and deal with it, not let it run or ruin my life.
Let’s say I’m writing about my first year in college, for me a traumatic year: I dropped out because of a failed love affair. Writing about it, I find three levels operating: first, the events of that year that I can establish via letters, photos, a journal, and others’ reminiscences; second, the events of that year that I’ve recalled (no doubt revised and re-evaluated) numerous times in the intervening years; and third, the event of my writing about it today pushing me to say why that year and the end of the romance remain important. Thus, the drama of that first year in college appears to me the writer as an event in its time, as an event processed in the times in which it’s been recalled from then to now, and as an event I’m dealing with today.
This layered simultaneity, time over time, is the prime relational dynamic between the memoir and the memoirist: the remembering self and the remembered self.
In Lost in Place (1995), Mark Salzman tells of his teenage devotion to kung fu and his fall from its embrace. In one passage, Mark’s father tells his son that some of his bravado from the martial arts that he’s learning is, well, ridiculous, and that Mark, even at fourteen, should be questioning what his teacher is telling him. His father punctuates his mini-lecture by saying, “Just be yourself, Mark. You’ll do just fine as you are” (60). In response, Salzman writes a paragraph in which he argues with his father and with himself about the meaning of this phrase. He does so by abutting his remembered (1975) self and the intervening selves (roughly 1975–94) who have thought about it. First is his reaction to his father, what he, Mark, was feeling at the time, and second is his mature, later-in-life reaction to what his father was posing to him, what he has felt over time.
Be yourself! What a can of worms he opened there. Of course I was trying to be myself! That was the whole point of the kung fu; to become the me I thought I ought to become, instead of some half-assed loser. Anyway, who was to say who I really was? I didn’t even know that—that was half my problem right there. All I knew was that when you’re a really little kid, your parents praise you when you do something they like. If you do something they don’t like, they say, “You’re not the sort of person who does that! Don’t try to be somebody you’re not! Be yourself!” So maybe, I reasoned, being yourself means being the person your parents or teachers want you to be. Do we have anything to do with who we are at all? As we get older, we think of ourselves as having unique personalities, and we take credit for these personalities when we do something good, as if we created these personalities ourselves. But maybe we didn’t! Maybe our personalities were shaped by how people around us responded to us. So who are we? As I said, this was a can of worms I didn’t care to dip into—at least not that day. (60–61)
We can hear the voice of the narrator shifting from the defensive feeling of the moment to the more “reasoned” feeling that comes with writing and with time. This is how I felt that day and this is how I have also felt about how I felt since that day. Thus, Salzman isn’t content merely to dramatize the scene with his father, staying “in character,” that is, in the fourteen-year-old’s self-consciousness. He intercedes from now: with explanatory narrative he shows us that he understands what he’s writing about—it is still a source of conflict that the writing is helping him work through—namely, the difficult truth about growing up, getting “used to disappointment” (68). Accepting disappointment is Salzman’s theme, the thing that defines his father’s life and that Mark must come to know about himself and their relationship. While this theme is embodied in the story, it is the memoirist’s current examination and editing of his younger self that propels the book beyond a chronicle of adolescence to a memoir of self-disclosure. Simply put, Salzman’s voice, in this passage and in many others, is honest about what he’s discovering he did and didn’t know and, thus, one we trust.
Salzman juxtaposes remembered and remembering selves with flawless ease. Many of us miss seeing the mix as craft because the author keeps the story moving. Only at set moments does Salzman intercede in this manner; instead, he keeps the narrative drama strong and the self-changing chronology (the rise and fall of kung fu and other adolescent interests, which eventually disappoint him) central. But the psychological impact of the narrator’s self-knowledge in memoir (knowing what when) is also central. It’s the memoir’s primary compositional conflict: voices from then to now are constantly revising what we remember. Those voices, collected over time and spoken now, may best reflect how we perceive ourselves, having lived with ourselves as long as we have.
The Present Overtakes
Mark Salzman’s mixing of narrative voices in Lost in Place is the result of much revision, of his listening to and adding in those voices as he drafted. It is also the result of time passing, first as he discovered the “disappointment” story and second as he filtered it through his memory and his sensibility. Enough time lets our many-voiced narrators speak, listen, and interact. This is one reason why writers come to the memoir: they feel that a sufficient amount of passing time will clarify their present perspective. But what of a memoir writer who has not yet lived past the time of her story, who is shaken as it unfolds in her current life and yet is drawn to write of it anyway?
One woman who has been trying to uncover her story is Sheila, a member of my memoir-writing group. Her struggle to find the person she is writing about is always apparent. She begins by focusing on her first marriage. As a senior in high school, she dates a man, Jerry, who’s two years older. They go steady, break up, get back together, and eventually marry. She recalls getting married as what she was supposed to do, being “naive on my part.” With no children, Sheila spends much time making a structured home for Jerry, with dinner on the table at 5:30 sharp. But Sheila suspects something is wrong. Jerry has become quieter, complaining that he’s not sleeping well. He has terrible dreams and is frustrated with his small business, supplying materials to contractors. One of his problems is with work. He refuses to work for anyone else, fearful of having his reading disability discovered. (Sheila says this was not identified at the time but was probably dyslexia.) She doesn’t know to what extent Jerry’s business is failing because he will go weeks without speaking to her. Sheila has a dreadful feeling that he’s in psychological danger. She can feel his foundering in depression. She begins to wonder, in her writing, when and how she knew this. One night Jerry doesn’t come home; she calls his business but there’s no answer. She calls the police and reports that he’s gone missing. The next day, she calls the police around noon. They tell her they cannot file a missing person’s report for several days. This is a Tuesday. By Wednesday, with no word from Jerry or the police, Sheila drives to the business with a friend. They climb a fence, smell exhaust fumes coming from a closed-up ware-house, and find his parked car. Jerry’s rigged a hose from the tailpipe into the car window. He’s killed himself.
It’s a stunning and disturbing story, and the group and I are curious where this opening volley will take her. And then we hear the second installment. Eight months after Jerry’s suicide, a man named Martin calls her, someone she once dated in high school. He has heard she is widowed and asks to see her. He is interested in psychology and in her plight; Sheila, who is open and vulnerable, responds favorably to him the next two years. Amateur shrink Martin begins taking Sheila apart. While they date, she is under a psychiatrist’s care. She tells me, in an e-mail, that those sessions consisted of “his asking me a question and my answering with uncontrolled sobbing. We did not get very far.” Feeling that she must choose between her psychiatrist and her psychologist, Martin, she chooses the latter and marries him. Once they move to San Diego, Martin becomes “more verbally abusive than ever. He had always been analyzing me, my motives, my life, and continually making me feel bad about myself.” It’s not long before Sheila seeks treatment from another psychiatrist, who ends up helping her divorce Martin. At the time, she writes, “I realized I had married two different men [Jerry and Martin] with major psychological problems, and I vowed not to remarry until I felt I would not attract a person like that.” Martin, though, remains a part of her life via frequent phone calls. Seventeen years later, after Sheila has married a third time, she learns one day that
