This guest post is by Linda LaRoche. Linda LaRoche is a writer, editor and teacher. You can visit her website lindalaroche.com or read her blog The Quill.Someone asked me the other day if I’d be interested in writing their memoir because they can’t remember a thing. I said, “No, I can’t invent a life.”
Photo by ^ Mimi ^
The thought of memoir writing reminded me of when I started out as a columnist for The Pasadena Star News in Southern California. I met celebrities both young and seasoned. It was the year 2000 and my reporting involved attending charity events.
My primary interest was serving organizations that had been under-represented. But if a cause caught my attention that was noteworthy, whether or not it had celebrity philanthropists, I covered it just the same.
My second month on the job, I met actor Robert Stack, famous for his television role in the Untouchables. It was Fat Tuesday. He asked me if I knew the series that was on the air when I was a toddler. I told a half-white lie, I said I did. Truth is I vaguely remembered his voice, not the series.
During the reception, they were serving apple martinis on trays, no doubt for their green color. When they held one up to me, in a gracious attempt I accepted. But I have a hard time not making a face when I drink alcohol. He laughed at my facial contortion. Needless to say I quickly got rid of it. I didn’t remember meeting him or the apple martini until last weekend, when at a restaurant I saw a woman drinking one.
All of which made me think how much memory is inside all of us, just waiting for someone to prod us and make it come out.
In my creative writing class when students are required to write a short-story, they often write about themselves. It’s a good idea to write what you know, and I’ve encouraged some to turn their story into a memoir. Character-driven stories make for a good read, however, memoirs in today’s market are written by a ghostwriter for a celebrity, so the competition is stiff.
Here are seven tips for writing a memoir:
1. Make it about a particular time in your life, keep in mind it’s not an entire life-time, that’s an autobiography.
2. Ask yourself—what is this about?
3. Make an argument—it’s crucial that we like your character. Your prose must read more like fiction (recollections) versus non-fiction (dates and facts) for the reader to care.
4. Keep it light—its’ personal reminiscing and we don’t need every single detail.
5. Have the character change—the experience may prove therapeutic for the writer but the reader has to witness an evolution.
6. Be open to rewrites. Don’t think with a first draft you have finished! If you want to be good at writing, then write, write and write!
7. Keep a word count—don’t focus on numbers until you are revising and editing. While there isn’t a magic number, a good range for a book is between 65,000 to 90,000 words.
PRACTICE
Write for fifteen minutes, without stopping, on a memory.
Remember the first day of school? What smells remind you of summertime?
Please share your comments in the practice section.
How often we remember just the moment and not the day. Remembering the moments can uncover so much more. Thanks for this.
The lighthouse of my childhood marks many happy times.
It was a time when my siblings and I still had many possibilities.
We went to the lighthouse at the Bluff for picnics and afternoon fish and chips battles with the seagulls. Sometimes we resorted to
eating inside the car when flocks of them were too aggressive.
I remember these people on these trips as mostly my mum, Dad, me and the brother just behind me in age, as the others brothers were either babies or stomach swells on my mum.
The smell of the salt, the grease of the fish, the taste of the batter –were punctuated by the cold winter wind. I’d wrap up my share of our fish and chip loot in a hurriedly torn off piece of paper. I loved to savour the taste of each chip and my half a piece of shark. It was such a feast.
The space was open. We did not need to row to our lighthouse,
only drive and then walk. It was accessible whenever Dad was home from working away. Mum didn’t drive. Tall, white, with red pin stripes, I never
remember going inside the lighthouse, only walking around it in awe.
The lighthouse trips were at a time when Mum and Dad must have felt they had man ypossibilities. They had recently left Papua New Guinea to return to the childhood home of my Dad in Devonport Tasmania and were intent on carving out a new life for themselves. Mum was busy having children and growing vegetables, and Dad was busy trying to hold down and find jobs, which often took him away from home.
The lighthouse picnics were a family ritual, and sometimes even a community one.
I don’t remember it clearly but family friends tell me we often went there to play cricket and picnic. We did all the typical things Aussie kids do.
