No matter how hard we try to push down old pains, they sometimes climb out of their graves like zombies. Some people try to drown their memories, pretending not to notice that the alcohol makes their pain stronger. Some lose themselves in work, which is good for the paycheck but not so good for the heart.
Healing begins when you face these old pains and try to disentangle yourself from them. Talk therapy helps to rebuild broken spirits. And thanks to the Memoir Revolution, our culture has provided a new path toward finding meaning. By translating the past into a sharable story, memoir writers transform even the ugliest wounds into sagas that help us understand ourselves and each other.
Some pains are so hidden we don’t even know we need to explain them
There are many types of old pains. Child abuse or neglect. Loss of a parent through divorce, disease, or addiction. Loss of a spouse or a child. Memoirs have educated me about all the ways that their authors have come to terms with these experiences.
One type of old wound I have recently found in a memoir is the tormented memory of a lost love. Julie Scolnik thought she’d discovered “the one,” but after pouring her heart into a future with him, she was plunged into the darkness of disappointment. Julie Scolnik’s Paris Blue, first shows the ecstasy. Then the slow motion disintegration into pain. Losing the bliss of love left a gash in the fabric of her universe sending her on a forced march.
The magic of this memoir is that the author refused to let go of what might have appeared to be a simple question: how did something so beautiful turn so ugly? If you know someone who clings to a question way past its expiration date, you may roll your eyes and say “get over it.” But if you are the person who is stuck with these ruminations, you know it’s not that easy.
Perhaps Julie Scolnik’s willingness to face agony was enhanced by her training in classical music. Musicians give a voice to these wounded states of mind through the great heaving cries of an operatic solo, or the stormy clash of kettle drums and blaring trumpets during a symphony. But despite all her self-expression through music, she’d never been able to put her pain to rest.
Pensive woman putting down baggage
Despair sends us on a search to find meaning
Grieving is not just one emotion. It’s a series of emotions, a journey really, through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression.
The goal is for the depression to eventually give way to acceptance. But if it doesn’t, you are stuck in depression. The missing ingredient in this healing process, according to expert David Kessler, is a search for meaning. (For his complete treatment of this insight, read his book, Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief.)
After it became obvious to Julie Scolnik that her love was no longer reciprocated, she had to find a way to get rid of the pain. That need sent her on a search for meaning.
The story creates the path from pain to healing
Initially, she hoped her broken lover would remove his taciturn mask and simply explain why he walked away. Sadly his inability to verbalize his own emotions was at the heart of the problem all along. Without such an explanationm one obvious impulse would have been to blame him. What an awful man. Was he deceiving her all along? That explanation would allow her to pile bitter anger on the wound. Fortunately, Julie had no intention of going in that direction. She wanted explanations. And not just any explanation. She had the artistic sophistication, and the ethical complexity to know that simple answers would not provide her the kind of closure she needed. She decided that only the ancient power of a story would be enough to let her put this situation to rest.
I love when memoirs attempt to dive under the surface of human experience, searching for wisdom amid the pain. Kate Braestrup’s memoir Here if You Need Me tackled another great mystery. After she lost her husband to an automobile crash, she grieved. Gradually Braestrup turned her quest into an exploration of the nature of grace and the dilemma of good and evil.
Julie Scolnik’s memoir tackles a problem almost as large. If one partner is 100% committed, and the other seems to be, is it a form of emotional abuse when one of them pulls away? Was he a bad guy, cruel and insensitive to the women in his life, or was he a victim of his own emotional limitations?
Sometimes ambiguous answers fill the need
Julie Scolnik’s refusal to give up has provided her (and her readers!) with an amazing introspective workshop, where she could forge emotional suffering into a beautiful story.
Perhaps the story of Paris Blue is not just an expression of the author’s pain, but also its solution. Like the haunting emotional power of classical music or opera, or the unanswered questions of a magnificent mysterious poem, the answer to unrequited love is contained within the work of art itself.
Paris Blue offers readers a front row seat to the whole, painful, all-too-human saga, first of the initial joy of full-immersion loving, then of her crashing disappointment, and then her lifelong search for answers.
When I turned over the last page, even though she had not revealed any clear, clean answer, in some sublime way, the story itself answered the question of her pain. By letting me and other readers join her on her journey, I hope she was able to put down some of the baggage which she had been carrying her whole life. I know that by the end of the memoir I felt better. Perhaps by reading it, you will too.
For another article about the uplifting power of ambiguous end, click this link.
To get the most out of life, don’t let that sweet sunset or that baby’s smile slide by. Your job as an aware human being is to appreciate every moment. Allowing yourself to fully absorb the present is touted by Buddhists, hippies, and poets. It is also promoted by positive psychologists who say that savoring helps you absorb more insight, more wisdom, more goodness. But what should you do with those moments after they’ve passed through the microscope, and end up a great pile on the far side of Now?
Thanks to the Memoir Revolution, we have discovered a new, exciting way to savor those past moments: through the magic of memoir reading and writing, we can appreciate them again and again.
Opening yourself up to the great mountain of material in the past might sound intimidating at first. But memoirs provide a roadmap through the vast storehouse of material. By lining up the pieces and assembling them into a good story, you will see your former self proceeding from a disorganized state at the beginning to a more organized, wiser one at the end.
If you would like to gather the wisdom from your own past, I can think of no better way than to write scenes that will let readers share your experience. By opening the curtains and letting light stream in through an imaginary window into your world, you will be joining your fellow Memoir Revolutionaries who are no longer willing to tolerate leaving all that experience buried in isolated crypts.
By translating the past into well-formed stories, memoirs add another healthy dimension to our appreciation of the infinite now. By blazing trails through the underbrush of the past, readers and writers gather together to make sense of the whole journey. Certainly, it is all too easy to allow those past moments to slip by unappreciated, but through savoring them in the form of a story, you can spot nuggets of wisdom that eluded you the first time.
While all memoirs are powerful examples of the art of savoring across time, one of the best I’ve read, from the point of view of sensory engagement, is Paris Blue. Perhaps because of her lifelong training in the art of expressing emotion through classical music, Julie Scolnik could be a professor of savoring, filling our hearts with the nuances of her own deep emotional experiences.
Another reason Paris Blue is so filled with the sensation of savoring is because it stands on the shoulders of that master of remembrance, Marcel Proust. Julie Scolnik’s story reads like an homage to Proust’s famous work of nostalgia, inviting you to enter into the delicious experience of an earlier time.
Thanks to my own love for the memoir genre, I have added another layer of savoring. After I read each book, I ponder what I’ve learned. Like listening with great care to a work of classical music, and discovering within it nuances of harmony and tonal tension and release, I have uncovered a feast of insights in Julie Scolnik’s Paris Blue. [To read my previous essay about this book, click here.]
Her loneliness and intrigue in the Paris of the seventies… Remembering young love… That first glance that took her breath away… The little garret apartment… Her memories awaken memories of my own, my fascination with France and all things French, my first love with its otherworldly sense of total hypnotic bliss. Reading Paris Blue is like reading Proust, but more feminine, more modern, more American.
Read Paris Blue as though you were sitting quietly in a symphony hall, listening with all your heart to the orchestra of her life, and the lives of the people she loved. And through its pages, ponder the way she transformed her powerful moments into a compelling story. Even the painful ones. Perhaps especially the painful ones. By revisiting it through the eyes of the storyteller, it will mysteriously acquire the sensibility of art –transforming the mundane into an uplifting journey on the magic carpet of savoring.
Writing Prompt: Use savoring to write your memoir
To use the concept of savoring as a recipe for writing your memoir, first look at the powerful memories that occasionally fly past your mind’s eye. All your life these glimpses have come into view, lingered, sometimes with strong emotion, sometimes as distant faint echoes. Then they always recede back into the blurry background from which they arose.
