Category Archives: Madison Wisconsin

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.

—

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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Read banned memoirs: Criminal or Social Activist?

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by Jerry Waxler

In the 60′s, I vigorously protested the Vietnam War, but like most Americans I thought the organization called the Weather Underground had gone too far. Without knowing many details, I associated them with violent, irrational extremism.

So I was surprised to hear that one of the founders of that organization was not only a free man. He was an acclaimed educator. I first heard about Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential campaign when television ads implied that Ayers’ criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam somehow tainted Barack Obama. The publicity intrigued me. I wanted to know more. After hearing an excellent radio interview with Bill Ayers, I decided to read his memoir “Fugitive Days.” Reading the book prodded me to review rusty old parts of my own beliefs.

When Ayers was a young man, his outrage against the war drove him to the brink of anarchy. In his memoir, “Fugitive Days,” he chronicles his violent thoughts and actions in almost poetic detail. Even after reading the memoir, it’s hard for me to decide if he was a hero who risked his life to save the world from the insanity of war, or a mad child, a criminal, bent on imposing his will on society. And therein lays the power of the memoir. It shows his world as it was, not as it ought to have been, allowing me to see for myself and ask my own questions. The description of life through his eyes provided a deeper understanding of the world than I could gain from sound bites and stereotypes.

Are young people idealistic or simple minded?

When I was young, adults taught me that people are supposed to be kind, generous, and empathetic. I desperately wanted to live in a world driven by these ideals. Too often, the difference between the world they preached and the one they actually offered made me angry. So I protested, trying to badger them into following their own principles. However, demanding change turned out to be far more complex than I first had hoped. After I participated in my first riot, I realized I was contributing to the very chaos that I wanted to stop.

The protest movement became increasingly strident at my alma mater, University of Wisconsin in Madison, until a climax in the1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center. At 3 AM, when the bombers expected the building to be empty, a young physics researcher unrelated to the Army or the war was killed by the blast, exposing the dark side of extreme protest. More disturbing still, moral outrage against government policies can be used to justify all sorts of violent protest. For example, the Oklahoma City bombers claimed they were obeying higher principles, a justification that comes all too close to the reasoning of the Weather Underground.

According to Ayers, his group never took part in an action that resulted in a death, so the book does not justify murder. In fact, the book does very little justifying at all. Rather than analyzing his actions, or even looking back at them with the hindsight of an older man, Ayers offers an immersion experience in that period. Just as you wouldn’t expect to see cell phones in a movie about the Vietnam War, Ayers also tries to keep his thoughts appropriate for a young man during the height of the Vietnam war protests.

Feminism was still in the future

In Bill Ayers’ time the feminist movement had not yet been born, so during his story, men were freely using women and justifying it with all sorts of theoretical excuses. Women were starting to complain, and in a rare nod to the future development of the feminist movement, Ayers hints at the tensions coming to the surface.

Structure is interesting: In Medias Res
The organizational structure of the book is interesting. The opening scene pulls me in with a bang. Ayers and his cronies are on the run, and they hear about the death of a comrade, letting me know they are all in mortal danger. This technique of “in medias res,” or starting in the midst of the action, is as old as storytelling itself. Once the initial scene pulls us in, he backs up and starts from the beginning. Then gradually the story moves closer to the tragedy, and then keeps going, to his fugitive life, and on to completion.

Is shame supposed to be hidden?

In the memoir, “This Boy’s Life” Tobias Wolff writes about some really bad decisions from his youth, like throwing eggs at the driver of a convertible car and stealing stuff from his step-dad. He does not apologize or justify. He simply describes. When I first read “This Boy’s Life,” I was shocked that he would be willing to talk about these obnoxious behaviors. How does that work? I hated remembering when I did shameful things like shoplifting. Uck. It feels horrible to admit that I ever did such a thing. Similarly Ayers reports many behaviors that one would hope one’s teenage son or daughter is not doing. However, now that I have been reading memoirs for a while, I am no longer so shocked.

