Tag Archives: Andre Agassi

More Fantasy Techniques To Help Your Memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

Memoir writers face the daunting task of turning life experience into a story. To do so, we must select from a variety of storytelling techniques, and find the ones most suitable for our own situations. In this part of my multi-part essay about fantasy techniques in memoirs, I review two more, inspired by a close reading of Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.”

Weapons and weapon masters in Memoirs

Each James Bond adventure begins with a visit to Q, who provides special purpose tools of war, communication, and deception. This mythical role of the weapons master turns up in a variety of stories. “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy was loaded with experts in the intricate arts of swords, axes, and arrows. And the role of the weapon master is alive and well in Andre Agassi’s memoir, “Open.”

The first weapon in “Open” is the tennis machine, code named The Dragon. This device acquires an almost mythical power over the boy, who had to return every ball that belched forth from the depths of the beast. His father custom tailors the machine, making his father the first weapon master in the book.

The weapon at the heart of the story are his tennis racquets. Agassi is obsessed with his racquet, its grip, and above all its strings. Agassi’s weapon maker is the guy who strings them. Before a match, he won’t let anyone touch his weapon. The psychological intensity of his obsessions with the proper care of his tools build to an almost magical crescendo, blurring the line between real life and fantasy.

Warriors also rely on their mode of transportation. A car or horse often contributes to the protagonist’s power. Agassi recounts several scenes in which driving in a fast car is an important part of his life.

Other memoirs offer variations on importance of tools and weapons. In “American Shaolin” by Matthew Polly, the main weapon was the fighter’s own body. Many of the martial artists turned parts of their body into “iron.” Other memoirs focus on the machinery of transportation. For example, Mark Richardson in “Zen and Now” talks at length about keeping his motorcycle in working order. Doreen Orion in “Queen of the Road” focused on details of her luxury motor home, an effective device that proves that with enough creativity you can create a story out of just about anything.

Writing Prompt
Most of us don’t have advanced involvement with weapons, but if you let your imagination roam, you might see tools with which you defend or express yourself. Musical instruments could fill this slot nicely. How did you care for your violin or guitar? If cooking was important, you may have cared for your pots and pans. Gardeners, sculptors, painters all have special equipment that must be cared for, often with ritualistic attention. If you had a special relationship with your mode of transportation, write a scene to show the power and intensity. Horses are especially rich sources of drama. What rituals went into maintaining your motorcycle or  bicycle?

Magic Potions in Memoirs

The protagonists of fairy tales and fantasy fiction often use potions to gain special strengths, cures, or visions. There are truth serums, knockout drops, and antidotes to poison.

In the middle ages, alchemists searched for the elixir of life, that would grant immortality. And of course, deep in Christianity is the communion, drinking wine in order to become  one with the divine presence. In everyday life, we take cough syrup, alka-seltzer and an endless variety of intoxicants, to help us find fun, forgetfulness, and liberation.

Potions played a key role in Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.” His sports trainer had a knack for concocting special drinks, some to build the tennis champ up before he played, some to sustain him during a long match, and other’s to help him recover. Agassi spoke with awe about these potions, to which he ascribed great power over his state of health, strength and stamina.

Probably the most common use of potions is to intoxicate. These mental releases sometimes open windows, and just as often close doors. When Agassi was in a dark funk, he took crystal meth, a move that gave him temporary pleasure and jeopardized his entire career.

Writing Prompt

What meds, coffee, vitamins, mind altering drugs and alcohol or other “magic” potions played a role in your journey?

Notes

This is part of a multi-part essay about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.” For the start of the series, see
When is a memoir by a celebrity not a celebrity memoir?

For the Amazon page for Open, click here.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

Cast of Characters in His Chosen Clan

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by Jerry Waxler

I used to think that heroes tended to be lonely but when I read Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” I realized they are not so lonely after all. It’s true they must leave home to go off on their adventures, which at first makes them seem isolated. But they soon collect allies. King Arthur was surrounded by his Knights of the Roundtable. The Hobbits traveled with a band of companions called the Fellowship, and in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy gathered the Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man. Similarly, memoir protagonists often attract a group of friends and followers.

Consider world famous tennis player, Andre Agassi, hero of the memoir “Open.” Before he could afford to hire companions, his brother accompanied him on tours. As his career grew, so did his band of allies. He hooked up with professional sports trainers and strategists, a personal racquet stringer, and a spiritual mentor. This cast of supporting characters culminated in a perfect match with his soul mate, Steffi Graf, another world-famous tennis player.