As a memoir writer, your job is to sit with pen or keyboard and when one of these glimpses jumps into view, grab it and translate it into words. Once you’ve got it in this container, you can turn it this way and that, write more about the implications, the feelings, the things that were happening in the world around you the day of the original event.
Keep doing this – over and over, months or years. This is the gathering stage.
Then as your file of written vignettes grows, use the copy/paste feature of your computer to reorganize them into chronological order. You’ll be amazed at how cause and effect begins to come to light when the first thing happens before the second thing. “Oh, that’s how that unfolded!” you might say as you work on your growing manuscript.
Once you realize you are writing a memoir, join with other memoir writers – who are trying to do the exact same thing- your lives might have been completely different in the past, but in the present as warriors of wisdom, attempting to find the shape of reality, you are fellow revolutionaries, no longer willing to let the past lay lost beneath the rubble of time.
I grew up at a time of sharp gender distinctions, but as a young intellectual I mostly kept out of the fray. For example, failing out of contact sports didn’t bother me. I did try a few other things I consider manly, like constructing a small rustic end table from lumber. And I changed the oil on my car a few times, and even changed the brake pads once. But the male stereotype I adhered to most ferociously was the shallowness of my interest in girly emotions.
I was curious about those exotic creatures, of course, who clearly had about a thousand times more insight into style and emotion in one day than I had in a year, but I never expected to find a pathway that would enable me to feel their feelings.
Looking back on it, I can see how my ignorance was supported by the reading material of the day. Throughout my youth in the sixties, Huck Finn, Great Expectations, the Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Alan Poe’s short stories, and the whole genre of science fiction, all shielded me from the experience of being a girl.
But the wall that separated me from the inner life of women rapidly crumbled when I discovered memoirs. When reading memoirs by female authors, I not only think about women. I spend hours vicariously thinking like one, allowing me to feel those complex emotions for myself. For example, reading books by mothers about the loss of a child took me on a journey through some of the most heart-wrenching emotions I’d ever experienced. [For example to read an essay I wrote about such a mother’s memoir, Lorraine Ash’s Life Touches Life click this link.]
I held back on the feminine experience of romance though, viewing it as a sort of final frontier that my male mind hesitated to cross. I did try reading a couple of romance novels, but I felt as though they were written in a foreign language, and could not let go in order to enter them vicariously. I needed to find a good romance memoir and build up the courage to read it.
Then last year I took a baby step in that direction. B. Lynn Goodwin’s memoir Never Too Late was the perfect starting point for my expanded emotional intelligence. Because her deep, heartfelt relationship happened later in life, between two people who leaned into pragmatic choices rather than emotional storms, I didn’t have to expose my logical male sensitibilities to more than I could handle.. But it broke the ice. [Click here to read my essay about that experience]
This year, my memoir romance reading jumped up a notch (or ten). Paris Blue by Julie Scolnik is a beautifully written book. It has all the vulnerability of a romance novel, but with the intense authenticity that arises from a heart-felt first-person account.
Paris Blue empowered me in the same way all memoirs do, to get me out of the limitations of my own approach to life in order to experience someone else’s. As her story awakened primal feelings of being swept away in love, I remembered when I felt that intoxication too! Through the magic of vicarious experience, I remembered those delicious moments as a young man when I felt swept up in that fascinating, fun, intricate, sensual, and sweet aspect of human existence.
Paris Blue, about the author’s most intimate moments, is yet another reason to celebrate the dawn of the Memoir Age – sharing stories lets us make better sense of each other’s inner worlds – like the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which enabled modernity to understand ancient hieroglyphs, the existence of a modern library of interior life journeys can help us speak to each other more openly and with deeper insight. In this way, memoir reading and writing will change the world.
This Is How I Save My Life: From California to India, a True Story of Finding Everything When You Are Willing to Try Anything by Amy B. Scher
At the beginning of Amy Scher’s memoir, This is How I save My Life, she is riddled with pain, weakened in every muscle of her body. Her young life is drowning in a blur of doctors, medications, and crises. She has tried everything. Nothing works. But she, and her parents, are not ready to give up.
And then, along comes an experimental stem-cell treatment at a small clinic in New Delhi, India. Really? Is she going to risk her life to save her life? As a reader, I’m skeptical. If she’s already tried the best doctors, why will this method work? But I like her writing, and I like her challenge, so I keep reading.
When she lands in Delhi, she has to adjust to the assault on her senses, colors, smells, noise. So what does she do? She manages, amazingly to turn Delhi, India into a character with a personality all its own. The way she portrays India is unique, interesting… and alive!!! It seems like everyone in India is painting outside the lines. And everywhere she turns, India is beckoning to her to let go of her rigid preconceptions and join in its exuberant chaos. I fell in love with Amy Scher’s personalization of Delhi. But wait there’s more.
At the clinic where her treatment will be administered, she meets an ensemble cast of patients and caregivers. To bring this experience to the reader, she repeats the same brilliant technique she used for Delhi. She turns the clinic into a character, too. In this way, she makes her trip so much more easily understandable. As characters, both the city and the clinic, offer lessons, joy, and companionship.
Reading this memoir reminds me of the importance of good writing – she provides humor, insight, and some of the most artfully interwoven backstory I’ve ever seen. And while all these features make the book easy and enjoyable to read, the highlight of this memoir is her journey of self-discovery. She constructed her story arc so well, I offer it as a “textbook” example of the story arcs at the heart of every good memoir.
Every memoir needs three basic components
First, every memoir needs to start with a high stakes question. Amy Scher’s debilitating illness is a perfect setup to capture our attention. However, spoiler alert, this initial challenge is a moving target. As the story proceeds, the challenge gradually shifts. I’ll have more to say about this challenge in a moment.
Second, as she moves toward resolving the problem, the author must encounter many obstacles. Her illness provides a constant stream of setbacks. Other setbacks arise from the discomfort, anxiety, and adjustment to such an exotic environment. So this requirement is satisfied as well.
Third, as she confronts each obstacle, she must exert psychological and emotional effort required to move from initial problem, through the obstacles, toward a conclusion. We want to see how our hero will push through all the obstacles in order to reach the conclusion.
While This is How I Save my Life perfectly exemplifies these three essential parts, Amy Scher modifies the formula a little and in the process makes its story arc exceptional.
At the start of the book, her main challenge seems to be medical. So if that continued to be the main challenge, the conclusion would be a cure. Naturally, as a compassionate human being, I would be thrilled to see the author throw away her pill bottles and get up and dance. But memoir readers tend to want to learn about psychological, social, or moral self-development. Memoir readers are actually psychology geeks – we have a thirst for understanding how people grow.
This notion of a character growing wiser, or more mature, or more accepting during the course of a memoir is one of my favorite things about the genre. I believe that the whole genre is devoted to reminding our culture of a simple concept about being human that has been lost in the hectic pace of modern times: that is, that adults can continue to grow throughout their lives.
Memoirs chart a path to the high road
I claim that memoir readers long to witness this feature of human courage – we want to admire people who climb to a higher elevation. But until the Memoir Revolution, our culture offered only a tiny handful of metaphors to help us visualize our upward moral mobility. In fact, I can only think of two.
In the Japanese culture, you take your shoes off when entering the home in order to symbolize that you are going to a higher spiritual plane. Just a step higher, but to a different plane. So simple, and yet it says so much. Similarly, when I heard Martin Luther King’s exhortation to “take the high road,” I knew exactly what he meant. There is some higher elevation that we all know about. And yet if we all know about the importance of the high road, why does the modern, educated Western world invite so little discourse about it? As a culture, we are suffering from a poverty of insight into the path to the high road.
