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The Memoir and the Memoirist
THOMAS LARSON
THE MEMOIR AND THE MEMOIRIST
Reading and Writing Personal Narrative
Swallow Press / Ohio University Press • Athens
Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2007 by Swallow Press / Ohio University Press
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Swallow Press / Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1
The epigraph quoted from Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion, pp. 8–10, is used by permission of the publisher, Seven Stories Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Larson, Thomas, 1949–
The memoir and the memoirist : reading and writing personal narrative / Thomas Larson.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8040-1100-6 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8040-1100-1 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8040-1101-3 (pbk : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8040-1101-X (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Autobiography—Authorship. I. Title.
CT25.L28 2007
808′.06692—dc22
2007005958
To Suzanna
How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!
—William Wordsworth, The Prelude
“Oh, ’Tis Me That Is Wounded”
—Scottish fiddle tune
Art would not be important were life not more important.
—James Baldwin
Once I had dressed, made up, done my hair and tidied the house, if I still had some time left, I would be incapable of reading or marking essays. In a way, too, I didn’t want my mind to concentrate on anything else but the wait itself, in order not to spoil it. Quite often I would write down on a sheet of paper the date, the time and “he’s going to come,” along with other sentences, fears—that he might not come, that he might not feel the same desire for me. In the evening I would go back to the sheet of paper, “he came,” jotting down the details of that meeting at random. Then, dazed, I would stare at the scrawls on the paper and the two paragraphs written before and after, which one read in succession without a break. In between there had been words and gestures which made everything else seem trivial, including the very writing destined to capture them. An interval of time squeezed in between two car noises—his Renault 25 braking, then driving off again—when I knew that nothing in my life (having children, passing exams, traveling to faraway countries) had ever meant as much to me as lying in bed with that man in the middle of the afternoon.
It would only last for a few hours. I never wore my watch, removing it just before he arrived. He would keep his on and I dreaded the moment when he would glance at it discreetly. When I went into the kitchen to get some ice, I would look up at the clock hanging above the door: “only two more hours,” “only one more hour,” or “in one hour I’ll be here and he’ll be gone.” Astonished I asked myself: “Where is the present?”
He would dress slowly before leaving. I would watch him button up his shirt, put on his socks, his underpants, his trousers, then turn towards the mirror to fasten his tie. After he had put on his jacket, it would all be over. Now I was only time flowing through myself.
—Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion
Contents
This Writing Life Now Is What I’ve Lived For: An Introduction
1. From Autobiography to Memoir
2. Discovering a New Literary Form
10. Which Life Am I Supposed to Live?
11. Memoir and the Inauthentic