Agassi did more than mention these people. He freely shared his debt to them, almost devotionally letting us see that even though he was the one out in the spotlight, his crew deserved a substantial portion of the credit for his success. One of his most damning criticisms of his first wife, Brooke Shields, was that she didn’t grasp the importance of the clan in his life.

Most memoir authors don’t have an entourage. For example, in “Zen and Now,” author Mark Richardson rode his motorcycle alone, occasionally meeting people on the road. One reason I found this book so haunting was because the author’s soul mates lived in a different time. In the present, he could only gather their ghosts. At the other extreme, in “The Path, One Man’s Quest on the Only Path there is,”  Donald Walters moved into an ashram. Sarah McDonald is somewhere in the middle. Her year in India is assisted by a couple of friends and the staff at her apartment, who help her understand the local culture.

A chosen family plays a central role in my own story. When I left home, I turned into a classic loner, essentially a recluse. Later, the pendulum swung and I moved in to a commune where I could enjoy both extremes. I could be as withdrawn as I wanted to be by closing the door to my room, and when I wanted company, I simply walked out into the kitchen to be with my band of allies.

Writing Prompt

The power of the chosen clan may add depth and interest to your own memoir. In different stages in your life, what micro-community gave you social context? Write a few scenes that show how you relied on them for support and companionship.

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Notes

This is part of a multi-part essay about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.” For the start of the series, see
When is a memoir by a celebrity not a celebrity memoir?

For the Amazon page for Open, click here.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

Shapeshifting, Costumes, and Imposters in Memoirs

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by Jerry Waxler

In myths, characters can sometimes change shape, for example transforming from man to wolf. Cinderella’s fabulous night out transformed her from a maid to a princess. The notion of moving from one role to another is not limited to fairy tales. Through costumes, cosmetics, hair style, and role-playing, we often alter the way we present ourselves to one another. In previous posts, I showed how ancient storytelling techniques helped Andre Agassi share his life in the memoir, “Open.” In this article, I show how changing shape or “shapeshifting” can help you add impact and authenticity to your memoir.

For the first 18 years of our lives, while we are trying to figure out who we are, our body is changing shape. So during our coming of age, we are all shapeshifters. During this period in Andre Agassi’s life, he had the additional complication of becoming famous. The public was trying to form an image of him, just as he was trying to form an image of himself. As a young man searching for his own teenage identity, he occasionally rebelled against rules, wearing different, non-regulation clothes. The public came to see him as a rebel.

His mane of gorgeous hair became his trademark. When it began to fall out in gobs he desperately tried to hang on to his old identity with wigs, terrified of being seen as a balding man. Finally he accepted the inevitable. He shaved his head, and radically changed his public image.

Writing Prompt

What alterations in your appearance could add nuance to passages in your memoir? Perhaps as you describe your shape, you will learn why people related to you the way they did.

Actors change shape all the time

Ironically, the person who encouraged Agassi to let go of this charade and shave his head was his first wife, Brooke Shields. This is especially interesting because during the course of their relationship, Shields was building her career as an actress and Agassi became increasingly unnerved by Shields’ ability to assume any role she was assigned to play. If she could play any character on demand, how did he know when she was sincere and when she was just acting?

These observations about his relationship with Shields show the confusing psychological aspects of being an actress as well as getting to know one. Through his eyes, I saw the connection between actors and the mythology of shapeshifting. Actors are paid to shift their shape.

Reluctant Shapeshifting is Common, Too

Whether we choose our new role, or have it thrust on us, it can take time to adjust. The transition period can be awkward or downright uncomfortable. When I first earned my Master’s Degree, I felt confident with clients, but in public, I didn’t feel like a therapist. Known as “imposter anxiety” this discomfort in a role is more common than you might think. For example, in “Down Came the Rain,” Brooke Shields looked at her newborn baby and was horrified to realize she wasn’t able to instantly shift into the new frame of reference of being a mom.

Writing Prompt

Consider situations in your own life when you felt like you were in a role that was “not really you.” This lag time during which you struggle to accept your role can help your readers relate to your growing-pains. Write a scene that shows your struggle. If later, you resolved the feeling and settled into the role, write a scene that shows your adaptation.

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Notes

This is part of a multi-part essay about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.” For the start of the series, see
When is a memoir by a celebrity not a celebrity memoir?