That impoverishment ended when we began reading memoirs. Each one is a roadmap of one author’s journey toward their higher inner qualities. In a sense, the genre is a sort of human university, and by immersing ourselves in the stories of people who have gone through these journeys, we have discovered a language of hope and courage at the heart of the human condition.
Until the Memoir Revolution, few of us had thought about our own life transitions in these terms. We lived, year after year, and filed away memories in their messy repository, only jumping out randomly, or during a conversation.
And so, chances are that when you read your first few dozen memoirs, you had a hard time fathoming how these particular authors had arrived at a coherent, readable account. Who were these unusual individuals, you might have asked? What made them so unique? But when you look more carefully, you realize they started out just like you, with a pile of memories and then years working out how the past fit together into a good story.
Once you decide it might be worthwhile for you to do something similar, at first all you have are a pile of disorganized memories as well. They have no inherent organization. Rather these bits of your past will only acquire the organizational framework of “story” after you’ve taken a lengthy, verbal journey to put the pieces together in a new form.
Read memoirs to learn how to find your own map
To help you find the wisdom embedded in your own life, take some time to make more sense of the memoirs you read. In each one, review how the author went from the challenge at the beginning, to a satisfying conclusion at the end. As you understand the way they portrayed their character arc, you can begin to do thought experiments, to see which parts of your life might line up accordingly. Amy Scher’s storyline offers a great example of the hope and courage available within the genre.
When the book starts, the main goal of the protagonist is to heal her physical disease. As the story proceeds, she gradually shifts her goal from the medical problem of curing a disease to a psychological and spiritual quest to become a better person. That gradual shift from curing a physical disease at the beginning, to her growing awareness of her psychological well-being by the end creates an exceptionally clever story arc.
So if you were looking for a recipe for healing chronic life-wrecking Lyme disease the story might be a bit disappointing. But if you are looking for a story about a really sick person coming to some sort of spiritual understanding of the healing process, you will find this book exciting and uplifting.
But when you take off your white coat, leave the lab and enter the streets of Delhi, life is no longer even remotely predictable. And what had begun as an attempt for a medical cure turned out to be a pilgrimage, whose ultimate lesson was that it’s okay to let go. And like heroes throughout the ages, once she learned her lesson she returned to the world to let the rest of us know.
One problem with this East Meets West lesson about reality is that we Westerners are afraid that if we let go of too much, chaos would ensue. There is no easy way to reconcile that fear, but if you want to find a good way to gather the two ways of looking at the world and hold them within the embrace of one good story, read Amy Scher’s memoir.
Instead of teaching us about one or two of India’s spiritual belief systems, she exposes the roots of those beliefs. India teaches her that to find her new truths, she must break through old boundaries. This is in a sense the very foundation of the Hero’s Journey – the hero must “go forth into the land of adventure” in other words, to start the journey the Hero must “let go.”
As she proceeds through the course of her treatment, she gradually discovers that it’s not the medicine that is healing her. The healing results from the courage to let go.
In her memoir, the mystical magic of India emerges organically, directly from its culture of acceptance, of controlled chaos, of believing that the truth is there waiting for you if you just let it in. In her own unique, subtle, innovative way, she shows the path to healing is through acceptance – once you let go, you let in the light.
What if letting go leads to chaos
This idea of letting go of emotional control is foreign to the educated Western mind. Still reeling from the cultural horror of the Dark Ages, we grow up believing that science is the bulwark against ignorance. Thanks to the great promises of analytical thinking, if you know the mathematical formula you can predict the exact trajectory. If you construct a proper experiment, you arrive at the best truth.
When you leave the sterile research lab with its white coats and controlled variables and enter the streets of Delhi, life is far messier than Western science would lead us to believe. Even in high school physics they taught me that the predictions only work when you ignore the messy details. And in medicine, the complexities of the body often outstrip the skills of the body.
So we’re stuck in an impasse. Western science is a bulwark against ignorance, except when it’s not. And Eastern (Indian) thinking is too wild, too out-of-the-box, to uncontrolled. This is where Amy Scher story introduces us to ideas that easily cross between the two cultures.
While it is lovely to appreciate Amy’s story as a literary experience, it’s even more intriguing when you can extend these insights into a framework that will make sense to your Western trained mind. If you want a little guidance, consider this quote. Dan P. MacAdams is a psychologist who has spent his life exploring how our individual sense of self, our very personhood, is wrapped up in the stories we tell about ourselves. In his book called The Stories We Live By he calls upon Western psychology to explain why Amy Scher’s ending feels so right.
But coherence isn’t everything. Some stories seem too coherent to be true. We do not need perfect consistency in order to find unity and purpose in life. Indeed, a good life story is one that tolerates ambiguity. Such a story propels the person into the future by holding open a number of different alternatives for future action and thought. Our stories need to be flexible and resilient. They need to be able to change, grow and develop as we ourselves change. Openness is a difficult criterion to judge in personal myth, for there is always the danger of too much openness reflecting lack of commitment and resolve. Still the personal myth that welcomes change and growth is superior to the one that is less welcoming. Without openness our personal myths run the risk of becoming rigid, stagnant, and brittle.
Dan McAdams PhD, Stories we live by, page 111
The principle at the heart of This is How I Saved My Life is that the stories we live by must have flexibility and expansiveness in them if we intend to be mentally healthy. When Amy Scher ventured forth to India in the hopes of finding her own truth she had to let go of the crazy notion that she knew everything.
Amy went on a pilgrimage, on a hero’s journey, to learn these lessons. She didn’t learn them from Dan MacAdams’ graduate Psychology classes on personality formation. Instead she learned them from the citizens of India who must embrace ambiguity in order to survive. Then she brought back her truth the way heroes are supposed to do. In Amy Scher’s story, the notion of letting go is indeed revealed as a beautiful truth in its own right.
The mix of East Meets West proposed by Amy Scher’s memoir is innovative, in the same way the music and culture of the sixties led to innovative mind expanding perspectives. It took an expansive, open mind to follow the artistryof Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar’s famous mashup. If you are ready to go for a similar expansive journey into the intersection of the two cultures through Story, take a deep breath and go for a ride through This is How I Save My Life.
If you have been trained in Western thinking, you might find it a bit scary. What if we “let go” too much? The dilemma between too much control and too little does not lend itself to an easy answer. But if you want to find a good way to gather the two ways of looking at the world, and hold them in your mind within the embrace of one good story, read Amy Scher’s memoir.
The process of getting together with a romantic partner is so psychologically complex, and so fraught with pitfalls and doubts, it makes perfect raw material for a memoir. Then why have I seen so few bestsellers centered on this theme?
Perhaps the subject has been so over-reported in fiction that some memoir authors might fear that mentioning their own romance will sound cliché. Others might be reluctant to reveal such an intimate insight into their hearts. And yet, as the Memoir Revolution continues to mature, every possible life experience is finding its way into a book length story. It’s just that romance is arriving slowly.
Romance did famously play a key role in Elizabeth Gilbert’s runaway best seller Eat, Pray, Love. This was “her guy.” No problem. Unlike the inner battles of the romance novel, there wasn’t a lot of “should I shouldn’t I” going on.
However, in a second, less famous book, Committed, Gilbert went through every agonizing contortion you could imagine, trying to convince herself to tie the bond. Unlike the inner debates in a romance novel, Gilbert didn’t fret so much about the suitability of the guy as she did about her hatred for the institution. The book was a protracted intellectual war within herself to talk herself into getting married. Committed was so emphatically not a romance novel, one wonders if she was intentionally avoiding those tropes.
