Category Archives: Idealism/Meaning

How Boys Become Men? (Hint: Memoirs Help)

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by Jerry Waxler

Ed Husain, author of “The Islamist,” grew up in a Muslim community in England. As a young boy in the 1980s his greatest pleasure was following his father and learning to pray. In high school in the 90s, he fell in with a group of boys who said that prayer was for old people, and that the urgent mission of every Muslim should be to destroy western culture. These ideas appealed to Husain, and overriding his father’s objections, he joined the demonstrations and soon began organizing them.

Husain’s choices offended me. Couldn’t he see his father’s wisdom was deeper than his own? Wasn’t it obvious he was attacking the very government that gave him the freedom to protest in the first place? While I was criticizing Husain, I felt a tug from another direction. In the back of my mind, I remembered my own choices when I was his age.

My father was a pharmacist. After years of hearing him speak reverentially about doctors, I decided the best way to please him would be to become a doctor myself. When I entered college in 1965, I was well on my way. But the Vietnam war was ramping up and so were the protests. When I was 20 years old, I stood outside the Commerce Building in Madison, Wisconsin, dodging tear gas canisters. A thousand kids with red faces and tears streaming down our cheeks, snapped our arms in a Nazi salute and screamed “Sieg Heil” at the club-wielding police. I had crossed a threshold into an angry state of mind where fixing the world took priority over a mere detail like my future livelihood.

Even though Husain’s journey and mine were light-years apart in ideology, we had many things in common. Both of us thought our hot-headed ideas were based on a pure ideology that demanded anger and action. Looking at our ideas as a matched set, I see how similar they were in their rejection of our parents’ values in favor of a pressured, bold path suitable for young men.

Another thing we shared was a conscience too deeply developed to ignore the inevitable results of our  rhetoric. Husain lost his taste for divisive political action when he saw a student knifed to death in the name of religion. I lost my enthusiasm for demonstrations when I realized I could not riot my way to peace. And yet, it was too late to retreat to the innocence of childhood. We had to go forward, following the path we started. It took years of self-discovery before we were able to reclaim a sense of purpose.

After Ed Husain disengaged from his activist friends, he needed to learn the truth. He moved to the Middle East to learn Arabic and study the Koran in its original language. Eventually, he not only returned to the prayerful religion of his father but also gained a deep respect for the freedom and dignity afforded by western democracies.

My return to my father’s way of life took many turns. First I tried avoiding adulthood altogether by becoming a hippie. Then I became a piping engineer, helping design nuclear power plants. When that industry collapsed, I took a job in a foundry along with muscular men who poured molten brass into black sand molds. I drove a sports car, a red Camaro, and changed my own brakes and spark plugs. Tired of muscles and dirt, I became a computer programmer and technical writer. During the entire period, it never once occurred to me I was trying to figure out how to become a man. I just thought of myself as a person.

Toward the end of the foundry stage I decided that if I was ever going to find my way back to wholeness, I had to keep growing, so I began to read self-help books. For example, Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” urged me to consider my thoughts and actions. Like a driver of a car who realizes he is steering a deadly vehicle, these authors showed me that living well required careful attention. I read a hundred books and learned something about how to be a better person from each one. I wanted to talk to someone about all this information so I entered therapy. After half a dozen years of talk therapy, I had gained so much respect for that process that I went back to school to learn to become a psychotherapist myself.

In graduate school, I deepened my understanding of people, for example, going deeper into the way children develop into adults. I learned general helping skills like the art of attentive listening. And I learned specialties like career counseling. In one of my specialized classes, I learned about a skill called assertiveness which means standing up for yourself and demanding your rights. The women’s movement has to a large extent been focused on teaching women how to become more assertive. I knew the course would help me counsel women, but I never found a corresponding course that would help me understand issues faced specifically by men.

I began reading memoirs, and many mysteries and puzzles about human nature came to life on their pages. For example, when I was growing up, the protagonists of novels were almost always men. Memoirs now gave me the chance, for the first time, to see the world through the eyes of female protagonists. I realized memoirs were providing insights into topics that I had only glimpsed in my counseling classes.

The big surprise was how much I was learning about boys. The more I read about other boys growing up, the more I began to see that growing up male has challenges that I had never before tried to put into words. After reading about Ed Husain’s experience trying to overthrow all of Western civilization, and reflecting on my own rebellion, I took another look at boys.