For the Amazon page for Open, click here.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

Two Types of Trainings in Your Memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

In a famous scene from Star Wars, when warrior Luke Skywalker was learning how to fight, his mentor told him to close his eyes and “feel the force.” The training was a crucial step in the young man’s journey and a perfect demonstration that heroes need to learn skills in order to succeed.

To see how this applies to memoir writing, consider the brilliant, detailed treatment of training and mentors in Andre Agassi’s memoir, “Open.” To become proficient as a tennis champ, Agassi relied heavily on sport trainers. In his description of his training, Agassi offers us a bonus, demonstrating the distinction between two fundamental types of training. One type could be called “fight training” relevant for battle. In his case, the battle was tennis. The other form of training was his ordinary schooling, which was supposed to teach him how to live in peacetime, if he had stuck with it. His struggle to balance these two types of training became a key dramatic tension in his memoir.

Tension between School and Sports

As a teenager, Agassi was sent away to live in a special high school for aspiring tennis champions. He only attended ordinary classes for a few hours a day and the rest of the time he practiced to become a fighting machine on the tennis court. He hated the mundane schoolwork and pressured his trainer to let him drop out. After Agassi quit, he became even more immersed in tennis. He listened to his coaches and worked hard, constantly striving to succeed.

His progress, at first glance, seems like a perfect model for a successful life: study, challenge yourself to get ahead, and rise to the top of your field. Despite Agassi’s success on the tennis court, he had the nagging regret that he had missed one of the foundations of being a human being. His lack of general education did not interfere with his ability to earn a living but it gradually revealed itself as a missing piece in his heart. When he began to search for fulfillment off the tennis court, he tried to fill in this piece, not by going back to school himself but by building a school that would give this opportunity to others.

Writing Prompt

Write about your own two types of training. Consider the type of training that prepared you for battle. Perhaps you were a soldier and you really did have weapons training, or an athlete, a violinist, or any other skill that you used to make your way in the world. Show scenes of the warrior training, including classrooms, coaching sessions, discussions with mentors.

If you can’t think of any obvious “warrior training” loosen your definition and use metaphors to search for your warrior side. For example, if you went to business school or fashion school, imagine it prepared you to go forth to do battle in your career. If you engaged in social activism, or fighting against poverty or ignorance, what training helped you fight these “battles”? If you engaged in sports for fun, write a scene of those competitive situations to see what warlike aspects of yourself you can reveal. Or perhaps your warrior nature is expressed in board and computer games. Such activities are inherently competitive. You win, they lose. Write a scene about these skills and activities, to see if they can reveal more about that aspect of your experience.

In the peacetime type of training, how did you learn to live with people, socially, understanding your culture, your home and hobbies, and the less competitive aspects of life. What lesson or experience gave you the wisdom to be smarter about just being yourself? What mentors, beliefs, books, or classrooms helped you become a wiser person, easier to live with, more helpful to your community, family, and friends?

When and how did you feel torn between the practical form of training and the more general, peaceful one? Which aspect was over-accentuated, and which under?

When have you passed the training along, paying it forward, or returning to your community to share your learning with others?

Note
Another example of the way training can change lives, is, The Pact by Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, Rameck Hunt in which three boys in the ghettoes of north New Jersey band together to overcome their environment and became doctors.

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Note

This is part of a multi-part essay about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.”

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

Myths Suggest a Universal Template for Memoirs

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by Jerry Waxler

Read Memoir Revolution to learn why now is the perfect time to write your memoir.

To share our life story, we first explore our interior landscape, searching for information that will make sense to ourselves. But when we try to explain our past to readers, it must do better than simply make sense. It must be interesting. So writers go on another quest, looking for techniques that will help them tell a good story. But not all of us know how to do that. Take me for example. Despite years of consuming stories, I didn’t know the first thing about creating one.

My first foray into the nature of storytelling came from a weighty book called simply “Story” by Robert McKee. McKee, a writing teacher, explained the steps needed to create a screenplay. His matter-of-fact approach gave me hope that I could learn enough about the structure to perhaps someday create my own.

My next burst of understanding came from Joseph Campbell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” Campbell’s explanation was based on a lifetime of studying world mythology. From his complex research he drew elegant conclusions about the importance of storytelling for human society.

I also attended workshops which taught me the various components of stories, such as characters, dialog, and plot. In one workshop, Jack Lule, a professor at nearby Lehigh University, shared his insights into the way mythology can help explain why some news stories resonate with public interest and some fall flat. He wrote about this topic in his book  “Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism.”  See my article on Jack Lule’s talk about myths and news.