My next foray into what looked like it might be a romance memoir was the improbably titled The Happily Ever After: A Memoir of an Unlikely Romance Novelist by Avi Steinberg.
I already knew Avi Steinberg’s penchant for a strong nonfiction slant from his previous memoir, Running the Books about being a librarian at a prison. Unfortunately, true to his quirky style, The Happily Ever After showed me a lot about Steinberg’s attempt to be accepted into romance writer’s groups, but did not do much for my insights into the emotionally complex journey to enter a committed relationship.
Actually over the years I have read several memoirs which included the connection with a romantic partner – (see notes at the end for more details) — but in all of these, the storyline included other powerful themes, such as death, cancer, and in one case concluding she would better off on her own. So I was gaining a slow education in the way romance could be introduced into a memoir.
I did not run into a full-blown “romance memoir” until Never Too Late: From Wannabe to Wife at 62by B. Lynn Goodwin. Not only was the memoir specifically about getting together as a couple. It also had the bonus feature of being by a woman who had made it into her 60s without having been married. It was a perfect opportunity to extend my horizons. And it didn’t disappoint. The memoir Never Too Late took me into the complex emotional territory of a romance novel, but completely within the style and intent of a memoir.
In addition to taking me on an excellent journey, I felt that B. Lynn Goodwin’s experience might help other authors who are debating whether or not to include romance in their memoirs. So I reached out and asked her a few questions.
Question about your decision/inspiration to write this
Jerry: At what point in your relationship did you realize you wanted to write about this experience? For example, had you been on the lookout for a deep story about yourself and realized as you entered this situation it would be worth writing about? Or did you become aware of the potential for a book much later in the period?
B. Lynn Goodwin: We’d been on 3-4 dates when I realized that if this relationship went any where it might make a good a memoir. Actually, I’d been free-writing with a group of married women, all younger than me, for about 8 years when Richard and I started dating. They had a lot more to write about than I did and somehow, I realized that I’d done many of the things that I wanted to, but I’d never had a chance to find out what marriage was like. I’d never even lived with anyone. Richard offered me that chance.
Did you have inner doubts about “do I really want to be writing this?”
Jerry: Never Too Late is an unusually frank and open look into aspects of your inner world that not everyone would be willing to expose. As you realized you might turn it into a publishable book, what additional self-doubts or worries crept in that you had to brush aside to keep going? Such as:
Jerry: worrying about his reaction to being made public”
B. Lynn Goodwin: Richard and I have done a good job working through all the compromises and choices we would have to agree on to become a couple.’ Though we still have our individual sides, fortunately neither one of us has to be right all of the time.
He sees life as black as white, and I see it in a spectrum of grays. I also pick my battles. It was easy to show this through our early encounters. Of course, he once suggested that after I wrote each chapter, he could write “what really happened.” He was joking… sort of. As the writer, it was my story, but in the end we were still aligned.
When it was done, I asked him to read it. His response to the book was, “It’s all true.” He’s right. I love his honesty.
Jerry: Worrying about what others will think about your own actions and choices
B. Lynn Goodwin: I was anxious about my lack of experience with relationships, but memoir writers reveal things that the rest of us keep private. Besides, it was no secret that I’d never been intimate. Most people probably figured it out immediately. Now moms often ask if I’m a grandmother, so whatever obvious signs were there about my single status have apparently disappeared.
Jerry: Worrying about what others will think about your writing.
B. Lynn Goodwin: I didn’t think my writing was bad and I appreciated when others pointed out what was unclear to them.
Inner debate as a cornerstone of the romance genre
Jerry: The whole basis for this story is remarkably similar to the Romance genre, which is largely about the journey of two people trying to come together as a couple. Did you make any conscious effort to follow or diverge from that genre’s story structure?
B. Lynn Goodwin: I didn’t have much experience reading romance novels, so it didn’t occur to me to reference them. If you’d like a little romantic symbolism, I opened like a rose, and my petals are still blooming.
Jerry: Okay. So even though you weren’t thinking about the romance genre, per se, you were certainly treading some of the same territory. Your memoir explores the whole process of choosing to enter into the partnership of marriage.
While everyone who has ever formed a relationship must sort out how much of themselves will be compromised, you have written a whole book about crossing that frontier. These decisions are especially complex and fraught for you because of your beliefs about gender, and your coming to this question late in life. Throughout the journey you write about in this book, you must weigh these questions in an astoundingly transparent and intricate series of self doubts and self discoveries.
Considering how differently the two of you were when you started, this desire to bond with this man, you had to use internal dialog to cross over some very complex terrain where heart and mind must come to some very important agreements.
I’m blown away at the content of these inner debates. You were asking yourself detailed questions about such an intense ethical and moral set of choices, almost drilling down to the heart of what it means to be a couple. Your story is a workshop in a dimension of personal attunement and personal ethics that most of us only ever think about in the background if at all. That is a fascinating journey. Thank you for taking us readers along for the ride.
B. Lynn Goodwin: Thank you for understanding what I was doing.
Jerry: The inner debates about what you will need to adjust in order to share a life are an amazing masterclass in this aspect of relationship building.
B. Lynn Goodwin: Still a student in this master class… Memoir is usually two stories. It’s the story of what happened and how the narrator felt then. The second story is about how the narrator feels now as she reflects. I’m often struck by the fact that no one can tell your story but you. If Richard were to tell the story of our meeting and marrying, his would be different from mine. Even his reporting of our experiences would be different. My story might speak to someone who’s had similar experiences and thoughts, and outside perspective often helps.
Jerry: Your circumstances added some fascinating nuances to the equation. You had never been married, and had a lot of life behind you as a single woman –to give over half of your life to this other person was such a huge decision and you take us deep into the guts of your decision.
B. Lynn Goodwin: Absolutely. There are many reasons a single woman needs to be cautious. I needed to believe we were both doing the right thing so I would not live with regrets.
How much did writing act as a workspace for your own emotional evolution
Jerry: I definitely had the sense that through the course of the story, you kept moving the dial from “I’m comfortable and content living on my own ” to “I want to be in this marriage with this man.”
So I’m looking at your memoir as a sort of real-time unfolding of your own evolving self-understanding. I love that. I think you spooled that aspect of decision-making masterfully through the course of the book.
So while as a reader I’m seeing how you are moving the dial of your decision making process, I wonder what that was like for you as a writer. Were you using the writing as a tool to help you expand and extend and clarify your own emotional vocabulary during this experience?
B. Lynn Goodwin: I used the memoir to help me figure things out and to justify my choice because plenty of my friends had questions. It did not seem like an evenly-matched marriage, but they were applying different standards than I was.
Jerry: Could you say more about how or if you see writing the memoir as a part of your evolution as a person.
B. Lynn Goodwin: I write tons of short memoir pieces in my journal. I call them flash memoir. As I write I discover a great deal about who I am and how I became the woman I am. Every moment of evolution helps me function better.
Jerry: As a writer, editor, and a lifetime reader and literary person, how much were you consciously thinking of this as a journey through your “Relationship value system?”
B. Lynn Goodwin: More than you might imagine. This is a hard one to answer, but Richard introduced me to honesty without fear of repercussions. It was something I’d always craved. I didn’t write much about why it was missing, because I wanted to limit this to our story rather than including excessive back story.
Jerry: What was the relationship of your passion for writing, with your earnest development of new emotional “muscles” in this time in your life?
B. Lynn Goodwin: My passion for writing helped me develop my buried emotional muscles. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d said no. I can’t imagine any scenario I’d like.
Notes:
Other books with strong themes of romantic connection. Each has its own unique slant of course, but as you search for the best way to include the notion of romance, consider these other approaches to constructing your story.