Mark Salzman, in his memoir “Lost in Place,” became obsessed with learning karate. Both he, and another author Mathew Polly in “American Shaolin,” even went to China to study martial arts. In “Tattoos on the Heart,” Father Greg Boyle worked with gang members in Los Angeles, mostly male. He was helping them find alternatives to shooting each other. I always knew the violent streak in boys lands them in jail far more often than girls, but now memoirs were allowing me to enter into those experiences and feel them more intimately. I now saw what should have been obvious all along. We have too much assertiveness. We become so fired up about our rights we demand, we defend, and we fight.

Of course not all boys assert themselves violently. In “Publish this Book,” Stephen Markley’s anger sent him running not to the barricades but to the voting booth. In the memoir “Three Cups of Tea,” Greg Mortenson looked for his manhood by trying to conquer  the Himalayan mountains. In his memoir “Open,” tennis champion Andre Agassi fought against his father’s demands by being a bad boy, breaking rules like dress codes, wearing colored shorts on the tennis court instead of whites. In so many cases, I saw how hard boys work to figure out how to grow up.

When I was young, I stumbled and struggled on my path toward adulthood. Now decades later, comparing my life with the lives of boys in memoirs, I see a pattern that helps me make sense of my journey. My decisions early in life seem to a large extent to be based on trying to please my father. I’ll call that Stage One. In my late teens, I became impatient with Dad’s way. His guidance seemed to be slowing me down and I felt a sense of urgency to pass him in the fast lane. That was Stage Two, but as Stage Two progressed, I didn’t know where to stop. I rejected my father’s path so effectively I began to fall apart. Finally, I became frightened by my own rebellion and realized I didn’t know what I was doing. Around 25 years-old, I entered Stage Three, when I stopped rebelling and started pursuing a career. That was what I used to call “adult life” and thought there was nothing after it. Decades later, just when I thought I had run my course, I discovered there was a Stage Four. After my youthful anger had passed, I rediscovered my youthful idealism.

I originally wanted to be a doctor to please my father. He loved healers and I wanted to become one. Decades later, I am revisiting that desire to help others, replacing the original intention of healing physical disease with my lifelong desire for mental and emotional self-improvement. I want to help people learn about themselves and find their best path. And I’m not alone in my return to the idealism that lay at the foundation of my youthful rebellion.

When Ed Husain was young, he wanted to tell the world about his religion. It was a righteous instinct that required intense action. Later, when he discovered the roots of his faith, he realized there was a deeper obligation at the heart of his passion. His more mature intuition was that people needed to learn these things for themselves. He ran for elected office in the British government and tried to steer other Muslims towards the gentler, more inclusive roots of their religion. Based on his experience of being misled, he reached out to help others avoid similar mistakes. Then he wrote about his memoir to raise the alarm about the dangers of the fundamentalist movement that was insinuating itself into the minds of young men.

Other memoir writers followed similar trajectories of enlightenment and generosity. Mark Salzman wrote another memoir, “True Notebooks” about going into a prison and teaching boys to write. Greg Mortenson decided to stop fighting mountains and start building schools for poor children. Andre Agassi was not content with being a world famous tennis player. A high school dropout himself, he started a school for disadvantaged kids.

For most of my life I resisted the notion that men have different ways of looking at the world. I thought we were just people. Yet all along, I was behaving like other men, heaving myself against war, against career, against everything. But without the wisdom to reflect on my compulsions, I could never relieve the pressure. Now that I compare my journey with those portrayed by other men, I believe I could have achieved my deeper goals faster and with more wisdom by acknowledging that I happened to be a male.

I didn’t know all this back then, but I know it now thanks to reading and writing memoirs. Memoirs have given me the ability to step back and look at the forces that were being played out. For example, I see myself at 22 years-old raging at the world to stop fighting. The world sent in their own platoon of young men and they were better armed. Looking back, I see this head-on collision only fulfilled our need to rage but failed to achieve our goals. Now, as I look at the state of the world, I wonder how many young men are out there fighting to tear down some enemy’s world, or furious at some group or policy, and I wish I could help those boys see a different way. I imagine a world in which, instead of devoting their energy to tearing things down, they poured their idealistic passion into building solutions.