All these parts of the storytelling puzzle fascinated me but I couldn’t figure out how to put them all together. Then I hit paydirt. The book “Writer’s Journey” by Chris Vogler explained how storytellers and mythmakers have been following a template since the beginning of recorded history. From the basic system outlined by Chris Vogler, I saw the parts of stories more clearly and began to form ideas about how I could apply these principles to my own life.

At first I was surprised by the simplicity of his ideas, but over time grew to see them as an inevitable connection of all humans throughout civilization. From that point of view, it made perfect sense that mythology is loaded with universal story telling devices. For example, here are some of the techniques that could be applied to memoir writing.

Mentors, Trainers and Training
Weapons, Weapon Masters
Talismans
Potions
Shape shifting
Chosen Clan, Allies
Coming Home or Nostoi

Some of these mythmaking devices look fanciful, completely disconnected from real life. And yet, with a little imagination, you can see how these techniques might highlight subtle aspects of your own story. To illustrate how this works, I will point out echoes of these mythological structures, suggested by Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open,” and then offer suggestions about how you can use them yourself.

In following posts, I will focus on each of these topics, give examples, and offer writing prompts for your own memoir in progress.

Note

This is part of a multi-part essay about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.”

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

In your memoir, how does your character grow?

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by Jerry Waxler

At the beginning of Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open,” the young protagonist hit tennis balls because his father ordered him to do so. As he grew older, he incorporated his father’s demands into his own motivation. As he won more and more games, inside himself, he knew something was missing. The book is essentially a search for that missing ingredient. Agassi transforms from a kid who wants to win, to an adult who wants to understand why he is alive. Eventually he realizes that working only for his own wealth and fame is not enough. The payoff of the story comes from his impulse to help underprivileged kids.

Agassi’s story offers an excellent model for a good memoir. The main character has flaws and moral dilemmas that set the story in motion. Through the course of events, he must solve all sorts of problems related to these flaws. By the end, something has shifted inside him, some lesson learned, some demon conquered. As I close this book, his  increased wisdom fills me with hope, a feeling that motivates me to recommend the book to my friends.

Most memoirs that I love end along similar lines, showing how the protagonist grows wiser. For example, at the beginning of “Here if you need me,” by Kate Braestrup, the protagonist was suddenly widowed. By the end, she didn’t call her husband back, but she did gain beautiful insights into the cycle of life and death. Brooke Shields in “Down Came the Rain” emerged from her post-partum depression with a more realistic, less idealized image of mommy-hood. Bill Strickland in “Ten Points” couldn’t undo the abuse he experienced as a child. Instead, he learned that embracing the horror of those memories led to inner peace.

That requirement for closure at the end of a story often stymies aspiring writers, who can’t at first visualize the satisfying ending that occurred during their own lives. They are afraid that if they report the events that actually happened, the reader will not feel particularly informed or uplifted. This question leads to the heart of the memoir genre. Our responsibility as writers is not just to repeat events but to share a creative way of looking at those events. Finding this shape, this wrapper, this satisfying ending is one of our most important challenges.

Even though all storytellers must end with a satisfying conclusion, memoir writers don’t have the luxury of being able to change the events to suit their needs. Instead, we must adjust the meaning, the implications, the interpretation. The typical exquisitely satisfying memoir does not arise from a perfect confluence of events, but from the wise reflection that shows what the protagonist has learned. Naturally when you first lived through experiences, the lessons did not leap out ready-made. The wisdom occurs to you later, when you go back to look for it, making the satisfying conclusion of your memoir as much a gift to you as it is to the reader.

Even though Agassi lived an interesting life, the structure of his memoir did not automatically arise from that interesting life. Consider an alternate structure. He could have ended his memoir with his fame and his marriage to one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Steffi Graf. But that happy ending would have made it just another forgettable celebrity memoir.

Instead, he and his ghost writer J. R. Moehringer focused on the inner journey, showing how he found a deeper set of values. He won at tennis, but his real love turned out to be helping children get an education. This expansion of his sense of social responsibility is known in literary analysis as a character arc. But I consider it to be more than just the reason to read a book. My term for it is “ending on higher moral ground” and I think it is a chance to find the value in living a life. Agassi found his true calling when he began to play tennis not just for himself but to raise money for those kids, a conclusion that leaves me with hope not only about Andre Agassi’s life, but the possibility for me to live a meaningful life, as well.