We’d yell at the seagulls through the glass of the car windows. However, at the end of our feast, if on the rare occasion we couldn’t finish our fish and chips we’d give the squawking birds the remainder of our food.
We’d dashback to the car, though, afraid that they might chase us. We’d shut the windows and sigh due to our full stomachs and our brilliant escape from the hungry birds.
June Perkins http://pearlz.wordpress.com
sorry had tricky time adding this – its a story I wrote in response to the prompt.
I could smell the fish and chips and hear the seagulls cry.
The curtains in the kitchen were orange. My mother had sewn rows of navy blue rickrack
across the bottom, then attached pins, big as dollar bills, tiny replicas of
the tall ships, and fastened them at irregular intervals, so that if you looked
at them in the right light, they were all listing.
I was staring at them, wondering where her obsession for
ships started. We lived in a land locked
state, but my mother seemed to know a lot about boats. She tied the curtains with rope gleaned from
my father’s workshop, twisted the hemp into knots so complicated they looked as
if they could never be set free.
“You ever been on a ship?” I asked her.
She had her back to me.
She was rolling out pie crusts.
On the stove, the filling for apple pies bubbled in a turquoise
pot. The air smelled like Lacey’s
downtown, when they put out the Christmas potpourri just after Halloween, and
sold it two for one.
“No,” she said. “But
I read about them. In a book called Small
Girl at Sea. There was a girl, no older than you, who slipped on board to come
to America from France with her boyfriend, who was an explorer. She dressed like a boy, called herself Jean and
hid mostly, rode out a storm that near about took the ship under, and made
herself known only when the ragtag team made it to Arkansas, made it all the
way up to the mountains where the falls are.”
The radio was playing the old stuff my mother never tired
of. Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Faron
Young. You’d cry if you listened long
enough, so I didn’t.
“You talking about Petit Jean?” I asked. Petit Jean was two hours away, so high up the
hang gliders had their convention there, meeting at the lodge and then taking
to the cliffs, high above the water falls, where they swooped off the edge like
they were born both of bird and man.
“The same,” my mother said, and dusted the crust with flour.
“So anyway, the girl got sick, you see, and the doctor came
in and took off her shirt and saw that she was not a boy, and called the explorer,
who took one look and realized Jean was the girl he loved in France.” My mother
frowned. “ Of course, she died,” my
mother said, “and they buried her there at Buzzard’s Peak.”
It was growing warm in the kitchen. The air conditioner had broken two months
before, and we were not replacing it until we raised the cash to do it. My legs were stuck to the bench where I sat
every night with my brother, who ate and then fled to his room where he’d stay
until the next morning.
“What a love story,” I said.
My mother turned to me. Her apron was a tea towel with the California
Raisins dancing across it, that she’d sewn to a sash that tied around her small
waist.
“Love story?” she said, her face turning red. “No, not love. The story of what happens to a strong-willed
girl who thinks she knows what’s what. Don’t you get it? She died!”
I was drinking my third cup of coffee, and lifted the cup
again, the steam rising across my face.
I took a sip and looked at my mother through the fog it caused.
She was a beautiful woman, prone to hysterics. I often imagined she was once a racehorse,
bred for speed, filled with drama. The
kind of horse that took the Triple Crown as if she’d always known it was hers.
I was not beautiful, not in the traditional sense. Exotic was what I was. Green eyes, dark hair, a nose that was a
little too long. I had a look that said I
was judging you, even though it wasn’t, so I didn’t have many friends.
“Lord, Mama,” I said.
“It was just a story.”
“A true story,” Mama said, and her bottom lip started to
tremble. “I worry about you all the
time, I do. I saw you last night, out in
tree swing with Davey, his hands roaming and you not doing one thing to stop
him. I thought you learned your lesson
with Rinnie, when I had to pick you up at the station. Fifteen and drunk. You have no idea the humiliation a mama
feels, picking up her daughter, who’s stinking of Boone’s Farm, her blouse
jacked up, buttoned wrong.”
She stomped her foot then.