Perhaps writing stories will help. It certainly helped me. By writing my memoir, I now see the journey through those stages. Perhaps it could help fathers, who, by writing their story, could become more sensitive to the journeys of their sons. And it might help the boys, themselves. Erin Gruwell, the teacher in “Freedom Writers Diary,” and Mark Salzman in “True Notebooks” showed troubled kids how to write about their lives, and as they heard the words on each other’s pages, their own sense of social responsibility emerged as if by magic.

Memoirs are spreading the word that we are protagonists in our own drama, that we are all intertwined, that our actions matter. Perhaps memoir reading and writing could help boys find their authentic selves faster, and convince them to spend less time pushing and heaving against the world. World peace without the riots. I know one 20 year old boy who has finally grown old enough to understand this truth. Now I need to explain it to a few others.

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Is it assertiveness or aggression? Neither it’s Thumos or Thymos!

What makes boys so willing to fight for what they think is “right?” I puzzled over this quality that drove me crazy when I was growing up. I don’t think “assertiveness” is the right word. Assertiveness indicates something more methodical and carefully planned. The impulse I’m trying to describe is more pressured, and instinctual and pervasive than that. It takes over a boy’s whole sense of direction. And I don’t think the word “aggression” fits either. The willingness to hurt others might be part of it. But this larger “boy’s instinct” is not just about a fight for a street corner. It’s more philosophical than that, as if boys have an instinct to understand their righteous place in the world.

I recently found a candidate for the right word in a book by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. In Shay’s professional life, he treats Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in combat veterans. In his private life, he studies Greek classics. In Shay’s book, “Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming” he points to the Greek quality called thumos (also spelled thymos). The Greeks harnessed this quality of righteous anger to train good warriors. Once I knew the word, I saw the quality everywhere. Consider the murderous fight between Tybalt and Mercutio in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” They were incensed by an insult from the “enemy” family.” Erin Gruwell, in “Freedom Writers Diary,” invited her students to compare Shakespeare’s deadly fight with their own Los Angeles gangs. Shay’s discussion of this Greek concept did not include advice for how to steer boys toward a more creative, socially productive outlet. For that, I will need more research. I think I will find the answer in memoirs, which are the repository of human truths of all kinds.

To learn more about the process of going from boy to man, I signed up for a Men’s group weekend offered by The Mankind Project,  If it sheds light on memoir writing or self-discovery, I will write more about it here.

Notes

Amazon page for “The Islamist”

Link to an article I wrote about “The Islamist” and another memoir, Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran

Index to articles about memoirs on Memory Writers Network

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Memoir interview about privacy, activism, style

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Interview with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg about her memoir “Sky Begins at Your Feet,” Part 2 by Jerry Waxler

This is Part 2 of the interview I conducted with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg about her memoir “The Sky Begins at your Feet.” In Part 1, (to read Part 1 click here) Caryn shares observations about the spiritual and religious journey. In this Part, she discusses community activism, privacy, style, and other issues that may help memoir writers learn more about their craft.

(Note: Caryn will be checking in during the blog tour to read and respond to your comments.)

Jerry Waxler: During the period covered in the memoir, you are also very much engaged in organizing an environmental conference, weaving your activism about earth into consciousness raising about breast cancer. This is a fabulous double-value of your story. Do you see the book as a tool of advocacy for ecology work, as well as health?

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: I see the health issues as relating directly to the environment, and I knew this book very much had to be a bioregional book. By bioregionalism, I mean the tradition of learning from your community and eco-community how to live, how to steward your home place and be a good citizen, and how to find greater meaning and purpose in your life through connection to the land and sky. The conference was actually a bioregional congress, focused on bringing people together from throughout the continent to network, share resources, and inspire each other in living more fully in our home communities. I hope the book does inspire people to, most of all, learn more about their environment, and from that learning, develop a greater connection with their local land, which will naturally lead to the kind of advocacy and stewardship that creates enduring ecological change. I also hope the book helps people see not just more of the connections between cancer and ecological degradation and destruction, but between healing and finding kinship with the trees, fields, birds, skies and other aspects of our homes around us.

Note: For more about the bioregionalism movement, click here.

Jerry Waxler: How has this memoir been received in your ecology activist community?

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: It’s been received very well so far, and next week, I’ll be reading it at another bioregional congress, this one at The Farm in Tennessee, so I’ll see more how it speaks to people in that community.