Writing Prompt
In your own story, find the values, the inner strengths, and beliefs that developed over time. Compare your character at the beginning and at the end of your proposed memoir. Write (or find) a scene at the beginning of the story which shows the flaw in your initial thinking. Through the course of the book, show a couple of lessons that led you to higher ground. Write (or find in your manuscript) a scene that shows the more mature reaction that will let the reader understand the development of your character, your maturity, or some other quality that will give your reader hope about the journey of your and their life.

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Note

This is part of a multi-part essay about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.”

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

Conflict with Parent Fleshes in Authentic Character

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by Jerry Waxler

When we look at the flaws in Andre Agassi’s character, as described in his memoir “Open,” it’s easy to see echoes of the tension between him and his father. From earliest childhood, Agassi’s father was obsessed with turning the boy into a tennis champion. At first his father looked like a tyrant, forcing the boy to hit a million balls a year. What kind of man would treat his son that way? In fact, Agassi goes on to explain his father’s thinking. One reason the book impressed me so much is because Agassi never asked me to hate his father. The memoir showed the characters and let me make up my own mind.

Agassi internalizes these demands, and feels enormous internal pressure to live up to his father’s unreasonable expectations. But simply following his father’s dreams starts to tear him apart. He wants to find his own goals. The journey of the memoir is about his self-discovery. The conflict keeps him striving and keeps me turning pages to learn how he would cope with it.

Agassi’s parental pressure turns up in a surprising number of ways. Both of his wives, Brooke Shields and Steffi Graf, were driven by high pressure, star-maker parents. When Agassi’s father meets Graf’s father the two highly competitive men almost come to blows. On the opposite extreme, Agassi’s friend and ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer grew up with no father. Moehringer wrote about this fatherless childhood in his memoir “Tender Bar.” Obviously Agassi has a lot going on in the parent department.

The tension I experienced with my ordinary father

This in-depth look at Agassi’s relationship with his father made me want to run back to take another look at my own. My father, a second generation immigrant, spent all his time tending his drugstore. I felt invisible and to gain his attention spent more and more time working at the drugstore. After I moved away from home, I continued to try to become the kind of boy he would notice.

Now that I have been working on my memoir for several years, I have a number of scenes that portray my involvement with him, and now, to learn more about our relationship I can read my own book. To my surprise, I find many instances when he offered himself to me in kindness and support. Even though I knew the facts, I had overlooked them for all these years. He did notice me. Now, I own that observation whether or not the scenes actually reach a published memoir.

Memoir writers and their parents

One of the most common complaints I hear in a memoir workshop is about the difficulty of writing honest feelings about parents. I encourage writers to push through their reluctance. Writing about them will reveal the relationships in new ways. Even if this material does not appear within the frame of your proposed story, you may find a wealth of material that can help you flesh in your own character, and sharpen your understanding of the conflicts that drive you later in life.

When you review your life, you may encounter things one or both parents wanted you to do. You have your own feelings about how these desires played out. You may have wished you lived up to their dreams, or resented that you followed theirs instead of finding your own. A memoir is a perfect place to explore these introspective topics, and even if you never intend to publish it, your family conflicts may help you discover your own organizing principles. After all, these were the people responsible for molding you. You can learn a great deal about yourself by seeing the conflicts with them unfold on paper.

Writing Prompt
Write scenes with your parents. Write about an argument, a missed dream, a desire for harmony. What did your parents want from you that you couldn’t deliver? Write a scene of rapprochement, or of reproach. Write about the first time you realized they might have inner or outer tension with their own parents, and then write what you know about those tensions. By recognizing the splits and paradoxes in your relationship with your parents, you can flesh in a more compelling portrayal of them as well as yourself.

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Note

This is part of a multi-part essay about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.”

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

This celebrity has flaws. How about you?

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by Jerry Waxler

Despite Andre Agassi’s fame, his memoir “Open” takes you on a real emotional ride worthy of any excellent story. In this multi-part essay, I look for lessons in the book that can help me learn about the structure of a memoir.

Every protagonist needs emotional flaws

Agassi became the best tennis player in the world, but it was never enough. Even with his money, his fame, and his supermodel wife, his dissatisfaction always left him sour. Talk about ungrateful! This guy was beginning to sound like a real jerk.

While genre fiction typically sets the protagonist against an external villain, in memoirs the enemy often lies within. Agassi’s disaffection with his first wife, the relentless pressure to win, and other internal battles created increasing agitation. He slipped close to the edge of an emotional abyss. His attitude became so bad he didn’t see any harm in a little crystal meth, a self-destructive choice for anyone. But with all the strict regulations in tennis, the move could have devastated his career. Surprisingly, Agassi’s revelation of flawed choices, rather than alienating me, drew me closer to him, letting me care not just about his career, but about a complete person.

