Is memoir a genre? Consider these matched pairs.

by Jerry Waxler

For more insight into the power and importance of memoirs, read the Memoir Revolution and learn why now is the perfect time to write your own.

I first became aware of matching pairs of memoirs after the publicity campaign last year for the memoir “Beautiful Boy” by David Sheff, whose son Nic was addicted to crystal meth. The dad’s memoir was accompanied by the memoir, “Tweak”, written from Nic Sheff’s point of view, about the nightmarish period of his addiction. The two books created a well-deserved media splash, including the interview I heard on national public radio. I read both books and learned so much, seeing this tragic situation from two different, and yet intimately connected perspectives.

Then, I read a less self-conscious pair of memoirs, Joan Rivers’ “Enter Talking” and Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up.” Written decades apart, these memoirs describe the journey of the two comedians from anonymity to fame. Despite their overlapping topics, I felt as curious through the second as I was through the first. The two books complemented each other, giving me deeper insight than either would have done alone.

Recently I read the New York Times bestseller “Color of Water” by James McBride, son of a black Christian father and a white Jewish mother. I found the book informative and uplifting. After I finished, I noticed a similar book near the top of my reading pile, “Black, White, and Jewish,” by Rebecca Walker. Previously, I might have rejected it on the premise that one memoir about mixed-race parents was enough. But now, I was eager to learn more.  “Black, White, and Jewish” turned out to be invigorating, another excellent read, and another window into one of my favorite topics, an individual’s search for identity.

Despite the superficial similarities of the two books, they were massively different. Rebecca was trained in literary arts. James was journalist and jazz musician. Rebecca’s mother was Alice Walker, the famous black author of “The Color Purple.” James’ mother was an anonymous white woman, whose only claim to public attention was that she was usually the only white person in the room. Rebecca spent her childhood shuttling back and forth between posh white communities on the east coast and multi-racial communities in San Francisco. James lived exclusively in black urban areas. The differences go on and on.

Each of the books informed me in ways the other had not. By reading memoirs, comparing them, and adding up my experience, I am increasingly convinced these tales of real life are emerging as a full-fledged genre.

What is a genre?

When a reader picks up any detective novel, the expected formula for the book is that someone dies and then the protagonist sleuths to unmask the killer. Of course, within the formula, the author introduces all manner of variations. The murder could be motivated by power, revenge, or greed. The detective could be a grandmother in town for the holiday, a hard-nosed cop, or a burned out private eye.

At first, it may seem impossible to fit memoirs into a well-defined formula. But despite the infinite variations in people’s lives, memoirs all share certain features, and these shared features appear to define a category. While every memoir stretches the “rules” in some way, they have enough in common that I have put together the features of what looks like a genre to me.

A memoir is a story

A memoir is driven by the power of its story, a formula as old as recorded history. In the beginning of a story, the protagonist feels some need, frustration, or desire. Circumstances force the protagonist on a journey, moving past obstacles by making choices. Eventually, a little older and hopefully wiser, the protagonist reaches some conclusion, and the dramatic tension is relieved.

Inside the protagonist’s perspective

Memoirs place our point of view inside the protagonist’s mind. Seeing the world from a real person’s mind generally feels significantly more nuanced and less predictable than what we expect in fiction.

Looking back with greater wisdom

While the bulk of a memoir takes place within a particular period, the reader knows that the author is writing this book after the experience is complete. This is tricky because we know the author has gained wisdom about this experience, but the story starts before the protagonist knew what was coming. A strong memoir will release information slowly and in its own time, stringing us along and building suspense. As a memoir reader, I enjoy this intriguing relationship between author and protagonist, and am always eager to reach the end to learn what lessons the author has discovered.

Character Arc of the protagonist is a valuable aspect of a memoir

The stories we admire most tend to be the ones that allow the protagonist to grow. For example, they gain insight into their moral responsibilities, or achieve emotional closure that convinces us they will be less likely to repeat their mistakes.

Truth

Memory is slippery. Conversations can seldom be remembered word for word even a few hours later, and major events which seem clear in one person’s mind might be remembered differently by a sibling. Memoir writers do their best, and readers expect that the story is told as truthfully as possible through the eyes of a fallible human being.

How will you fit your lifestory into this budding genre?

There is a good chance the main theme of your life has already been covered in someone else’s memoir. There are books about immigration, dysfunctional parents, foster kids, searching for spirituality in an ashram, coming under fire in Vietnam, losing a loved one, or any of dozens of themes that have been written elsewhere.

And yet, despite the similarities between your story and ones that have already been written, yours will be different because this one is about you. It’s written in your voice, through your perspective, with the particular characters in your life, and the beliefs that sustained you or pulled you astray. All the things that make your life unique will make your memoir unique. By telling your own story, and then publishing it so others can read it, you take your place on the shelf amidst the rest of the authentic life story literature of the twenty-first century.

Notes
One of the first memoirs I reviewed for my blog was about the search for identity by another young man with mixed race parents, “Dreams of Our Fathers” by Barack Obama.

Essay about James McBride’s search for identity in “Color of Water”
An essay about Joan Rivers’ tenacity in “Enter Talking”

Essay about Steve Martin’s fame in “Born Standing Up”

Essay about two memoirs by an addicted son and his father, click here.

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.

To order my how-to-get-started guide to write your memoir, click here.

Read banned memoirs: Criminal or Social Activist?

by Jerry Waxler

Read my book, Memoir Revolution, about how turning your life into a story can change the world.

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

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

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

Are young people idealistic or simple minded?

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

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

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

Feminism was still in the future

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

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

Is shame supposed to be hidden?

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

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

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

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

NOTES

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.

To order my how-to-get-started guide to write your memoir, click here.

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, first thoughts

by Jerry Waxler

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

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

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

Obama is in a position to share a fascinating insight into being black because he was raised by his white mother and her parents, and so he has seen this issue from both sides. I have heard glimpses of what it is like for black people who as children are innocent of race, and as they come of age start to realize that American culture still struggles with this ugly scar. What a disturbing insight for any young person to realize they are in a group that is disliked by another group, and that other group has power over them.

His experience reminded me of when as a teenager I read about the capture of Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Reading the horrific accounts of Nazis hating groups and wanting to kill them made me realize that being Jewish is dangerous. As I’ve grown older, every few years another instance of group prejudice breaks into violence and murder; the civil war in northern Ireland, the Serbs and Croates, Tutsis and Hutus. And in the shocking aftermath of 9/11, hundreds of millions of people realized they could be hated and killed for being part of western civilization. To stop the outrage, we turned to the old standby. Find the cultural identity of those who hate us, and kill them first.

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

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