Jerry Waxler: I love the characters in your community. So many people reach out with compassion, to help you with food, with caring for your family, and of course the all-important emotional support. In the process of telling about these people, aren’t you to some extent impinging on their privacy? Many memoir writers are confused about how much to say, how much detail to include, whether to change names, and so on. How did you balance your friends’ privacy with your desire to tell the story of friendship and community.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: This was an issue I thought long and hard about, and basically, anyone who showed up more than once, I contacted when the book was in its final draft, and sent them a copy of the book to read, letting them know that if there was anything they couldn’t live with, they should tell me. Few people asked me to change anything, but I thought asking was the ethical thing to do. I also shared the final draft with all my doctors, my children, my mother and siblings. I worked hard in editing to remove any references to people (there were just a few) I had larger conflicts with because I didn’t want to use my writing in any way to play out those conflicts. Occasionally, when I did present something unflattering about anyone, I changed the name of that person and that person’s identifying characteristics.

Jerry Waxler: You went through a terrifying period, facing the loss of part of your body, and a profound alteration of body image. In the memoir, you have explained and explored this loss of part of yourself, in far greater detail than most of us imagine. What I’m interested in knowing more about is what it felt like to write about this profound relationship between flesh and life. What sort of processing did you do while you were writing about this impending loss? Was it traumatic to write about it? Did writing the memoir help you understand more or cope more or come to terms more with this loss?

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: I write through whatever life gives me, so I wrote through cancer, not always coherently, but writing helped me sort out my feelings and also helped me make what was happening more real. The writing itself wasn’t traumatic although I’m aware that we can re-ignite trauma in our lives sometimes if we write obsessively about such events (as researched in the work of James Pennebaker and others). Before I lost various body parts, I wrote to those parts of my body (and I wrote some about this in the memoir), using writing itself as part of the ceremony of letting go of my breasts or uterus or ovaries. For me, it’s very important to create ceremonies that involve writing and sometimes spoken words as a way to name the rite of passage, so yes, all the writing helped me come to terms with losses. At the same time, time itself is wildly effective at helping people, including me, make peace in such situations.

Jerry Waxler: In a couple of places in the book you use Flash Forwards. For example, you say “I had no idea she would be killed in an accident in 5 years.” The character had no way of knowing this from within her own Point of View. Stylistically, this raises an important puzzle for memoir writers. The Author, the person sitting at the computer typing the book, is older and knows so much more than the Protagonist, the younger one undergoing the experience. How did you steer between these two sets of knowledge? What can you tell us about the relationship between the Author’s POV and the Protagonist’s? How does the unfolding of the Protagonist’s Point of View in the story help reveal what the Author is going to know in the future?

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: I purposely wrote this book very much from the perspective of being in the future, looking back. Particularly with the big stories of our lives, I think the added perspective of the author in the present can help readers better understand the various ramifications and unfoldings of the story. Two pieces of advice that influenced me were from a poet, who once told me how much we need to let our experiences ripen over time until we can find the real essence of the story or poem that wants to be told, and my oncologist, who said however I felt about my cancer experience would continually unfold and change over time. Also, when telling stories in which mortality is a kind of character, I think having the perspective of time passing allows an author to go much deeper into the hard stuff — the terror and sadness, grief and confusion — without making the reader feel too overwhelmed.

Jerry Waxler: The book contains quite a bit of concrete information about the medical diagnosis and treatment. How do you see your role in that regard? While writing it, were you thinking about how it could help cancer patients and their loved ones demystify the technicalities of this journey? How has that turned out so far?

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: I knew that I had to share at least some technical information because going through serious illness is often a technical journey as well as an emotional and spiritual one. I also wanted to demystify the genetic mutation discussion surrounding breast cancer. Because of fears many have about losing insurance if they reveal that they have the BRCA1 or other genetic mutation, it’s a difficult thing to talk about, and yet we’re only going to change the crazy biases of insurance companies by talking about things like this in print and out loud. I also was lucky enough to know I wouldn’t be dropped from my insurance although several of my doctors told me how careful they were in medical records never to write “BRCA1″ but use a symbol instead so that the patient would be protected. I also find that people going through cancer, at some point or another, want and need to know about the technical aspects of their cancer; for example, is the cancer particularly aggressive or slow-growing? We get that information often from numbers on a page, and it’s difficult at times but important to understand these aspects or we won’t have the information we need to make the most informed decisions possible about treatment options.

Jerry Waxler: Are you reaching out to offer the book to that audience?

