Archive for the ‘Family Memoirs’ Category

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

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

For James McBrides’ Home Page, click here.

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

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

Interviewing is an Act of Love, Even After Memory Starts to Fail

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

Last year I visited a recording booth run by the nonprofit organization StoryCorps. The purpose of the booth was to invite people to interview and record stories of their elders. Thanks to its presence in communities and the publication of stories through National Public Radio, StoryCorps has become an influential advocate for the simple act of asking, listening, and recording the stories of our elders and each other.

Thanks to the publicity and outreach of the StoryCorps, and other social factors, the general culture has become increasingly interested in preserving the stories of their elders. And yet, for many people, a sensitive topic arises. They fear it may be too late, because Alzheimer’s is stealing their loved ones’ memories.

And so it was with great interest that I recently heard that the StoryCorps is investigating this exact problem, trying to find the stories of those whose memory is starting to fail. The program is called the Memory Loss Initiative. To learn more, I interviewed Dina Zempsky, senior outreach coordinator of the initiative.

My first question related to my surprise. How could an interviewer reach past the ravages of the disease to reclaim the past. Zempsky explained that short term memory deteriorates before long term memory, so people who forget what happened five minutes ago can have a clear memory of something that took place 50 years ago. I knew this was true in principle, but didn’t realize these memories would be accessible in coherent stories .

Zempsky assured me that the Memory Loss Initiative has successfully helped many people gather such stories. She said, “When people actually make the effort to interview their parents, the resulting stories are usually clearer and more interesting than people expect.” And the session of storytelling does more than simply pass on information. Zempsky explained that the families of Alzheimer’s sufferers have come to expect failure and disappointment in their attempts to communicate. These interviews allow them to share intact memories, offering everyone a sense of success, restoring dignity through the simple act of asking and listening.

I asked Zempsky to help me understand, “Why don’t people know about these memories? Why aren’t more families connecting to these past experiences?”

She said, “Even when their memory is intact, most of us don’t take the time to sit down and ask questions.”

Her answer hurt me with the same nostalgic regret I have heard from so many others. Even when my parents were alive and clear minded, I didn’t ask them about their younger days. In the absence of any intentional attempt to elicit the past, their history remained hidden.

When I hung up the phone, I was stunned by this offer of hope for people who think it’s too late. To learn more, I turned to another national organization whose members preserve stories, called the Association of Personal Historians. One Personal Historian, Sarah White, shared her experience interviewing a client with failing memory.

“My client and I had completed the interviews, and they went much as other people suggest — he was able to recall past events quite clearly,” said White. “In fact, he did a masterful job of dictating his life story; completely without notes, he delivered a story with a clear sense of what each episode meant in the big picture of his life. It was an honor to be witness to that act. He had been a great attorney, and all that courtroom prowess was evident as he worked from what was left of his memory.”

She continued, “Only specifics such as names and dates were missing. I certainly didn’t want to pause him to ask “Now what was that guy’s name? How was it spelled?” while he was in the midst of that creative act. But now he’s a couple years older and foggier.  So my problem is figuring out how to fill in the blanks that his mind didn’t supply the first time and is having even more trouble this time around.”

The solution for this particular elder was to research the details amidst his personal papers. But for the rest of us, this is a cautionary tale. Get those stories while there is still time. One step you can take is to go to the StoryCorps website, under Memory Loss Initiative, and learn from the interviewing tips.  If you live near one of their booths, you could visit them in person, and directly benefit from their recording studios and interviewing guidance. Or you can hire them to visit your organization. To keep their work alive, make a charitable contribution.  Visit their website for more details.

And while you are preserving the memories of your loved ones, consider preserving your own. Research indicates that education, mental exercise, and other mental stimulation can reduce the ravages of Alzheimer’s. Of course, it’s not possible to know for sure, but just as physical exercise protects the heart and arteries, it makes sense that mental stimulation will protect your neurons. And it’s fun to stay mentally active so it’s a win-win situation. While you challenge yourself to write the stories of your life, you will stimulate your mind in the present, create a legacy of your past, and at the same time increase your chances for mental vigor for years to come.

—

Notes

StoryCorps Memory Loss Initiative, click here.

To read my observations of the StoryCorps experience, click here.