My more tolerant and expansive understanding of how to remember bad choices came during a lecture by John Bradshaw, the brilliant author of a number of books about healing. In the lecture, Bradshaw explained that there are two kinds of shame. Of course I knew about “bad shame.” The new information came from his description of “good shame,” a beautiful and redeeming concept I had never considered.  Good shame serves a positive purpose. When you’re ashamed of something you’ve done, it’s your mind attempting to restore you to obey your own rules. So shame is a good thing, enforcing people to do their best. When people are “shameless” they can be rude or deceive each other without remorse. The absence of shame is the real anti-social condition.

Actually, not only is Ayers not ashamed of his actions. He even flips it upside down, and points a sense of shame back at the rest of society. He doesn’t feel shame for having protested the war. He feels shame for having participated in a country that was waging the war, and for example, dropping Napalm on babies. Wow! That fascinating twist makes me think long and hard about my own role as a citizen in a country that does a variety of things I wish they would do differently.

On every page, Ayers awakened memories of my own angst in the sixties. His experience stretched me to review my attitude towards social responsibility, and then, as I followed his trajectory, watched the terrifying consequences of his extreme position. It was an amazingly thought provoking and successful book.

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Link isolated anecdotes into a story with the power of your beliefs

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By Jerry Waxler

A memoir starts with a single anecdote. Then another, and another. In our imagination, we know these events formed our life. But other people can’t read our imagination. They can only read what’s on the page. We must transform the anecdotes into a compelling story. The memoir writer’s job is to discover the binding that will bring the reader from one event to the next. One place to look for this continuity is in your beliefs. Beliefs are important. They influence our decisions and shape our mood and emotion. And yet few writing classes explore the impact of ideas and beliefs.

To see how ideas can influence a life, see my essay about the beliefs that changed Henry Louis Gates’ attitude towards girls. In today’s essay, I explore this strategy further by looking within a series of my own anecdotes for the underlying beliefs that could help pull them together into a story.

High School Trolley
My own school, Central High in Philadelphia, drew academically inclined boys from all over the city, so at the end of the day each of us went off in different directions. Sitting by myself on the trolley, a pack of boys piled in from a nearby Catholic High School. They all knew each other and they shouted and laughed far more boisterously than the studious kids I knew. Even though they never bullied me, nor did they seem to be bullying each other, I kept very still. When I reached my stop, I nonchalantly pulled the cord to signal the driver, and squeezed my way to the door. It slapped open and I stepped down, safe again on a quiet street in familiar territory.

Brainstorm underlying ideas
I look more closely at my thoughts and feelings in this scene. What can I learn about my trust in people, my fragile pride, my ethnic identity, and the way a city kid could feel vulnerable in a crowd, hoping to remain invisible.

Freshman year debate
In Freshman year, I was a thousand miles from home, living in a high-rise dormitory at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a sprawling campus with thirty thousand students. Some upper classmen were visiting the dorm to debate the U.S. action in Vietnam, while the mainly freshman residents crowded in to the meeting room to listen. “The U.S. government is using Vietnam as an excuse to test its weapons. We shouldn’t be there.” “Oh, yeah? You’re a fool. If we don’t stop communism in Vietnam, it will spread and take over the world.”

I tried to find my own truth amidst their battle of ideas. I could barely keep up. How did these people know so much? And why were they filled with so much intensity? What did it all mean?

Sophomore Year
At the end of my freshman year, I went home to a quiet summer in Philadelphia, working as an assistant in a medical research lab, and working in my dad’s drugstore on weekends. In the fall, I returned to Madison. Amidst the hordes walking to and from class, I saw Kathy Bridgman, one of the only girls I had dated the previous year. The date didn’t go well. I had become so nervous I had to cut it short, and never went out with her again. Now, our eyes met, we smiled tentatively, and kept walking.

Walking with the crowd, I felt a  little lonely. Seeing Kathy tipped me off balance, reminding me of my social incompetence. How would I survive three more years?