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: Given that one out of three of us will have a cancer diagnosis in our lifetimes, that audience is actually very large. Just about all of us have had cancer or been close to someone who had cancer, so yes, I did want to reach out to that audience, but this is also a book about losing a parent, finding strength in the land and sky, connecting with community, and making greater peace with living in a flawed, aging and still miraculous body.

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Links

Click here for Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s website

Click here for more information about Caryn’s Transformative Language Arts Program at Goddard College

Click here for the Transformative Language Arts Network

Click here to visit the Amazon page for The Sky Begins at Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

This interview is part of the blog tour hosted by Women on Writing. To see Caryn’s Blogtour page, click here.

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Freedom Writers Diary Turns Journaling Into Activism

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by Jerry Waxler

The Freedom Writers Diary is a collection of diary entries written by inner-city high school kids in Los Angeles. When I first heard about it, I thought the book would be too scattered and too youthful to have anything to do with memoir writing. After I started reading, I discovered these authors were doing essentially the same thing any memoir writer does; telling stories about their lives, and sharing them with the world.

I was stunned by the intensity of their circumstances. In the classroom, the kids separated themselves into racially defined groups – Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and Whites.  Out on the street, many were members of rival gangs, killing and being killed for the color of their skin. Most of them had been shot at, and almost all had lost at least one friend to gang violence. The cultural tension portrayed a more complicated view of the American Melting Pot than I ever knew, and highlighted the terrible tendency of human beings to group together with their “own kind” and to exclude and misunderstand “the other.”

This particular classroom was designated for the throwaway kids, the ones who would never make it. Their home life was racked by poverty and drugs, and broken families. Some had been evicted and a few had even been homeless. When Erin Gruwell, a new teacher fresh out of college, walked into her English class, two things seemed obvious to everyone but her. First, these kids would continue their murderous hatred for each other, and second, none of them would graduate high school.

Through her innovative use of literature and journal writing, the young teacher defied both of these predictions, offering her students opportunities to escape their apparent fate. They raised their test scores, crossed racial lines to form deep friendships, finished high school and went on to college.

Uses of Journaling

To try to overcome their initial hostility to her and to each other, Erin Gruwell asked them to write about their personal lives. She had no idea she was turning on a spigot that released a flood of revelation and sharing. Through the writing, members of the class opened up to each other, breaking out of rigidly defined racial identities.

The journey to tolerance was helped by Gruwell’s use of world literature, especially the recollections of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of another diarist, Anne Frank. After reading Anne Frank’s diary, the students realized they were not the only ones persecuted. The Holocaust’s impact on the kids was so strong, Gruwell wanted to teach them more. She took them to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and she introduced them to several Holocaust Survivors. By visiting these horrors of recent history, they began to open their eyes to the futility and horror of racial hatred.

Shakespeare helped, too. The kids thought it was stupid that the two feuding families in Romeo and Juliet would kill each other merely for being born with the wrong name. Then Gruwell pointed out the similarities to their own situation. They made the connection and learned another lesson about prejudice.

After four years of sharing their stories with each other, working together to raise money for educational projects, and becoming avid students of the literature of tolerance and survival, these kids traded in their hatred for harmony. Over and over they use the word “family” to describe their feelings for their fellow classmates.

The Power of Sharing Private Experience

Now that their diary entries have been published, the rest of the world can share their moral journey, too. Like the shape-shifters in magical myths, they tear off the masks of gang bangers, of druggies and anti-social kids who will never amount to anything, and reveal real people, with real dreams for family and a safe society. Their experience makes me dream of the possibilities.

After they graduated, the book ended but the kids kept pushing their agenda. Using the public awareness generated by the book, Gruwell and the Freedom Writers formed a non-profit organization, the Freedom Writers Foundation, to bring the message of hope to other schools.

Their public relations campaign shifted into high gear when the Freedom Writers experience was produced as a movie starring Hilary Swank. The production moved me as deeply as the book did, and will extend the reach of their message even farther, proving this amazing lesson about memoir writing. By telling the story of our own lives, we reach beyond ourselves, sharing experiences that potentially help other people grow, turning private lives into a public act of social change.

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Writing Prompts
Write a situation in which you felt empathy for someone who was on the other side of some wall, contained behind the boundaries of your pre-judgment. Write what it felt like before the connection was established, and then what it felt like as the wall started to crumble and you saw the real person beyond it.

Consider some interaction you have had with a person from the “wrong” race or religion. Tell a story about your interaction. Stretch your imagination and try to tell the same story from their point of view.