Again in a Heartbeat by Susan G. Weidener. Romantic, connection, then loss, and grief. Then on to reclaiming her own strength as a single mom.
Banged Up Heart by Shirley Mellis. Romantic, connection, then tragic loss. A real ode to a relationship – and like B. Lynn Goodwin’s Never too Late, it took place later in life.
Click here to read my article about these two romance/grieving memoirs.
The Dog Lived and So Will I by Teresa Rhyne. This was a great, romantic comedy. And it involved a dog, and like the previously mentioned ones, cancer.
Click here to read my article about the adorable, brave and romantic memoir The Dog Lived and So Will I
MatchDotBomb: A Midlife Journey through Internet Dating by Francine Pappadis Friedman. An unromantic book that speaks to the horrors and disappointments of midlife dating.
Growing up Jewish gave me a front row seat to the hatred proudly on display against people of other races, not only in Europe but right here in my own country. By the time I arrived in college, the signs posted on beaches and restaurants throughout the American South – No Jews or Blacks Allowed –had been reluctantly taken down, and I happily assumed that the American promise of universal equality was heading in the right direction.
Sadly that optimistic belief has been challenged by the presence of video cameras in everyone’s pockets, which document the fact that something is still desperately wrong. From a woman tasered and jailed for refusing to put out her cigarette, to suspects of a minor crime shot multiple times in the back while running away, to a man strangled to death in front of a crowd of onlookers, the injustice continues, and even though it’s an uncomfortable conversation, it is also one my heart demands I enter.
Since I’ve spent the last 15 years making the audacious claim that memoirs have the power to transform society, it makes sense to tack on this additional hope – that memoirs could specifically elevate our conversation about race.
After George Floyd’s murder, while riots raged in cities around the country, I reviewed the Black memoirs I’d read, and found that the very first blog post I wrote in 2007 mentions two memoirs by Black authors, one of which inspired a trip into Philadelphia to meet the famous Tommie Smith. In 1968, Smith, one of the great runners of the modern era, stood with his Gold Medal on the podium of the Olympics and raised his fist in solidarity with Black protests.
Back in 1968, while I was busy trying to grow up, Tommie Smith’s brave gesture quickly slipped out of my awareness. Reading his memoir years later revealed what happened next. His simple plea for equality ran afoul of the racial caste system, and decades before “cancel culture” became a thing, he lost his endorsements and was blacklisted from college and sports team. His silent, bold, dignified gesture hurtled him into obscurity and poverty.
I am ashamed to admit that when I first read Tommie Smith’s memoir, I was still clinging to the belief that the vicious backlash directed against him was some sort of mistake, and that in general, while the American promise of equality had flaws, it was still essentially intact.
George Floyd’s murder made it impossible to ignore that these supposedly small pockets of racial indignity run much deeper into the fabric of our society and have more far-reaching, dire consequences than I wanted to believe. But what could I do?
I can’t change the world, but perhaps I could cry harder, and invite others with big hearts to cry (and try!) with me. Because in addition to protests, the other way to lift this mess is with love, and love sometimes requires exposing one’s self to pain.
So I dug deeper into my reading list, and eventually I came to see that the American system of promising everyone equality and then withholding it from those of a different race has forced many people to find the dignity hidden in the spaces permitted them by their circumstances.
I didn’t make these observations of moral strength on my own. I extracted them from between the lines of another Black writer I met in Philadelphia, Lorene Cary. In reviewing her two books, Black Ice and Lady Sitting, I formulated my ideas for a 21st Century approach to racism, and how the response to it is a search for dignity.
After I wrote an essay on the topic, my own blog seemed too limited a platform. To stretch outside my usual range, I sent the essay out into the world. When I heard back from, Mary McBeth, the editor of Memoir Magazine that she wanted to talk to me, I was flattered that she would take some time to help me improve it.
Unfortunately she did not find my exploration of these topics to be as clear as I’d hoped. Fortunately, she wanted to talk about it, and that resulted in an impromptu seminar in the language of being Black (and white) in America.
It turns out that she too has been longing for a way to contribute to this conversation, but she has the privilege of seeing the situation from the Black side of the ocean that separates us. When she saw I’d dived into that ocean, she jumped in too, in order to see if we could meet in the middle.
During two phone conversations, spanning 3.5 hours, we attempted to swim across the turbulent waters that divided her world from mine. Because of hundreds of years of cruelty and contention, it turns out that steering through appropriate, compassionate language is more difficult than I’d anticipated.
Based on her feedback, I mulled over my article, and eventually returned version two. She reviewed that one and gave me even more feedback. By the third round, she said she didn’t just like it. She loved it.
The article, published in Memoir Magazine [Click here to read the whole thing, ] says much of what I’ve been thinking about since the George Floyd murder, I also want to add one more thing here.
I’ve been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns, about the Jim Crow south, and the great migration from south to north. Wilkerson’s thoughtful, heavily researched story has shredded the blinders that kept me from seeing the history of racial atrocity in this country. Perhaps because I am now close to three quarters of a century old myself, the sadistic, dehumanizing laws and social norms against Blacks in the first half of the twentieth century don’t seem so long ago. In fact, they were taking place in the same decades as the groundswell of human cruelty was rising in Europe to create the Holocaust – it’s all too close for comfort.
Of course no one can reverse past oppression, but as we move forward, in order to live up to our own standards of “freedom for all” we must learn to use our words in the service of mutual respect. While most of our public debate about the empathetic use of language has been directed against inflammatory and demeaning word choices, an even more valuable use of words occurs in the mutual respect we gain by listening to each other’s stories. This is the promise of the Memoir Revolution, that while we all live our own unique lives, stories enable us to have empathy for each other’s.
After you’ve given an author several hours of your attention, you have entered into one of the most dignified, and dignifying relationships in human experience, vicariously setting yourself aside, and letting them lead you through their journey.
I’ve often said that memoirs generate hope, because each one leads from a place of lesser personal satisfaction to greater. But whenever I cross a barrier of race, or culture, or any other difference in our backgrounds, I believe that equally important is its promotion of empathy. By allowing myself into their worlds, each memoir chips away at the sense of otherness, and immerse myself in the knowledge that we are all swimming in the same ocean.
When I was a teenager, in the sixties, I loved to read novels about the previous hundred years. Authors such as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway led me on astonishing journeys through the worlds that existed before my time. Mysteriously, though, it never occurred to me to ask my parents about their own earlier lives, or the stories their parents might have told.
Today, 60 years later, I feel bewildered by my teen preference for the written words of strangers, while ignoring the history living within the people who raised me.
In my fifties, I discovered the Memoir Revolution, a cultural movement that transforms the memory of elders into the engaging form of a good story. The trend has given rise to a whole army of cultural historians, scouring their memories to report the way things used to be. While it was too late to ask my own parents about their past, I could open a book and read about an author who had done just that.
The popularity of memoirs might at first glance appear to be little more than a passing trend in reading preferences. But when viewed as an expansion of our understanding and respect for the past, this trend has the potential for raising our cultural wisdom.
Winston Churchill famously wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Considering our poor track record of learning from the past, it would be easy to interpret his pronouncement more as a death knell than a wake up call. So are we really doomed? Not if the Memoir Revolution has anything to say about it.
The cultural interest in memoirs assigns elders one of the most important roles in their lives. As the keepers of the longer view, their well-written records of actual lives will help our culture hang onto some wisdom. Memoirs are a modern method of crowdsourcing an ever richer view of the past.
However, while memoirs beautifully reveal the person doing the writing, their value falls off sharply when they guess what went in the minds of those already deceased (unless of course the ancestor left behind a memoir.)
