Tag Archives: technique

Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time

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by Jerry Waxler

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

In previous essays in this series, I’ve attempted to explain the way memoir writers structure their stories. In one sense, this could be a simple question. We lived it chronologically, so we ought to tell it chronologically. And yet, one of the memoir writer’s goals is to keep it interesting, and that means learning the storyteller’s craft. Storytellers since the beginning of time have been looking for the best way to weave in various aspects of a story to keep it interesting and engage the mind of a reader. This series has offered some insights that I hope will help you on that quest.

The final method to consider is a sort of pinnacle of the attempt to tell the backstory. I’ll start out with three examples. Each one starts with the intense dramatic conflict of adulthood. Then once they hook the reader, they jump to a chapter about childhood. Then in the next chapter they return to the adult story. Each timeframe is clearly established so you always know exactly where you are in time. It’s as if you’re reading two interwoven memoirs, one of earlier life interspersed with the later one.

Alternating back and forth between the past and present, these authors achieve the best of both extremes, providing psychological background of the author’s formation, and also providing a direct, compelling tension in the adult situation.

The Orchard by Theresa Weir

The book starts just as the main conflict of the story is about to begin. Theresa Weir is working in a bar, about to meet her husband-to-be. Marrying into a farm family seems wrong in every possible way, and so, we are swept along by the conflict inherent as the couple falls for each other, obviously for all the wrong reasons. It’s nonsense. A mistake. It will never work. Then, as the present-day conflict amps up to the boiling point, she returns to her dysfunctional childhood, and inserts entire chapters from early in her life when her parents essentially abandoned her. This material from childhood adds psychological depth to her character and helps her reveal the whole person, not just a small slice of one.

By starting with adulthood, she lets us understand where we’re going. Then when she weaves in the childhood, we’re already invested in this complex person. So where did all this complexity come from? She lets us live those younger years with her as well.

Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham

A young man, pursuing an engineering career, leaves it all behind so he can ride his bicycle around Vietnam to try to understand his roots. His adult life is intense, with confusion about his identity as a Vietnamese in America and his relationship with his edgy father. As he cycles around Vietnam, we realize the danger he has placed himself in. It turns out that many Vietnamese hate those who have moved to America. They have a scornful name for these hated betrayers, viet-kieu. In the thick of this adult story, he alternates chapters that show his childhood life leading up to the war, and the family’s escape from the communist takeover.

In his next book, Pham extends his inquiry across more generations. In Eaves of Heaven, A Life in Three Wars he tells the family history through the eyes of his father, a ghost-written memoir of his father. This other memoir also repeats the two-time frame method, showing his father’s early years growing up in the French version of the Vietnam War and then later years coming up to the American invasion. Taken together, the two memoirs Catfish and Eaves, describe the escape from Vietnam and entry into the U.S. from the point of view of three generations, a fascinating journey through the history of a family and a country.

Riding the Bus With My Sister, by Rachel Simon

The book is woven from two fascinating stories. The headline story is about her attempt as an adult to become close to her mentally disabled (what used to be called retarded) sister, Beth. Beth’s main activity is riding buses all day every day, and Rachel decides that if she is going to get to know her sister, she will have to ride the buses too.

Interwoven with this excellent story of love between two adult sisters is a second time frame, about growing up with an abandoning mother, who was unable to cope with the stresses of motherhood and finally ran away from the family. The two stories meet up, as the young sisters grow into adulthood.

Why interspersed backstory works so well in these three cases

All three had serious dramatic conflict in both time frames. With enormous dramatic tension in childhood. In Riding the Bus as well as Orchard, the family was under pressure from parental dysfunction. In Catfish and Mandala, the author was in a war.