Junior Year
A year later, in the fall of 1967, my hair in a frizzy mop, and sporting bushy sideburns, I approached a group of students who were gathering to block a classroom. By now, I had decided to join the protesters. Together we would alter the course of history. I crowded into a hallway of the Commerce Building, packed tightly, arms locked together. After we had been there for a while, police broke out the plate glass entry-way, stormed in and swung their clubs with force. Many students went to the hospital, including the girl who stood next to me. She needed emergency surgery for a ruptured uterus. The violence I had witnessed disturbed me. I had started out full of hope and ended more confused than ever.

What ideas drove me to protest? What other ideas drove the police to fight back with such violence? What happened to me, as my ideas shattered along with the day’s events?

Senior Year
For most of my senior year, I stayed alone in my apartment. Depressed, I skipped as many classes as possible. I was falling off the edge of my ambition, and collapsing into myself.

Search for the ideas
As these scenes first occurred to me, they seemed isolated. Now, by looking for continuity, I recognize the way crowds worked in my mind. I had always been fascinated by mobs in history. Now I could see that my academic curiosity was really about me. I was constantly looking for the balance between my desire to be inside a crowd, and my desire to be alone.

My Coming of Age was beset by this tension. In high school, I started out as a nerd, very much alone. Then at the university, I jumped in to crowds, deeper and deeper, until I felt stripped of my individuality. I lost my momentum and collapsed back into myself. Now, to collect the events and find a conclusion, I need to show how a more balanced understanding of groups redeemed me, filled me, and brought me back to life.

These anecdotes have not yet formed a story, but now I feel the dramatic tension that links one to the next, providing the seeds of an emotionally authentic and hopefully powerful tale, transforming isolated bits of memory into a story that will hold a reader’s attention from beginning to end.

Writing Prompt
Look at some of the anecdotes in your notebook. See if you can tease out the ideas that added power to each scene and linked it to the next. What additional background will offer the reader a greater understanding of your emotions and decisions?

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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Awakening bad memories helps shape your new life

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by Jerry Waxler

One night in the summer of 1968, I walked along a busy street in Madison Wisconsin with my friend Ely, a soft-spoken math graduate student, and his girl friend Joan. We were enjoying the cool evening breeze, in a college town relatively quiet during the summer holiday. Then we heard shouting. I turned around and saw five boys rushing towards us. I shouted at them to stay away, and the ringleader tackled me and threw me down. Then the others swarmed around me and kicked. Ely asked them to stop. A boy punched him in the mouth and split his lip.

Joan screamed, and passing cars honked. Then a getaway car pulled up and the boys drove off. The intern at the hospital expressed no interest in how violated I felt. Reluctant to order an X-ray, he brushed off my headache. “Of course it hurts,” he said. “You were kicked in the head.” It turned out, he was right. I had no serious physical injury. By now almost dawn, two policemen took me back to look for my contact lens. When I was a protester, I hated the police, but now, these two men were shining their flashlights, bending down and looking for the tiny piece of plastic that enabled me to see. I felt an unexpected flush of gratitude.

Joan had written the license number, and with the help of a hippie lawyer we found that the ringleader was the son of the police chief of a small town 50 miles away. The lawyer and I split the settlement of $75.00. The rest of the summer I slunk around, racing into shadows when cars approached. In the fall, surrounded by thousands of returning students, I felt safe enough, and I let the incident slip into the past. After a few months I forgot it entirely.

Thirty three years later, in 2001, I was traumatized along with hundreds of millions of others by airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center. I wanted to help in some way so I took a workshop to qualify as a helper in community traumas. To learn how to conduct a group discussion, we were asked to talk about something that had happened to us. As I prepared, I unearthed my memory of being beaten.

Until that time, I had never thought in detail about the scene. Now as I tried to explain it, I saw it more clearly, describing who was there, what happened next, and so on. The event seemed important, so I tried to go deeper by writing about it. As it took shape on paper, it gradually changed from a vague, disturbing set of memories into a story.