That lack of visibility into the minds of the dead has spawned a subgenre in which the author sets out to wrest the story from their ancestor’s graves. (Literally in the case of genealogists who travel around looking for inscriptions on gravestones.)
Such memoirs regularly show up on my reading list, many from authors whose previous memoirs I already respect. These intrepid personal historians have such a strong desire to know the folks who came before them, they devote whole chapters of their lives to this quest.
My first encounter with the subgenre came from one of my memoir heroes, Linda Joy Myers, the president of the National Association of Memoir Writers. She spent fifteen years writing about her own childhood, resulting in her first memoir, Don’t Call me Mother, an insightful, psychologically-rich Coming of Age story. [I wrote about that memoir here: ]
After publishing that book, she went on another multi-year journey to decipher the emotional history of a family of women who kept abandoning their daughters. She writes about that search in Song of the Plains. [I wrote about that memoir here: ]
Another author who attempted to find the stories of her ancestors was Tracy Seeley. In her book My Ruby Slippers, she travels from California to Kansas to understand her roots. Her book weaves together the history of her family with the role Kansas and the plains played in the history of our nation. [Here’s a link to my article about that book ]
Recently another such memoir pushed me over the threshold from ancestry skeptic to believer. I’d already read and reviewed Neill McKee’s first memoir, Finding Myself in Borneo, about how a gig as a government worker set him on a lifelong career of foreign service. [I wrote about that memoir here ]
In his second memoir, Guns and Gods in my Genes, he travels around North America to visit his family roots across hundreds of years, settling the frontier and earlier still, to the birth of Canada and the United States. The history of his ancestors is fascinating and sobering, drenched in the blood of the people who were already here.
After reading these three searches for ancestry, I’ve drawn a more complete understanding of how the Ancestor-search subgenre works and what it contributes to the Memoir Revolution
Who is the hero of an ancestor memoir?
My love for memoirs comes from their ability to take me inside another person’s journey to grow from some lesser state at the beginning to the wiser, more mature state at the end. But because ancestor-research memoirs spend so much time chasing down insights into the lives of other people, I originally questioned if they have the well-defined, character-driven story that would qualify them as “real” memoirs?
Upon reflection, I found abundant proof that they do indeed satisfy the requirements. The ancestor research memoir expresses the author’s driving curiosity to “know thyself.” That’s a perfect characteristic of the hero of a memoir.
Like any good memoir, each one has an outer story. The hero must relentlessly scour every corner of their history, painstakingly searching for clues. They are detectives!
Each one has an inner story, as well. The main character’s passionate curiosity shines like a beacon from the beginning of the story to the end. These writers soldier on, driven by some psychological force to get to the bottom of their nagging questions about their ancestral inheritance.
The promise of new information from a microfiche, a gravestone, or a museum sends them flying across the country. It’s a chase, a hunt, and to that end, these authors are true memoir warriors, archeologists, forensic scientists, trying to recreate the knowledge hidden within the ruins.
All memoirs invite us to ponder the truth at the heart of the Memoir Revolution. “Who I am today is an evolution of who I used to be.” In most memoirs, that question of identity is explored through the main character’s own recollections. The ancestor research subgenre poses a somewhat different question. “If I’ve been influenced by the psychological truths of my parents, what psychological factors influenced them?”
Ancestor research memoirs, by their nature, seem choppy
These three memoirs, Song of the Plains, My Ruby Slippers, and Guns and Gods in my Genes, rely on genealogical sources such as research in libraries and interviews, and in precious snips of old letters. Stories reconstructed from these artifacts will of course sound very different from stories created out of a memoir author’s memory.
In fact, so different that they introduce a fault line, in which the reader must across the chasm. Instead of identifying with the hero/author, the reader must jump into the life of the ancestor currently under review.
The resulting attempt to reconstruct the past breaks our attention away from the present and forces the writer to disrupt one of the primary methods for maintaining the story-reader’s attention: continuity. Instead of staying inside the mind of the protagonist, the way most memoirs work, the story must leap back into the world of the ancestor.
This need to jump in time disrupts that hypnotic sense of vicarious identification that is such a lovely aspect of the typical first-person memoir. Of course, no matter how diligently researched, the story that emerges from research cannot be as introspective as it would have been if an ancestor had written a memoir (hint, hint.)
However, despite the inherently choppy story line, these fragments being unearthed by the author really do begin to come together, in their mind and in ours, as a tantalizing visualization of the way life used to be.
So do I wish their ancestors had written memoirs? Sure. Do I wish that the author’s hard work could have magically reconstructed a smooth, introspectively authentic narrative? Sure.
But because this is a memoir, it has to stick with the facts. And the facts are that the hero of the memoir was desperate to know about their past. As we accompany them on that journey, we eventually do reach a point of acceptance, not perhaps that we’ve found a perfect story, but that at least we have done everything in our power to elevate these memories into conscious awareness. There is a satisfaction in that astonishing yeoman service, and I turn the last page and close the book feeling that I too have heard those ghosts whispering from the past.
Ancestors, in our genes, our minds, and in society
These three well-crafted, passionately researched stories, took me on multi-year journeys, attempting to coax stories from cemeteries, libraries, and museums Through this painstaking process, I witnessed tendrils of the authors spread throughout a pre-industrial land. The fact that their findings on the American frontier are so sketchy put me off at first. But then, the ghosts of the past turned into a chorus which informed me of something I should have known all along.
Collectively, they “said” that the stories of our ancestors are important. The revelation sounds somewhat prosaic when I say it out loud. And yet, despite its power and importance, it has largely been hidden from my awareness.
When I was younger, I would have scoffed at the idea that ancestral knowledge has value. Like most American children of my era, I was raised to believe that while grandparents might be loving, their experience at the dawn of automobiles and phones had very little relevance to me.
But in reading these memoirs, I finally get it. We all not only have childhoods. Our own personal cultural roots stretch far into the past, and even though we don’t think about it consciously, when we pass someone in the grocery store, or encounter them in the news, they have a history that extends far beyond the person we can see with our eyes.
As I contemplate this fact in memoir after memoir, I awaken to a new interpretation of Churchill’s warning about ignoring history. He wasn’t just referring to the lessons we studied in our high school text books. We all have our own personal history. And whether conscious of it or not, the way we envision our ancestors has the potential to inform and influence our self-understanding throughout life.
While most of us probably are not going to embark on the long, difficult road of research traveled by Linda Joy Myers, Tracy Seeley, and Neill McKee, I’m coming to understand that we all have an inherent thirst for our own identities, and even if we don’t know the details of our actual ancestors, we all invent stories about where we’ve come from. I know I certainly did.
I never heard a single story about life before my ancestors arrived on the shores of the US. I only knew the general outline of the facts. Like so many others who came to these shores, they were seeking protection from religious persecution. So without specific stories, I cleverly filled that vacuum by concocting my own.
One surprising source for my story-of-self came from American history. Because the men and women who broke away from British rule had so much interest in religious freedom, I have always envisioned the founders of the nation personally saved me from persecution.
So even though the events of the American Revolution took place 125 years before my ancestors came to this country, I used to walk around the streets of my hometown, Philadelphia, and imagine them populated by the characters I read about in history books, believing that those shadowy figures were more real to me than my own invisible and voiceless ancestors.
I have these three memoirs to thank for awakening a deeper understanding of the way I conflated my personal history with the idealistic dreams of a new nation. It was a fiction, but it entered my definition of myself with the full brunt of truth.
Allowing myself to feel the pain and curiosity, the thirst for identity shown in these three memoirs, I awaken to the incredible pull these ghostly connections have on all of us. How do the rest of us piece together these ancestral fantasies based on vague, bits of story told over holiday meals, or taught in school, or reflected in the statues in our town squares?