And in the later time frame, each author was also under major conflict. In Riding the Bus, Rachel Simon was a high-functioning journalist who was trying to make sense of her responsibility to her sister, and also a secondary story pressure that she was also lonely and seeking. In Orchard, Theresa Weir was a misfit, with absolutely no direction in life, who married into a farm family, and had to make the leap from a drifter to a family that literally had roots in the soil. In Catfish and Mandala, the author went on a dangerous cycling tour, with native Vietnamese hating him for being an American, which was cruelly ironic because earlier he showed how some Americans hated him for being Vietnamese.

All three of these books stand out as exceptionally successful. The Orchard was an Oprah pick. Catfish and Mandala was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Riding the Bus with My Sister was made famous by a movie adaptation.

Does that mean that it’s a surefire winner and that you should copy it and use it? It’s not that easy. Finding a working structure for your memoir is going to require an organic evaluation of the way your own life experience unfolds and the story you want to tell.

Consider two combat memoirs which took very different approaches. In A Temporary Sort of Peace, Jim McGarrah’s gut-wrenching Vietnam War combat memoir, he stayed in one time frame. William Manchester’s equally gut-wrenching combat memoir Goodbye Darkness shows him returning to the scenes of his battles in the Pacific in WWII and attempting to quiet his demons. The two authors made their own very different choices.

As you continue researching your own memoir, step back out of the details and try to visualize the way your chapters and sections are coming together. Can you picture your earlier formative years as a separate story from the later one?

Writing Exercise
Write a description of each of your two stories, the backstory, in which your younger self undergoes formative experiences. Then write a description of the second time frame.

Now think about these two stories. Does each story have a good beginning, middle and end? Does the first one naturally provide background for the second? Do they flow from one to the other in time, or is there a big gap between two main stories?

Might they work as a series? Consider the way Frank McCourt wrote Angela’s Ashes about his youth, and then wrote two more books, ‘Tis and Teacher Man as a sort of de facto trilogy. Or how Carlos Eire’s two memoirs, Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami tells a long story in two parts.

Are they equally balanced or is one more important than the other? Consider the example of Ruby Slippers by Tracy Seeley. So much of the book was about an adult investigating her childhood, that the child’s life faded into the background and the adult’s inquisitiveness took center stage. Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls had the opposite effect. The book seemed to be all about a child growing up, and yet, one of its greatest strengths was the tiny sliver at the end about her later rapprochement with her parents.

How the story falls together in the reader’s mind will depend on these questions of structure. Take your time. It’s your life, and if you want to turn it into a great story, don’t be surprised if you have to work at it with the same creative obsession that you expect from the authors of the books you read. And even if you started your project simply trying to tell a good story, you may find that by peering closely and with great creative passion at the structure of your memoir, you will come to understand, at a much deeper level than you ever thought possible, the structure of your life.

This is the seventh and final essay in a series about how to structure a memoir. Here are links to the whole series:

How Should I Begin My Memoir?
One of the most puzzling questions about how to structure a memoir is “Where do I begin?”

How Much Childhood Should I Include in My Memoir?
Since memoirs are a psychologically oriented genre, we want to include enough background to show how it all began. But how much is the right amount?

Should You Use Flashbacks in Your Memoir?
Flashbacks provide important background information, but you need to use them carefully so you don’t confuse your reader.

More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir
The timeline of a memoir contains the forward momentum, and the laying out of cause and effect, so it’s important to learn the best techniques for laying it out.

Beware of Casual Flashforwards in Your Memoir
In real life, we can’t know the future, so to keep your memoir authentic, try to avoid sounding like a prophet.

How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir
When you try to tell your own unique story, you might find that you need an additional layer of narration to make it work. Here are a few examples of writers who used wrapper stories.

Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time
If you want to tell about the childhood roots of your adult dilemmas, you could follow the example of these authors who wove the two timeframes together.

 

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

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

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

How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

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

Many memoirs are contained within a wrapper story. The device is familiar from a number of stories. For example, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is told by Ishmael who chronicles the whole thing. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a sailor tells his story to a group of travelers. In the Odyssey, Ulysses tells his story to Nausicaa when he lands among the Phaeacians. And in the movie Titanic, the entire story is supposedly narrated by an elderly survivor.

