This blog entry is the reprint of my article in WestWord Magazine, the Magazine of the Writers' Guild of Alberta
“Memoirists are not just creative writers; like historians, they describe real events. Memoirists are lay historians who … set out to construct lucid, defensible narratives about the past. Like their professional counterparts, memoirists tell their stories from various philosophical perspectives, which influence the stories they tell...Memoirs give us partial access to a past reality.” (JensenWallach)
The challenges faced in life are partially due to or are affected by the fact that we live in a certain time and place – this is the ground each memoir stands on.
Toronto-based Holocaust survivor Max Eisen’s memoir By Chance Alone, won the CBC Canada Reads contest for 2019. He is Jewish and lived in Europe during the Second World War and the rise of Hitler – a victim of the evil generated at that particular time and place in history. Many memoirs have been written about the Holocaust, including The Nazi Officer’s Wife, The Last Jew of Treblinka, Woman in Gold, Anne Frank – the Diary of a Young Girl, and each one tells the history of a time and place, but from different points of view. All are necessary to give readers a more complete picture of what happened during the war. Each is a piece of the whole puzzle.
Every memoir has the underlying theme of metamorphosis, healing or change in one’s attitude or understanding. It is not just a reiteration of events, but rather a story of circumstances that led the author on a journey of transformation initiated by a challenge. A good memoir contains reflection on who the author was while the upsetting events were occurring and who the author is now. A discussion over time.
We are the product of many influences – our parents’ child rearing methods, their education, values, emotional and physical health, our own health and nutrition, schooling, religion, ethnic origin and social milieu. All of these are influenced by the time and place in which we live. When and where we live has a huge impact on our lives. If you grew up in a middle-class home in Canada in the 1950s, you were in the midst of great social change. Gender expectations were changing, the women’s movement building on the contribution women made during the war and the unhappiness of many unfulfilled housewives who were asked to resume traditional gender roles after the war. Along with the promise of new technology, there were people still recovering from the effects of the war, the ongoing cold war and the build-up of nuclear weapons. There were prejudice and intolerance, few methods of dealing with psychological issues, and the rule in many households that children should be “seen but not heard.” In this atmosphere, child abuse, sexual and domestic abuse, racism, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress were often swept under the carpet – or dealt with by drugs and alcohol. Those who grew up in those years had different influences and thus a different story to tell than those who lived through the war years or those growing up now. Though the individual stories and struggles are different, memoirs set in that time are part of the entire picture of that time and place.
The human challenge to go beyond survival and live a life of fulfillment and integrity never changes, but the environment in which we live makes the life journey different for all of us. In Canada, awareness of sexual and domestic abuse is much greater now than in the past. There are shelters for those affected by domestic violence and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are widespread. These issues are not solved, but the awareness and understanding of them has increased. However, in many places in the world, individuals are still fighting to be heard because discrimination, and sexual and domestic abuse are not being addressed. Memoirs written at the same time about the same issue in different countries give a more complete picture of the world situation.
I lived through a marriage in which my husband was controlling and ultimately abusive. I did heal but I didn’t know why an intelligent, well-educated woman ended up in that situation. I wanted to figure this all out, to answer the question for myself, to “connect the dots” of my life. I decided to write a memoir.
I had written a non-fiction book, journal articles, history articles, and academic papers, but not memoir which is creative non-fiction. I looked for courses but there were none. I ordered a book about memoir writing – Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story – and it was excellent. I attended a fiction writing class, but decided it was not a good fit when someone in the class challenged a true account I’d written about an incident in my marriage. She said it was “not believable.” Writing a memoir of a very painful time in one’s life is doubly hard when you are criticized.
Writing my memoir, The Full Catastrophe, helped me to make sense of my life, past and present. After it was published, I decided to use my background as a teacher and retired clinical psychologist to teach all that I had learned while writing it. I proposed a course, “Memoir Writing for People with Difficult Stories to Tell,” to the Alexandra Writers’ Centre in Calgary. People come to the course with a desire to write a story from their lives. My three-part course is focused on the story they want to tell, writing skills, and self-care - no critiques. They get guidance, acceptance, and social support from the group. They have the freedom to write and tell out loud what they often have kept hidden - sometimes for decades.
Secrets are destructive. They are usually about things considered shameful. People learn to keep the secrets and hide their true feelings – and so often feel as though they themselves are shameful. The things families hide change with moral imperatives in society which are often dictated by time and place. Getting those secrets out is psychologically healthy and allows for the individual to heal and for social issues to be exposed.