My identity story is one of being lost to persecution and being found and protected by idealism. In these three memoirs I see very different origin stories. Their ancestral identities were shaped by the harsher, more desperate times of the settlers. The stories raise questions about the millions of people in the US who look back and see ancestors involved in the American Indian “wars” (or more accurately the genocide), the slave trade and other harsh realities. These insights offer a new way for me to interpret the divisive news of today. In our fantasies, I suspect many of us are still fighting our ancestors’ wars.
Can we ever fulfill the promises and ideals of this nation? In the second part of this article, I will delve into more observations about pioneer trauma, as I search for glimmers of hope and courage awaiting us among the lessons of history revealed by the Memoir Revolution.
(Note: This article began as a review of Strawberry Roan by Judy Beil Vaughan, and over time turned into a longread about the intricate relationship between memoir and autobiography. If you are a writer wondering how your memoir will work, or a reader, wondering about how to make better sense of these two types of life writing, consider the creative way Judy Beil Vaughan bridged the divide.)
During my training to become a therapist, one of the more esoteric instructions I received was that when a client told me about their situation, I was supposed to pay attention to my own feelings.
I found this instruction unsettling, given that I had no idea how to observe my own feelings. It soon became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to help other people until I learned how to steer through the complexities of my own emotions.
Hoping to correct my deficiency, I read Emotional Intelligence, by Dan Goleman, and was heartened by his assertion that this “intelligence” was learnable. So I started on a long road of self-development, to increase my sense of empathy.
Years of being in therapy helped, but the real breakthrough came from a surprising direction. From reading memoirs.
I’ve always enjoyed losing myself in books. The problem was that in my younger years, all my reading matter was written by males. They involved very little emotional intelligence.
So for example, I read lots of books about people dying, but instead of learning about the emotions of loss, the story centered on finding the killer.
Other emotions were similarly superficial or ignored altogether. Take children for example. A mother’s love for a child was given a vague gloss. Cute but without any depth. And the experience of falling in love was a linear operation, with little time spent appreciating its complexity.
Back then, my reading preferences exposed me mainly to people who barely bothered to feel their lives. But when I decided to broaden my emotional horizons, I switched to reading memoirs. By immersing myself in each author’s inner world, I experienced what it was like for that one individual. And after I completing each one, I pondered how I felt about it, similar to the instruction in my therapy training.
One reason reading memoirs had such a profound influence on me was because I was also trying to write one. In order to effectively communicate my experience, I needed to learn how to communicate emotion. And the only way I, with my tin inner ear, could know if I’d succeeded, would be to get feedback from readers. So I joined a critique group, composed of others who were also trying to turn their lives into stories.
Together with a few people, all in a similar situation, I discovered an exponential benefit. By sharing our works-in-progress, we were becoming each other’s teachers, not just in writing but in empathy.
The directive to “pay attention to my own feelings” became crucial when critiquing my fellow memoir writers. To give them feedback about the quality of their writing, I had to tune into the emotions they aroused in me.
In this way, the empathy-enhancing effects of memoir reading were accentuated (or “potentiated” in the parlance of neurobiology) – and as a result, year over year, I could observe myself growing increasingly curious about the whole range of emotions that had once eluded me.
As I continue to gain emotional sensitivity, I keep pushing the limits. Glad, sad, mad, might sound simple, but in their infinite variety of expression and nuance, they continue to draw me out of myself and into an intimacy with the human condition I never knew was possible. Memoirs were an incredible source for this never-ending variety.
Perhaps one of the most complex, enjoyable and emotionally satisfying memoirs I’ve read recently (or perhaps ever) is a surprisingly light hearted little book about cancer, named The Dog Lived and So Did I by Theresa Rhyne. As I set myself aside, and entered Theresa Rhyne’s story, I was in for a feast of emotion, artistically organized into a fulfilling tale.
For a guy who was looking for deeper insight into the realms of emotion, this book is especially valuable, because it weaves together three stunningly intricate emotional experiences: the threat of mortality, loving a pet or child, and most stunning of all is the entanglement of two people attempting to partner up.
Rhyne offers a rich drink from the cup of emotion, providing nuances about her specific circumstances that allow me to turn each of these situations over and over in my mind in new, unique ways. And it all added up to a terrific story.
In the case of cancer, first her dog, then (spoiler alert) she herself, must go through the grueling rigors of chemotherapy. But while the medical details of such a process might be cold and clinical, in a memoir the journey becomes warm and inspiring, filled with the intricacies of misery and courage.
And her relationship with her dog raises astonishing emotional complexity. While Marley and Me by John Grogan brought us closer to the family dog, The Dog Lived takes it a step further, making the relationship almost indistinguishable to the emotions you might expect with a troubled child. And in her love for her pet, it is easy to feel the full protective embrace of a mother’s love.
Finally, there was the romance – that terrifying process that in my younger male mind, I wrote off as a caricature only relevant in cheesy novels. I used to pretend that partnering was easy, or more to the point, if it was difficult, I didn’t want to know about it.
After I’d read enough memoirs, I developed a far more nuanced appreciation for the ups and downs of finding a romantic partner. Theresa Rhyne’s story pried me open further, making me even more willing to include the aching pain of romance into my ever widening circle of empathy.
The thing that makes this particular memoir so emotionally rewarding is the expertise with which the author weaves these three themes. Each one is as complex and nuanced as any good theme should be, and yet they add power to each other, providing a far greater story in combination.
Her memoir demonstrates the vast difference between mere memories and the stories they generate. Anyone who had to look back on this collection of past events, all one might see in memory might be a bratty dog with behavior problems, two incredibly disruptive scary cancer experiences, and an attempt to forge a relationship against unbelievable odds.
I am in awe of this nearly-impossible challenge that every memoir writer faces – to take the life dealt to you by destiny, and turn it into a satisfying page turner that resonates long after the book is closed.
How Theresa Rhyne pulls the whole thing together into such a lovely memoir is a testimony to her skill as a writer, and also a testimony to the enormous humanity of this genre – it is designed for exactly this deep human need – to enable us to immerse ourselves in each other’s emotional experiences.
I’m not the only one who could benefit from a course in empathy. My hope is that as more people discover the nuances of the human experience, as shared in memoirs like this, we will all grow more empathetic to the difficulties and joys of being human together.
Writing prompts
Write a paragraph about our most complicated romantic encounter
Write a paragraph about an encounter with cancer or some other life threatening and disruptive health issue.
Write a paragraph about a relationship with a pet, child, or someone else who both relied on you and caused you problems.
If you are feeling adventuresome, try to weave these three high-intensity interactions in your life into one compelling story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Footote about empathy and neurons
How could I, or anyone for that matter, truly be learning how to be more empathetic? Wasn’t I stuck with the amount of empathy I was born with? Based on the most up-to-date neuroscience, our adult brains can change. Through effort and lots of training, I was able to increase the number of neuronal connections responsible for my sense of empathy.
Our brains contain a feature called “mirror neurons” which enable us to empathetically relate to each other’s emotions. So in a sense, the best way to raise our aptitude about our own emotions is to carefully pay attention to each other’s.
In my early teens I learned how to lose myself by entering into the minds of detectives and space adventurers. In more recent years, I’ve shifted to actual people, whose memoirs enable me to leave my life for a while and enter theirs.
After years of memoir reading, I am a well-seasoned lifestory traveler, but the variety of human experience is so vast, I continue to encounter surprising, insightful, unique adventures.
I recently completed such a vicarious journey with a young woman named Erica Elliott who, when she was trying to figure out what to do with her life, went to teach school children at the Navajo Reservation.