For more information about Association of Personal Historians, visit their website. And if you want to make the most of what they have to offer, consider their annual conference, to be held near Philadelphia in October, 2009.

Sarah White’s home page is http://www.whitesarah.com/

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Posted in Aging, Associations/Training, Family Memoirs, Oral History | 2 Comments »

Give Thanks for Your Family Stories

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

Thanksgiving is a banquet for the senses, with a table overflowing with food, and the room overflowing with relatives, now a year older and hopefully wiser. And yet family gatherings often arouse tension. We fear arguments with some visitors or feel a hole where we wish we could see a loved one, or wonder about a new potential spouse. Our anxiety seems ungrateful. This feast ought to be a time of joy. To shift attention to the positive aspects of such meetings look at them as opportunities to learn and share each other’s stories.

Listening, as the saying goes, is an act of love, and your willingness to open up and let their stories in will create a lovely, kind, and energetic atmosphere. But the old conversation patterns have a mind of their own. Instead of hoping the energy will shift, take a leadership role. To steer the conversation in a new direction, you need to prepare.

When you are in a safe, healthy space, right now for example, list a few things you wish you knew about each person. Then, in the press of food and family, if you feel a wave of annoyance coming on, switch it to curiosity. Look at your list, take a deep breath, and ask a question. You might at first feel a moment’s hesitation, like you are being rude for breaking into the old pattern. But the surprise will last just a moment, as the other person adjusts his thinking to focus on your question. By asking them to talk about a specific time in their lives, your curiosity will arouse memories. If you press forward, asserting your real interest, you have a good chance of shifting their attention into a reverie about the good, or strange, or formative times. Their story telling will (hopefully) arouse more interesting emotions than the ones you interrupted.

It’s easier if you get this storytelling focus started early in the day, before the old patterns set in. Broadcast the message that you expect them to tell at least one story that you haven’t heard before. And for best results, make suggestions. It’s almost like pitching them some of the writing prompts you would use to develop your memoir. “Tell us about your first day at your first apartment.” “Tell us about where you were when you saw a beautiful sunset.” If you don’t have time to arrange this before the holiday, do it when you first walk in. Write something up. Claim you need these stories for a writing project you’re working on. (And if you write the stories afterwards, then this claim will be true.)

Once you get the ball rolling, if you feel people steering towards boring territory, say, “The rule today is a story we’ve never heard,” or, “I already knew about that situation. But I can’t picture it. Tell me who else was there, what the walls looked like, what did you smell?” You can lead people away from negative feelings by pushing the clock forward. What happened afterwards? Where did you go next?

And if they get stuck in a story you know, listen to it with fresh ears. See if you can imagine being there with them during their original experience. Your curiosity will instigate new questions that will pop you into a fresh perspective. You could think or blurt out, “Hey, wait a minute. That sounds similar to another time in your life.” Or, “Oh. I didn’t realize that happened so soon after you moved.”

In addition to gaining material for your family storybook, you will achieve immediate benefits. Speakers will feel the unusual sensation that people are actually listening to parts of their lives. This is a warm and disarming sensation, that draws everyone closer and reaches across boundaries. For example, if an old-timer tells you about a youthful experience, it puts them on a level playing field with younger family members. And then, when you give a younger person the floor, they will feel empowered by an audience of adults who are suddenly interested, not in finding fault, but in finding entertainment. And for new couples, visitors, and distant relatives, it will give everyone an opportunity to appreciate this whole person.

Prepared to follow your own rules. Dig up a story you’ve never told before. There’s a good chance you never told it because you feel a little embarrassed. This is good. It’s an opportunity to tell people things about yourself that will give them a more intimate and less formulaic impression. Your willingness to share parts of yourself in a room full of people is a good way to flap your memoir wings. So as you look forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, or any time when extended families get together, use stories to create intimacy, defuse tension, and develop a deeper sense of gratitude for the people in your life.

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To improve your memoir, break down the code

Friday, June 29th, 2007

by Jerry Waxler

My dad owned a neighborhood drugstore in north Philadelphia, and on the nights he was able to make it home for dinner, most of the conversation centered around him telling us about the menagerie of characters who streamed through the store and gave him endless raw material. We sat and dutifully listened, but since there was no rule about equal air time, I grew up without having picked up even a smattering of skill to help me tell stories of my own.