Something a racehorse might have done, I thought. I wondered how she’d gotten here, a beauty
like her, tied to my father, who seemed to only notice her at suppertime or
when he needed someone to hold the door when he brought in firewood.
“I said I was sorry about Rinnie,” I told her, although I
wasn’t the least bit sorry, and that night, before I landed in jail, I was the
happiest I’d ever been. We’d hopped a
train, something I loved to do, and climbed atop one of the cars. And it wasn’t Boone’s Farm. It was Cold Duck. We drank it fast. There was a meteor shower that night, and so
we lay there, the chug of the train ricocheting through us, the stars exploding. He was my explorer that night. But I did not die.
“You think you have all the answers,” Mama said. “You think you can dance and party and drink
and none of it will come back on you, but it will. You’ll ruin yourself and then where will you
be?”
Sweat was rolling down my back then. Outside, the chickens squawked. It was laying day, the day they earned their
keep, when their existence made sense, when they could strut with reason. My mother returned to her pies, the thing she
did best, I suppose, and I knew later she would set one on the table in front
of my father, and she would wait for him to ask for a piece, so that she could
offer it up to him. She would set it on
a chipped red plate and step back and watch him take a bite, the only
confirmation she had that her life was on track, that she hadn’t ruined anything
at all.
I felt low then, the way you do when you see backside of a
circus act, the grubby costumes up close, the weary eyes of the tightrope
walker. I brushed past her, out the
kitchen door, and I ran until I made it downtown, where Rinnie worked in the
arcade. I’d get him to clock out and we’d
find another train – there was always a train leaving this place – and we’d
ride the rails again, we’d count the stars, we’d start something that nobody
could stop.
Marla, I love reading your writing! This is great.
Thanks so much Katie!
Wow. This was simply amazing, Marla. I loved it. Great job!
I particularly loved the comparison of the mother to the race horse. On paper, that sounds like something that could only be cruel, but you made it very personal, even beautiful in its honesty.
Thanks Jeff. You’re so observant. I appreciate your input so much.
I love the details – they are so telling. And the young woman’s almost dispassionate observation of her mother. Growing into her own life.
This is absolutely incredible, Marla! Love it!!
“I felt low then” … love that! i can totally relate to a teen being shamed by her parent but it DIDN’T WORK!
I love the sensory details. Really puts me in the scene.
The walk from the car to first period is an unpleasant one. It’s been three days since I last came to school. Three days since I got of the couch to do anything, but use the bathroom. I showered this morning. That was tough. This is a nightmare.
Everyone smiles when they see me. “How ya been? Still recovering?” I smile back and nod. I assume they all think I’ve had the flu or-
Breathe! Just…don’t think about it. If your heart keeps racing like this you’re going to pass out. Tunnelblackworldshrinkingawayt a k e a breath!
My friends notice something’s up, because I’m sweating and I stumble a little, but I just wave it off. “Still a little shakey. No big.” The medicine isn’t working. The doctor said it would be a few weeks, but it’s not working. It’s not. I’m not supposed to be having these panic attacks anymore! Why- Stop it. Continue to breathe and go to class.
I sit down at my desk. The teacher gives me the usual “Hey how are ya?” and I tell her I’m sorry and she feels for me, she really does, but she also hands me a stack of homework I need to catch up on that is roughly the size of my backpack. Three very important days, that’s what she tells me before she gets everyone’s attention and begins the class.
Nothing she says is making any sense because my focus waivers from extrovert to introvert, outside and the turmoil inside. I want to listen. I want to know what I’ve been missing in class, but I can feel myself slipping, rolling, diving into a panic. There is nothing going on! Nothing to terrify me! Make it stop! This is bullshit! I open my binder and I write a number – 0899 – and another – 5566 – and add them together. The result is 6465. I write 5646 below that and add the two together. The result is…and so on and so forth for the rest of class.
When the bell rings, I realize that I haven’t heard a word the teacher said this whole time. She gives me today’s homework and I stuff it in my backpack with the rest. Every class is exactly the same. Too much homework, hyperventilation, number crunching, and phasing away from everyone’s awareness.