Write about a period in your life when you felt stuck behind a façade, in which others saw you differently than you saw yourself. Write a story about taking off that mask.

Write a story about a book that made a difference in your life.

Write a story about a teacher who made a difference in your life.
Notes

The Freedom Writers Diary : How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them, by Freedom Writers, Zlata Filipovic, with Erin Gruwell

Freedom Writers Foundation

Read my essay “The Terrible Logic of Uncivilized Boys” about Mark Salzman’s creative writing class inside a juvenile detention center for gang members in Los Angeles,

More memoir writing resources

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

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

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

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

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Gary Presley’s Memoir Defangs the Horror of Aging and Disability

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by Jerry Waxler

The children’s illustrator, Maurice Sendak told an interviewer that when he was little, he was scared of old people. He was afraid of their wrinkled skin and hair growing out of the wrong places. Such scary impressions formed the basis for the monsters in Sendak’s children’s books, monsters that made him famous. The interviewer Marty Moss Coane then asked him, “Now that you are 80 years-old yourself, do you feel you have become a monster to the small children who read your books?” “Absolutely” he answered. “Many children at signings are afraid of me and burst into tears when their mother tells them to hand me their book.”

The conversation stirred my own childhood memory of visiting my great-grandmother in a nursing home. She was very, very old, with white hair and shriveled skin. I couldn’t wait to get out. As I grow older, my own body gradually becomes less perfect, an observation made all the more disturbing by my tendency to prefer lovely and smooth people over flawed ones. If I judge my own vitality the way I judge theirs, I come up short, in fact shorter all the time, as even my height collapses under the weight of years.

I feel an urgency to start loving the flaws in the human condition, because if I don’t do it soon, I will start hating myself. To help me change my perspective, I have been reading people’s stories. Their thoughts and feelings teach me who they are, in the full flower of their differences and imperfections.

Take Gary Presley, for example, a moderator on InternetWritingWorkshop. I admire Gary’s relentless kindness and service to fellow writers. And, it turns out, Gary accomplishes these achievements from a wheelchair. His body was ravaged by polio when he was 17, and now decades later, he has written about his journey in the memoir “Seven Wheelchairs, A Life beyond Polio.”

As I learn about Gary, I recognize in his story, a central aspect of my own ambition. I too pour myself into writing, wanting to be known not by my increasingly flawed body but by the long reach of my curious mind. By understanding him, I learn much about myself and continue to expand my fascination with people of all kinds. His world makes mine richer.

But to share his world with me, he had to figure out how to set words on a page. It is through this strange medium that he, and every memoir writer, shares our world. And so, despite his physical difference from me, Gary has traveled a writer’s journey that has created a voice, strong and deep, through which to present himself in all his complex, rich energy of a creative human being, exemplifying universal qualities that make life worth living — the will to learn, to create, and then to express inner life and share it with the world.

While all of us have a story, not all of us have been to graduate school to study the nuances of writing style and theory. Instead we accumulate knowledge in bits and pieces. One workshop leader shows us how to create a unique character by describing a tic or habit. A book about writing explains the importance of starting a story in the middle of the action. An especially important insight for memoir writers is the difference between essays and stories. Gary Presley’s memoir contains excellent lessons about these two forms because it straddles the fence between them.

I think of pure story as something you can put on a stage. It progresses through scenes, and shows you specific images that you can visualize. So for example, consider Gary’s portrayal of his last walk under power of his own legs. He was milking the cows one evening, felt sick, went to bed, and woke up the next morning unable to move his legs. It’s a story.

I think of an essay as a discussion of ideas. For example, Gary explores his relationship with the Seven Wheelchairs in the title, rapidly traversing periods of time, progressing from one wheelchair to the next, and explaining the importance of this vehicle for his independence. He hates it when people say he is “confined to a wheel chair.” He prefers to see the machine as a sort of external appendage of himself, like a bionic man who uses wheels instead of legs. This discussion of his relationship to wheelchairs is an essay.

Reading Prompt
Most memoirs are mostly stories. And yet, when you look more closely you almost always find essays, sometimes a paragraph long, and sometimes a page, embedded within the framework of the story. To learn about the relationship between these two forms, read Seven Wheelchairs or any favorite memoir carefully. In one color, highlight the scenes that could be performed as a play. In another color, highlight the parts that describe thoughts and ideas. See which parts you like, and think about how the author has handled the mix between these two forms.

