muck is obvious: “I wanted my memoir to be about my long struggle to free myself from attracting suicidal types.” Though she knows today that these men died because of their own problems with depression, that fact doesn’t settle what’s roiled her for decades. She wants to know what it was “about me, without my knowing it, that contributed to their deaths.”
Though Sheila’s story may sound desperate, she is not herself desperate. At sixty, she is well adjusted; her marriage is good, and she values writing and therapy. The therapy of memoir, however, reopens old wounds, as becomes very clear to her and to us when, a few weeks later, she brings in a third installment. She has written what has just occurred, part of it torn from the week’s headlines. One of her friends, a man named Bill who had battled with a woman for years about custody of their fourteen-year-old son, Evan, and had been given a court order to stay away from both the boy and the woman, has killed the boy and himself. After Bill murders Evan and before he kills himself, he calls several friends. Sheila is one of them. She doesn’t get the call, but he leaves a message on her machine. He speaks not only of the horror he has just committed but also in a voice that sounds to Sheila like the despairing voices of her first and second husbands were they to have left her messages before suiciding.
In shock, Sheila is grieving the loss of a friend and his son. In writing about her grief, she is unsure what she’s feeling. Suddenly, this one event has fused her life and her writing. In the wake of the murder-suicide, Sheila loses the safety in which she was examining how suicide and intimacy cohabit, somewhat safely, in memory. Her life, in its uncanny ability to stay on theme, has got in memoir’s way, and it stops her from writing for a while. And yet she tells us that she can’t escape the feeling that the deaths of all these men she’s known have something in common. What is it? That the world is more out of control and more directed than she thought? If true, what is that saying about her? She doesn’t know. Maybe she’s not supposed to.
Sheila’s story is unusual in that the very theme of her work—men’s suicides—has merged the past with the present. For me, her story dramatically exemplifies the interaction of life and memoir writing. For Sheila, her memoir is now overrun by the changeable present, which, I remind her, is always exercising its dominion over the past. Time has assuaged her theme and time has again blown it apart. Her tale depicts how psychologically alive the body of memory is: it is both an elder, offering the wisdom of experience, and a child, wanting our attention now.
After Bill’s and Evan’s deaths, and, in part, because of the writing, Sheila is thrown into a “debilitating funk.” With a therapist, she finds that she has been able to work through the “post-traumatic stress.” She wants to begin writing again, and I wonder how Sheila might tell her story.
One way is to tell the tale only from the perspective of the young woman who endured and survived her first husband’s suicide. Okay, but how does she limit the emotional participation of the later suicides, which are surely part of how she might portray that younger self? Telling about each suicide chronologically might show a culmination. But each suicide and her feelings may get mixed up. The force of their accumulation is inescapable. These male death-events have already coded themselves as part of her DNA’s memory: the code retains a record of its evolution—where it’s been, how it’s been modified, how it’s been expressed. Moreover, today the code is selecting for her emotional survival, insisting that there is no other way to write this story than to intermix the years.
If we know that we grow and change as individuals, why do we believe that our memories of traumatic events don’t also grow and change? Why do we think that such events are isolated in their time and somehow just as isolated when we recollect them? I want to answer these queries because it seems that we are finally learning that memories evolve as their rememberers evolve. It may be the rightness of this idea that has so many people reaching to the memoir form, perhaps to verify it for themselves as well as to express the potency, both aesthetic and experiential, of remembrance.
Detaching Now from Then
Here is an example of how one memoirist has bridged from the person who is struggling with the past today and the person who struggled in the past. Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (1987) uses the interplay between now and then to stage and reveal her childhood sexual abuse. Fraser narrates the story of her past abuse in present tense. She discloses in past tense that which she understands today about the past. It may sound disorienting but it’s not, for we soon discover why she adopted this form. Writing the book over a three-year period, Fraser brought the past back so vividly into her life that for her emotional security the past needed to be separated from the present. An instance of Fraser’s method comes from the second chapter, “The Other.” It begins with an account of her current knowledge about her father in the past tense:
When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine, whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I did not remember my daddy ever having touched me sexually. I did not remember my daddy ever seeing me naked. In the future, whenever my daddy approached me sexually I turned into my other self, and afterwards I did not remember anything that had happened.
Even now, I don’t know the full truth of that other little girl I created to do the things I was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do, [sic] the things my father made me do, the things I did to please him but which paid off with a precocious and dangerous power. She loved my father, freeing me to hate him. She became his guilty sex partner and my mother’s jealous rival, allowing me to lead a more normal life. She knew everything about me. I knew nothing about her, yet some connection always remained. (15)
As the memory heats up and challenges the author to flesh out her feelings, her “other self”—the little girl about to be abused—arrives in present tense. Fraser shifts from her narrator now to the persona, the four-year-old, who was the target of the father’s daily sexual advances. Italics highlight the current recovered material, which, as she gets closer and closer to it, becomes dissociated from her adult narrator and is rendered in third person.
Through the bathroom door I hear my father splashing in the tub. Holding my breath, I slide under his bed, grabbing for Smoky [her cat]. Now the bath plug is being pulled. With a gurgle, the scummy water sucks down the drain.
By the time daddy stomps out of the bathroom, saronged in a towel, my other self is curled on his feather pillow, sucking her thumb and wearing Smoky’s dirty pink ribbon. A breeze blows the curtains inward, just like the hair of a fairytale princess, giving her goose bumps. Whose little girl are you? (27)
Fraser’s “other self” is “sucking her thumb,” sprouting “goose bumps” from the inward-blowing curtains. “I” has become “she.” And because of the transformation, she achieves something remarkable. The author has merged “I” and “she” in order to juxtapose childhood abuse and adult remembrance. These voices become mutually supportive; working together, they enact the story and the means by which the story can be told. Neither the abuse nor its recollection dominate. They are coequals, as if to say Fraser’s true self is a never-ending release from and return to what her child self was forced to endure.
Margaret Atwood noted in a blurb that My Father’s House reads like “a detective novel—except that the detective is a part of the narrator’s self, and so is the murder victim.” As the author recollects the events, detective and victim slowly become aware of each other. Fraser’s interweaving of these two takes time, and she is careful to prepare us at each juncture. Eventually our recognition of their watery coexistence in her is what intrigues us the most. What’s more, these parallel selves call forth the memoir’s guiding narrator, who lives now. She sees how complex the multitimed and many-voiced