With the Vietnam War raging, my attention was diverted from typical college concerns. All I could think about was the war. I didn’t think it was justified or fair, so I protested. I wanted to protect myself, the Vietnamese people, and the boys who were getting sent into danger. I thought my goals were noble, so why would anyone attack me?

To tell a more complete story, I tried to picture one of the high school boys in his home, eating dinner with his dad, who was probably a veteran of World War II. Dad was praising the soldiers who were out with machine guns and artillery hunting down the enemy. This was how Americans defend their freedom. Dad expressed his fear that if protesters stopped the war, it could unleash chaos, and threaten their way of life. The protesters must be stopped. So his sons protest the protesters by beating up someone with long hair. They were upholding the values of their family and country.  Under the circumstances, their actions were the most honorable thing they could have done.

Now, these many years later, I know a lot more about war trauma than I did back then. I imagine that one of those boys had an older brother serving in Vietnam. Instead of being kicked, he was getting shot at and watching his companions blown to pieces before his eyes. If he lived, he would for years continue to be assaulted by memories that repeatedly tear him apart. Flashbacks are the other way humans deal with trauma.

While flashbacks sound like the opposite of forgetting, these two reactions have one thing in common. They both leave you powerless to think clearly about the original experience and so the events remain stuck in their original shape. Only later, after you start trying to communicate, can you slow down and put things together.

Writing the memories gives me new power over them
I never understood the way the mugging influenced the following years. I always thought my profound depression was caused by some generalized angst. I didn’t make the connection with the trauma because I had forgotten it. I had not made the connection between being attacked and my loss of interest in protesting. I just thought my disengagement from the protests was because the whole thing was too emotionally exhausting. Now I see that beating was intended to stop me from protesting, and I got the message. My body wounds healed, but that part of me that wanted to share my opinions never did.

Writing the story reveals another powerful truth about that night in 1968. It was just one moment in time. Storytelling drags and pushes me to the next day and the next, until eventually I find myself on more stable ground. I find myself more whole.

How can writing help me grow?
As my storytelling reveals that night as one night in my six decades of life, I consider my decision to stop expressing my opinion. Must I for the rest of my life please everyone for fear they won’t like me and beat me up? If I am true to myself, I inevitably will displease some people. Everyone is different and unique. Now, instead of being limited by the decisions of a scared young man, I am working on a more public approach to my opinions that allow me a more vibrant relationship to the world. Diving into painful memories has helped me grow towards expressing my greater potential as an individual unique, human being.

Writing Prompt
Write a story about a time when you felt wronged. After you write it from your point of view, write another story about that experience from the other person’s point of view, seeing the way they justified their action initially, and the way they justified or forgave themselves afterwards.

Writing Prompt
In an experience you had that seemed traumatic, write a story in which that experience was the beginning, and then proceed from there. Look for a way to resolve the dramatic tension by reaching stable ground, or coming to terms with the trauma, or find some new direction or lesson that resulted in a positive ending.

Note
For another essay I wrote about PTSD and the horrors of war, click here.

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

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Good hair in the melting pot

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by Jerry Waxler

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

During the cultural rebellion of the sixties, like many white kids, I tried to reach across the racial divide by emulating black slang and embracing soul music. My dark brown hair grew longer, and by the time I returned home from the University of Wisconsin that first summer of 1966 it had curled into a tangle that looked vaguely like an Afro. My great-uncle Ben, with whom I had always got along, said “I didn’t know we had anything like that in the family.” We never spoke civilly to each other again. In Madison, Wisconsin the following year, some boys drove to campus to beat up kids who looked like me. They jumped out of their car, threw me to the ground and kicked me for a while to let me know that long hair was against the American way.

A memoir by Henry Louis Gates called “Colored People” made me think more about that incident. After all, this is the Melting Pot. We’re supposed to be able to absorb all kinds of people — the northern Europeans with their blond hair, Irish with their red hair, Mediterraneans, with their jet black hair. My own ancestors, eastern European Jews, inherited dark curly hair from our Semitic ancestors. Blending hasn’t always been easy. As each group arrived, a cry went throughout the land “We already know who we are and you are not us.” After a couple of generations, the children lost their accents and adopted clothes and customs that helped us blend. We intermarried. Voila. We’re in the mix.