Philosophy of self-reliance seen through the eyes of a crip
Presley tells the story of his life in a wheelchair, a “crip” as he calls himself, when he fell from the teenage graces of an adult into the prison of an iron lung. Then he describes years of life, from reliance on caregivers, to his employment in an office, and so on. Through it all, he faces a powerful inner tension. He is unable to get into or out of bed or clean himself without assistance, and yet his pride demands he be self-reliant. How can he be both self-reliant and yet rely on his helpers for his very life?

He expresses his dilemma eloquently, describing his initial anger and despair in the early years, and gradually he discovers a balance in his attitude that would sustain him through the rest of his life. In this state of inner tension, to survive as a proud individual, he exerts indomitable will, founded upon a rock-solid determination to manage his mind, the part of himself he can still control. He must not give in to depression, laziness, or dependence. Within himself, and with others, he demands the right to be a full person.

Gary’s biography proves that ideas are more than mere garnish. His ideas about self-reliance kept him alive, pushed him to excel, and despite the limitations polio foisted on him, he continued a lifelong commitment to giving and interacting with others. His ideas were crucial for shaping and sustaining his life.

His determination to rise above mere circumstance forces me to look beyond the frustration of traffic jams, the fear of economic downturn, and even the health and wholeness of my body. Idealism is more than all of these things. Idealism provides an image of what life could be. Then we idealists passionately reach towards it, and struggling, come as close to it as possible. By showing me how he arrived at these ideas, he transformed his outer disability into a story of inner strength, providing a noble ideal that I hope to be able to follow.

Notes
Here are two more memoirs that combine the story and essay form:
Kate Braestrup’s “Here when you need me” contains essay thinking about the theodicy problem.
Henry Louis Gates’ “Colored People” contains a terrific essay about hair.

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below.
You can also download the podcast from iTunes:

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Memoir writing is a step along my spiritual journey

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by Jerry Waxler

(Listen to the podcast using the player control at the bottom of this post. You can also download it using iTunes.)

Now that I’m 60, I am facing an age when the end of the story seems to be shimmering out there on the horizon. I’ve always been obsessed with who I am and where I’m going, and now I feel like I have a deadline.

People often talk about the urgency of living each day as if it’s their last. This perspective is especially compelling when someone we know has recently departed. I too find a desire to live each day to its fullest. But my pressure arises from a slightly different reason. I ask, “What if I’m here until I’m 90? How will I live a meaningful life for another 30 years?” That’s a daunting task. And it turns out that memoir writing has become the center piece of my plan. By delving into the inner journey of who I’ve been, I’m learning more and more lessons about where I’m going.

I recently gave a talk at a gathering at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethlehem Pennsylvania about using life stories to build a sense of purpose at any age. I didn’t give the talk during a worship service, and I’m not a preacher. This was an open meeting before the service, when people from the community come to listen to guest speakers talk about all sorts of topics. It was a perfect audience for my eclectic views on life, on memory, and on meaning. And during the three months I spent preparing the talk, I developed a neat way to explain how my life journey makes more sense than ever. It was ambitious of me to try to explain the meaning of life in 20 minutes, but I think I did a decent job. I’ll post the written version later. For now, I’m attaching the audio version. I’d be delighted to know what you think.

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To see the written version of the talk I gave about how memoir writing enhances my faith in the future, see my blog entry by clicking here. To listen to it, click on the podcast link below.

Podcast version click the player control below:

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Deformity and love in Martha Beck’s memoir Expecting Adam

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by Jerry Waxler

I overcame a thrill of horror when I purchased Martha Beck’s memoir, “Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic” about giving birth to a child with Down Syndrome. I like to think of myself as an accepting person. But since deformity, by definition, breaks the mold, it challenges my acceptance. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to read Martha Beck’s book. I was hoping her love for her son would help me grow.