In fact, I spent quite the next several decades story-less, feeling awkward about reporting on what happened to me. And though I didn’t realize it at first, I gradually noticed that my lack of storytelling was cutting me off from people. Stories are how we tell each other who we are, and so without stories, I felt isolated. Once I noticed how important it was to be able to tell stories, I set out to learn in adulthood what I had not learned as a child.

It turns out that with a little digging you can find storytellers who will teach you their craft. For example, Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, has been studying story telling for years. For him, storytelling is a performance art. He looks like Mark Twain, including the flowing mane of hair and bushy mustache, and when he dresses in period costume, it’s like listening to your own copy of Mark Twain. In addition to the performance and folklore aspects of storytelling, he’s also interested in creating them.

Here’s the simple, powerful lesson he shared with me, that he’ll be teaching in more detail at the Augusta Heritage Folkarts Festival in West Virginia, July 8-13, 2007. Say you’re sitting around at a family gathering, and the older adults start telling stories about Uncle Bob. The ones who knew Uncle Bob start laughing, and everyone else glazes over. They never met Uncle Bob, they didn’t know his pranks, or the sadness underneath his smile, so the story isn’t working for them. The problem is that so many family stories contain codes. The people who know the code can make sense of the story, and those who don’t know the code are left out.

It’s like that old joke about a newly convicted criminal in the penitentiary. Someone down the cellblock screams out the number “68″ and all the other prisoners crack up laughing. The newbie asks what is going on, and his cellmate says, “We’ve heard these jokes so many times, we just tell them by the number.” It’s the same with family stories. As storyteller Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, explains it, say you’re at the dinner table celebrating a holiday with your extended family. You start telling stories about Uncle Bob, and all the adults who knew Uncle Bob crack up, while the kids who don’t remember Uncle Bob glaze over. Why are they staring at the ceiling, waiting for an excuse to get away from the table?

Kiernan’s family-oriented workshop will teach students to slow down and instead of telling stories in code that only insiders understand, they’ll learn to tell the story in a way that can be understood by listeners who never met Uncle Bob. The trick is to describe him in more detail. What did he wear? What was his hair like? What room do you picture him in? Sit down with someone who didn’t know him and describe him in as much detail as possible, so your listener could pick Bob out of a crowd.

If you want to tell a story, look closely at your language, and “unpack” it, laying out its content for everyone to appreciate. With a little learning you can turn the joke known only to the old inmates into a joke you can share with kids and strangers.

While this advice sounds simple, I consider it to be brilliant. For one thing, it acknowledges an important fact. Just because we think we’re telling a good story doesn’t mean the listener is hearing a good story. That in itself is a powerful piece of information, because most of us think that when we tell about events, we are doing the best possible job sharing the story. It turns out, the storyteller plays a crucial role, shaping a bunch of events into something worth listening to. Once we realize this fact, we can start looking for tricks to give our stories more impact.

Secondly, the message is brilliant because it is extraordinarily fundamental, sweeping across all aspects of storytelling. For example, I was preparing to write a description of my years in college, and was hoping to explain how the music of the times influenced my feelings. I could hope that by simply mentioning that the Beatles were intense or important, I might be able to convey what I was feeling, since everyone really knows about the Beatles. But I remembered Kiernan’s advice about avoiding code words, and thought how that applies to those icons of the sixties. If I just mention the word, “sixties” or “Beatles” I might hope everyone understands what I mean. But they will only get what they think, not what I think. That’s like the prisoner saying “68.” I have to tell a story.

So how can I unpack my thoughts and feelings about the Beatles? I’ll talk more about that in my next blog entry, and put into a scene what I mean by the coded word “Beatles.”

Posted in 60's, Family, Family Memoirs, How-to, Lehigh Valley Regional, Literary Non-fiction, Storytelling | 2 Comments »

Stories heal families

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

By Jerry Waxler

When I was a teenager, I started pulling away from my parents. I didn’t understand who these people were, and didn’t think we had much in common. Ignoring all the support mom and dad had given me, the safe and sane home, I longed to escape their influence. When I moved out of my childhood home in Pennsylvania, I tried to put many miles behind me, first moving 1,000 miles to go to school in Wisconsin, and then moving 2,000 more miles to Berkeley, California. The geographical separation was only an external symptom of what I was feeling in my heart. I was trying to shake them off. Sometimes I didn’t speak to them for a year, and never reached out for support. All of this distance was accompanied by enormous pain. I had cut myself off from my family, and wondered why I felt so alone.