But the resistance to blacks has persisted longer than for most other groups. I’ve thought about the reasons and the problems of that lack of mixture my whole life, but I’ve never thought about it as clearly as I did when I read Gates’ memoir, in which he explains what it was like growing up in the segregated south. As I listen to Gates, the magic of story reading takes over and I’m with him in the 1950′s and 60′s. At home he saw people of one color, and on television he saw another. As he ponders this contrast, and tries to sort out his place in the mix, one of the most revealing insights is the chapter on hair.

As a child, Gates’ barber complimented him on having a “good grade of hair,” or “good hair” meaning it wasn’t too curly. His good grade came with his genes, while others had to work for the desired straightness by greasing hair down and flattening it with a tight stocking cap. They ironed their hair. They used home chemical concoctions of potatoes and lye to defeat the curls. Or they spent big money on a chemical procedure call “processing.”

Through Gates’ story, I begin to see that hair has deep significance, and the more I think about how it fits into our emotional lives, the more of its power I see. Absence of hair is important to men who lose it at middle age, and the loss of hair during chemotherapy is one of the demoralizing marks of cancer. Prison camp inmates and new military recruits often have their hair shaved to reduce their individuality. Older people hide their gray to look young, while young people enhance sexual charisma by primping, extending, dying, or spiking.

So I shouldn’t be surprised that black people, to improve their image, would like to manage the impression their hair conveys. Working in my dad’s drugstore in the early 60′s I often saw black guys wearing these tight caps, or “do rags” as they were called. And my dad stocked a whole section of specialized hair products. Looking at it from the outside it seemed mysterious. Now I see they were trying to do the same thing Americans had been doing for centuries, trying to achieve entry into the Melting Pot, so they could participate in the American dream.

Hair defines the group a person is in. That simple, yet profound observation sends me searching. Surely something so important must insinuate itself in other aspects of my life. As I look for more evidence of the importance of hair I spot another crucial period.

Before I turned forty, my prematurely gray hair made me look like an old guy, an outsider among the young people I walked past every day at the university where I worked. I decided to dye it back to its original color, to reclaim my membership in the younger generation. The first time I went to visit my friends Larry and Ivy for lunch, their eyes opened wide. “It’s like instant youth.” My membership restored, I have been dying my hair ever since, despite research that suggested prolonged hair dying might cause a deadly form of cancer. When I was knocked down and kicked because my hair was too long, it never occurred to me to cut it. Now, I am once again placing my acceptance into a group above my own safety. With my dark hair, I’ll signal my membership in the youthful American Melting pot, even if it kills me.

Writing Prompt
Write a story about times in your life when you liked your hair, or didn’t like your hair. What message was your hair broadcasting?

When have you changed your hair to try to redefine or accentuate your acceptance into a group?

When has some one else’s hair sent you a message you had a hard time accepting?

Have you ever had the experience of being an outsider because of your hair, like the time I came home with long hair and was outside my family’s comfort zone, or like the way my friend’s blond daughter provoked cat calls in Egypt, where she stuck out like a… blond in Egypt.

Note

It turns out that my college hair style now has a name. It wasn’t really an Afro. It was a Jewfro.

To learn more about the African American attitude towards hair in the melting pot, see the documentary called “Good Hair” by producer and performer Chris Rock.

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

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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.

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


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Beatles and other loaded words in your memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

“Beatles.” This word contains the memories of a generation. Who among us has not seen videos of them waving as they disembarked from the plane on their first American tour? As they’re playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan show, the camera pans to the girl screaming so hard she has to hold onto her face with both hands so her head won’t explode. Since such scenes were part of your life, you might want to tell about them. But to a listener these culturally loaded words sound like clichés. Events that happened to you also happened to hundreds of millions of others. We’ve heard and seen these images until we are weary of them.