A memoir is a story taken from one’s life, and is often about triumph or struggle. A memoir can have a universal theme like finding one’s identity. It can be based on a health issue like having cancer or an accomplishment like climbing Everest or founding a commune. A memoir can be about surviving war or disruption due to immigration. What better way to understand the difficult journey of moving from one culture to another and the journey to shed separateness than to read the memoir of someone who has gone through it.
During my years teaching memoir, I have learned to expect any and all stories of challenge in the lives of those who come to the course. I have been in awe of people’s courage as they write about facing demanding times to be transformed in their lives. Their stories and the memoirs they write are a cause for celebration – testaments to the human condition and to the bravery and endurance that many people have had to muster in order to live their lives to the fullest.
James Pennebaker of the University of Texas researched the healing power of writing about traumatic events. The anecdotal results showed that making sense of one’s life through writing reduces anxiety. But he also found that if people use their writing to better understand and learn from their emotions, it can boost the immune system.
Reading memoir is one of the best ways to learn what a time and place were really like - because in memoir the writer is constrained by the actual (Birkerts). Historical fiction is fiction set in a certain time and place. If an author has done thorough research, the era and setting may be accurately portrayed, but the memoir of someone who was actually present at the time gives the reader an “on the ground” look at a particular time and place.
A memoir can be a window into another time. Details of time and place bring a memoir to life. Simple details like the candy bought at the corner store, local politicians, the names of comic books, the rural area or city in which the memoirists lived, the clothes they wore, laws, or world events place a memoir in a certain time in history. If memoirists can’t remember certain information, they can look it up online, in their local libraries or museums, and use those details as memory prompts. Music is a powerful memory prompt, so listening to the songs popular during a significant time may bring back details to add to the writing.
If you want your memoir to be relatable, and to have a universal appeal, write small – provide details of the incidents that are turning points in your memoir. Your memoir will be adding a piece of the puzzle to the history of a particular time and place.
Birkerts, Sven. (2008), The Art of Time in Memoir, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Pennebaker, James. (2016), Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press, New York, NY.
Rainer, Tristine, (1997), Your Life as Story. Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, NY.
Wallach, J.J. (2014), Remembering Jim Crow: the literary memoir as historical source material. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
This article is reprinted from WestWord Magazine, Vol. 39, No. 3, July-September 2019
“Memoirists are not just creative writers; like historians, they describe real events. Memoirists are lay historians who … set out to construct lucid, defensible narratives about the past. Like their professional counterparts, memoirists tell their stories from various philosophical perspectives, which influence the stories they tell...Memoirs give us partial access to a past reality.” (JensenWallach)
The challenges faced in life are partially due to or are affected by the fact that we live in a certain time and place – this is the ground each memoir stands on.
Toronto-based Holocaust survivor Max Eisen’s memoir By Chance Alone, won the CBC Canada Reads contest for 2019. He is Jewish and lived in Europe during the Second World War and the rise of Hitler – a victim of the evil generated at that particular time and place in history. Many memoirs have been written about the Holocaust, including The Nazi Officer’s Wife, The Last Jew of Treblinka, Woman in Gold, Anne Frank – the Diary of a Young Girl, and each one tells the history of a time and place, but from different points of view. All are necessary to give readers a more complete picture of what happened during the war. Each is a piece of the whole puzzle.
Every memoir has the underlying theme of metamorphosis, healing or change in one’s attitude or understanding. It is not just a reiteration of events, but rather a story of circumstances that led the author on a journey of transformation initiated by a challenge. A good memoir contains reflection on who the author was while the upsetting events were occurring and who the author is now. A discussion over time.
We are the product of many influences – our parents’ child rearing methods, their education, values, emotional and physical health, our own health and nutrition, schooling, religion, ethnic origin and social milieu. All of these are influenced by the time and place in which we live. When and where we live has a huge impact on our lives. If you grew up in a middle-class home in Canada in the 1950s, you were in the midst of great social change. Gender expectations were changing, the women’s movement building on the contribution women made during the war and the unhappiness of many unfulfilled housewives who were asked to resume traditional gender roles after the war. Along with the promise of new technology, there were people still recovering from the effects of the war, the ongoing cold war and the build-up of nuclear weapons. There were prejudice and intolerance, few methods of dealing with psychological issues, and the rule in many households that children should be “seen but not heard.” In this atmosphere, child abuse, sexual and domestic abuse, racism, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress were often swept under the carpet – or dealt with by drugs and alcohol. Those who grew up in those years had different influences and thus a different story to tell than those who lived through the war years or those growing up now. Though the individual stories and struggles are different, memoirs set in that time are part of the entire picture of that time and place.