I eat lunch with my friends, but I am too shaken, too spacey, to really give as much as I get. Every joke feels like a calculated blow meant to destroy me. The usual camaraderie is missing. Everything is hollow. This has to stop. Not the jokes, I’m a master humorist, but the worry and the self-pity and the victimization. I have to get a hold on this. But what if I don’t? Breathe you fucking idiot! Not again. This is exhausting. What if it never goes away? Stop saying “what if!” Stop it. Stop the nonsense.
My mom picks me up at the end of the day and I curl into a ball in the passenger seat. “How was school?” she asks in that voice she’s been working on. The “I don’t want to upset you” voice.
“I got through it…” I say.
“Good. So you’ll get through tomorrow too.”
I feel a weight expand in my chest like the world’s most hateful sponge. Tomorrow. God, round two. Forever. For eternity. Tomorrow will always be looming no matter how well I do today. That’s it then. This can’t go on any longer. I am too tired to keep doing this shit for the rest of my life. I have to get better. I have to make the difference, because I’m the only one who can.
I’m not sleeping on the couch tonight. I’m not watching TV. I’ll just focus on my homework. Phase out. Shift away from my own awareness.
Oh my. This is so powerful, Jeff. The weight like a sponge and the turmoil of taking a shower. You’ve described panic in such a specific way that I get it and feel the agony. The ending is strong, when the news arrives that the days go on, no matter how you feel.
Thank you very much, Marla! I’m glad that you were able to connect with this piece, it’s very personal to me.
Thank you for sharing. I love that determination at the end – that decision to make it better.
Thanks Juliana, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Wow, Jeff, this is so good. Vivid and strong, you portray the bombardment of thoughts so well, the displacement and panic. Been in a similar space before, and you write about this so well.
Thank you Zoe, I really appreciate all the kind words and I’m glad you were able to connect with this 🙂
I really enjoyed reading your post. Dealing with anxiety attacks is difficult for people to understand but I think you did a really great job of showing that struggle.
Thank you Lis, it means a lot to me that I am able to communicate anxiety to my readers, it was a big part of my younger life.
Great description of anxiety disorders & the struggle within them. Had a close friend that struggled with this. It was hard to know what to say, even though he needed to hear from me.
Thanks Joe, I’m glad you liked it. Anxiety is a really powerful disorder and can affect everyone involved, anxious or not. My mom went through Hell during my teenage years when I first came into my panic disorders. She’s a trooper though and I’m lucky to have her.
Memory just waiting to come out – so true. This just came out – as is.
The phone rang. It was the middle of the night. A hot summer end night. I listen to my husband – his voice is groggy.
“Can you say that again?”.
I sit up and listen to the one sided conversation. He puts the phone down.
“Your father has been admitted to hospital. We should go.”
He drives fast, the night is dark, the street lights dazzle my vision. I am uncomprehending, numb.
The lights of the emergency room are so bright they hurt. We are taken to a curtained area, there is my mother small and scared. They have been away I have not seen them for a couple of weeks. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last year. Random thoughts. My father lies under the sheet, his big nose, we always teased him, is prominent above his slack mouth. They have taken his teeth.
I take his big capable hand in mine, it is unresponsive, cold. I lean into him, whisper in his ear like I used to when I told him “secrets”.
“I’m here now.” I say “I’ll take care of her. I promise”
His chest rises and he breathes out a long noisy breath, a sigh and then another and then his chest stays still.
Somewhere a nurse says “It’s over now”
My mother and I cling to one another and my husband gently ushers us out back to the car. I look back but there is nothing there, only a shell, he is gone.
This is so real, so raw – like a punch in the stomach. Gosh, I think the saddest parts are when you write about the past – his big nose that you used to tease, whispering in his ear – it shows the stuff of grief, that the person you know is no longer, even before they are gone. I’m so sorry for your loss.
Thank you Zoe! I was surprised at how intense this memory was (is) – It is 17 years since my dad passed away – a lifetime.
Agree with point number 2. Think of the end first, it will help you find the arc, or the story line of the memoir. This will save you an incredible amount of time, unless you are unemployed and enjoy slogging through the past for days on end.
