Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

I’ve been listening to Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. My reason for picking it up was because I wanted to know more about this person who has become a political celebrity in the last year. What I was really looking for was a genuine insight into his life that would help me learn more about him than I could learn through the marketing hyperbole, superficial glosses, and spin doctors.

The central purpose of memoirs is to share a view of the protagonist’s life experience. That’s a minimum requirement. But in addition to this central purpose, almost all memoirs try to accomplish other tasks as well. Travel memoirs show us a foreign country. Tell-all books turn into public confessions. Memoirs often are used as platforms to explain part of history or even teach a lesson. For example, Foster Winans’ memoir shows us the workings of stock brokers. Tracy Kidder’s memoir shows us the workings of a particular section of the army in Vietnam. Shirley Maclaine used her life experience to teach her ideas about how people should relate to the cosmos. Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” uses his experience in a death camp as a teaching tool to show readers how to live a better life. If the memoir does its central job of sharing personal experience, it can make a good read, despite the other purpose. But if the other purpose takes center stage, it sometimes drains too much energy away from the personal experience and the book falls flat. I wondered if Obama would let me know his experience, or would his experience be drowned in his message?

The audio book starts out with a preface from his current situation as a politician. I became concerned that it was going to be more a political lecture than a memoir. His speaking voice is clipped and not as good as the professional readers I had become accustomed to on other audio books, and his vocabulary uses a few more college words which slows down the narrative a bit. As he got into the actual story of growing up I was still distracted by his non-dramatic reading voice and the occasional sense that he was lecturing or making too many sociological points, but I continued listening, and as he told more about what it was like growing up, I found myself drawn into his experience. That’s the job of any memoir, to help me get into the protagonist’s shoes and see the world from inside his experience. I think he does a decent job of sharing his experience.

Obama is in a position to share a fascinating insight into being black because he was raised by his white mother and her parents, and so he really has seen this issue from both sides. I have heard glimpses of what it is like for black people who as children are innocent of race, and as they come of age start to realize that American culture still struggles with this ugly scar. What a disturbing insight for any young person to realize they are in a group that is disliked by another group, and that other group has power over them. This experience reminded me of when as a teenager I read about the capture of Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Reading the horrific accounts of Nazis hating groups and wanting to kill them made me realize that being Jewish is dangerous. As I’ve grown older, every few years another instance of group prejudice breaks into violence and murder; the civil war in northern Ireland, the Serbs and Croates, Tutsis and Hutus. And in the shocking aftermath of 9/11, hundreds of millions of people realized they could be hated and killed for being part of western civilization. To stop the outrage, we turned to the old standby. Find the cultural identity of those who hate us, and kill them first.

Perhaps the only antidote to this human problem of groups hating each other is to understand other people as individuals. And I can think of few better ways than through writing and reading memoirs. Obama’s coming of age tale helps me understand what it is like to be black in America. He tells me not from the point of view of a sociologist but from inside one person’s experience. Through the magic of memoir, he lets me inside his thoughts, his revelation, his own real life. By reading, I enter the life of a black teenager, trying to evolve from an innocent and protected child into an adult, trying to understand from inside his own life experience our complex attitudes about being black and white in America, or in his case both.

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Click here to read the second part of my review of Dreams from My Father.

by Jerry Waxler

Yesterday, I was thinking about what benefit Frank McCourt achieved by writing Angela’s Ashes. Of course by publishing it he received world wide acclaim and lots of money, but I was thinking about the act of writing it. What was he after? Then I remembered his detailed descriptions of his relationship with confession, and how everyone told him it would all be better if he told of his transgressions. Well, here he was telling his transgressions to the world. The book was a massive confession, and according to the logic of his life, by telling us the story he was going to feel better. We are all his confessors.

If all he wanted from his story was the opportunity to tell it, he could have just written it in a journal. But since he wrote it so superbly, he found many readers to share it with. If he couldn’t tell it well, he wouldn’t find readers, and without readers, it wouldn’t be much of a confession, would it?

So consider this. There are two parts to telling a story. What you get from telling it, and what the reader gets from reading it. If you only pay attention to the first part, you might as well write it in a journal. In your journal, you can say anything. And frankly, that can feel good. Writing about yourself, watching the facts and observations roll out onto the page can be liberating. But with no sharing at all, the catharsis doesn’t tie you in with anyone. It’s not a social experience.

One of the most interesting things about memoirs is what happens in a memoir class. I’ve seen it over and over. The teacher gives some writing prompt, and gets people writing about some time in their lives. After the exercise, most people feel surprised at what they found in their own memory. It’s a little revelation, that the material was even in there at all. They thought they had long forgotten it, and seeing it now brings with it a bit of an ah-ha about some important moment.

Those experiences happened individually, before anyone reads aloud. But then after the reading, we find that the sharing had power to connect people. Even though the reader is looking down at the paper and reading words, their story draws the people in the room closer together. Very quickly, you go from sitting with strangers, no more familiar to you than if you passed them on the street, to someone with whom you feel you are somehow connected . The power of memories to bond people together is striking, and one of the payoffs waiting for memoir writers.

That’s a great thing that happens in a memoir class. But how do you get someone to read it in a different situation? There’s your family of course, but beyond that, if you are going to find readers to connect with, you need to put attention on how to tell a story that someone will read. What will it sound like? Are you presenting the material in an order that makes sense?

To gain the pleasure of reaching other people, you need to go from an explorer in your own mind, to an explorer in the mind of the reader, trying to understand what sounds well, and how to organize your thoughts into a story. That’s a pleasure that requires more organization than just writing in your journal. But when you arrive at that point, and find new ways to tell the story, you gain so many new dimensions of pleasure. It will make the pleasure of writing seem like only the first step towards a much greater treasure of connecting with people.