provide an enormous amount of dramatic tension.

In my next blog essay, I will offer a number of examples of memoirs whose authors struggled on their transition into adulthood.
Writing Prompt
Consider the impact this period had for you. If you have had a curiosity or horror about your own transition from childhood to adulthood, you will find that the power of this period can make compelling material.

Note
To read the essay I wrote about how John Robison’s memoir gave me permission to be myself, click here.

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Princeton Student transfers to the School of Hard Knocks or Learning Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

Every week, the television show “Kung Fu,” opened the doors of a magic kingdom in which the hero, a peaceful warrior named Kwai Chang Caine, avoided violence except when he needed to save innocent people from persecution. Then, he crushed his opponents. Dreamy flashbacks showed Caine with his teacher, Master Po, in an exotic oriental temple. When the student was ready to go into the world, he lifted a kettle of red hot embers between his forearms, forever burning the Shaolin Temple into his skin and my mind.

Recently, I saw a memoir “American Shaolin” by Matthew Polly, a young man who dropped out of Princeton to study Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple in China. I was stunned to learn the place was real and even more astonished that it still existed. At first I resisted reading the book, afraid the real world might ruin my fantasies. Finally curiosity won. I jumped in to “American Shaolin” and kept turning pages to the end.

Matthew Polly left his Ivy League school, and traveled to a small town in China, where he moved into a small sparsely furnished room, took a vow of celibacy, and began his studies. The memoir contained many interesting themes: a search for identity, for spiritual meaning, for the soul of China, and it was a book about men and fighting.

What are men really like?

I’ve never understood girly-girls. Their world view seemed as inaccessible as say, inhabitants of the planet Venus. That was before I started reading memoirs. Now I can see into the mind of anyone who takes the time to write about themselves, expanding my insight across gender lines in a way I never considered possible.

It turns out, I don’t know much about gender-drenched men, either, having lived a watered-down version of masculinity. I never played sports, never was in a fight, never served in the military, never hung out in bars. Matthew Polly’s book has taken me inside a more masculine world than the one I inhabit, and now I know more about that half of the world, too.

From Polly, I learned that some things about men remain consistent across drastically different cultures. For example, after a hard day of strength, agility, and fight exercises, Shaolin monks went out drinking. Talking shop about their day’s practice, their conversations also included that favorite male topic, women, demonstrating the influence of lust across cultural lines.

Writing Prompt
Write a scene when you were attracted to or repelled by a stereotyped male or female trait, such as “too macho” or “too cute.” In the same scene, or another one, write how you felt about your own gender traits?

Wooing and Other Bargaining

Despite his vow of celibacy, Matt Polly did occasionally try to woo a Chinese girl. His attempted liaisons were complicated by four decades of Communist party propaganda that taught Chinese citizens to beware of westerners. The girls were suspicious of Matt and at the same time attracted to him, providing a weird, intriguing mix of politics and sexuality.

On one occasion, he had a hot date the night before an important fight. During dinner, his coach created such an embarrassing scene the girl walked out in frustration. Afterwards, the coach said to Matt, “It’s just as well. If she stayed it would have made your legs weak.” When Polly did finally sleep with a Chinese woman he described the scene with lyrical tenderness. But then she expected him to marry and he fell back to another famous male stance, fear of commitment.

Trying to get a girl into bed was not the only maneuvering going on. One-upsmanship occurred in a variety of situations. Of course, in fighting, the opponents must constantly try to get the upper hand. The focus on strategy set the stage for all sorts of situations of bargaining and maneuvering. For example, he had evidence he was overpaying for rent and tuition, and he tried to negotiate with the temple managers to lower the price. The maneuvering on both sides demonstrated the business-like mentality of the place.

Forty years of hatred for capitalism did not stamp out the Chinese instinct for bargaining any more than it stamped out sexual attraction. Polly’s description of Chinese bargaining strategies helped me understand the expression “inscrutable oriental.” The men were employing a technique known in the west as a “poker face.” To beat your opponent, you must hide your feelings.

I used to think it was tacky to write about money, but I have since come to realize the stuff keeps showing up in real life as well as in good stories. In “American Shaolin,” Polly uses money to show the power struggles among people, to offer insights into his own circumstance, and to provide another window into the Chinese culture. Strangely enough, the tense negotiations between Polly and the managers of the Temple did not ruin my impression of Polly or the Temple. It simply helped me fill in additional aspects of their world, proving once again that the mundane side of human nature, when told well, can breathe authenticity and tension into ordinary situations.

Writing Prompt
Bargaining is a common activity, when we try to get what we want through arguing, or pleading, or strategy. Write a scene when you had to get something from someone, whether for love, or money, or power. Show your plan. Or show how you acted impulsively, without a plan. How did it work? How well did the other person defend their own needs? What did they do to resist your request? Who was the better strategist?

Notes
Click here for the Amazon Page: “American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China by Matthew Polly”

Matthew Polly’s Home Page

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.