She quickly fell in love with the indigenous people and their culture, and thanks to an incredible ability to set herself aside, she merged so thoroughly with them that she sometimes actually forgot she was a foreigner. Even more remarkably, they seemed to forget, as well.
Thanks to the magic of memoirs, she took me on that journey with her, showing me things about being Navajo that could only be known by insiders, and helping me more than ever understand the ancient culture that our pioneer forebears were so intent on destroying. Erica Elliott’s memoir opened a portal and let me travel back in time to a people who lived closer to the land.
Coincidentally, Erica Elliott’s memoir intersected with my fascination with mysteries. Her observations about Navajo culture validated everything I learned from the many detective novels I’ve read by Tony Hillerman. It also reminded me of a very different experience of Native American culture. During many hours in my childhood, I sat glued in front of the television, watching the good guys (all white) killing the marauding “Indians.”
Back then, I had no appreciation for the fact that the Indians were fighting in order to protect their own homes. Nor could I have known this seemingly innocent entertainment was conditioning me to see white people as “us” and people of color as “other.” I am so glad that I now live in a time when stories let us see each other, no matter what color, in a more spiritual light. Through Erica Elliott’s eyes, their “otherness” simply disappears.
But this book is actually two stories in one. In addition to an immersion in an ancient culture, it’s also the story of a young woman trying to find her path to adulthood.
Leaving child self to enter adult self – launching
At that time in life when we must go forth from our family of origin, and declare our individual identity, most of us follow the prescribed sequence – get married, get a job, start a family. For Erica Elliott, curiosity burned like lava. The possibilities were endless. The entire world beckoned.
In her state of massive questioning, she let go of all previous assumptions about who she was. It was a daredevil stunt… throwing herself into the unknown… a true hero’s journey.
I have met or read about many people who struggled mightily to reinvent themselves during that transition. In fact, I was one of those people myself.
Fed up with the ills of Western culture, at the end of the 60s, I attempted to become a hippie, which meant I tried to divest myself of all social norms. And once I started down that road, I wanted to keep going. As luck would have it, Jane Goodall showed up in town (Berkeley, California) and praised the innocence of primates. Her message was the sign I’d been looking for. I decided that living like a chimpanzee would be the most noble path. In a sense, I went berserk.
One reason I was willing to throw everything away was the Vietnam war lapping at my doorstep. I couldn’t picture myself entering adulthood holding a gun. But while I was running the other way, many young men were hoping that military service would be a valid, and honorable gateway into adulthood.
Jim McGarrah was just such a recruit. In his memoir A Temporary sort of Peace about his stint as a combat soldier in Vietnam, McGarrah had every right to expect that his experience would be a healthy, ordinary, rite of passage. But on the battlefield, with death all around him, having given up everything, with nowhere else to turn, McGarrah became unraveled. He too went “berserk.” Since he was holding a rifle at the time, berserking turned into a deadly affair.
The thought-leader who helped me find a language for battlefield breakdown was Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who spent his life trying to understand the psychology of war, by treating PTSD in combat veterans, and by interpreting Homer’s classics, The Odyssey and The Iliad. (I was grateful to Shay for finally explaining the point of those obscure stories, which I also read in high school.)
While the psychology of warriors seems off-topic from Erica Elliott’s lyrical journey to serve those in desperate need, it all has the stamp of young people, trying to grow up by throwing away their old selves.
See notes at the foot of this article for more examples of intense, sometimes desperate young people, who tried to destroy their childhood limitations in order to find their adult truths.
Memoirs provide an encyclopedia of life transitions
Memoirs about the transition to grow up are written by people who have gotten to the other side of that turmoil, often many years later, and are looking back on it hoping to make better sense of what took place. (See notes below for a couple of fun exceptions.)
Looking back from that stable position in adulthood, it is really difficult to sort out the memories and explain what happened back then, even to yourself.
This problem of making sense of our younger selves has often left adults speechless about their own younger years. But now, in the twenty-first century, we have the cultural benefit of memoirs to help us shine a beacon on those difficult transitions.
There’s no better way than a memoir to forensically reconstruct who you were and how you became the person you are.
And in addition to writing your own story, you can read many others. Memoirs create a free worldwide university course, (a MOOC or massively open online course) where we can lose ourselves in any number of these journeys, and see how they feel. And after reading, we can close the book, wiser about the way another person’s experience, and a little wiser about our own.
Erica Elliott’s intense journey with the Navajos was often profoundly uncomfortable and at times even dangerous. Her memoir let me accompany her on that entire journey, in only a few hours in the comfort of my home. And yet, despite these vast differences in the scope of our investment, both she and I were attempting to achieve the same goal –we were both trying to give up who we’d been in order to become better, wiser, broader.
How about your transition to adulthood?
Perhaps your own launching was as wildly experimental as Erica’s, mine, Jim McGarrah’s or others that you’ve read about. Or perhaps it was more routine. But whatever your specific path, in order to get from one side of that journey to the other, you had to redefine yourself.
To learn more about your own transition, try writing the sequence of events. A simple ordered list will start you on the journey to remember your past. And if you keep at it, learning to write scenes, and gather them into a narrative, you will be embracing one of the coolest most educational hobbies in the universe. You might discover things about yourself that you had not considered before, adding to your wisdom. And ultimately, you might be able to pass these insights along to others.
The Memoir Revolution is the synergism of two exciting forces in society – on the one side, it is an invitation to those of us who attempt to see our own life journeys through the lens of a story. And on the other side, it is an invitation to those of us who are curious about the lives of others to discover this deep way to enter into (and lose ourselves in) their lives.
Writing prompt
When you were trying to find your adult self, what sort of detours or experiments did you make in order to go out of the ordinary life, and try to lose yourself in another?
A few more examples of memoirs of drastic launchings
An excellent memoir about this impulse to throw away your childhood identity is Unquenchable Thirst, by Mary Johnson. When she sought the best way to become an adult, she attempted to stamp herself out in the service of God and the poor. She defied her parents to become a nun in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
A very different example of giving up your former identity in order to find a new adult one was explored in the launching memoir the Orchard by Theresa Weir. She was a footloose young woman, with no sense of purpose or direction. Seemingly on a whim, she married into one of the most stable families imaginable, a family of apple growers with deep roots to the land. Instead of leaving some stable life and going into the unknown, Weir left behind her instability and tied herself down.
Berserking was sadly quite common in the 60s, when the normal rhythm of growing up middle-class was disrupted by anti-establishment values. Here’s an intense example of another person who like many of us in those days knew what she was running away from, but was muddled about what to run toward. Pamela Jane’s An Incredible Talent for Existing. See my essay about this memoir by clicking here. https://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/is-your-memoir-boomer-lit/
Finding an adult belief system is another challenge of becoming an adult. If the belief system you inherited from your parents does not fulfill your idealistic impression for your own destiny, you must go on a search for a belief system of your own. https://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/launching-pt3-beliefs/
A stylistic note about Medicine and Miracles: The infamous pull-out first chapter
At the beginning of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, she famously lost her boot on a mountain top – – perhaps an ironic “cliffhanger” at the very beginning captured enough attention to engage the reader to turn pages to learn how she survived that event.
Erica Elliott’s pull-out first chapter serves a similar purpose, getting us deeply engaged in the character and causing us to turn pages. Astonishingly the pull-out first chapter, which I must admit was one of the best I’ve ever read, actually takes place in a second memoir. I don’t want to give too much away. You should read the book to see what I mean. But if you are considering writing a memoir, figuring out which scene will set the pace for the rest of the story will become one of your most complex puzzles. This book provides a powerful example.
