After the war, he became a salesman and, eventually, a marketing director for a St. Louis paper company. By the 1960s, however, he was miserable, in large part because he had turned his back on his calling. Another factor: my father struggled his entire life with obesity. Throughout his childhood, my older brother Steve, who was bigger than my father, got the brunt of Dad’s wrath. I escaped the onslaught because I was athletic and not fat. In fact, I was shamelessly favored while Steve was cruelly teased. Because I was better and compliant, my father would confide his hatred of work to me, rationalize his despair. His three sons needed feeding, he’d say; Mother’s “lifestyle”—a Lincoln Continental, country club fees, carpet cleaning, color TV—needed funding. Feuding with Steve, a fat man’s diet, and office politics took their toll. He would have two heart attacks, the second of which, at sixty-one, killed him, a couple months into retirement. That was 1975.
Marriage and a postwar family had set my father on a career track where promotions were keyed to long hours and company servility. The work was soulless, and its tedium was killing him. Plus, because of his complaints, no promotion was forthcoming. When he told me all this, I said he should quit. But he didn’t quit. He just ground it out, year after year. Feeling his desperation, I tried to be empathetic. Along with my friends, many of whom had bitter fathers as well, we blamed the business world for our fathers’ collapse. We choose paths in the arts or education. Plus, we thought that sensitivity to our fathers’ entrapment would keep us from repeating the walling-in of ourselves by career, marriage, and children. Not a chance. Families bring us our fate. My father, like Baldwin’s father, had a morbid sense that the American male had no choice but to be enslaved. This feeling that both men shared—though the suffering from racial discrimination was no doubt much greater—lodged in my mind as it had in Baldwin’s. Eventually, as a young father, I became overweight and depressed, hated the jobs I had to do to earn a living. My own misery grew and, at times, I lashed out at my wife and at friends. And yet I was fortunate. The hell realm my father had been sentenced to lasted, for me, only a few years. As painful as that summer I got divorced and became homeless was, my father’s wound was finally laid bare. The moment I woke up to the father-son pattern, it cowered and weakened.
Later, after my older brother Steve died in 1989—a heart-attack victim at forty-two, he had inherited our family’s heart disease—I began writing about, that is, remembering and refeeling and grieving, the strain between my father, my older brother, and me. Soon I was including my mother, a younger brother, sons, an exwife, lovers. How did these diverse people relate emotionally and psychologically to me and to each other? How did this affect my sense of self? Sorting all this out became my occupation.
I discovered that I had come to defend the doltish low-wage work I did as necessary, much as my father had. I had taken little responsibility for nurturing my artistic talent, cursing others instead. It was easy to justify my failure to pursue my artistic dream by identifying with my father. As I wrote about my phases, I read memoir, those fearless authors like Frank Conroy and Geoffrey Wolff who had endured some version of what my family had endured. These writers revealed the monolithic nature of our prisons, be they social, intellectual, familial. I learned that anyone who could narrate his condition and its development within his family could be freed from that condition. The way out of the cell—and the means to stay out—came for me through writing memoir. The tales I read about real families and the tales I told about mine took me beyond self-discovery. Memoir writing and writing about memoir enacted in my life a purpose for my life. Fifteen years into this process, I have found that memoir has led me to two of my deepest sensibilities: the psychology of adult development and the art of critical discovery.
The trouble is, these sensibilities, as potent as they are, are also buried the deepest. To stay connected, I must try to be honest about myself and those, like my father, I write about—above all, try to be honest about the slipperiness of telling the truth. I say try because honesty is never simple. And telling the truth, to ourselves and to others, guarantees emotional anguish. In fact, trying to be honest about the difficulty of unearthing what’s painful may be the truest thing one can do. I’m not alone in feeling this way. Hundreds of thousands of people, not just writers, rely on devotional and therapeutic practices by which they can inquire into the truth of their lives. Memoir is one practice, and it has ascended for this generation because the form is so useful in getting at the truth. To be useful, of course, aggravates postmodern thinking. But I have found that memoir’s pragmatism is its genius, limiting neither the possibility of the form nor the expression of the author.
AT THE GROUP’S last class, several read their latest excerpts, critique one another with an authority that’s also tempered by regret. One woman declares, “How will I ever know why you left your husband?” Suddenly it’s 9:30. I offer praise, thanks, wish them luck. Into the night we go, each to our locked cars. I leave last, intending to move on, where, I’m not sure, though I’m unconcerned.
Outside the door, eight are huddling, buzzing quietly.
“Good night—” I say.
“Wait!” says one, who startles me.
“We don’t want this to end,” says another. “Is there any way we can keep meeting? We just got started.” She’s a bit upset. “You can’t abandon us.”
Another woman asks whether I would consider continuing. “We’ll pay you to lead us,” she says. “We’ll meet at one of our homes.” Ollie, our seventy-three-year-old matriarch, volunteers her living room. “You won’t have to do any preparation. Just facilitate.”
How curious. And yet it shouldn’t be, given the power of the group and the form, which I discover are lashed together. As to their request, I’m grateful: I don’t want to lose them either. But I’m also uncertain, fearing a dependency. And yet their élan is irrepressible. What I don’t want to lose—I see this now—is their memoir-in-the-making, what they are undergoing and I get to witness. I want to stay close to them as adults, in whom writing memoir is a living entity, the mature transformations of an unfinished person and an unfinished life. And though it takes time, those self-transformations, as the writer works through them, will complete themselves as stories. These people I am getting to know as memoirists I will know as memoirs. How can I let go of that?
WEEKS LATER, a group of eight begins meeting twice a month. One reads, the rest comment. I speak last, hoping to help each writer balance, where possible, self-exploration and her self-selected theme. One guideline I return to is that whatever we’ve witnessed, we’ve also participated in. And the act of writing memoir allows us to continue participating in what we’ve witnessed. Writing memoir means that we combine what happened with how the exploration of what happened continues to affect us. After forty-six years, Julie is writing a memoir. Part of her turbulent past has flooded in, and, she thinks, her life now is one of remembering. Her focus on a long-gone phase has her believing that the past is the seat of her emotion, more so than the present. The past drama, however, is not the only drama. The present drama of recollection is equally alive, equally in and of the story. Julie is finding that as she remembers she is being emotionally altered by what she remembers. She is discovering things she never knew she knew. And it is this startling alteration of herself—to be drawn in deeper, to be surprised by what she didn’t know or half-remembered, to be enthralled about her choices and her fate more than she has ever been—that galvanizes her writing. What Julie is learning is that as a memoirist This Writing Life Now is what she has lived for.
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From Autobiography to Memoir
Autobiography and the Autobiographical Essay
For the last century and a half, the world of life-writing, which includes biography, autobiography, memoir, and confession, has been dominated by the personal tale of a public figure, a life socially significant in his or her own time.