If you tell a story with loaded words, people will hear what they already know, rather than learning about you. The loaded words will wash out the individual meaning from your story. So how do you write about the past, without falling into this trap? Use the storyteller’s advice. Slow down, set up the scene, and tell the reader how they affected you in particular.

So how could I unpack the meaning of the word Beatles and turn it into a unique image in my own life? I can see myself standing at the record store in Madison, Wisconsin, where I stopped on my way home every day from class, to stare at the rack of new releases. My mind was blazing with an almost supernatural desire, as if each album might release a Genii that would grant my every dream. But describing a boy standing at a record rack doesn’t give the reader much to go on. To share my unique feelings, I have to set up a scene in a way that you’ll be able to relate to.

Here’s a piece of advice on this topic by author and writing teacher Philip Gerard, from his book “Writing a book that makes a difference.” He says, “The key is always to include your reader in the process by which you arrive at your position. Instead of demanding that the reader experience anger or love simply because you say so, create for your reader the same experience that led to your reaction.”

So I try to remember a scene that would help me show my relationship to music in the sixties and I remembered the summer when the Revolver album was released. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I wanted to get back to campus early. When I returned in mid-August, all the summer classes were over, and even the faculty and staff were away on vacation. Madison, Wisconsin was essentially a ghost town. I didn’t have anywhere to live yet, but an acquaintance was out of town and told me I could crash at her place.

I walked in to the apartment building, musty from years of student tenants, and set down my belongings. My stuff was stored in another friend’s basement so all I had with me was a suitcase and the Revolver, which I had picked up from the record store on my way in to town. As soon as I sat down, I took out the album, turning it over and searching the graphics, the liner notes, and even the names of the production staff as if they might reveal some secret.

Ripping off the flimsy cellophane, I pulled the record envelope out, and then grabbed the record by the edges between my open palms to avoid letting any finger oil smudge the surface. Positioning the record over the turntable, I dropped it gently, feeling the anticipation not only that this would be the first time I listened to it, but also disappointment that this would be the last time I would ever listen to it for the first time. This troubled me because records lose 40% of their quality after the first playing, wearing down the little plastic ridges that jiggle the needle to create the sound.

In rapt attention, I turned towards the speakers and listened. And as I entered each new song, I felt a wave of excitement. Somehow the Beatles had broken with their genre over and over, as if they were inventing a new style of rock and roll in each song. I was especially smitten by the haunting violin accompaniment like cries of sadness, wails really, on “Eleanor Rigby.” I wondered who she was, and why I felt so drawn to her.

That afternoon, I left the apartment to buy food, and I saw a girl walking my way. A person! As she came nearer, I smiled. The smile of a stranger always made me feel okay, like the world was safer and more fun. So I smiled at this stranger, and she kept walking past me, as if she didn’t see me. Despite the long, cruel winters, Madison in August is blazingly hot and muggy. I looked around at the apartments that would in a few weeks be teeming with kids living in every possible space. The houses had not been painted recently nor were the gardens groomed. It was a student neighborhood, run by landlords we never saw, and kids who were just passing through. And now they were empty. I wondered where my home was. Certainly not Pennsylvania. I was no longer a child, and it was time to get away from there. And I didn’t feel at home here either, where there were no other students, and the only person I saw didn’t even smile at me.

The one thing I did have, the one element in my life that made me feel connected at that moment was the Beatles. Their passion for breaking with all the things that were wrong with the world leapt out at me. But rather than providing simple answers, they asked questions, set to music. Not just any music but orchestral music and fresh melodies and rhythms. They poured their creative energy into the album to let me know they shared my sense of urgency. We had entered a pact in which we agreed that our questions were important, were powerful. I closed my eyes, and hummed along with the lyrics, already starting to burn into my memory.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

I too lamented about life, while those violins tore into my heart. Hearing the lyrics made me feel more peaceful, understood, and one with the world.

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