By developing the narrator as a visible presence in the story, you can help the reader gracefully move back and forth between the time frame of the person writing the book and the time frame of the character who lived through the earlier events. Here are examples of the way the wrapper story has been used in memoirs.

Scene in the Present that Shows Why You Need to Tell the Story

In Colored People, Henry Louis Gates tells his children about the old days in order to help them understand where their ancestors have been.

Story of Waiting

In Tony Cohan’s memoir Native State, his father lies dying, and while he is stuck in California, he reminisces about his childhood and about his experience as an expat in north Africa. It is an unusual, complex coming of age story and reflects Cohan’s interest in the multiple streams of jazz.

Investigation into the Past

Some authors start from the present and then, following their curiosity about the past,  they write a memoir about exploring their earlier lives.

Mistress’s Daughter by AM Homes: Her birth mother contacts her and the author must go hunting for her biological family.

My Ruby Slippers by Tracy Seeley: She has cancer and takes time away from work to go back to Kansas to investigate her family roots.

Color of Water by James McBride: His mother is near death, and he realizes that unless he pries her history out of her, her childhood will be lost forever. The book is his search for her past.

Breaking the Code by Karen Fisher-Alaniz: Her father hands her a bundle of letters he wrote as a soldier in WWII. She painstakingly investigates the untold story of his years during the war.

Digging Deep by Boyd Lemon: He is retired, looking for the meaning in his life, and he decides to try to make sense of his three marriages, looking for the common thread within himself that sabotaged each one.

Travel as a Wrapper Story

The current events in a travel memoir tell a story in their own right. In addition, some travel memoirs are used as containers in which the author spends so much time exploring the past, or reminiscing about it, you begin to wonder if the story is about the journey or the memories. This dual use of a travel memoir, as both a story of a journey and a wrapper story of a previous time, is especially noteworthy in:

Zen and Now by Mark Richardson: As the author follows the path of Robert Pirsig’s original motorcycle ride, there is plenty of time for reflection about his past.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed: To sort out her life, the author walks along a wilderness trail, again providing a blank slate on which to paint the story of her earlier life.

Writing Prompt
Review these methods and write a synopsis of wrapper story you might use to help you structure your memoir. For example, imagine telling your story to an interested listener, (a therapist, a lover, or a child, for example). Imagine going on a journey back to your roots and reminiscing. Or imagine investigating your past and revealing the pieces as you find them.

Two Alternating Time Frames

The travel memoir as a wrapper story introduces the potential for telling a story in two time frames at once. Another technique jumps all the way into the two-frame concept and weaves two parallel stories, one from earlier in life and one later. By going back and forth between the two timeframes, these authors have managed to start the story right in the thick of it, and then go back to give the backstory without diffusing the power of the book. I’ll describe this method and give examples in the next post.

This is the sixth essay in a series about how to structure a memoir.
How Should I Begin My Memoir?
One of the most puzzling questions about how to structure a memoir is “Where do I begin?”

How Much Childhood Should I Include in My Memoir?
Since memoirs are a psychologically oriented genre, we want to include enough background to show how it all began. But how much is the right amount?

Should You Use Flashbacks in Your Memoir?
Flashbacks provide important background information, but you need to use them carefully so you don’t confuse your reader.

More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir
The timeline of a memoir contains the forward momentum, and the laying out of cause and effect, so it’s important to learn the best techniques for laying it out.

Beware of Casual Flashforwards in Your Memoir
In real life, we can’t know the future, so to keep your memoir authentic, try to avoid sounding like a prophet.

How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir
When you try to tell your own unique story, you might find that you need an additional layer of narration to make it work. Here are a few examples of writers who used wrapper stories.

Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time
If you want to tell about the childhood roots of your adult dilemmas, you could follow the example of these authors who wove the two timeframes together.