By the time I reached page 70 I had already cried four times. These were good tears, of empathy and insight. I am grateful for her ability to share her experience so clearly and compassionately. And while she does not mention any particular belief system, I find this to be one of the more spiritual books I have read in recent years. For some reason it reminded me of William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence, about how spirituality is wrapped up neatly inside ordinary life.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

I looked up the text of this poem, and was surprised to discover how passionate Blake was about protecting those who are different or helpless. “Expecting Adam” also reminds me of my father’s brother Harry. My father Sam was six feet tall and lanky, a great looking guy with blue eyes and a gorgeous smile. His older sister was also tall and good looking, while his younger brother Harry was about three feet and change, with a flattened nose, a forehead that took up way too much of his face, and legs so short he scampered rather than walked, all symptoms of what is known as dwarfism, or achondroplasia. Harry was a kind and energetic member of the family, helping his father and sister take care of the apartments they owned. We never talked about his stature, and so it was almost invisible to me, other than unavoidable details like the way the foot pedals in his car were built out so he could reach them.

When I went away to school, Harry discovered Little People of America, and he converted from being a freak to an accepted member of his own clan. When I came home for holidays, Harry began acting more like teenager than a 50 year old, having discovered dating for the first time in his life. Then while I was off finding myself, Harry died and I have not thought about him since, until recently when folks of his stature showed up on a reality television show. Despite my affection for Harry and my lifetime striving to accept people in all their diversity, I still find it harder to embrace differences than I would like.

I suppose my life would be simpler if I pushed this problem aside, and loved only the people who look like me. But that would cut me off from all of humanity, one way or another because there are a zillion ways humans can be different, or at least 8 billion, anyway. We are all unique, even though we expend a lot of energy pretending we’re like everyone else. One of the reasons I love memoirs is that they give me the opportunity to see into the minds and hearts of individuals, and learn how life works for them. By sharing her love for her son, Martha Beck’s memoir Expecting Adam has assisted my project of respecting the entire human race, one individual at a time.

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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It’s a wonderful life for every memoir writer

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By Jerry Waxler

Every year millions of people watch the movie “It’s a wonderful life” in which Jimmy Stewart’s guardian angel stops him from killing himself by showing him how his life has made a difference in people’s lives. Once he sees the bigger picture, he regains confidence and charges back into the fray. Why has this movie become an annual ritual for so many people? Of course, we love to see the hero overcome obstacles and save the town from the greedy landlord. But I think we are attracted to this movie for a much deeper reason. The fear that crept into Stewart’s mind, that his life was not worthwhile, could overtake any of us.

If we lose our sense of making a difference, we too start to lose our way, not necessarily contemplating suicide, but questions creep up. “If no one cares what I do, what’s the point?” So while for most of us, our situation is not as dramatic as Stewart’s, we can still empathize with his plight, as well as empathize with his need for deeper meaning. We would all benefit from finding that sense of engagement.

Fortunately, the movie is not about changing the past. The actions that restored Stewart’s faith took place years ago. The angel simply gave Stewart the gift of sight so he could see how these actions helped. I think this is what keeps us coming back to the movie year after year – the hope to see that we made a difference.

So while we’re waiting for our own angel, what can we do to find meaning in our lives? Try writing a memoir. Writing is the way we remind ourselves of all sorts of things. Take for example a shopping list. When I realize I need something at the store, the thought seems so real, so obvious, so compelling. But if I don’t write it on a list, that idea turns out to have been fleeting. I’ll stand at the store surrounded by thousands of items, but the one I wanted a few days before now simply blends in.

It’s the same thing with memories. As they occur, they seem so vivid. By writing them, I gradually compile a list of times I was able to help people. The efforts I made at work kept not only my own paycheck coming but also contributed to the business that supports many other people as well. My presence at a funeral or during a divorce offered support exactly when it was needed. I list moments of generosity and victories over my own limitations.

Am I going to find only times I saved people from despair and ruin? Of course not. I’m not a character in a movie. I see plenty of times when taking care of myself obscured my concern for others. In fact, when I was younger, I rarely thought about my impact on other people.

Seeing less than perfect actions in the past seems like it should upset me, but instead it has turned out to be exhilarating. By looking squarely at the way my life played out, I understand more about who I am, and how my story interacts with the world. Instead of feeling worse about my life, I see those events as part of a dynamic force. I grew, I tried things, made mistakes, learned from them, and kept going. The story with all its ups and downs had a continuity that carried me through the years.

Telling about the past at first seems like a simple act of remembering. But then out of the story emerge lessons that help me make the most of my actions today, so I can move in a worthwhile direction, and do things that make a difference tomorrow. In the movie, the angel didn’t say much. He just showed Stewart how the story works. Based on those observations Stewart drew his own conclusions. As I write, I go through the same process he did, and I’m drawing the same conclusion, too. It turns out it really is a wonderful life.

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