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Posted in Book Review, Coming of age, travel | 1 Comment »

Color of Water, a memoir of race, family and fabulous writing

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

James McBride’s mother, Ruth, taught her twelve children to reach for their dreams.  For example, a little-known clause in New York City’s educational system allowed her to send her kids to any school. She sent them to the best in the city where they were often the only blacks in the class. Despite her intense involvement in their lives, they knew little about her past. When James was a young boy, struggling to understand his racial identity, he asked her, “Are you white?” She evaded the question, replying, “I have light skin.” He couldn’t figure it out, and kept hounding her. “What color is God?” he asked. “He’s the color of water,” she said. “He doesn’t have any color.”

James McBride’s search for his racial identity intensified during adolescence. While his older siblings were earning college degrees, McBride rebelled so hard he ended up on a street corner, hanging out with punks stealing and dealing on their way down. In their company, something finally clicked and he realized the street corner was a dead end.

I should not be too surprised that McBride suffered while searching for his identity. During my adolescence, I too went through a period of uncertainty and anxiety so severe it turned self-destructive. One challenge for me was to figure out how a Jew was supposed to fit in to the Christian Melting Pot. After reading McBride’s memoir, I realize I had it easy compared to this boy with a white mother and a black father, trying to find his place in a culture that takes race far too seriously.

Surrounded by an all-black cast of siblings, neighbors, and extended family, he had no trouble finding the black half of his heritage, but his white relatives were a closed book. After college, less troubled but still curious, he applied his journalistic skills to discover the white half.

His requests to his mother became more focused, and finally after a lifetime of secrecy and angry refusal, she started talking. His interviews with her resulted in the New York Times bestselling memoir “Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother” which weaves his mother’s tales of her youth into the author’s memories of his childhood.

Ruth’s reticence about her past reflected much that she preferred to forget. She grew up as an orthodox Jew in a small town in the south, shunned by her schoolmates, and raised by a cruel father who treated his wife and two children like servants. When Ruth set out to start her own life, she rejected everything about her father including his racism. She fell in love with and married a black man, triggering her entire family to reject her. The cut-off went in both directions. She broke off contact and eventually converted to Christianity.

If he wrote about his whole life, why wasn’t it an autobiography?

McBride’s life contains more than enough material for an entire memoir, and yet by the end of the book, we have also learned his aging mother’s history, a combined story that spans 80 years. This extended timeline defies the generally accepted rule that the journey of an entire life is an autobiography, a form supposedly more suitable for celebrities, politicians, and generals.

To write for strangers we’re supposed to limit ourselves to tighter timelines that focus on one particular aspect or period. Despite the broader scope of “Color of Water,” the book was fabulously successful, selling more than a million copies. How did this apparent autobiography earn such a prominent position as a highly acclaimed memoir?

In my opinion, “The Color of Water” compels me to turn pages for the same reason any good book does. The author has achieved expertise as a storyteller. McBride’s writing style was fostered by the years he worked as a professional journalist, reinforcing the comment I heard recently at a writing conference that the best preparation for any writer is to take a job as a reporter.

One scene offers an example of the lively nature of his writing. McBride’s older brother told him there was a surprise waiting in the closet. McBride peered into the dark to see what it was. The brother shoved him in and slammed the door. So far it sounds like a normal prank. The additional twist was that another brother, waiting quietly at the back of the closet, suddenly screamed and attacked, scaring McBride out of his wits. The two brothers had schemed to maximize the mischief, providing the reader with a vivid image of the loving mayhem that permeates McBride’s home.

Stylistically, the “Color of Water” jumps back and forth through time, interspersing tales of his mother’s childhood with his own. He even pops forward into the present, describing his trip to the small southern town where his mother grew up. As a reader I enjoy his time-weaving, but as a writer I find his style less accessible to analysis than a simpler, more chronologically organized tale. I wonder if his creative license comes from his years as a journalist or as a jazz musician, or more likely, both.

Somehow, McBride managed to achieve it all, thus proving that the power of memoirs is not in the rules but in the craft. Thanks to his excellent storytelling, James McBride ushered me into his life, where I joined the other million readers who also learned about the trials, pleasures, and challenges of this family and this man. Together we shared his tribute to his mother, Ruth McBride, and became one person wiser in our exploration of the vast range of human experience.

Writing Prompt
Write about a prank, an accident, or some explosive moment that left you disoriented and lets you show your characters in an almost otherworldly state of mind.

Writing Prompt
Look again at misadventures of your adolescence that you typically think of as stupid, misguided mistakes. Challenge your automatic self-attacks by writing about those events as if they were valuable experiments or detours along the longer road of growing up. For the purposes of this exercise, push your self-critic aside. Instead of judging yourself, simply tell the story.

Writing Prompt
Scan your life story writing, and pick an important scene you wish you could deepen. Interview a parent or sibling or, if they are not available, imagine you are interviewing them. Ask about their role in this scene, or their ideas about it, or about similar situations that they might have experienced. Use this real or imagined conversation to help flesh in some background to deepen your own scene.

Note

For the Amazon link to Color of Water, click here.

For James McBrides’ Home Page, click here.

Note
Another bestselling memoirist John Grogan, author of Marley and Me, also started his career as a journalist. To read more about my take on Marley and Me, click here.

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Posted in Black Culture, Coming of age, Family Memoirs, identity | 6 Comments »

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