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

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

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

More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

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

Real life happens in sequence, first one thing and then another. However, when we store those events in memory, they tangle together in chaotic piles. To construct a story, we must extract snips from memory and arrange them into chronological order. We also must find their “psychological order” to convey the dramatic tension that drags the reader as well as the author through a chain of causes and their effects.

As readers and viewers, we expect protagonists to travel along a compelling arc. Now, to write a memoir, we must “go back to school” to learn how to reframe life events. Where do we get such training? In addition to instructional books and classes, we can learn from reading memoirs to see how the author shuffled events into chronological and psychological order.

Take for example, the way Jon Reiner creatively weaves events in both time and importance. His memoir, The Man Who Couldn’t Eat, describes the year during which he suffers and recovers from an acute attack of Crohn’s disease. To understand his predicament we need to know how he arrived here. The book starts with a bang when Reiner collapses from crushing intestinal pain. As he struggles to maintain consciousness, scenes from the past drift in and out of his delirious mind, adding backstory right there in the urgent startup.

Elegant techniques such as this one, and Cheryl Strayed’s memories as she hikes on the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild, rely on convincing us that the character has a powerful reason for doing a lot of thinking. Like James Thurber’s brilliant device of setting stories inside Walter Mitty’s imagination, when we successfully keep the reader inside the character’s mind, we maintain suspension of disbelief.

Remembering a scene is only one way to portray the past. You could do something in the present that brings the past into focus. For example, you could return to your childhood home the way Tracy Seeley does in My Ruby Slippers. As she walks around her old neighborhood, naturally she thinks about the past. Or you could dig up old letters your father wrote home from the war the way Karen Alaniz does in Breaking the Code. Jon Reiner uses another clever variation of this technique. He meets an old high-school flame for a lunch date. Since he can’t eat, and maybe they weren’t such great friends after all, their encounter is conflicted and interesting, and it doubles as link between the past and the present.

Backstory does not always require entire scenes. Sometimes the narrator simply tells us about something from the past. For example, Jon Reiner indicates that he is on a first-name basis with his doctors because his chronic disease has forced him into an intimate relationship with them over the years. He provides this information, at least in part, by simply informing us, rather than going back in time and showing how the relationships evolved.

Such information can seem perfectly natural to the reader, and yet, it touches on an important stylistic issue in memoir writing. Information you supply to the reader can straddle two timeframes, the one in the character’s mind, and knowledge offered by the narrator years later. If the reader thinks the information is being delivered by the narrator, it could break them out of the time of the story and yank them into the time of the narrator To become more aware of the tension between character and narrator, pay attention to the timeframe of every sentence. I’ll say more about this tension between the character and narrator in another blog post.

Move it back into Chronological order

You may be seduced into using flashbacks because when you wrote your first draft, a scene from an earlier period jumped into your mind and you let it flow into your narrative. Later, when you reread it, you think, “nice touch.” After all, your unconscious mind dished it up right there, so perhaps that’s where it belongs. But another interpretation is that your unconscious mind is reminding you of an event important enough to deserve its own scene.

Writing Prompt

Review your manuscript or free-written draft, and when you spot a mention of an earlier event, zoom in on it. Instead of simply mentioning it in passing, pull it out into its own paragraph or more and try writing it as a full scene. Then insert it into the appropriate chronological sequence elsewhere in your story. This exercise can help you share important scenes organically within the storyline.

Unabashedly Tell Some History

At the opposite extreme, instead of avoiding flashbacks, jump all the way in and tell the whole thing the way Helene Cooper does. Her memoir House on Sugar Beach is about growing up wealthy amid poverty in Liberia. The book shows the class tension that she experienced as a child in the African nation, which is then torn apart by violent upheaval. In order to help readers make sense of those events, she inserts a history lesson about Liberia, filling in important background information that most American readers have never heard.