But I couldn’t figure out how to break through this wall, and see them as real people. Somehow I had built up such profound edginess I simply couldn’t approach them. So I stayed away, hurting them and myself in the process. While my situation sounds extreme, I have spoken to many adults who hold on to complex, painful resentments about their parents, and would greatly benefit by finding a way back home.

For example, when memoirist Gretchen Gunn first decided to write about her childhood, she knew she had lots of interesting material. She grew up in a hippie commune. And as a tiny child, she witnessed first hand the culture of the early seventies, where people, including her parents valued their own desires above common sense or standards of decency. But Gretchen felt unable to tell the story because she was so angry with her dad’s irresponsibility and abandonment. She thought her anger would get her in trouble, so she decided to write it as fiction. That turned out to be a great choice, because the more she tried to tell the story, the better she understood it.

To write a good story, the goal is to not describe characters like they belong in a cartoon. If they look empty, or the same as every other character you have read about, they will not be interesting to read. Instead of a superficial gloss, you have to look more closely for signs they are human. If your vision is clouded by strong feelings of resentment, disappointment, or other confusing emotions, getting to the human story beneath the cloud of emotions might happen in layers rather than all at once.

So when Gretchen wrote her early drafts, she expressed her disgust, but when approaching the story in this way, it didn’t seem interesting. So she shifted her image of him from a bad person to simply a dead person. By killing off her father, she was able to see the whole situation more clearly. He was out of the picture, and out of her life, and instead of hanging on to her fury, she let him go. This shift in perspective was so profound that she lost her grip on her gripes. There was no more point in being angry, and she felt like she released a huge weight, allowing her to see events more clearly than ever. Even though she had been writing fiction, the act of turning her life into a story had set her free from the demons of the past, and gave her deeper insight into her childhood and her parents.

After my self-imposed exile in California, I moved back to Pennsylvania in 1971. But moving closer geographically did not bring me closer in my heart. I went months at a time without calling home, and skipped most holiday gatherings. After decades of therapy, I went to graduate school and got my Master’s degree in counseling, and started to see the secret everyone else seemed to know better than me, about the ever-present intimacy between a parent and child. My interest in mom increased, and I spoke with her every week, trying to understand how to relate to this person who not only gave birth to me, but taught me how to be a human being. Week by week, year by year, our conversations cleared away whatever issues had kept us separate. Fortunately, my mom lived to 87, which gave me plenty of time to transform my attitude. Finally, I got it! She was a person! A good person. She longed to make the most of her life. She strived to stay fit. And I finally noticed she had many devoted friends who looked up to her. I became one of her admirers. We became friends! At the end of an aerobics class, she wasn’t feeling well, and a neighbor took her to the hospital. When she lay in bed, a few days before the end, she turned to me and said, “I lived a good life.” And so she had, and together, we were at peace with that.

Posted in 60's, Coming of age, Family Memoirs, Memoirs, Storytelling | No Comments »

Families are an ocean of memoirs

Friday, March 30th, 2007

by Jerry Waxler

Families are like the ocean – no matter where your life takes you, eventually all memories, like rivers flow back into the family. So when my sister said she was moving out of her old house, I thought it was a great opportunity to help her go through a transition, and at the same time, take a swim in my family memories. Well, that’s a story I can’t tell yet, because I’m going to help her tomorrow, but I’m sure it will release a story or two.

We’re both interested in the past. For one thing, we’re the only two people left alive who grew up in that row home in northwest Philadelphia. So I was interested when she told me she signed up for a memoir class at the West Laurel Hill Cemetery. What a great idea, having a memory writing class at a cemetery. And it’s the same cemetery where my brother was laid to rest, so the three of us will be together again for the first time in years, sharing memories about life in the family ocean.

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Posted in Family Memoirs, Memoirs | No Comments »