The human challenge to go beyond survival and live a life of fulfillment and integrity never changes, but the environment in which we live makes the life journey different for all of us. In Canada, awareness of sexual and domestic abuse is much greater now than in the past. There are shelters for those affected by domestic violence and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are widespread. These issues are not solved, but the awareness and understanding of them has increased. However, in many places in the world, individuals are still fighting to be heard because discrimination, and sexual and domestic abuse are not being addressed. Memoirs written at the same time about the same issue in different countries give a more complete picture of the world situation.
I lived through a marriage in which my husband was controlling and ultimately abusive. I did heal but I didn’t know why an intelligent, well-educated woman ended up in that situation. I wanted to figure this all out, to answer the question for myself, to “connect the dots” of my life. I decided to write a memoir.
I had written a non-fiction book, journal articles, history articles, and academic papers, but not memoir which is creative non-fiction. I looked for courses but there were none. I ordered a book about memoir writing – Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story – and it was excellent. I attended a fiction writing class, but decided it was not a good fit when someone in the class challenged a true account I’d written about an incident in my marriage. She said it was “not believable.” Writing a memoir of a very painful time in one’s life is doubly hard when you are criticized.
Writing my memoir, The Full Catastrophe, helped me to make sense of my life, past and present. After it was published, I decided to use my background as a teacher and retired clinical psychologist to teach all that I had learned while writing it. I proposed a course, “Memoir Writing for People with Difficult Stories to Tell,” to the Alexandra Writers’ Centre in Calgary. People come to the course with a desire to write a story from their lives. My three-part course is focused on the story they want to tell, writing skills, and self-care - no critiques. They get guidance, acceptance, and social support from the group. They have the freedom to write and tell out loud what they often have kept hidden - sometimes for decades.
Secrets are destructive. They are usually about things considered shameful. People learn to keep the secrets and hide their true feelings – and so often feel as though they themselves are shameful. The things families hide change with moral imperatives in society which are often dictated by time and place. Getting those secrets out is psychologically healthy and allows for the individual to heal and for social issues to be exposed.
A memoir is a story taken from one’s life, and is often about triumph or struggle. A memoir can have a universal theme like finding one’s identity. It can be based on a health issue like having cancer or an accomplishment like climbing Everest or founding a commune. A memoir can be about surviving war or disruption due to immigration. What better way to understand the difficult journey of moving from one culture to another and the journey to shed separateness than to read the memoir of someone who has gone through it.
During my years teaching memoir, I have learned to expect any and all stories of challenge in the lives of those who come to the course. I have been in awe of people’s courage as they write about facing demanding times to be transformed in their lives. Their stories and the memoirs they write are a cause for celebration – testaments to the human condition and to the bravery and endurance that many people have had to muster in order to live their lives to the fullest.
James Pennebaker of the University of Texas researched the healing power of writing about traumatic events. The anecdotal results showed that making sense of one’s life through writing reduces anxiety. But he also found that if people use their writing to better understand and learn from their emotions, it can boost the immune system.
Reading memoir is one of the best ways to learn what a time and place were really like - because in memoir the writer is constrained by the actual (Birkerts). Historical fiction is fiction set in a certain time and place. If an author has done thorough research, the era and setting may be accurately portrayed, but the memoir of someone who was actually present at the time gives the reader an “on the ground” look at a particular time and place.
A memoir can be a window into another time. Details of time and place bring a memoir to life. Simple details like the candy bought at the corner store, local politicians, the names of comic books, the rural area or city in which the memoirists lived, the clothes they wore, laws, or world events place a memoir in a certain time in history. If memoirists can’t remember certain information, they can look it up online, in their local libraries or museums, and use those details as memory prompts. Music is a powerful memory prompt, so listening to the songs popular during a significant time may bring back details to add to the writing.
If you want your memoir to be relatable, and to have a universal appeal, write small – provide details of the incidents that are turning points in your memoir. Your memoir will be adding a piece of the puzzle to the history of a particular time and place.
Birkerts, Sven. (2008), The Art of Time in Memoir, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Pennebaker, James. (2016), Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press, New York, NY.
Rainer, Tristine, (1997), Your Life as Story. Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, NY.
Wallach, J.J. (2014), Remembering Jim Crow: the literary memoir as historical source material. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
This article is reprinted from WestWord Magazine, Vol. 39, No. 3, July-September 2019
RSS Feed