The technique of inserting a history or biography lesson into the flow of a memoir is especially common in stories about the lives of parents. These inserted stories-within-stories provide background that occurred before the author was born.

In Breaking the Code, Karen Alaniz Fisher provides background about her father’s life during World War II.

In My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor provides a biographical sketch of her parents, neatly inserted into her own early childhood.

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight  by Linda Austin takes a different approach, reconstructing the story of her mother’s early life, based on interviews. Andrew X. Pham does something similar. In Eaves of Heaven, he describes his father’s life in Vietnam, providing a fascinating view of the wars that tore apart his family and country.

Lucky Girl by Mei-ling Hopgood is about an adopted Chinese girl growing up in the Midwest. When she meets her biological family, she tells their history and what led to giving her up for adoption.

In Color of Water, James McBride spends considerable time reconstructing his white mother’s childhood, based on interviews with her and others in her earlier life.

Writing Prompt

If you are wondering how to gracefully insert backstory, consider turning it into unabashed history. Write it as clearly as possible, and take special care to craft the transitions from your main story to this inserted one, and then back out again. Insert this snip and try it out on readers.

Just How Much History Should You Include?

Martha Stettinius’ memoir, Inside the Dementia Epidemic is about caregiving for the author’s mother who is losing her cognitive ability. While writing the book, Stettinius’ desire to include her mother’s history took her directly into the conflict about how much backstory to include. Advocates for concision told her to cut straight to the matter at hand, and at the same time, she intuitively felt that a story about her mother’s deteriorating mind needed to include a synopsis of her previous life.

In the final analysis, Stettinius, like every memoir writer, had to steer through these decisions, to determine not only how much to include, but also how to do it gracefully. Stettinius succeeded, as did all the authors I’ve mentioned. By working out their challenges with time, character development and suspense, they successfully set the reader’s expectation and then fulfill those expectations. These memoirs and the hundreds of others I have read demonstrate over and over that Story is a form that is flexible and expansive enough to allow us to convert the events of our lives into compelling, inspiring, and informative drama.

Notes

This is the fourth essay in a series about how to structure a memoir.
How Should I Begin My Memoir?
One of the most puzzling questions about how to structure a memoir is “Where do I begin?”

How Much Childhood Should I Include in My Memoir?
Since memoirs are a psychologically oriented genre, we want to include enough background to show how it all began. But how much is the right amount?

Should You Use Flashbacks in Your Memoir?
Flashbacks provide important background information, but you need to use them carefully so you don’t confuse your reader.

More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir
The timeline of a memoir contains the forward momentum, and the laying out of cause and effect, so it’s important to learn the best techniques for laying it out.

Beware of Casual Flashforwards in Your Memoir
In real life, we can’t know the future, so to keep your memoir authentic, try to avoid sounding like a prophet.

How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir
When you try to tell your own unique story, you might find that you need an additional layer of narration to make it work. Here are a few examples of writers who used wrapper stories.

Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time
If you want to tell about the childhood roots of your adult dilemmas, you could follow the example of these authors who wove the two timeframes together.

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

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

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.

Yin and Yang of Storytelling – Dramatic Tension of Opposites

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by Jerry Waxler

Writing your memoir? Memoir Revolution provides many examples and insights into how to authors are translating life into story.

An author’s job is to tie us in knots, forcing us to search for relief on the next page. Thrillers easily generate tension when the hero races to find and defuse a bomb. But how do writers create tension from ordinary life? To find out how one writer achieves this creative task, I peered into the collection of short stories, “Inheritance of Exile” by Susan Muaddi Darraj.

Each story shows characters caught in the emotions and circumstances of ordinary life, and yet despite their ordinariness, I feel engaged in their struggles, turning the page to learn more. As I seek to understand how Susan Muaddi Darraj has accomplished her hold on me, I notice a particular feature of the writing. She has superbly tapped the power of opposites.