The fat waxing moon floated above the wild Pacific, soft gold light shimmering straight up to the beach illuminating the crashing foam. Larry had driven the Lucky Truck, a red Dodge panel van, right down onto the sand and parked so we could open the back doors and watch the moon set while the kids slept. We lay on a mattress on the raised wooden platform, breathing the cool salty air and were lulled to sleep by the sound of the monotonous thunder of the waves.
I did not want to miss the moment the moon dove behind the waves. I dozed off but every few minuted I opened a groggy eye to see the moon a bit closer to the horizon. I woke hours later, the brisk dawn breeze tossing sand up into my face, sea birds wheeling and diving, calling out to each other with gull cries. A flock of pelicans flew close to the surface of the waves, their single-file line dipping behind the tall swells and reappearing as they searched for breakfast. I sighed and pulled the covers closer. Good morning, ocean, good night, moon.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to smell the sent of Cool Water cologne and not think of Ben. That smell will always remind me of him and the life altering experiences that took place during those fragile years of 17 to 19.
I was during those years that I came to know myself better. It was in those years that I gained my love of walking. Ben and I walked pretty much everywhere we went. I became fascinated by just how far I could get in an hour. We walked to pick up, to go to parties and for hours around town with friends on late summer evenings. The sweet smell of summer and it’s comforting heat still bring crushing and sometimes unexpected memories of those years.
I know those times were often far from good but I look back on them with a fondness. I look back with some heartache for our immaturity and foolishness. I look back and sigh with amusement at life and it’s tragic and beautiful imperfections.
Thanks for the guest post by Linda. Really helped me better understand memoirs.
I hate doing the dishes. But, I never hated it more than when I lived in the little yellow house with no dishwasher and a too small sink.
I suffered from severe post partum depression after the birth of my daughter and I was having a very difficult time being alone. This particular morning I had begged my husband to stay home with me because I didn’t feel safe alone with my thoughts and the baby. She was such a good baby. But, things were happening to me that I didn’t understand. I felt like I was trapped in a horror movie every minute of every day.
Just the day before, I was standing in the kitchen and felt water slowly rising from my feet to my knees and then my waist. I looked into the water and there were dead babies floating in the water. So many dead babies. Some with their eyes closed, some with their eyes open. The water was rising rapidly and I threw the door open and ran outside silent and shaking. I stood stunned and frozen for some time. Eventually my head and heart found there way back into my body, and I realized it wasn’t real. It felt as real as anything had ever felt before. My husband wasn’t there, my son wasn’t there, my little baby was sleeping. Thank god. I really didn’t want to be alone just in case the dead babies came back.
My husband had already taken off all the days from work he could, and he just had to go in. I know he would have stayed if he could. He was scared also. My wee one smiled and cooed and almost made me purr like a cat when I held her in my arms. She is so soothing. Then nap time came, and as usual I was trying to get done as much as I could before she woke up. This meant it was time to do the dishes. I approached the sink and opened the window over it. I knew I was going to be there a while and since I was still 70 pounds heavier than I used to be, I knew I’d break a sweat. I ran the water and the steam fogged my eyes. I looked into the forest in front of me, and hanging from every tree was me. Me in a noose. Hundreds of me’s, hanging there dead. The water was now running over the sink and onto my toes. I didn’t notice that. I punched the screen out of the window and started pitching dishes out the window toward the trees. I threw cups, plates, silverware, pots, and pans. I threw Grandma’s china teacup. I threw it all. I climbed on top of the sink so I could throw them harder. I was trying to knock the bodies off the branches with the dishes. I liked the sound of the glass shattering. Eventually I ran out of dishes, and the kitchen was flooded. I climbed down and got some towels. I wiped the floor until the water was gone. I closed the window.
My daughter woke up. We played until daddy got home. He said, “The house looks nice honey. You even did the dishes.” I didn’t say anything. Then, he went outside and saw the wreckage. He didn’t say anything either. He cleaned up the mess. He came in the house. He sat on the couch and hugged me. Then he said, “I’ll get a dishwasher tomorrow.”