Writing Prompt

Write a scene that showed you behaving poorly. Such scenes may be dark, but you don’t need to be stuck there. The power of memoir writing comes from the complete picture, including the whole gamut of your experience. Write a scene in which someone, whether a stranger or a friend reached out to help you. Write another scene that shows your courage, your self-awareness, and your progress. These lows and highs give your reader a real person to relate to, on a more authentic level than if you pretend you have always been perfect.

Write about taboo behavior

Andre Agassi’s behavior crossed a taboo. He took drugs while playing professional sports and then lied about it. Some people will never forgive him, and yet he revealed the behavior anyway. There are other taboo subjects like child abuse or other forms of cruelty that your audience will not be disposed to forgive. One way you could explore the topics is through fiction. Having said that, we live in a time when taboos are breaking down all the time. Brooke Shields’ memoir “Down Came the Rain” is a fascinating example. The social expectation for all mothers to love their babies has created a wall of silence around postpartum depression. Shields leveraged her stardom along with the self-reflective mood of our times to bring this crucial mental health issue into the open.

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More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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

The Protagonist of a Memoir Must have a Goal and Obstacles

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by Jerry Waxler

A fundamental element in every story is the reader’s identification with the protagonist. This protagonist doesn’t just stand there. He or she wants something and then moves toward it, while readers turn pages, eager to overcome the obstacles. In Andre Agassi’s “Open” the pressure to push against obstacles generates enormous tension that makes the story move like a novel.

Identify the Protagonist’s “True Goal”

Andre Agassi obviously wanted to succeed at tennis. Or at least that was what his father wanted him to do. Even while Agassi was winning matches, inside himself, he felt lost. Over the course of the book, he discovered another set of goals. These were not the ones his father had imposed on him – fame and wealth through tennis – but the ones that came from his own heart. Until he discovered his passion for helping kids, his path was murky. In fact, this is one reason why the book felt so profoundly satisfying. His search was not simply to achieve his goal. First he had to find it.

Writing Prompt
To find the essence of your own story, identify the desires that drove you. This can be even more intriguing when you explore the way your goals changed over the years. List or describe the things you wanted when you were twenty. Make another list for what you wanted ten or twenty years later. Compare the lists. What changed? Write a paragraph or a page describing the evolution of your desires.

This celebrity’s inner obstacles were just as interesting as his outer ones

As a tennis player, each serve and volley was crucial. Agassi compared tennis to boxing, but much lonelier since tennis players never even touch each other. The image was apt as I could imagine him grunting, sweating, and struggling to fight off the blows from his opponent and land some of his own. Agassi describes many critical wins and losses, providing fascinating external drama.

But the heart of his story took place inside him. Even as he was becoming famous, he continued to feel confused and rebellious, creating a reputation as a bad boy. Hired to act in a television commercial, the director told him to say “Image is Everything.” Even though the motto was intended to sell cameras, his critics and fans jumped on the phrase, twisting the words that came out of his own mouth into a confession that he was in fact shallow and self-involved. Now, he had to fend off insinuations that he had no inner life. The media and fans made him their own creature, someone they could shape, since he obviously was having trouble shaping himself.

This pressure between his inner struggle to define himself and the outer pressure of the media to define him creates one of the most insightful portrayals of the celebrity culture I have ever seen. It is also evidence that a passionate memoir writer can delve into the facts of life and go deeper and deeper until he discovers authentic, unique, interesting dramatic tension.

Writing Prompt
Your own obstacles will be an important component of your story. Some of the outer ones will be easy to spot. You didn’t have enough money, or you lost a parent. Write one or more scenes, portraying how you overcome external obstacles.

In addition, to describing the things outside yourself, look within and describe inner problems. Perhaps you violated your own principles, or tried to please the wrong people, or perhaps there were things you only realized you wanted after the failure of your first round of desires. Write a scene that shows a moral or psychological dilemma. What emotions or beliefs got in your way? Continue to the next development. How did you overcome the obstacle?

This is part 2 of an article about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.”  In Part 1, I pointed out that a memoir can be great even if it’s by a celebrity. In the next part of my search for the techniques that make the memoir work, I will look at the emotional flaws in the character, and conflicts with other characters.

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More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

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