Opposites generate texture in every aspect of ordinary life: sad and happy, rich and poor, young and old, hope and despair. It’s the yin-yang of nature, that oriental principle that claims each polarity contains its opposite. I knew about the principle, but I never noticed it as a tool for storytelling. Now I discover the secret hidden in plain sight.

Opposites, by their nature, create tension, like the sparks that jump across the two terminals of a battery. The tension pulls together when opposites attract, or pushes apart when we want to maintain our distance from the other. By juxtaposing the two sides and allowing us to feel the contrast, the writer generates energy, creating an intellectual and artistic feast. Here are examples of the opposites I noticed in these stories:

Girl and boy romance

While describing a relationship, the author maintains her protagonist’s feminine needs, and at the same time, she shows a deep empathy and understanding of the boy’s perspective.

Child and parent have two very different views

She shows characters at different stages of Coming of Age, wanting to grow up, and at odds with their parents. This universal tension can be confusing and polarized. And yet, somehow, Inheritance of Exile brings enormous compassion to these situations by giving us deeper understanding of the parents’ point of view.

Tension between rich and poor

To earn a few dollars, she sells hand-made baskets at a craft fair. People with lots of money stop by to look. The contrast between their economic situation and hers crackles with tension.

Hoodlums and law abiding working people

A working man is robbed at gun point, showing the stark contrast between these two lifestyles. The man works hard, pushing himself through the daily grind to support his family. The hoodlums break the law and steal what he built up. The scene creates an intense contrast of these opposing life choices.

Relationships with Father vs. Mother

The protagonist’s relationship with her mother and with her father are each formidable, each rich in emotion, tension, and love. The real power, though, comes from the juxtaposition of the child’s relationship with each. The difference in her connection with each of these two parents creates enormous tension that the character must sort through, and which drag me deep into their family dynamic. Mother-love and father-love, so different and so authentic, create dramatic tension that drives me not only to turn pages, but to ponder these truths of the human condition after I have closed the book.

Palestinian (immigrant) culture and American (dominant) culture

Of course, every immigrant copes with these two opposing forces – the confining boundaries of the culture-of-origin, and the inexorable crucible of the melting pot that demands escape from that confinement. Susan does an artful job of showing her characters moving sometimes easily and sometimes awkwardly between these two different states.

Life is a balance of opposites

All of life is caught in the pincers of endless pairs of opposites. Opposites create revolutions, hatreds, and passionate love. At a more ordinary level, we strive to balance or solve cold and hot, hunger and fullness, loneliness and anger. At every level of life, from physics and biology, individual life, and the history of civilizations, opposites move us forward. Find these opposites in your story to propel your reader’s attention forward as well.

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Writing Prompt

To accentuate dramatic tension in your own story, look for the opposites. Use the same ones I noted from reading Inheritance of Exile or look for others: educated and not, healthy and sick, and so on.

Notes

The famous graphic symbol of yin and yang is a circle with the two black and white interlocking shapes. It is called Taijitu. Here’s a link to a wiki page.

Visit Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Portfolio

Visit Amazon’s page for Inheritance of Exile

More memoir writing resources

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.

Memoir writing lessons from the heart

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by Jerry Waxler, author of Memoir Revolution: Write Your Story, Change the World

Perry Foster was an ordinary business man until he found himself on the wrong end of a cardiology exam. Now he bears a scar on his torso that looks like it was zipped shut, which makes him a member of the zipper club. When he chose to record his experience he was not drawing upon years of training as a writer. He simply wanted to tell his story and his memoir “Hands Upon My Heart: My Journey Through Heart Disease and Into Life” is the result. Whenever I read a memoir, I look for lessons. How did the author put it together? How did his words create the emotions as I was reading? I have found that new authors, in their passion to explain what happened, often provide lessons every bit as good as the ones I learn from the pros.

Memoir like a novel
One of the most basic lessons in this book is Foster’s knack of telling a story like a novel – that is, he lets me see events for myself. His descriptions are so quintessentially “show don’t tell” that reading the book is like attending a “show don’t tell” seminar. Take for example a stressful scene in a doctor’s office when Foster’s wife pulls out a bottle and takes two aspirin, showing the headache rather than telling it. And precisely because the example is so basic, its lesson is easy to learn. If he had written, “she had a headache,” he would be reporting a fact that was inside her head, not his. A slightly improvement would be dialog. If she had said “I have a headache” at least he would not be reading her mind. But now she becomes the one who is telling. When he shows her taking the two aspirin, readers can see the evidence for themselves.

Foster also does a good job staying within a time frame. He immerses himself within each scene, providing sensations that let me lose myself in his world. Since the book starts around the time he learns his heart is failing, I know little about his history until he is sedated for a surgical procedure. In his drug altered state, he describes a picture perfect flashback from his childhood. This ploy supplies background about his family, and the flashback also provides pacing, letting me linger there with him while surgeons are poking at his body.

His observations include his own thoughts, feelings, and body reactions. These internally directed observations take me inside his experience. “Does anyone ever wake during surgery?” he asks his surgeon. He notices the taste of perspiration dripping from his upper lip. After this frightening meeting he becomes furious with his wife for trying to relax while she was waiting. “You’re buying a romance novel,” he asked in a restrained voice. “How could she?” he thinks.

Edgy characters make me turn pages
From the beginning Perry Foster showed me his messy emotions. He was afraid for his heart, angry at the doctors, and edgy with his wife. His thoughts are often judgmental, and paranoid, and I think, “No wonder this guy’s heart is a wreck.”

I also wonder how he could be so honest about these feelings. This is a big issue for me, because my instinct is to hide my imperfections. “Hands Upon my Heart” shows me that disclosing authentic feelings, even if edgy and flawed, creates human warmth so palpable I want to pick up the phone and ask him about his health.

Perry Foster’s nervous tension serves another purpose. It increases dramatic tension. Consider Shakespeare’s characters Hamlet, and Ophelia, or Romeo, and Juliet. Their edginess creates suspense because you’re never sure what they’ll do next. Foster achieves the same effect. I kept turning the pages to see how he will juggle the pressure of his disturbing emotions.

Will he grow?
I love character development in a book. By the time I reach the end I’m hoping some lesson has been learned. Because this is such a satisfying payoff for me, as soon as I recognize the character flaw I start anticipating how the person will grow. It’s part of the suspense that keeps me reading. I found this suspense especially acute in “Hands Upon my Heart,” where Foster seemed like such a likable guy, I couldn’t wait for him to find inner strength and peace.

In the end the author does become more accepting of his situation and his wife, but his changes did not match what I expected, resulting in a feeling of being let down. What can I learn from that? It feels like a variation on the famous advice offered by Anton Chekhov. If you show a gun in the first scene of a play, you should fire it by the end. It looks like this advice could also be applied to character development. When the beginning of the book shows dramatic tension in the character, then by the end that tension should be relieved.

My expectation that Foster was supposed to grow during the course of the book raises a fascinating question. Should a memoir take me on a perfectly crafted ride, or must it follow the course of events, precisely? My view is that from the same raw material, a storyteller could craft a thousand different stories. The memoir I end up actually reading is not the person’s life, but rather a creative representation of it. And it turns out that telling the best possible story provides a benefit to the writer as well as the reader. The more you strive to tell a good story, the more you learn about your life. Perry Foster’s “Hands Upon my Heart” has stimulated and informed my thinking about these issues, and as I look for the story within my own life, Foster’s work will be one of the sources for my deeper understanding.

See my other essay about Perry Foster’s memoir by clicking here.

See also: Dee Dee Phelps was another adult learner who developed her writing skill not as a professional writer but through workshops. Read her insights in the interviews we reported here.

See also: Chekhov’s Gun, a wikipedia entry

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